Bram Stoker: His Internalized Homophobia Externalized in “The Censorship of Fiction”

Whereas twenty-four-year-old Bram Stoker’s 1872 letter to Walt Whitman confessed his yearning for comradeship with like-minded unconventional men, and forty-nine-year-old Stoker’s 1897 publication of Dracula, with its dueling depictions of comradely and predatory male interactions, revealed the author’s anxiety over Oscar Wilde’s 1895 trials and imprisonment for “gross indecency,” sixty-year-old Stoker’s article “The Censorship of Fiction” (1908) amounted to a public declaration of his internalized homophobia. Though couched in opaque Edwardian language, his self-loathing turned outward and against other authors indisputably targets, among other so-called unspeakable unnatural depravities, homosexuality as depicted in fiction, as spelled out in boldface at the end of the following passage:

“The self-restraint and reticence which many writers have through the centuries exercised in behalf of an art which they loved and honoured [i.e., fiction writing] has not of late been exercised by the few who seek to make money and achieve notoriety through base means. There is no denying the fact nor the cause; both are only too painfully apparent. Within a couple of years past quite a number of novels have been published in England that would be a disgrace to any country even less civilized than our own. The class of works to which I allude are meant by both authors and publishers to bring to the winning of commercial success the forces of inherent evil in man…. For look what those people have done. They found an art wholesome, they made it morbid; they found it pure, they left it sullied. Up to this time it was free—the freest thing in the land; they so treated it, they so abused the powers allowed them and their own opportunities, that continued freedom becomes dangerous, even impossible. They in their selfish greed tried to deprave where others had striven to elevate. In the language of the pulpit, they have “crucified Christ afresh.” The merest glance at some of their work will justify any harshness of judgment; the roughest synopsis will horrify…. It may be taken that such works as are here spoken of deal not merely with natural misdoing based on human weakness, frailty, or passions of the senses, but with vices so flagitious [i.e., atrociously wicked; vicious; outrageous], so opposed to even the decencies of nature in its crudest and lowest forms, that the poignancy of moral disgust is lost in horror. This article is no mere protest against academic faults or breaches of good taste. It is a deliberate indictment of a class of literature so vile that it is actually corrupting the nation.”

It is beyond belief that Stoker did not comprehend how his own words could be used against his own work (i.e., Dracula) to argue it “deeply affect[ed] the principles and lives of the young people of [his] country” and called for “repressive measures such as are required in dealing with all crimes”—including the intervention of “the police.” But then, he doubtless believed his own published depravity was worthy as a cautionary tale against the sins he excoriated and, like most hypocrites, entertained, even if he could not bring himself to enjoy them.