The Arabian Nights imagery signals Eastern sexual degeneracy as a moral corruption

Evidence

Another scene featuring Islamic imagery takes place in London, when Mina and Lucy open up a copy of 1,001 Nights to find a pornographic painting. Mina is repulsed by the images in the book. Lucy, however, is very intrigued, a foreshadowing of her later copulation with Dracula. Coppola takes the sexual nature of Stoker’s text seriously, and this is not the only scene in which Dracula’s focus is on the carnal. In a scene between Dracula and Mina that takes place in London, in which the monster is seducing the virgin, a white dog suddenly appears. The two characters pet the animal in a scene of “heavy stroking” that is more than suggestive of their sexual desire for each other. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 662

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s guiding question 1: which Western anxieties the monster carries. Here the Muslim-coded figure carries sexual degeneracy. — connects to: Critics linked Islamic sexual laxity to its doctrines of determinism and paradise; Delacroix depicted the Oriental despot as cruel, powerful, and sexually deviant; Nineteenth-century American Muslim knowledge came from Bible, Arabian Nights, and Twain — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 211