Right-Wing Gothicism

Joe McLaughlin, “Right-Wing Gothicism: Dracula’s Microfascist Modernity” (pp. 73–106)

This essay argues for a thoroughgoing effort to historicize the cultural and intellectual tradition of the hard right, putting recent theoretical developments in fascist studies into conversation with texts from the period prior to the twentieth century as a way to better understand the resurgence of the hard right and its relationship to failing liberalisms today. It is impossible to properly understand the enduring fascination with fascist aesthetics, I argue, without an attempt to historicize and theorize the development of what Christopher Bollas terms “the Fascist state of mind,” or what Michel Foucault tantalizingly calls “the fascism in us all.” To this end, I revisit Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) as one unexpected, yet prescient site of what Jack Bratich has recently described as “microfascism,” or the cultural and affective structuring logics of fascist thought, feeling, and fantasy. Looking at Dracula as a case study in the formation of “the Fascist state of mind,” I argue that the novel demonstrates how nineteenth-century liberal modernity was itself deeply imbricated in the formation of illiberal, authoritarian, and patriarchal aesthetics and values. I conclude by interrogating Dracula’s cryptic and paradoxical relationship to microfascist ideology and reflect on the gothic as a generic mode in order to make the case for the possibility of transhistorical antifascist reading practices.