The Rhetoric of Reform in Stoker's Dracula : Depravity, Decline, and the Fin-de-Siècle "Residuum"

Abstract

In the past decade, critics of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) have dis covered the fruits of historicizing a novel previously read chiefly in psychoanalytic, anthropological, and transhistorical terms.1 This new attention to the embeddedness of Stoker's text has produced a number of persuasive attempts to flesh out what the Count might represent to late Victorian readers: criminality and degeneracy, for eignness, and homosexuality, to name the more noteworthy asser tions.2 While in many ways dissimilar, these readings all recognize Dracula's capacity to shape and to be shaped by the late-Victorian discourses that together constitute national identity—the colonial project, scientific theory, race, and sexuality certainly among them. Moreover, many of these readings share the understanding that the Count transgresses boundaries near and dear to the late Victorian frame of mind, and that the novel, betraying a fear of cultural decline occasioned by these sorts of transgression, struggles throughout to preserve boundaries and restore cultural order.3 The reading I offer here seeks to illustrate how Stoker's novel asso ciates crossed boundaries and potential decline, as did many social commentators of the 1890s, with a particular segment of the English population. I will argue that Stoker's Count is associated and allied with the poorest of the poor—not the industrious artisan but the va grant, not the respectable working class but its supposedly shiftless, slum-dwelling underclass4—and that the threat of Dracula and vam pirism stands in for the late-century threat of the lumpenproletariat.5 If the wandering and slum-dwelling poor, like the vampire, pre sented a material threat to the sound health and social harmony of England, their moral threat was at least equally important. Stoker and nineties commentators cast vampire and lumpen alike as repre senting—sometimes even causing—cultural decline effected, above all, by a disregard of middle-class norms, including domesticity, motherhood, and female sexual purity. Read in tandem with works such as William Booth's 1890 In Darkest England and the Way Out, Sto ker's novel betrays a similar preoccupation with cultural collapse ef

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