Colonizable Bodies and Geographies: Constructing Foreignness in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Abstract

The essay juxtaposes Bram Stoker’s discourse on foreignness in his gothic novel Dracula (1897) against two overlapping ideological frameworks: first, the racially loaded anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Victorian age as exemplified in Evans-Gordon’s propaganda book, The Alien Immigrant (1903); second, colonial discourse and its attitude to foreign bodies and geographies. The authors contend that the novel Dracula reiterates contemporaneous sentiments and representations of foreign bodies and geographies as it justifies the need to gain control over Count Dracula and his habitat.