Dracula’s monstrosity is a vessel for Christian Europe’s anxiety about its Ottoman-Islamic past.

Evidence

Dracula is many monsters—a Jew, a Muslim, a Hun, a dracul, the devil. As other scholars have pointed out, the crusade against the monster is symbolic of the mixed Ottoman bloodlines that have infected Europe, threatening Anglo-Saxon purity. Stoker had a purpose in writing Dracula situated in racial politics: “[He] is setting in motion a deligitimization of the Ottoman history of Europe through the figure of the vampire, whose hybrid identification (a result of his history) as both Christian and Ottoman, makes him monstrous and ultimately incoherent, a source of history that logically (but also anxiously) needs to be silenced.” This silencing can only be achieved through the impalement and beheading of all vampires, which in the eyes of the heroes, eliminates the threat of Islam in Europe. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 557

Categorization

• XREF: This is the exact composite-monster function the reader is tracking — the single figure carrying multiple Western anxieties (Jew, Muslim, Hun) at once, paralleling the monster/demon/giant figures elsewhere in the book.
• SEED: Angle: how Stoker’s Dracula — read as impalement of Ottoman history — inverts the historical Vlad the Impaler from crusader against the Ottomans into the Ottoman blood itself, an example of image manufacture overcoming documented history.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that a vampire novel does ideological work by ‘silencing’ Ottoman history through fictional violence is dense — the monster must be destroyed precisely because he embodies a real history Europe cannot admit.