Bram Stoker’s Dracula is constructed as a Turk and Muslim monster

Evidence

Dracula is a Turk. He admits his Ottoman bloodlines when he laments, “Woe was it that his own unworthy brother [a Dracula ancestor], when he had fallen, sold his people to the Turk and brought the shame of slavery on them!” The Count functions as a symbol of the weakened Ottoman Empire: he is a “composite figure straining to represent coherently all the social forces that the disintegrating Ottoman Empire brought to light.” Dracula admits his Muslim bloodlines when he says the invaders of Transylvania, whom his ancestors were mingled with, were of “the blood of those old witches” that joined “with the devils in the desert.” His Jewish-Muslim-witch-devil nature makes him monstrous because, in addition to the anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim identities, he is of a mixed race, which makes him even more degenerate. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 538

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s monster/demon/giant taxonomy and to moral-panic readings of Islamicate figures in Western literature.
• SEED: A Dracula-as-Muslim-monster essay would pair the 1897 novel with contemporaneous Armenian massacre reporting to show the image tracking real Ottoman decline.