Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a Gothic tale that in a lure of decadence warns against the pull of the past. Victorian ideals are set to cherish the idyllic home, but when the national dwelling is compromised, Dracula’s invasion mixes the foreign with the familiar. England, a paragon of Western order and a colonizer, fears any disease that weakens the growing Empire. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the Count embodies the Victorian fear of reverse colonization through his deliberate crossing of cultural and physical boundaries as a way to undermine British imperialism.
The Count represents the stifling anxieties of the “outsider” in Victorian England with his physical appearance. When Jonathan Harker meets the Count he describes his “ very strong—aquiline—with high bridge of the thin nose” and
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He intentionally crosses this cultural border as a way to create more vampires like him. The Count infects Lucy with his blood so that “in a trance, she is Un-dead too” (Stoker 229). When Mina sucks the blood from the Count’s chest, she spiritually connects to him. This allows the Count to hypnotize his victims, spreading vampirism. When Van Helsing sees Lucy in a languid state he insists that she have four transfusions to return Lucy’s English blood. The Count causes degeneration with his goal to create a massive army of vampires that have a different racial identity than the British. Arata claims that “the spread of vampirism shows the fear that the British ‘race’ would decline in favor of that of immigrants' ' by infecting the blood of the people until they look and act like the Count. This encompasses the very heart of reverse colonization. England fears that not only will an outside race invade, but also subvert the West with a spiritual threat. With one bite the Count can change the alliance of his victim which allows him to grow superior to the modernist but ultimately England wins in the