The Return of the Repressed/Oppressed in Bram Stoker's Dracula

80 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW BURTON HATLEN THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED/OPPRESSED IN BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA Marxist criticism has until recently generally assumed that only "realistic" literary works are worthy of serious critical analysis. As a result, Marxist critics have only occasionally concerned themselves with the literary mode that is today generally called "romance." The writings of Georg Lukács offer us perhaps our clearest example of the preoccupation with "realism" which has generally been characteristic of Marxist criticism. As G. H. R. Parkinson has noted, to Lukács "realism is the artistic basis of every authentic creation. ... In other words, for Lukács the words 'work of art' (used in their evaluative sense) and 'realistic work of art' have same reference."1 Lukács's literary theory thus simply rules out ipsofacto any serious analysis of works in the romantic mode. In the process, Lukács relegates to limbo much of our literary heritage. Marxist criticism cannot, I submit, simply ignore the romances of Chrétien and Malory, Ariosto and Spenser, the Brontes and William Morris. Furthermore , works in the romance mode seem more deeply rooted in popular culture than are works in the realistic mode. As Mikhail Bakhtin has demonstrated in his brilliant study of Rabelais, the popular imagination is far more likely to give birth to flamboyantly unrealistic characters like Pantagruel than to "typical" human beings like Emma Bovary.2 If Marxist criticism takes seriously the idea that the people as a whole rather than this or that elite are the ultimate source of all that is vital in human culture, then a literary theory which cannot offer a plausible account of the role of the romance mode in literature seems decidedly inadequate. Fortunately, however, conditions now seem propitious for the development of a Marxist theory of romance. Such a theory can, as Frederic Jameson has argued, build upon the important work of Northrop Frye in this area, while simultaneously subjecting Frye's critical categories to an explicitly Marxist critique.3 Frye's principal virtue as a critic is his insistence that all texts, even those which orthodox academic criticism has dismissed as merely "commercial" or "popular," are equally worth the critic's attention; and Frye has been especially interested in charting the position of romance, a form once respectable but in our century generally dismissed as trivial, amid the galaxy of literary forms. Frye sees romance as bordered on the one side by comedy (with which romance shares a confidence in the ability of human energy to triumph over all obstacles) and on the other side by myth (with which romance shares a deception of life as a struggle between divine and demonic 81 HATLEN powers). Romance itself is, says Frye, "nearest of all literary forms to the wish-fulfillment dream," in that the romance hero (unlike the comic hero) confronts genuine Evil, and always triumphs." Frye's critical categories are static and ahistorical. Therefore his treatment of romance can only be a starting point for the development of a Marxist theory on this subject. Yet as Jameson has demonstrated, Frye's categories can be used to good effect by the critic who, rather than simply classifying a work as a romance, instead looks both at the "generic affiliations" of the work and its "systematic deviations" from the conventions of the genre. The critic who looks at both similarities and differences (rather than, like Frye, at similarities alone) will, says Jameson, find "clues which lead us back to the concrete historical situation of the individual text itself, and allow us to read its structure as ideology, as a socially symbolic act, as a protopolitical response to a historical dilemma" (Jameson, p. 157). Jameson's brilliant redaction of Frye's theory of romance can, I believe, show us how to move beyond Lukács's sterile pre-occupation with "realism," and how to move toward a Marxist theory of romance. And my hope here is to further, in however small a way, the emergence of such a theory. In this essay, I shall attempt to bring to bear upon one particular example of the romance mode some methods of analysis that derive primarily from Frye and...