Stoker: An Ambivalent Metrocolonial

BOOK REVIEWS space enough to convince us that her argument about the ambiguity of Gissing's response to the aestheticism of the eighties and nineties in its several forms is a just one; as it stands it is in a sort of not-proven situation , but one full of potential. At first glance there is enough material throughout Gissing's work for her to handle, and there might be an interesting book in it, certainly a substantial article. Lucy Crispin's "Living in Exile" is another worth while paper that is really too short to do justice to its complex idea. She is more at home than most contributors with contradictions in characters and narrative voice; indeed she sees them, correctly I think, as of the essence of Gissing. Ultimately what she shows is that Gissing offers an excellent example of a mind brought up in Victorian dualism, but turning quite quickly towards monism and the modernist sensibility—most seriously English literature in transition. There is not a lot to make a reader smile in this collection, and I was grateful for her sentences about the ending of New Grub Street: "Absolute value has disappeared, and we see the nightmare tautology of Social Darwinism: survivors survive. You're a winner if you win. The ducking stool meets Catch Twenty-two...." SIMON GATRELL University of Georgia Stoker: An Ambivalent Metrocolonial Joseph Valente. Dracula's Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. χ + 173 pp. $29.95 DRACULA'S CRYPT offers a new attempt to break out of an interpretive trap that Bram Stoker's 1897 novel has presented to recent scholars, who have been inclined to read the book as a colonialist allegory . Joseph Valente begins by observing that the last decade in Dracula criticism could be described as the decade of the "Irish Dracula." By this phrase, he means to group together critics who read Stoker's novel as an allegory of Ireland's colonial experience. For some, Count Dracula stands in for Charles Stuart Parnell, and the threat of vampirism is a symbol for the threat of the degeneration of the British Empire through the incorporation of Irish stock. For a few, Dracula is associated with parasitic British colonial power, and then the novel as a whole constitutes a thinly veiled fantasy of revolution and independence. Valente, however, emphasizes the complex and ambivalent nature of Stoker's background. While critics have been eager to assign Stoker the role of the loyal British subject and Irish protestant, Valente shows that it is 451 ELT 46 : 4 2003 precisely Stoker's mixed heritage, belonging to neither the Anglo-Irish ascendancy class nor to the Celtic rural world, but having a foot in both of them, that produces a profound and productive ambivalence towards the category of "blood" as a metaphor for racial purity. Valente's refusal of simple allegory requires him to take more complex stands towards the novel's characters than the critical tradition to this point has led us to expect. In one passage, Valente asserts that we should not take the group of vampire hunters (Jonathan Harker, Quincey Morris, Professor Van Helsing, Doctor Seward, and Arthur Holmwood whom he refers to collectively as "Little England") as representing a perfect, if somewhat cartoonish, exemplum of ideal, civilized, youth. Rather, he suggests that Stoker's relation to these figures is ironic, and that we are to see in their bloodthirsty pursuit a mirror image , so to speak, of the Count himself. The central figure of Stoker's novel, as Valente reads it, is Mina Murray/Harker, who is able to transcend the "blood logic" shared by hunter and hunted alike, and to bring Little England around to her more tolerant, hybridized worldview. Valente first moves to establish Stoker's subject position as not essentially British-identified or Irish-identified, but as "metrocolonial" (his own term). Metrocolonial suggests, on one hand, a cosmopolitan existence under which the shared cultures of city life connect the residents of one "métropole" (in this case, Dublin) with others (most importantly, London), resulting in an identification with Britain and its interests; on the other hand, it suggests the...