Sociopolitical Philosophy In The Works Of Stoker And Yeats Essay

Socio g all overnmental Philosophy in the Works of Stoker and YeatsAround the turn of this century there was widespread fear throughoutEurope, and curiously Ireland, of the consequences of the race mixing that wasoccurring and the rise of the lower classes over the aristocracies in control.In Ireland, the Protestants who were in control of the country began to fear therise of the Catholics, which threatened their land and political power. TwoIrish authors of the period, Bram Stoker and William Butler Yeats, offer theirviews on this problem in their works of fiction. These include StokersDracula and Yeats On Bailes Strand and The Only green-eyed monster of Emer, and theseworks show the authors differences in ideas on how to deal with this threat tocivilization. Stoker feels that triumph over this threat can only be achievedby the buck of these demonic forces through modernity, maculation Yeats believesthat only by facing the violent and demonic forces and emerging from them could Ireland return to its ancient and traditional roots and find its spatial relation insociety.The vampire was a common metaphor used by many authors in an attempt toportray the rising lower class and opposed influence as evil and harmful tomodern civilization. The Irish Protestant author Sheridan Le Fanu uses vampiresto represend the Catholic uprising in Ireland in his degree Carmilla. Like muchof gothic fiction, Carmilla is about the mixing of blood and the harm thatresults from it. When vampires strike, they are tainting the blood of the pureand innocent, causing them to degenerate into undead savages who will take overand annex until their race makes up the condition of the whole world. Thiswas the fear the Protestants had of the rising Catholic class. They were seenas a lowly people and the fear was that they too would colonize and degenerateIreland, and perhaps the rest of Europe, back into a primitive land of savages.This fear of the breakdown of civilization by dark forces is also what Draculais about.In Dracula, Stoker sets up the heroes and victors of the novel ascivilized people, while the foreign villain is ancient and demonic. The bookbegins with the journal of Jonathan Harker, a stenographer from London who issent to Transylvania to close a land deal with the mysterious Cou... ...rk forces that threatenit, and removing itself from these forces, in addition to simply delaying theinevitable, will only lead to further tragedy.The works of these two Irish authors are fine pieces of fiction thateffectively employ the elements of horror and tragedy which are common in gothicliterature, but they also service as valuable insights into the philosophies thatwere shared by many Europeans during these times of anxiety and change. It isdifficult to say which philosophy is superior to the other. Stokers Draculawas published in 1897, while Yeats works were written later, with The OnlyJealousy of Emerwritten in 1919, giving him the advantage of witnessing th eEaster Rising of 1916. The turmoil of the period was not as simple as modernversus primitive or good versus evil, and certainly not everyone in Europeshared their views or anything close to them, thus making it intimatelyimpossible to judge the superiority of one philosophy over another. Whilereaders may not agree with either of the authors, these works are still socialize and serve as a testament to the power of literature as a platformfor social and political opinion.