Subverting Anthropocentrism: Fear, Enslavement, and Reversed Colonisation in Dracula

Stoker’s Dracula stands out as one of the most significant examples of English Gothic literature from the late Victorian era. Stoker’s portrayal of Dracula and vampirism foregrounds a pronounced hostility towards the Other, most visibly enacted by the novel’s human protagonists. This paper examines the antagonism of Victorian humanity towards Dracula and vampires, arguing that the roots of this hostility lie in the anthropocentric ideology that dominated nineteenth-century thought. Dracula’s non-human ontology and ecological mode of existence destabilise humankind’s assumed position at the apex of the hierarchical power structure. By seeking to expand vampirism through the enslavement of humans, Dracula threatens to overturn anthropocentric dominance. Renfield functions as a particularly unsettling figure, epitomising the enslaved human subject and embodying the master–slave dichotomy that exposes human vulnerability to non-human power. The human characters’ fear of reversed colonisation, enslavement, and the dissolution of human identity ultimately motivates the violent extermination of Dracula. Crucially, the paper concludes that Victorian anthropocentrism deliberately obscures the shared parasitic relationship that both humans and vampires maintain with their environment. While vampirism is framed as monstrous exploitation, human parasitism is naturalised and rendered morally invisible. This asymmetrical framing allows anthropocentrism to weaponise environmental parasitism as a means of retaining humans at the top of the hierarchy, while simultaneously excluding Dracula from moral consideration and ethical recognition.