Exchanging Fantasies: Sex and the Serbian Crisis in The Lady of the Shroud

Abstract

Stoker’s The Lady of the Shroud (1909) is a double text in several respects: it exploits two relatively different sets of genre expectation — the Gothic novel and the Empire adventure story — and employs two quite different modes of writing to gain the peculiar effect which I shall call here ‘exchanging fantasies’. In the process, the narrative serves two different but related propaganda aims. These are, first, to put another nail in the coffin, so to speak, of the New Woman, by asserting the Masculine values of protective instinct and natural chivalry; and second, to challenge the ‘liberal’ approach to Britain’s foreign policy in the Balkans. The novel plays on traditional (but apparently outdated) British fears of Turkey, and further suggests to the reader the desirability of Serbian expansion against Austria-Hungary, in the wake of the latter’s annexation of Bosnia in 1908. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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