Anglo-Irish class anxieties about Catholic emancipation drove Carmilla and Dracula

Evidence

For LeFanu and Stoker, both members of the Protestant Anglo-Irish ruling class of nineteenth-century Ireland, these legends [of vamps, vampires, necrophiles, and necrophilles] were at once local folklore and metaphors for their class’s anxieties about the unhyphenated Irish, who were emerging from centuries of suppression to demand political and economic power. The Anglo-Irish feared intermarriage with the Irish, which would lead to racial degeneration, and the loss of power which would inevitably follow letting the Irish gain ownership of land. These anxieties underlie such works as Carmilla and Dracula. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 536

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s third question — what the monster lets its makers avoid seeing about themselves: the Anglo-Irish displacement of their own feared dispossession onto a racialized Other.

Related

• Dracula’s vampire fear projected Anglo-Irish anxieties about Irish intermarriage and land (similarity 0.94)
• Stoker mapped anxiety about Catholic Irish onto the vampire threat (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Stoker mapped anxiety about Catholic Irish onto the vampire threat #expands (0.90) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 535