In the Howard Hawks 1951 horror film "The Thing
from Another World", a UFO from another planet crashes at the North Pole in
the attempt to land on Earth and is buried in the ice. Setting out from a US
research station, scientists and soldiers are looking for the crash site. Their
attempt to recover the damaged spaceship fails: it explodes in an attempt to
melt it out of the ice. But one of the occupants, who was apparently thrown out
during the crash, is still frozen in the ice. The creature is hacked out of the
ice by the Americans and brought to the research station in the block of ice, in
which it is entombed, as it were. A dispute between Dr. Carrington, the head of
the team of scientists, and Captain Hendry, the commanding officer of the
soldiers, ensues at the station. Dr. Carrington wants to thaw out the alien
immediately to examine it scientifically, while Captain Hendry wants to wait
until he gets permission from his military superiors. Hendry prevails and the
alien is not thawed out immediately, but kept in its "coffin of ice"
in a storage room of the research station. The soldier on guard duty can't stand
the horrifying sight and covers the block of ice with a blanket which,
unfortunately, is an electric blanket: the creature is thawed out, rises from
its frosty grave, its shadow falling on the soldier who, though he is not
attacked by the alien, panics and shoots at it. The creature escapes from the
research station and is attacked by sled dogs who tear out one of its arms.
When Dr. Carrington and the other scientists examine this arm in the lab of the
research station, it turns out that the alien is a plant and that the arm is
spattered with blood from the dogs, with which the alien has fought. The torn-off
arm, exposed to the arctic frost and therefore lying lifeless and rigid on the
laboratory table, is defrosted in the heated room and thereby put in a position
"to ingest the canine blood". This food apparently allows the arm to
gain strength and come alive again, for it begins to move - "the hand
became alive," as Dr. Carrington notes. So the eerie creature feeds on
blood, is a kind of vampire and therefore akin to Dracula in Bram Stoker's horror
classic. And this kinship goes even further. Stoker's novel and Hawks' film
also have the subject of invasion in common. Dracula leaves his native
Transylvania and goes to England with hostile intent. He wants to suck the
blood of as many Englishmen as possible, thus turning them into vampires, his
equal, and so form a dominant parallel society. In the 1951 film, the aliens,
of which only one survived the crash, also came to conquer the Earth and feed
on the blood of humans and animals. Stoker's Dracula therefore belongs to the
genre of invasion literature, and Hawks' film can be characterized as an
invasion film. Another thing Stoker's novel and Hawks' film have in common is the
importance of soil, which is vital for the monsters. The focus of the film
therefore turns to the soil the scientists brought to the North Pole. To enrich
their diet, they need the soil to grow strawberries and various varieties of vegetables
in the greenhouse, which is part of the research station. It is because of this
soil that the alien gains a foothold in the greenhouse and plants the seeds it
produces in it, so that its offspring can grow there in the form of numerous
plants. The soil, then, is needed for reproduction, to grow an army of its own kind
which is meant to conquer the Earth. His Transylvanian home soil is also vital
for Dracula. He must rest in it in order to recover. Just as the researchers in
Hawks' film brought American soil to the North Pole, so does Dracula bring
Transylvanian soil to England. It is contained in 50 boxes, in which Dracula
likes to rest, because this soil has a regenerative effect on him. It is from
this soil that the vampire draws new strength for his invasion. But what is so
special about this soil that Dracula couldn't survive without it in England? As
Dracula proudly recounts, Transylvania's soil was made fertile in numerous wars
with the blood of fallen soldiers:
…
there is hardly a foot of soil in all this region that has not been enriched by
the blood of men, patriots or invaders.
It is the blood from which the vampire draws the
strength to survive. The soil, in which the alien in Hawks' film plants its
seeds to avoid dying out on planet Earth, is also fertilized with blood, with
the blood of two men who were killed by the alien for this purpose.
Literary researchers have found that Dracula's
homeland of Transylvania either (1) stands for a country colonized by England,
(2) for Ireland or for another third world country, and the blood sucking for
exploitation, also sexual exploitation of the colonized by the colonizers.
Dracula therefore comes to England as an avenger who turns the tables. Just as
the British imperialists colonized and exploited the Irish, Indians, or Black
Africans and used them for their own subsistence, so Dracula, as a vampire,
exploits the English and feeds on them. Literary science therefore speaks of
reverse colonization (3) and places Stoker's Dracula in the genre of invasion
literature. Dracula embodies the fears and racist prejudices the English had in
the face of the mass influx of poor Irish workers into expanding industrial centres
such as London and Liverpool. For the Irish men were less civilized, and
therefore healthier and more masculine than the effeminate upper class English men
who grew up in luxury. And their abundance of children posed a competitive
threat for the demographically depressed British, who had to fear that the
immigrants would soon dominate England. As early as a quarter of a century
before his novel Dracula was published, Stoker postulates the decline of the
Anglo-Saxon race in his speech The
Necessity for Political Honesty (4) and contrasts it with the vitality of the
Irish, to whom the future belongs: "... the native Anglo-Saxon race is
dwindling", he notes with regard to the English-speaking population of the
United States and attests to its "effeteness", which can be
counterbalanced by the immigrants, as the Irish, who have remained "half-barbarous
amid an age of luxury", have retained their "strength" and
"vital energy ".
This is how Arata and Valente capture the essence of
these fears and prejudices against the Irish:
They
are reckless overbreeders (remember Jonathan Harker’s agonized vision of the
“new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons” to be engendered by
Dracula.” (5)
Through
the vampire myth, Stoker gothicizes the political threats to Britain caused by
the enervation of Anglo-Saxon “race”.
…
… Dracula … is by his very nature
vigorous, masterful, energetic, robust. Such attributes are conspicuously
absent among the novel’s British characters, particularly the men. All the
novel’s vampires are distinguished by their robust health and their equally
robust fertility. The vampire serves, then, to highlight the alarming decline
among the British …
…
The vampire’s vigor is in turn closely connected with its virility, its ability
to produce literally endless numbers of offspring. … In marked contrast, the
nonvampires in the novel seem unable to reproduce themselves. Fathers in
particular are in short supply …
Arata speaks of “the fear of vampiric fecundity, a fecundity that threatens to
overwhelm the far less prolific British men.” (6)
These prejudices and fears are reflected in Stoker's
novel when Dracula, as an immigrant from the Third World or Ireland, sexually
assaults women of the English such as Lucy Westenraa and Mina Harker and wants
to establish a parallel society with his victims, who are meant to turn into
his kind and become vampires. For the colonizer not only takes possession of
the land of the native population, but also of the bodies of the native-born girls
and young women (7), whom he exploits sexually. This is why land and women are
often mentioned as objects of colonization in the same breath. A good example
is Coetzee's novel Disgrace, which
describes how the effects of colonization by the whites still resonate in post-apartheid
South Africa. Pollux, a young black man, rapes Lucy, the white daughter of a
white professor who previously has sexually assaulted one of his coloured
students, an act that is rooted in the long tradition of sexual exploitation of
indigenous girls by white colonial masters. Lucy's rape by Pollux can be
interpreted as revenge, as an act of reverse colonization. When Lucy refuses to
abort the child and instead wants to bring it to term and raise it, this is
what goes through the jealous and racist father's head:
Something
about Pollux sends him into a rage: his ugly, opaque little eyes, his
insolence, but also the thought that like a weed he has been allowed to tangle
his roots with Lucy and Lucy’s existence.
The seed that Pollux has sown inside Lucy will thrive;
the "weed" that is germinating in Lucy is Pollux's flesh and blood,
his child. From the perspective of the jealous and racist father, Pollux has robbed
him of his daughter, has colonized her. Other examples of fights over white
women that are fought between white men of the First World and non-white men
from the Third World are Shakespeare's drama Othello, which culminates in intermarriage between Othello and
Desdemona. Venice's white men, of course, are not thrilled about the fact that
a perfect stranger, who is dark-skinned to boot, marries the senator's daughter
Desdemona, but they grin and bear it, because Othello is a capable admiral who
is needed to defend Venice against the Ottoman enemy. He is irreplaceable, for Venice's
world of men, these "wealthy curled darlings" (I, 2.68) who have
become weak and decadent amid the prosperity of the rich commercial metropolis,
cannot bring forth a soldier of his stature (I, 1.152). They have reason to be
afraid of Othello as a virile and martial rival who will melt the hearts of
women.
Or the 1933 film King Kong, in which
a giant ape claims the young blonde Ann Darrow as his bride. Since the ape
comes from the jungles of the Third World, it stands for a man from the Third
World, for example a black African or black American who, while being primitive
in the view of the white racists and an ape-man that is still closely related
to the animal ancestors of the people (8), must still be feared as a sexual
competitor. For King Kong, who comes from the jungle, embodies the primordial
power of a creature not corrupted by Western civilization. The American men are
no match for his physical strength. They need modern technology like gas bombs
or warplanes equipped with machine guns to cope with him. The fact that the ape
climbs up the Empire State Building at the end of the film has a symbolic
meaning. For this skyscraper, the tallest building in New York (until the
construction of the Twin Towers), embodies America's power and greatness (9)
and rises, in allusion to Freud, as a pretentious phallus. This phallus is
conquered by King Kong, that is, he conquers it as a mountaineer conquers a
summit, together with Ann Darrow, whom he has stolen from her white fiancé - a quasi-sexual
provocative act.
Back to the Stoker's novel: Dracula drinking Lucy
Westraa's blood is an act of reverse colonization. He not only wants to take
possession of the territory of the natives, but also of their girls and women, and
with Lucy he also succeeds. By sucking her blood, he turns her into a vampire,
into one of his kind, and makes her part
of the parallel society he intends to establish in England, thus removing her
from the world of English men.
This also applies to the alien in The
Thing from Another World. Its intended victim is also a female character,
so that its invasion, as in Stoker's book, can also be interpreted as a quasi-sexual
act of reverse colonization, as an attack on women in conjunction with a
humiliation of white men. But why do we think that the alien is rooted in the
tradition of Othello, who takes Desdemona away from her white father, or of Dracula,
who digs his fangs into Lucy's body, drinks her blood and makes her his own,
and of King Kong and Ann Darrow? There are two women who belong to the crew of
the polar station. One of them is Nikki, the attractive assistant of Dr.
Carrington, with whom Captain Hendry has fallen in love. But the alien wants to
rape neither of the two pretty women. Still, the alien's intended victim
belonging to the polar station is nevertheless a woman. It is a mythical female
being: Mother Earth. There is soil in the station's greenhouse, which the
researchers probably brought from the US. It is in this earth, this American
soil which the men use to grow vegetables and strawberries to enrich their diet,
in which the alien sows its seed and lets its offspring grow. And the earth,
which receives the seeds in its womb and like a mother brings forth fruit that
nourishes humans, is female - that is an ancient idea. Three examples:
“Attic religion clearly attests
to the fact that the sowing and harvesting of fruit was equated with human
procreation and birth, that is to say, they were seen as one,” writes Albrecht
Dieterich in his essay Mother Earth: an
essay on folk-religion, still considered fundamental to this day. Of the
many examples listed by Dieterich (10), one in particular is worth mentioning.
In Sophocles’ drama The Women of Trachis, Deianira is the wife of
Hercules, bearing his children but still feeling neglected by him, as the adventurous
hero is rarely at home with her; she compares herself to a distant field, with
him as the farmer:
And then
children were born to us; whom he has seen only as the husbandman sees his
distant field, which he visits at seed-time, and once again at harvest. (11)
The archetypal
image of the field, which is female, and of ploughing, which symbolises
procreation, also inspired Shakespeare, who, in his Sonnet 3, urges a
handsome young man to father a son to perpetuate his own beauty, which fades
with age:
Look
in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another;
Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
Forwhere is she so fair whose unear’d womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
The Koran (The Cow, 2:223)also
compares a wife with a field cultivated by her husband; although not expressly
stated, the archetypal analogy insinuates that sex not only conduces to lust,
but also procreation:
Your wives are a tilth for you;
so approach your tilth when and how you like
The
alien in Hawks' film is also a farmer who sows his seed in the American soil that
belongs to the white men of the polar station in order to hatch his offspring, an army of monsters
who want to subdue the Earth. The alien takes possession of the earth in the
greenhouse, "impregnating" and guarding it.
The two adversaries, the alien and the Americans at
the polar station, are not least fighting for the earth, without which the
intruder could not unfold its overwhelming fertility. This also applies to the adversaries
in Stoker's novel, Dracula and the English vampire hunters. Like the Polar
explorers in Hawks' film, who brought along soil from America to grow vegetables
and strawberries in order to make their stay in this outpost on their journey
to the North Pole more pleasurable, so does Dracula bring along Transylvanian
home soil in his invasion of England in order to draw renewed strength from it for
his conquest of the imperialist metropolis. The vampire hunters put consecrated
hosts on Dracula's earth in an effort to sterilize it and ensure that the
vampire can no longer draw any regenerative power from it. Since
"sterilizing" means to make someone or something barren, Arata is
right in interpreting this act as an attack on Dracula's sexual potency and fecundity,
which is so menacing to the English men: "The vampire's vigour is in turn
closely connected with its virility, its ability to produce literally endless
numbers of offspring. Van Helsing’s concern that the earth in Dracula’s boxes
be 'sterilized' underlines the connection between the Count’s threat and his
fecundity" (12). An attack on the potency and fecundity of the alien is the
fact that the sled dogs tear out an arm, which according to Freud can be
interpreted as castration, especially as the arm, which stands for the severed
penis, has a phallic character: the seeds Dr. Carrington sows in the soil in
his laboratory grow in the palm of the alien's hand, so that its offspring are
growing from it - the severed arm is a source of sperm!
Count Dracula embodies an avenger who comes to England
from a colonized Third World country. Or from a country that is not so far
away, but belongs to the British Isles: from Ireland. This also applies to the alien in The Thing from Another World. The other
world from which it comes to take revenge when it encounters the Americans
could be Africa - this is suggested by an allusion at the very beginning of the
film, when one of the American air force soldiers, who are later threatened by
the alien, recounts the time he was stationed in Accra in Ghana:
We
met at Accra … the women hardly wore anything at all. Very intelligent of them.
You just lie there in a hammock while three of them fan you.
The soldier was in the role of the colonial master who
let himself be pampered by the indigenous women. Like slaves, they fanned him
with cool air and were virtually naked, that is, sexual objects for the soldier
of the imperialist power. The alien can therefore be interpreted as an African
who haunts the polar station, an outpost of American power that also extends to
the North Pole, as an avenger by sexually taking possession and impregnating a
female being there: Mother Earth. However, as with Dracula, one can also
imagine that it does not come from a distant country, but from a world that is
different but is quite near. Thus, when a crew member of the polar station sees
the soldiers, who are armed with axes and rifles, looking for the alien, he
calls out in surprise:
What’s
up? Looks like a lynching party.
Just as one can imagine Dracula as an Irish man, so
one can imagine the alien as a member of the black population in the US, which
has so often been victimized by mob violence. This is also in line with what
Dr. Carrington, who is obviously an anti-racist leftist and someone who advocates
a culture of welcome and humane treatment of the immigrant, says about the
alien:
… remember it’s a stranger in a
strange land. The only crimes were those committed against it. It woke from a
block of ice, was attacked by dogs and shot by a frightened man.
To be attacked by dogs of the whites is part of the
traumatic collective memory of black Americans. The monster "from another world" is thus a black person from the Third
World or from the parallel society of blacks in America, who saw themselves as
Third World people living in internal colonies of the US. And the earth it
impregnates stands for a white woman, since she belongs to the white garrison
and hatches the fruits, strawberries and vegetables they have sown. The fact
that it now sows its seed into this earth reflects the whites' fear of intermarriage,
which was still prohibited in many states in 1950-1951, when the film was made.
At that time, the racist tradition of white women being a forbidden fruit for
the black man was still commonplace, and this conviction is also reflected in
the polar station, for the greenhouse and the things growing in it, such as vegetables
and strawberries, are symbolic: the door to the greenhouse is tightly locked,
and above it a sign reads: KEEP DOORS CLOSED, because - according to one of the
men - the Eskimos had a weakness for strawberries and would steal them
otherwise. The strawberries therefore symbolize the forbidden fruit of which
Adam and Eve partook in the Garden of Eden, and for which they were expelled
from paradise and couldn't go back because the gate to it was closed to them
and strictly guarded. The people of the Third World, here at the North Pole the
Eskimos, are excluded from this paradise, while it is open to white people. The
fruits of this paradise, vegetables and strawberries, are reserved for the
whites, and the film shows how one of the white men is picking and eating a
strawberry, one of the fruits forbidden for the indigenous people.
If the earth, which the alien "impregnates" with its seed, is
interpreted as a white woman, then the enmity between Man and the alien that
prevails in the film as well as in Stoker's Dracula
is all about sexual jealousy. This also fits with the fact that the arm, which
is torn from the alien, can be interpreted as a phallic symbol. Castration of
the victim was often a part of lynchings in the US.
In Stoker's vampire novel and in The Thing from Another World, white men fear the other as a sexual
competitor. So Dracula, as an Irishman, is less civilized than the English. He has
also been made less effeminate by civilization and, not to put too fine a point
on it, has remained an untamed savage, a barbarian who as such is more virile
and sexually potent than the English. Lucy Westenraa, who represents the world
of British women, is therefore not only afraid of his attempts at sexual
conquest, but also longs for them in her subconscious mind. The literary scholar
Kathleen Spencer has found that Lucy is guided by her longing for sex with the virile
Dracula in her sleep or at times she is sleepwalking, when the power of her
controlling consciousness is diminished. This is why she removes the cloves of
garlic in her sleep, which the vampire hunter Van Helsing has put around her
neck to keep Dracula away from her. And when sleepwalking, she leaves her house
and walks to the cemetery where Dracula lives in an empty tomb and waits for
her (13). The white men have every reason to be afraid of Dracula! And since
Dracula is more attractive because of his manliness, Lucy Westenraa is driven
by the unconscious desire called "going native" - she wants to
belong to Dracula's people.
Men from the Third World are not only more masculine
and potent, they also have more children. This is also why whites fear that
they could become the dominant force in the state and society, and this fear is
also reflected in Hawks' film. In his laboratory, Dr. Carrington has sown the
seed from the torn-off hand of the monster in the soil and fertilized it with
blood. The numerous plants that grow from it, and in which the offspring of the
alien are maturing to grow into an army of monsters who want to dominate the
world, illustrate the superior reproductive capacity of the alien - the whites,
whose birth rates were already stagnating in 1951, therefore have every reason
to be concerned. And it's not only blacks that triggered fears in white
Americans of being swamped by strangers; the same can be said of the abundance
of children produced by Chinese and Japanese immigrants - as evidenced by the
catchword "yellow peril"! - which created a fear of being defeated in
a war of births. For example, as early as 1920, the American racist Lothrop
Stoddard complained about the fertile Japanese picture brides in his book The Rising Tide of Color against White World
Supremacy:
The
California Japanese settle in compact agricultural colonies, which so teem with
babies that a leading California organ, the Los Angeles Times, thus seriously discusses the matter:
‘There may be a time when an anti-Japanese land bill would have limited
Japanese immigration. But such law would be important now to keep native
Japanese from possessing themselves of the choicest agricultural and
horticultural land in California. For these are now more than 30,000 children in
the State of Japanese parentage, native-born; they possess all the rights of
leasing and ownership held by white children born here … The birth statistics
seem to prove that the danger is not from the Japanese soldiers, but from the
picture brides. The fruitfulness of those brides is almost uncanny… We are
threatened with an over-production of Japanese children. First come the men,
then the picture brides, then the families. If California is to be preserved
for the next generation as a <white man’s country> there must be some
movement started that will restrict the Japanese birth-rate in California.
(p. 288)
The quote also shows that the fear of being overrun by
strangers is often accompanied by the fear that migrants take possession of
land, that it may literally come to a kind of "land seizure". In
Stoker's novel, this is reflected in the fact that Dracula buys an estate, a
stately home on a vast plot, in the Purfleet neighbourhood of East London. The
high wall that surrounds it gives it a fortress-like character - it is meant to
serve Dracula as a stronghold, a base from which he wants to colonize England.
Such an Irish immigrant who acquired landed property produced more fear and
discomfort among the English than his many penniless countrymen who mainly had
to live in the East End of London in miserable tenements which were not theirs,
and who were fleeced by horrendous rents. Another house Count Dracula acquired
in London is characterized as a "mansion" by the broker who arranged
the purchase. The thought that migrants can be transformed from exploited
proletarians into land and real estate owners is a horror for many locals.
The notion that the homeland, which supports and nourishes the people like a
mother, is acquired by immigrants from a foreign culture by purchasing the land
in order to take root, strengthen their status and gain in power is not only discomforting
to right-wing racists such as Lothrop Stoddard, but also to leftists such as
the German Ralph Giordano, who as a Jew was persecuted by the Nazis and fought
his entire life against racism. He saw the construction of the stately DITIB
mosque in the Ehrenfeld district of Cologne as "a land seizure on foreign
territory" and a "declaration of war"; he saw this mosque as a
base from which the Turkish head of state Erdogan, who controls the DITIB
organization, can wield his influence on Germany, as an ostentatious building
that embodies the claim to power of a patriarchal parallel society
characterized by oppression of women and anti-Semitism. Many Germans also felt
uneasy about the minarets of the Great Mosque, which rise to the sky like
phallic symbols and are reminiscent of the potency and abundance of children of
the Islamic immigrants. In Switzerland, a referendum imposed a ban on the building
of minarets, which according to Freud can be interpreted as a symbolic
castration.
In Hawks' film, this fear of land seizure by immigrants from the Third World with
many children is reflected in the "colonization" of the soil in the
greenhouse and in the lab by the offspring of the sexually potent alien.
This also becomes clear at the end of the film, when
the alien has been destroyed and the crew of the Polar Station can breathe a
sigh of relief. The soldiers' military superior, Captain Hendry, is in love
with Dr. Carrington's secretary Nikki, an attractive young woman who returns
his love. She wants to marry him, but he is not entirely thrilled about the
idea, because he is fond of his independence as a bachelor; his inner resistance
to marrying and starting a family, which everyone expects of him, can be
clearly noticed. In reference to this impending marriage, two of his soldiers
are joking:
He’s
had two things on his mind.
We’ve
only had one.
Our
worries are over, while our captain…
This is followed by allusions to Captain Hendry's
imminent married life, in which he will have to make financial sacrifices,
which would however be tolerable because of the child benefits he would receive
- the blessings of many children is once again alluded to. What is striking
about the remarks of the two soldiers, who want to be funny, is the fact that the
Captain's two worries, his worry about the monster which has been successfully
resolved, and the impending start of a family which is just now beginning, are
mentioned in one breath - as if Nikki was just as much of a challenge for the
captain as the monster. The film does not answer the question if this will
indeed be the case, but these two challenges for the captain, the monster that
impregnates American soil, and Nikki, who expects him to father many children, are
connected: the alien, who is remarkably fertile and able to produce an
impressive number of offspring, is eliminated as an enemy and competitor and
the tilth has been liberated from him and his seed, so that it can be cultivated
by white American men like Captain Hendry. May he prove to be a capable farmer!
Jonathan Harker, one of the vampire hunters in Stoker's novel, is in a similar
situation as Captain Hendry, who will still have to prove himself as a man in
married life. His fiancée Mina, to whom he will soon be married, is waiting for
Harker at home in England while he is staying at Dracula's castle at the
beginning of the plot. Not only will he have to prove himself as the founder of
a family, but also in his profession. For Hawkins, his gravely ill employer whose
retirement from working life is foreseeable due to his age, wants him to be his
successor. He is to replace him as head of a prestigious law firm. In light of
this twofold challenge, Jonathan cuts a very weak figure as a man. For example,
he delays his return from Transylvania to England, where he is to stand his ground,
and gets stuck half-way in Budapest, where a nervous breakdown ties him to a
hospital bed for a long time. He writes to his employer that he will return in
a few weeks, because he wants to recuperate in a sanatorium in the Hungarian
mountains after his hospital stay, but this does not matter because his
energetic fiancée Mina is on her way to Budapest (at the time it was quite
unusual for a woman to undertake such a journey) and takes him home to England,
since he lacks the energy to do so on his own.
Back home in England, his employer soon dies, Jonathan becomes his successor
and feels overwhelmed; Mina writes in her diary:
Jonathan
is greatly distressed. It is not only that he feels sorrow, deep sorrow, for
the dear, good man who has befriended him all his life, and now at the end has
treated him like his own son and left him a fortune which to people of our
modest bringing up is wealth beyond the dream of avarice, but Jonathan feels it
on another account. He says the amount of responsibility which it puts upon him
makes him nervous. He begins to doubt himself.
… and now, married to Jonathan, Jonathan a
solicitor, a partner rich, master of his business, Mr. Hawkins dead and buried,
and Jonathan with another attack that may harm him …
This attitude, that is putting off facing his
challenges out of cowardice instead of vigorously tackling them, obviously also
applies to Jonathan's sexuality. Not until the very end of the novel, seven
years after the hunt for Dracula, does he announce that he has become a father:
Seven
years ago we all went through the flames; and the happiness of some of us since
then, we think, well worth the pain we endured. It is an added joy to Mina and
to me that our boy’s birthday is the same day as that on which Quincey Morris
died. His mother holds, I know, the secret belief that some of our brave
friend’s spirit has passed into him. His bundle of names links all our little
band of men together; but we call him Quincey.
This final comment leads to the conclusion that
Harker's son was born at the earliest one year after Morris's death. So he also
takes his time in this respect, and in this he is the opposite of the male
daredevil Dracula, so that Stephen Arata comments ironically on his belated
paternity:
The
vampire’s vigor is in turn closely connected with its virility, its ability to
produce endless numbers of offspring. … In marked contrast, the nonvampires in
the novel seem unable to reproduce themselves. Fathers in particular are in
short supply … Thus … the arrival of little Quincey Harker at the story’s close
signals the final triumph over Dracula, since the Harker’s ability to secure an
heir – an heir whose racial credentials are seemingly impeccable – is the
surest indication that the vampire’s threat has been mastered. Even this
triumph is precarious, however. Harker proudly notes that his son is named
after each of the men in the novel, making them all figurative fathers, yet
Quincey’s multiple parentage only underscores the original problem. How secure
is any racial line when five fathers are needed to produce one son? (p. 631f.)
He is unsuccessful in fathering a son until Dracula,
his sexual competitor, is vanquished, which he cant accomplish on his own, but
only with the help of five other men.
The fact that the alien in Hawks' film is slaughtering
white men and fertilizing his offspring with their blood is not only an
expression of the fear of whites of the greater number of children produced by people
from the Third World, but also of feelings of guilt. This can also be proven by
comparing the film with Stoker's novel. Dracula says to Mina, whom he has
attacked to turn her into one of his kind, a vampire:
And
you, their best beloved one, are now to me, flesh of my flesh, blood of my
blood, kin of my kin, my bountiful wine-press for a while, and shall be later
on my companion and my helper.
Mina is to be Dracula's winepress. What does that
mean? It is an allusion to scripture, Isaiah
63, 1-6, where God slays the people of the Edomites to punish them for their
sins:
Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments
from Bozrah? this that is glorious in his apparel, travelling in the greatness
of his strength? I that speak in righteousness, mighty to save. Wherefore art
thou red in thine apparel, and thy garments like him that treadeth in the
winefat? I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the people there was none
with me: for I will tread them in mine anger, and trample them in my fury; and
their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my
raiment. For the day of vengeance is in mine heart, and the year of my redeemed
is come. And I looked, and there was none to help; and I wondered that
there was none to uphold: therefore mine own arm brought salvation unto me; and
my fury, it upheld me. And I will tread down the people in mine anger, and make
them drunk in my fury, and I will bring down their strength to the earth.
God crushes these sinful people like grapes in a
winepress, so that their blood is spattered on his garments and poured on the
earth. Mina, then, is supposed to become a vampire and slay the English at
Dracula's side, as God slays the Edomites, by sucking their blood to punish
them for their imperialist misdeeds. Since blood sucking stands for
exploitation, even sexual exploitation, Dracula's attacks on the English are
reverse colonization. Isaiah 63: 1-6
is also alluded to in another English invasion novel, that is in Wells' War of the Worlds. This science-fiction
novel also describes an invasion of England, though not by vampires, but by Martians
who colonize England and also feed on the blood of the English, which makes a
clergyman think of God's wine-presses:
"It
is just, O God!" he would say, over and over again. "It is just. On
me and mine be the punishment laid. We have sinned, we have fallen short. There
was poverty, sorrow; the poor were trodden in the dust, and I held my peace. I
preached acceptable folly—my God, what folly!—when I should have stood up,
though I died for it, and called upon them to repent—repent!… Oppressors of the
poor and needy!… The wine-press of God!"
The poor and the wretched here are not (or not only)
the English industrial workers in the Marxist sense, but nature, that is,
animal and plant life, as well as Third World natives who live in harmony with
nature and are colonized, exploited, corrupted, and even exterminated by the
British imperialists - as H.G. Wells clearly says in his novel:
And
before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter
destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the
vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians,
in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war
of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are
we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same
spirit?
The imperialist English therefore deserve to be slain
like the Edomites and to bleed for their sins. This is the moral of the novel,
which HG Wells also expresses clearly when he describes how the invaders absorb
the blood of their victims:
They did not eat, much less
digest. Instead, they took the fresh, living blood of other creatures, and injected
it into their own veins. I have myself seen this being done, as I shall mention
in its place. But, squeamish as I may seem, I cannot bring myself to describe
what I could not endure even to continue watching. Let it suffice to say, blood
obtained from a still living animal, in most cases from a human being, was run
directly by means of a little pipette into the recipient canal.…
The bare idea of this is no doubt horribly
repulsive to us, but at the same time I think that we should remember how
repulsive our carnivorous habits would seem to an intelligent rabbit.
The
tables are turned: the aliens feed on the humans much as these feed on rabbits.
And this also applies to the monster in The
Thing from Another World. It is a plant that feeds on human beings much as
these feed on plants; Dr. Carrington gets to the heart of it:
He
has the same attitude toward us as we have toward a field of cabbages.
What is exploited and corrupted by the white man, nature
and the Third World, is striking back. Wells puts his countrymen in the
position of rabbits who are slaughtered and eaten, and Hawks puts the polar
explorers in the position of vegetables that are being consumed - both are
driven by the guilt of the Westerner. Westerners hate themselves because they
no longer live in harmony with nature like Indians, ancient Germanic peoples or
poor medieval peasants. This is the original sin in which they have been living
for many generations, their original crime which they also repeat and spread by
colonizing, that is to say subjugating, exploiting and corrupting uncivilized
or less civilized peoples and alienating them from their natural way of life or
even eradicating them. Hence this feeling of guilt towards nature, plants and
animals and towards less civilized people from the Third World.
In The Thing from Another World, the
imperialistic impulse of the white man is directed at the North Pole, at one of
the few regions of Mother Earth that has not yet been colonized, a last part of
nature that has remained unexplored and unspoiled due to its inhospitableness,
its forbidding arctic cold and inaccessibility, into which the Americans are
nevertheless advancing. By growing vegetables and strawberries at the North Pole,
the Americans are crossing a line set by nature; they unnaturally force Mother
Earth to produce fruit where she wants to remain sterile and virginal - which
is related to the behaviour of the white conquerors of North America, which was
condemned by the Indian Sitting Bull as a sacrilege:
They
claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbours
away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse. They
compel her to produce out of season, and when sterile she is made to take
medicine in order to produce again. All this is sacrilege.
And the more civilized, the more decadent Westerners
become, the stronger their conscience is haunting them because of their
original crime, the more indebted they feel towards immigrants from less
decadent countries. In Stoker's novel and Hawks' film, this feeling of guilt is
suppressed and the avenger is demonized and made a monster. But suppressing and
demonizing is wrong - it would be better to admit guilt. However, it is also
wrong to go to the other extreme, as happened in Rotherham, for example. There,
English social workers, police officers and other representatives of the power
structure stood by for 16 years as men from former colonies sexually exploited very
young white children from the countryside. Here, too, feelings of guilt and a
need to be punished may provide an unconscious motive: the sexual exploitation
of women and children by the colonial masters in the colonies, indeed the
exploitation of nature, from which the white man has become estranged, must be atoned.
This is how the police officers, social workers and other mostly left-wing but
powerful people ease their conscience, but at a the cost of others, again in an
exploitative way, for it was not their own daughters, but girls of the lower
classes which they handed over to a vengeful Moloch as an atoning sacrifice.
1)
Stephen
D. Arata: The Occidental Tourist:
“Dracula” and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization. In: Victorian Studies
Vol. 33 No. 4 (Summer 1990)
2) Joseph
Valente: Dracula’s Crypt. Bram Stoker,
Irishness, and the Question of Blood. 2002, especially p. 60 et seq.
3) See
Arata, p. 623: “Dracula enacts the
period’s most important and pervasive narrative of decline, a narrative of
reverse colonization. … In whatever
guise, this narrative expresses both fear and guilt. … As fantasies, these
narratives provide an opportunity to atone for imperial sins, since reverse
colonization is often represented as
deserved punishment.”
4) The
“Address”, held at Trinity College in 1872 and printed in: Bram Stoker: A Glimpse of America and other Lectures.
Interviews and Essays. Edited and Introduced by R. Dalby. Quotes on p. 45.
5)
Valente p. 61
6) Arata
p. 629 et seq.
7) See
Arata, p. 630: “Horror arises not because Dracula destroys bodies, but because
he appropriates and transforms them.”
8) See
Fatimah Tobing Rony: The Third Eye. Race,
Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle, S. 157-191
9) Rony, p. 186: “Completed in 1932, the
Empire State Building was, at the time of the film, the ultimate U.S. symbol of
progress, technology, and Civilization. Like the Eiffel Tower at the turn of
the century, perceived as embodying French greatness…”
10) Dieterich, p. 46
11) Translated by
Richard C. Jebb
12) Stephen
Arata: The Occidental Tourist… ; p.
631
13) Kathleen
Spencer: Purity and Danger: Dracula, the
Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis. In: ELH Vol. 59,
No. 1 (Spring 1992), p. 211
