more on monsters, race and degeneration

This clip is from an article titled "Race and the Victorian Novel" by Patrick Brantlinger in The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (pp. 149-150): ...a widely held Victorian view of race as the mainspring of world history is evident from Culture and Anarchy (1869), in which poet and critic Matthew Arnold employs "Hellenism" and "Hebraism" as racial terms to distinguish the chief tendencies of Western civilization. Arnold believed that he was echoing the latest findings of "ethnology," an early version of physical anthropology that scholars today treat as a pseudo-science of racial difference. "Race is everything: literature, science, art, in a word, civilization, depend on it": so... declared Dr. Robert Knox in The Races of Men (1850). Foreshadowing Count Gobineau's influential Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, published in France in the early 1850s, Knox argued that historical change is due to the physical and mental inequalities among races; that race hatred and conflict are inbred factors in human nature; that war and imperial expansion are the results of this hatred; and finally that, where climate does not affect the outcome, the fair, stronger races invariably defeat and either enslave or exterminate the dark, weaker races. And further on, Brantlinger writes (p. 161)... Like the Monster in Frankenstein, the demonic characters in Victorian Gothic romances such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are often, at least implicitly, racial others. Thus, in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), the Count, carrying the scourge of vampirism from Transylvania to England, reflects several aspects of late-Victorian racism: anxieties about immigration, especially from eastern Europe; the anti-Semitism that such immigration aroused; and the fear of racial degeneration among the English themselves.

---