Foreign influence

Gothic fiction peaked during the height of British imperialism, when an assumption of Western superiority was prevalent in British society. The colonial “Orient” was an imprecise area, but had an initial focus on the Ottoman Empire: southeast Europe to Northern Africa and West Asia. Gothic novels highlight the imperial ideas of the East as a place of excess and sensuality, but also a place of contagion and disease. They reflect the fear of what influence these Eastern cultures might have on British society.

The Vampyre is famed as the novel that introduced the seductive, charming, aristocratic vampire. Previously, vampires existed largely in Eastern folk tradition and Polidori opens the novel by placing the vampiric tradition firmly in the East, recounting its spread to the West. Dracula took this fear a step further, addressing fears of miscegenation, of the creature that would come from the East and diminish the true English bloodlines. The Beetle, which initially outsold Dracula in the year they were both published, played on the fears of ancient, “primitive” forces invading the colonial, “civilized” West.

Eastern objects are used to portray wealth, decadence, and destruction throughout Dorian Gray. The debauched Lord Henry is introduced lying on a “divan of Persian saddle-bags”. After Lord Henry corrupts the mind of Dorian Gray, Dorian begins to use Eastern delicacies on a path of self-destruction. Dorian travels to an opium den and smokes alongside “Malay” and “half-caste” [mixed heritage] people: a use of Eastern luxuries unacceptable to the imperial mindset. By smoking with these people, he is no longer owning and dominating Eastern luxuries but is seen as degrading himself by sharing a space with the people as equals.

The creature in Frankenstein learns to speak by observing human speech. Felix De Lavey is in love with Safie, a “stranger” described as “Arabian”. As he teaches Safie to speak his language, he unknowingly teaches the creature hiding nearby. Felix’s lessons highlight imperial rhetoric. He tells Safie of “the slothful Asiatics” and the “stupendous genius and mental activity of the Grecians”. Postcolonial critics of Frankenstein have located the creature in an Orientalist context through descriptions of his “yellow skin” and “lustrous, black hair”, and have identified him with colonised people of who had suffered many years of East Indian Company misrule by 1818, furthering a fear of what would happen if those colonised reversed the situation.