Tina Dyer

“A Mile in English Shoes”: Dracula and the Myth of Modernity

When critics sit down to talk about the cultural aspects of Dracula—the way the novel juxtaposes England and Transylvania, forcing them to interact through Jonathan Harker’s travels and Dracula’s incursion and defeat—they tend to phrase their arguments in terms of anxiety, the fear of an inevitable breakdown, whether of masculinity, reason, critical cultural institutions, or empire. This emphasis on anxiety implies some risk of similarity between the self and other which, to conquer the disquiet, must be obliterated by the traditional hero-slays-the-monster narrative triumph. This paper argues, however, that this dichotomy between self and other is no more rigid than Transylvania’s political and ethnic boundaries, and that the mark of Dracula’s “primitivism”—his connection with the past—exists in equal measure in the work of the modern cosmopolites that destroy him. The novel therefore constitutes an examination of revisionism-in-process, an ethnographic analysis whose focus switches, because of Dracula’s unexpected proficiency at invasion, from “primitive” Transylvania to “modern” Britain, critiquing a self-concealing atavism with persistent—and unconquerable–similarities to the vampire model.

Tina is in the third year of the Ph.D. program in British and American Literature at the University of Utah, specializing in the 18th and 19th century.  When not reading about libertines and aesthetes, she teaches technical writing in the engineering program.