Dracula’s vampire fear projected Anglo-Irish anxieties about Irish intermarriage and land

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

• SEED: Article angle: the vampire genre as real estate and bloodline anxiety — how gothic monsters encode oligarchic fear of land redistribution.
• XREF: Hallmark of the manufactured-fear thesis: the monster stands in for a real local political threat (Irish Catholic rising), not actual Muslims — clear projection mechanism.