"I Would Be Master Still": Dracula as the Aftermath of the Wilde Trials and Irish Land League Policies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the intersection of sexual identity, gender, and politics in the specifically Irish context of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Neither Stoker nor Dracula are typically thought of as Irish, but by highlighting Stoker's presentation of thirdspace characters, as well as his own thirdspace identities, it becomes possible to see the distinctly Irish origins and influence of the author and the novel. Critics have in the last 20 years read Draculaeither as a novel with queer concerns or a novel with political concerns. By looking at these two aspects together and in light of each other, a specifically Irish, postcolonial understanding of the novel becomes possible. In 2001, vampires are often portrayed as bisexual, promiscuous, and androgynous. In 1895, Stoker presented vampires as having blended characteristics of masculinity and femininity. Female vampires have masculine sexual behaviour, while male vampires like Dracula have typically feminine sexual behaviour. This picture of vampires mirrors the way homosexuals were being discussed by some theorists at that time. Particularly in the aftermath of the Oscar Wilde trial, scientists came to see homosexuals as people who possessed both masculine and feminine characteristics, as a third sex. Also as a result of the trial, it became popular to discuss homosexuals as a group that restocked their populations by converting young people. Conversion was also the typical way to conceive of colonial activities during this time. Natives were considered backward or inferior, so converting them to English lifestyles and customs was seemingly the kindest action the English could take. Replacing native customs with industrialisation and technology was considered a progressive type of colonialism. Stoker portrays this conversion method of colonialism in the character of Dracula. The Count threatens to take London not by force, but by slowly converting its citizens to his way of life. This intersection of colonialism and homosexuality in Draculaallows Stoker to re-define the importance of a third position to the contemporary Irish problem of the Land League. Like homosexuals at that time, the Anglo-Irish also occupied a third position, considered neither truly Irish nor truly English. Just as it takes those defined by a third position to defeat Dracula's attempt at colonisation, Stoker seems to suggest it will take the Anglo-Irish to settle colonial issues in Ireland successfully.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".