Similarities Between Dracula And The Clansman

Wilhelm Reich once wrote “A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know. He hides his pettiness and narrowness behind illusions of strength and greatness”(). So then, what does that say about societies that hide their pettiness and narrowness between the covers of time-honored works of literature? Axiomatically, one must deduce that such social orders are cast within a matrix of irrational fears. Phobias that in maturation bring forth the illusion of greatness and strength by reactionary hostility, hatred, and violence. Further, to make mainstream hate more palatable it is interwoven into indoctrinations of morality and values: faith, patriotism, and family. These calculated perversions of values are expressed throughout Bram Stoker’s Dracula as well as its fortuitous reconstruction, The Clansman by Thomas Dixon Jr. An analysis of alterity as portrayed in both Dracula and The Clansman reveals congruent invisible empires of systemic cultural oppression erected upon the foundations of white supremacy, religiosity, and patriarchy. Semiosis and propaganda emerging in literary discourse during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries commonly conveyed

Religion is used as moral justification through ceremonies, rituals, and analogy. In Dracula, the appeal to faith is apparent. Stoker, using a fundamental distortion of Christian principles makes Count Dracula into the anti-Christ. Dracula, as the anti-Christ, promises eternal life through the drinking of human blood. This act is a clear perversion of the holiest sacraments in Christian faith, communion. Portraying the outsider as the anti-Christ is in some sense to say that ‘if it is not white, it is not right.’ While Religion is discussed throughout the entirety of The Clansman, the most interesting connection between religion and The Clansman is that Thomas Dixon Jr. was himself a renowned Baptist