Language: The Exploited Weapon of Dracula

Abstract

As both the ability that is believed to divide animals and humans, and as the patriarchal tool of Christian Victorian England, language is the primary weapon of defense wielded by the righteous crew of men in Bram Stoker's Dracula against the primal, uncivilized Vampire. Where there is rapid technological change, the Gothic is never far behind. In her book Over Her Dead Body, Elizabeth Bronfen delves into the centrality of how language develops as technology advances, and, vitally, how these modes of communication and transmission of information were understood to be under the ownership of the patriarchally ruled West. It is through the vessel of developing and exploited language in Dracula that the English anxieties surrounding death, the feminine, and the foreign are expressed. Stoker demonstrates that language, as symbolism that stands-in as a representation of reality, is not only faulty in the hands of the English men to whom it supposedly belongs but is unnecessary to the forces of feminine and foreign power. When language fails, not only do Stoker's gang of English men lose their only defense against the external threat, but they also lose the ability to access their own souls. It is only Mina, perfectly strung between the linguistic masculine and the bestial feminine, who holds complete power. By extrapolating the tensions of the patriarchal English and the feminine foreign to encompass the battling forces of the Judeo-Christian God and Devil, Stoker pours even more control into Mina who exists in tandem between good and evil, and, consequently, becomes an embodiment of both, taking on the qualities and abilities of each. Stoker is unable (or, perhaps, unwilling) to completely ease the anxiety of femininity built into Dracula because he positions the patriarchally "civilized" woman as holding both the linguistic power of the male West and the ungovernable ferocity innate in her femininity.