Gothic vampirism recast older fears of Muslim monsters as racial contagion

Evidence

Modernity altered the limits placed on the monster in more ways that one. Gothicism introduced adaptability—making the monster capable of transmogrifying into a variety of forms. Metamorphosis is symbolic of the creature’s ability to move across land and water. The changing of one’s body, seen in numerous Gothic texts, is a signifier of the genre’s “movement across diverse geographical spaces.” Gothic mobility also granted monsters the ability to infect humans, increasing their sphere of influence, acts that were symbolic of European anxieties about racial purity. The early vampires featured in Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Stoker’s Dracula infect the European through biting, causing illness, conversion to monsterdom, and in some cases, death. In these stories, Gothic monsters often attack white bodies, corrupting bloodlines, and causing bodily disintegration and decay. When Dracula enters England, he violates both the nation’s borders and English bloodlines. The threat of foreign infection is represented both in the disruption of bodies that turn monstrous as well as the possibility that Dracula’s progeny will be carried on in Mina, whose child may be a hybrid monster. The theme of miscegenation is common in modern tales of Muslim monsters, much as they are in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 56

Categorization

• XREF: The infection/bloodline-corruption mechanics connect to the reader’s interest in how the monster figure morphs to fit each era’s dominant anxiety - same underlying thesis as the miscegenation theme in medieval sources.
• ADDENDUM: The bloodline-corruption and miscegenation dread here parallels the moral-panic dynamics of ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ (fears of foreign contamination of the body politic).