ABSTRACT
It has become customary to enlist Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) in support of what remains a dominant myth of both the culture and popular fi ction of late Victorian Britain: namely, that these fi elds were obsessed with the preservation of a pure, homogenous, and unchanging national identity increasingly under siege from subversive elements. While critical assessments of the nature of the menace or the success of its narrative resistance vary, the essential terms of the debate – outside versus inside, dangerous dissonance versus healthy cultural stability – remain remarkably consistent. So common, indeed, is this approach it has earned its own sobriquet as ‘the anxiety theory,’ an expression used by Nicholas Daly to describe the thesis whereby a particular fi ctional villain signifi es a dissonant threat to an established social order (184). While Daly uses this term specifi cally in reference to Dracula, it might equally describe the dominant response to any number of the period’s popular novels that pit dangerous outsider forces against the territory or cultural representatives of a nineteenth-century Britain imagined to be terrifi ed of heterogeneity and change. This chapter uses Dracula and other invasion texts to disrupt the conventional accounts of the fi n-de-siècle cultural imagination – as preoccupied with a conformity of gender, national identity, and of language – they have been so frequently used to engender. While these popular novels do indeed crystallize specifi c threats to the late Victorian community, the nature of these dangers needs to be re-articulated. I contend that it is the danger, rather than necessity, of social and linguistic homogeneity that texts such as Dracula dramatize a homogeneity embodied, not by the valiant defenders of Britain, but rather by the nation’s alien antagonists. Stoker’s resistance to uniformity is most evident in his celebration of the non-standard Englishes that act as important tools in the vampire’s defeat.
