Ethnic monstrosity is read through physiognomy and distinctive facial features

Evidence

Dracula, then, resembles the Jew of anti-Semitic discourse in several ways: his appearance, his relation to money/gold, his parasitism, his degeneracy, his impermanence or lack of allegiance to a fatherland, and his femininity. Dracula’s physical aspect, his physiognomy is a particularly clear cipher for the specificity of his ethnic monstrosity. When Jonathon Harker meets the count on his visit to Castle Dracula in Transylvania, he describes Dracula in terms of a “very marked physiognomy.” He notes an aquiline nose with “peculiarly arched nostrils,” massive eyebrows and “bushy hair,” a cruel mouth and “peculiarly sharp white teeth,” pale ears which were “extremely pointed at the top,” and a general aspect of “extraordinary pallor”… Visually, the connection between Dracula and other fictional Jews is quite strong. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 525

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows how the ‘monster’ category is operationalized through physiognomic coding — appearance as cipher for ethno-racial identity, useful for the reader’s analytical framework.
• QUESTION: Does the same physiognomic coding appear in medieval descriptions of the Muslim monster (e.g. the giant Saracens)? Worth tracing the continuity of nose/hair/teeth features across eras.