Resumo de Gregory Castle's Critique Of Ambivalence And Ascendancy In Dracula

To understand Gregory Castle?s Ambivalence and Ascendancy critique of Dracula one must first have a basic knowledge of the literary school of theory known as the New Historicism. New Historicism was first presented in the 1980's. It basically took shape as a reaction against the dominant school of theory of the day, the New Criticism. New Critics believed that the work itself stands alone in the analysis of a piece of literature without any outside influences. New Historicism was different from the traditional historical criticism of the 1930's and 1940's because it embraced perspectives such as the feminist approach, cultural and even Marxist criticism, among others. New Historicism viewed history, not as a linear perspective, or as something that evolved from a beginning or a definite ending with a "things are getting better" point of view. This major historical element comes from the French philosophical historian, Michel Foucalt who regarded history as a composite of many different events that traditional historians would regard as unconnected. He stated that it is difficult to view present cultural practices critically without bias from within that culture. He also felt that entering bygone days was extremely difficult.

Gregory Castle?s New Historicism critique provides interesting parallels between Bram Stoker?s Dracula and the modern, cultural, political and historical events that were taking place in 19th century Ireland. This critique includes the postcolonial perspectives relevant to the political situation in Ireland. Castle also uses Terry Eagleton?s analysis of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy that took place in Ireland. The Anglo-Irish rule over the Irish Catholic common majority, with its absentee land-lord practices, extortionist rent practices and its political and social disbarment, drained Ireland of its wealth and goods, its "life-blood" and was compared to the blood-sucking vampire Stoker?s Dracula who drained individuals of their blood and life. This idea of comparing the Ascendancy to vampires was not new; before Dracula was written other critics such as 19th century critic Michael Davitt, a member of the Irish Land League, compared the Ascendancy to vampires and described its social structure as parasitic.

Castle presents a view of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy?s undesirable and vacillating social position; it was labeled as both the colonizer and the colonized and it was divided and caught between two discordant cultural spheres. This created an intolerable social situation for the Irish Protestant presence in Ireland. The failure of the Anglo-Irish to achieve political and social ascendancy over the Irish-Catholic majority and to preserve close ties with the British Empire. The Anglo-Irish Ascendancy experienced a double threat, one threat emanating from the base Catholic entity and one coming from the British empire. This social splitting or division created for the Anglo-Irish a precarious cultural and political identity. However, the greatest threat came from the British empire, who in the end, abandoned the Anglo-Irish.

In Dracula, Anglo-Irishness is represented as a hybrid, animalistic figure who came from a once civilized and dignified race of people. The lines of distinction are blurred between the civilized and the primitive, between England and Transylvania. Bram Stoker?s own family were Irish Protestants, and as Castle suggests, when one reads Dracula with the awareness of the Anglo-Irish uncertainty that Stoker must have felt, religious-political sensibilities change from an emphasis on a Protestant England invaded by Irish Catholic vampires to a conflicting, vacillating religious-political system in which Anglo-Irish Protestants (represented as Count Dracula) must arbitrate between the Catholic peasantry from which they derive financial sustenance or "life bloodnd the English government which determines their future.
Castle also asserts that the character Van Helsing, as well as the character of Count Dracula, symbolizes the social reality of a once ruling class who has declined, lost its relevancy and has become homeless or persons without a country. In that sense, Dracula has become representative of a particular historical process that actually happened, the decline and the displacement of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy.
In the last half of the 19th century in Ireland, the Anglo-Irish Land League lost its control. Its leader, Charles Parnell lost favor with the Catholic Church via a romantic affair with a married woman. The Catholic Church organized a campaign to bring Parnell down and it succeeded. Parnell lost his position with the Land League and his leadership with the Irish Paramilitary Party. Political cartoons of the day abounded depicting Parnell as a blood-sucking vampire and a man, a two-sided creature.

Realism was a dominant form of literature in 19th century England; however, it developed differently in Ireland. Castle feels that true Realism never really developed in Ireland partly because of the denial and fabrication of the Ascendancy academia?s own contribution to negative social events that affected Ireland. As Castle point out, a middle-class or bourgeois society could never develop under colonial rule because of the reality of unbearable social conditions for the individual under colonial domination. For the colonized writers, the lack of causal explanations of intolerable social conditions for the dominated society forced them to create allegorical representations of fantastical and phantomlike creatures in literature. This is evident in the 19th century Gothic literature of such writers as Sheridan Le Fanu, with his female vampire, Carmilla, Charles Maturin with his haunted Melmoth the Wanderer and Stoker?s Dracula.

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