Sociopolitical Philosophy In The Works Of Stoker And Yeats

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Protestant author Sheridan Le Fanu uses vampires
to represent the Catholic uprising in Ireland in his story Carmilla. Like much
of gothic fiction, Carmilla is about the mixing of blood and the harm that
results from it. When vampires strike, they are tainting the blood of the pure
and innocent, causing them to degenerate into undead savages who will take over
and colonize until their race makes up the condition of the whole world. This
was the fear the Protestants had of the rising Catholic class. They were seen
as a lowly people and the fear was that they too would colonize and degenerate
Ireland, and perhaps the rest of Europe, back into a primitive land of savages.
This fear of the breakdown of civilization by dark forces is also what Dracula
is about.
In Dracula, Stoker sets up the heroes and victors of the novel as
civilized people, while the foreign villain is ancient and demonic. The book
begins with the journal of Jonathan Harker, a stenographer from London who ...

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beginning to lose command over the language, as he writes, “
They were evidently talking of me, and some of the people who were sitting on
the bench outside the door. . . came and listened, and then looked at me, most
of them pityingly. I could hear a lot of words often repeated, queer words, for
there were many nationalities in the crowd” (13). Harker's inability to
understand the language is one of the ways in which he loses control as he
travels east. Back in the modern world of the West, even in foreign countries,
Jonathan can understand what is being spoken and therefore has a sense of
control over his situation. In the East, however, he has lost this control. If
he were able ...

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