Gothic horror portrayed Muslim figures as damned sexual monsters

Evidence

Another way in which people experienced the Orient was through literature, exemplified in Bram Stoker’s adoption of a travel diary as a narrative device in Dracula. Stories were often set in an Oriental locale (also the case with Dracula, set in former Ottoman territory), exotic lands fraught with dangers, as in Beckford’s Vathek, whose central character is a Muslim ultimately damned for his numerous sins, including homosexuality and mass murder of a group of naked young boys. Gothic horror, a subgenre of Romantic literature that will be examined in the following chapter, was aligned with the growing popularity of Orientalism. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 422

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how directly did Vathek and Dracula map the Muslim-monster template onto their monstrous characters?
• FICTION: The structure — a travel diary narrating encounter with Eastern monstrosity — is a usable frame for fiction.
• XREF: Dracula’s Ottoman setting and the monster template may connect to how the reader’s own society images monsters.