A Writer's Notebook, Day Nine-Hundred-And-Ninety-Nine

 I have been doing a bunch more research in preparation for redrafting my Dracula essay.  I want to incorporate a number of other aspects, and I am thinking of restructuring it a bit, including more personal elements as well.  I think the first draft was good, but there are certain things that I come back to which are not yet there.  A major part of this is to do with the question of the vampires appropriation as a symbol of outsiders and by various oppressed communities.  While I can appreciate the use of the vampire's use in those roles, I also find it very odd, because the qualities that lend themselves to those interpretations are so often connected directly with the anti-Semitic aspects of the book.  For example, the sexuality of Dracula, his seductive nature, is clearly of the same line of thought that led George Du Maurier to create the Jewish villain Svengali in his novel Trilby.  The undertone of homoeroticism, even, connects to long standing stereotypes of Jews as debauched, as well as the depiction of Jewish men as effeminate.  There are a number of 16th or 17th century English poems that depict a dinner party where a Jewish man arrives to teach all involved, men and women, about the pleasures of receiving anal sex.  It is not a stretch to see that these ideas still infected Britain during Stoker's era.  I've mentioned before that the Jack The Ripper killings were initially claimed to be the definite work of a Jewish villain, and consider the victims being prostitutes is a scandalizing, sexualizing detail, one that brings added perversion for the Victorians.  I still do not know what to say of this, but I find it strange that the major reevaluation of vampires entirely stepped over the anti-Semitic core, to revitalize a monster without addressing who it defamed.

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