Postmodernist consumption in Bram Stoker's Dracula : a material culture study -

Abstract

This thesis analyzes Bram Stoker's Dracula through a materialist lens in order to study how the inventions in the novel: •inform of the social changes taking place at the fin-de-siècle, •reveal the social anxieties existing during that period, •and help envision the fate of a society deeply invested in modernity. In fact, a materialist reading quickly invites itself due to the characters' extreme reliance on up-to-date technologies in this novel, such as Kodak photography, phonograph recordings, and most importantly Mina's typewriter. This analysis contextualizes the inventions under scrutiny as a creation of a newly nascent capitalist society which relied on mass production and mass consumption of manufactured goods, all of which were phenomena resulting from the Industrial Revolution. This new system was intertwined with cultural change so deeply that it transformed feudal conventions of labor, class, wealth and ownership of property but not without accompanying social anxieties. This study borrows from various material culture critics, such as Peter Stallybrass, Daniel Miller, and Bill Brown, to define the field and to specify the particular approach adopted by this thesis. This study's specific use of material culture focuses on consumption of objects in the era of new consumer culture to present a problematic, but also productive, consumption in Dracula. The technologies in Dracula ultimately reveal postmodernist suggestiveness that encompasses three main streams of postmodernist thought: •Jean Baudrillard's absence of the real and its replacement with simulacra; •Fredric Jameson's urgency to historicize and his postmodern emphasis on consumption; •and Jean-François Lyotard's suspicion of grand-narratives and his criticism that modernity must take to itself the task of continuing the incomplete Enlightenment project – a project supposedly based on progress. Finally, this analysis sheds light on the significance of Dracula as a text that has been its