Monty Cantsin
5th October 2004, 11:25
Bleeding the Bourgeoisie Dry: Dracula and Fears of Monopoly Capitalism
Dracula was published in 1897, a decade after Stevenson's Jekyll. If Jekyll had worked in relation to bourgeois fears of disruption from the 'lower orders', Dracula worked in relation to bourgeois fears of domination from above. There have been many psychoanalytic readings of Dracula and vampirism in horror, but Stoker's novel is not the product of transhistorical unconscious tensions. Instead, as Franco Moretti has argued, it was a desperate attempt to articulate anxieties about the crisis of liberal capitalism which was taking place within the 1890s, and the challenge to the hegemony of the professional bourgeoisie which it entailed.
Earlier in the century, Marx himself had used the vampire metaphor to discuss the workings of capital: 'Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks." Stoker's vampire conforms to this description. He has no life himself, but maintains himself by living off the life of others. He does not feed upon them for the pleasure of it, but in order to survive; it is his nature. The more he feeds, the younger and stronger he becomes, but his feeding also extends his domain. Through feeding he converts his victims into his slaves, but again he does this not through choice, but through necessity. His nature 'compels him to make ever more victims, just as the capitalist is compelled to accumulate. His nature forces him to struggle to be unlimited, to subjugate the whole of society."
It is for this reason that while Dracula is a representation of capital, he is presented as a threat to the professional bourgeoisie. He is not capital itself, but a particular form of capital which was emerging in the 1890s: monopoly capital. As Moretti puts it, 'Dracula is a true monopolist; solitary and despotic, he will not brook competition.''; The professional bourgeoisie had established its hegemony by challenging feudal despotism with a concept of individual freedom. It challenged monopolist tyranny with free trade. However, monopoly capital sought to eliminate competition, and by extension the professional bourgeoisie's concept of individual freedom and independence. Monopoly capitalism threatened the era of liberal or laissez faire capitalism through the concentration of ownership. More and more of the population had less and less economic independence from capital. More and more of the population became employees who were dependent on the monopolies for their livelihoods. The bourgeoisie had combated the forms of hound labour associated with feudalism with the concept of the labour contract. The capitalist had no inherent rights over the labour of the worker as had been the case with the feudal lord. By contrast, the capitalist and the worker engaged in a contract in which they were, in principle, free and equal participants. Workers could not only choose the employer to whom they sold their labour, but their labour was also only sold for a fixed period. The worker had rights over his own labour. Dracula accepts no such rights or choices, even in principle. Once one is his, one is his completely and forever.
The distinction between the public and the private spheres of life was also intended to protect individual rights - or at least, the individual rights of the male. The bourgeois employer only had rights over the labour of the worker, not his whole being. Aspects of the worker were defined as private. The employer could control the labour of the worker for which he had paid, but nothing else. The worker could also escape the world of work within the private sphere of the home. The home was a place of privacy and individual sovereignty. It is Dracula's inability to accept any limitation to his will which evokes such horror for the bourgeoisie. He not only threatens the public sphere, but the private sphere too. He invades the bourgeois home, the bedchamber, the body, and finally, the will. It is for this reason that while he converts the free subject into a slave who is compelled to act according to his will, the manner of his attack is clearly sexual. Within bourgeois culture, sexual activity is defined as the most private of activities, and sexuality as the most private aspect of identity. The description of the act of vampirism is linked to sexual activity by the specific types of physical intimacy involved. As is often noted, the vampire's bite - or kiss as it is often described - suggests a whole series of oral sex acts such as fellatio and cunnilingus. Vampirism is also linked to sexual activity by the types of excitement which it evokes in the vampire and its victims.
While Dracula's attacks are aimed at the private sphere, his primary attacks are on bourgeois females, not bourgeois males. Women were defined as the organisers of this private sphere. They were supposed to display their husband's productive power, and create a suitable environment within which the males could escape the demands of the public sphere. Dracula's attack on these women converts them into his slaves, and turns these women against their men. He overturns the sexual politics of the bourgeois home. Ironically, once these women become Dracula's victims and slaves, they acquire an active, and even aggressive sexuality which is traditionally defined as the prerogative of the male. The men, on the other hand, are placed in a position of sexual passivity and victimisation previously associated with femininity. it is in this way that the figure of the New Woman is presented as such a threat within the novel - but her emergence is identified as only one aspect of an even broader crisis within bourgeois society.
The sexual nature of the attack reveals both the strengths and the weaknesses of Stoker's attempt to represent this crisis. if the vampire's power is frequently presented as its ability to hypnotise its victims with its sexual magnetism, the attack cannot be purely external. Instead the victim must be seen as unconsciously desiring their own victimisation, and the threat is presented as both internal and external. Stoker's Dracula is a peculiarly contradictory figure. He is both secretive and an exhibitionist, both the natural - transforming himself into beasts - and the over-cultured or decadent. He represents both the rational and the irrational. But he is also, strangely, an aristocrat. He is a feudal lord without peasants, only investment capital. Unable to acknowledge and recognise monopoly capital as a product of its own economic and cultural processes, the professional bourgeoisie was only able to represent Dracula as its negation. Having come to consciousness as a class in the struggle against feudal despotism, the professional bourgeoisie were only able to perceive monopoly capitalism as a resurrection of the past, not as a future which was emerging from capitalist competition itself. For this reason, Dracula must inhabit the body of an aristocrat.
If the novel attempts to diagnose the crisis of bourgeois individualism, it does not prescribe individualism itself as the solution. Van Helsing and Mina, Dracula's chief opponents, both stress the importance of collective action. As Waller points out, in his fight to save Lucy from Dracula, Van Helsing transfuses the blood of several different males into her, an act which he knows will horrify her suitor. The novel presents these transfusions, like the vampiric act, as sexual in nature. In order to combat Dracula, Van Helsing must knowingly transgress bourgeois taboos. He must ignore the sexual codes which define sexual contact with the female body as the right of a single, individual male - her husband.
In order to defend itself, the bourgeoisie progressively moved away from ideologies of free trade and freedom of the individual in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Instead, they developed an ideology of collectivism and economic tariffs. Isolated individuals were simply not equipped to deal with the problems associated with the increasingly complex economic and social relations which were developing in the late nineteenth century. Members of the bourgeoisie were forced to recognise their shared interests and work together. Moreover, Dracula is not only an aristocrat; he is a foreigner. The bourgeoisie came to regard overseas competition as a threat, not the market itself, and sought to defend itself through protectionist tariffs.
Dracula's two most vehement opponents arc also significant. Van Helsing is a sort of secular priest, a man who integrates scientific empiricism with religion, while Mina is a defender of communal values over individual interests. Women occupy a peculiar position within Dracula and vampire fiction in general. They are a central threat to be feared and distrusted by the male figures from whose position the narrative is often seen. But they can also be the major bulwark against vampirism. The appeal of the bourgeois home, for many women, was that it had been defined as a protection from aristocratic licence. If a woman would accept the authority of a husband, he would protect her against exploitation by other men. For this reason, despite its limitations, women have often been the staunchest defenders of the family. Mina is particularly interesting, however. She does not simply accept male authority, but actively draws the group together.
Like Jekyll, Stoker's novel does not present a linear narrative with a single, individual point of view. Instead, it presents a series of different points of view and different forms of writing which are drawn together by Mina as she establishes the group. She collates and integrates these different accounts, and eliminates the errors and ignorance which arc the result of their individual points of view. It is only after her act of collation that the collection of individuals becomes a group, and the hunt for Dracula can proceed. From then on, as Moretti argues, it becomes
more accurate to speak of a 'collective' narrator than of different narrators. There are no longer, as there were at the beginning, different versions of a single episode, a procedure which expressed the uncertainty and error of the individual account. The narrative now expresses the general point of view, the official version of the events.
Dracula registers the major shift in bourgeois thought in which the class which had established its dominance on a doctrine of individual freedom began to develop a doctrine of collectivity. The legacy of this development was dramatic and would have far reaching implications and effects, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century.
http://www.newi.ac.uk/rdover/other/mark_jan.htm
comments?
Dracula was published in 1897, a decade after Stevenson's Jekyll. If Jekyll had worked in relation to bourgeois fears of disruption from the 'lower orders', Dracula worked in relation to bourgeois fears of domination from above. There have been many psychoanalytic readings of Dracula and vampirism in horror, but Stoker's novel is not the product of transhistorical unconscious tensions. Instead, as Franco Moretti has argued, it was a desperate attempt to articulate anxieties about the crisis of liberal capitalism which was taking place within the 1890s, and the challenge to the hegemony of the professional bourgeoisie which it entailed.
Earlier in the century, Marx himself had used the vampire metaphor to discuss the workings of capital: 'Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks." Stoker's vampire conforms to this description. He has no life himself, but maintains himself by living off the life of others. He does not feed upon them for the pleasure of it, but in order to survive; it is his nature. The more he feeds, the younger and stronger he becomes, but his feeding also extends his domain. Through feeding he converts his victims into his slaves, but again he does this not through choice, but through necessity. His nature 'compels him to make ever more victims, just as the capitalist is compelled to accumulate. His nature forces him to struggle to be unlimited, to subjugate the whole of society."
It is for this reason that while Dracula is a representation of capital, he is presented as a threat to the professional bourgeoisie. He is not capital itself, but a particular form of capital which was emerging in the 1890s: monopoly capital. As Moretti puts it, 'Dracula is a true monopolist; solitary and despotic, he will not brook competition.''; The professional bourgeoisie had established its hegemony by challenging feudal despotism with a concept of individual freedom. It challenged monopolist tyranny with free trade. However, monopoly capital sought to eliminate competition, and by extension the professional bourgeoisie's concept of individual freedom and independence. Monopoly capitalism threatened the era of liberal or laissez faire capitalism through the concentration of ownership. More and more of the population had less and less economic independence from capital. More and more of the population became employees who were dependent on the monopolies for their livelihoods. The bourgeoisie had combated the forms of hound labour associated with feudalism with the concept of the labour contract. The capitalist had no inherent rights over the labour of the worker as had been the case with the feudal lord. By contrast, the capitalist and the worker engaged in a contract in which they were, in principle, free and equal participants. Workers could not only choose the employer to whom they sold their labour, but their labour was also only sold for a fixed period. The worker had rights over his own labour. Dracula accepts no such rights or choices, even in principle. Once one is his, one is his completely and forever.
The distinction between the public and the private spheres of life was also intended to protect individual rights - or at least, the individual rights of the male. The bourgeois employer only had rights over the labour of the worker, not his whole being. Aspects of the worker were defined as private. The employer could control the labour of the worker for which he had paid, but nothing else. The worker could also escape the world of work within the private sphere of the home. The home was a place of privacy and individual sovereignty. It is Dracula's inability to accept any limitation to his will which evokes such horror for the bourgeoisie. He not only threatens the public sphere, but the private sphere too. He invades the bourgeois home, the bedchamber, the body, and finally, the will. It is for this reason that while he converts the free subject into a slave who is compelled to act according to his will, the manner of his attack is clearly sexual. Within bourgeois culture, sexual activity is defined as the most private of activities, and sexuality as the most private aspect of identity. The description of the act of vampirism is linked to sexual activity by the specific types of physical intimacy involved. As is often noted, the vampire's bite - or kiss as it is often described - suggests a whole series of oral sex acts such as fellatio and cunnilingus. Vampirism is also linked to sexual activity by the types of excitement which it evokes in the vampire and its victims.
While Dracula's attacks are aimed at the private sphere, his primary attacks are on bourgeois females, not bourgeois males. Women were defined as the organisers of this private sphere. They were supposed to display their husband's productive power, and create a suitable environment within which the males could escape the demands of the public sphere. Dracula's attack on these women converts them into his slaves, and turns these women against their men. He overturns the sexual politics of the bourgeois home. Ironically, once these women become Dracula's victims and slaves, they acquire an active, and even aggressive sexuality which is traditionally defined as the prerogative of the male. The men, on the other hand, are placed in a position of sexual passivity and victimisation previously associated with femininity. it is in this way that the figure of the New Woman is presented as such a threat within the novel - but her emergence is identified as only one aspect of an even broader crisis within bourgeois society.
The sexual nature of the attack reveals both the strengths and the weaknesses of Stoker's attempt to represent this crisis. if the vampire's power is frequently presented as its ability to hypnotise its victims with its sexual magnetism, the attack cannot be purely external. Instead the victim must be seen as unconsciously desiring their own victimisation, and the threat is presented as both internal and external. Stoker's Dracula is a peculiarly contradictory figure. He is both secretive and an exhibitionist, both the natural - transforming himself into beasts - and the over-cultured or decadent. He represents both the rational and the irrational. But he is also, strangely, an aristocrat. He is a feudal lord without peasants, only investment capital. Unable to acknowledge and recognise monopoly capital as a product of its own economic and cultural processes, the professional bourgeoisie was only able to represent Dracula as its negation. Having come to consciousness as a class in the struggle against feudal despotism, the professional bourgeoisie were only able to perceive monopoly capitalism as a resurrection of the past, not as a future which was emerging from capitalist competition itself. For this reason, Dracula must inhabit the body of an aristocrat.
If the novel attempts to diagnose the crisis of bourgeois individualism, it does not prescribe individualism itself as the solution. Van Helsing and Mina, Dracula's chief opponents, both stress the importance of collective action. As Waller points out, in his fight to save Lucy from Dracula, Van Helsing transfuses the blood of several different males into her, an act which he knows will horrify her suitor. The novel presents these transfusions, like the vampiric act, as sexual in nature. In order to combat Dracula, Van Helsing must knowingly transgress bourgeois taboos. He must ignore the sexual codes which define sexual contact with the female body as the right of a single, individual male - her husband.
In order to defend itself, the bourgeoisie progressively moved away from ideologies of free trade and freedom of the individual in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Instead, they developed an ideology of collectivism and economic tariffs. Isolated individuals were simply not equipped to deal with the problems associated with the increasingly complex economic and social relations which were developing in the late nineteenth century. Members of the bourgeoisie were forced to recognise their shared interests and work together. Moreover, Dracula is not only an aristocrat; he is a foreigner. The bourgeoisie came to regard overseas competition as a threat, not the market itself, and sought to defend itself through protectionist tariffs.
Dracula's two most vehement opponents arc also significant. Van Helsing is a sort of secular priest, a man who integrates scientific empiricism with religion, while Mina is a defender of communal values over individual interests. Women occupy a peculiar position within Dracula and vampire fiction in general. They are a central threat to be feared and distrusted by the male figures from whose position the narrative is often seen. But they can also be the major bulwark against vampirism. The appeal of the bourgeois home, for many women, was that it had been defined as a protection from aristocratic licence. If a woman would accept the authority of a husband, he would protect her against exploitation by other men. For this reason, despite its limitations, women have often been the staunchest defenders of the family. Mina is particularly interesting, however. She does not simply accept male authority, but actively draws the group together.
Like Jekyll, Stoker's novel does not present a linear narrative with a single, individual point of view. Instead, it presents a series of different points of view and different forms of writing which are drawn together by Mina as she establishes the group. She collates and integrates these different accounts, and eliminates the errors and ignorance which arc the result of their individual points of view. It is only after her act of collation that the collection of individuals becomes a group, and the hunt for Dracula can proceed. From then on, as Moretti argues, it becomes
more accurate to speak of a 'collective' narrator than of different narrators. There are no longer, as there were at the beginning, different versions of a single episode, a procedure which expressed the uncertainty and error of the individual account. The narrative now expresses the general point of view, the official version of the events.
Dracula registers the major shift in bourgeois thought in which the class which had established its dominance on a doctrine of individual freedom began to develop a doctrine of collectivity. The legacy of this development was dramatic and would have far reaching implications and effects, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century.
http://www.newi.ac.uk/rdover/other/mark_jan.htm
comments?