Dracula Secondary Resources
Rosemary Jackson, ‘The Fantastic as Mode’ from Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion
(London:
Methuen, 1981)
p.g3
The forms taken by any particular fantastic text are determined by a number of forces which
intersect and interact in different ways in each individual work. Recognition of these forces involves
placing authors in relation to historical, social, economic, political and sexual determinants, as well
as to a literary tradition of fantasy, and makes it impossible to accept a reading of this kind of
literature…
It can express desire through tell of, manifest or show, linguistic utterance, or it can expel desire.
When this desire is a disturbing element which threatens cultural order.
4
The fantastic traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture:
14
Utopian allegories, dream visions, surrealist texts, science fiction, horror stories, all presenting
realms ‘other’ than the human.
18
fantasy told of leaps into other realms. T hrough asceticism, mysticism, metaphysics, or poetry,
the condi tions o f a purely hum an existence were transcended, and fantasy fulfilled a definite,
escapist, function. ‘It manifested our hum an power to transcend the hum an. Men strove to
create a world that was not of this world’ (Sartre, 1947, p.58).
96
Confined to the margins of Enlightenment culture, these ‘fortresses of unreason’ were both created
by the dominant classical order and constituted a hidden pressure against it. It is in this period that
inherited patterns of meaning are lost, with the result that notions of ‘reality,’ of ‘human nature,’ of
‘wholeness,’ are dissolved.
103-104
They fantasize a violent attack upon the symbolic order and it is no accident that so many writers
of a Gothic tradition are women: Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Christina
Rossetti, Isak Dinesen, Carson McCullers, Sylvia Plath, Angela Carter, all of whom have
employed the fantastic to subvert patriarchal society-the symbolic order of modern culture. In
this way, female authors wield the gothic genre as their own political weapon-to subvert
or, even, to defy normative values of the dominant order.
Pg 118
Ninteenth-century English gothic. The consequences of a longing for immortality from a merely
human context is horrifically realized by Dracula, who is not content with a promise of eternal life