Who Gets to Be the Monster? Race, Fear, and the Colonial Imagination

There is a question that Gothic fiction has been answering for two centuries without quite admitting it is doing so.

The question is this: who gets to be the monster?

It sounds like an aesthetic question — a matter of casting, of narrative choice, of which body the author decides to load with dread. But it is not aesthetic. It is political. It is historical. And one of the most precise answers the Victorian Gothic ever gave to it is a novel that most literature classrooms have never taught, despite the fact that it appeared in the same decade as Dracula, was written by a British author, and was reviewed enthusiastically by the British press.

The novel is The Blood of the Vampire by Florence Marryat, published in 1897. And it answers the question with an honesty that is, depending on your perspective, either refreshing or deeply uncomfortable.

Harriet Brandt, the novel's protagonist, is young, beautiful, wealthy, and genuinely without malice. She is also, the novel insists, monstrous — not because of anything she has done, but because of what she is. Her father was a British plantation owner in Jamaica who conducted experiments on enslaved people. Her mother was a woman of African descent whom the novel describes in terms drawn directly from the racial pseudoscience of the period. Harriet has inherited, the text suggests, a vampiric quality from this heritage: she drains vitality from those she loves, unconsciously, simply by existing in proximity to them. Infants sicken in her arms. Husbands weaken. Friends fade.

She has no fangs. She undergoes no transformation. She performs no supernatural act. Her monstrousness is entirely and explicitly racial — a quality encoded in her blood by the colonial encounter, by the mixing of what the novel frames as incompatible human categories.

Marryat was not writing a racist polemic. She was writing a Gothic novel in the conventions of her time, drawing on the anxieties that her culture had produced and that her readership would have recognized immediately. That is precisely what makes the novel so useful in the classroom. It does not disguise its politics as aesthetics. It wears them openly — which means that a careful reader cannot mistake the source of Harriet's monstrousness for anything other than what it is: the colonial imagination, in print, in 1897, telling its readers exactly what it feared.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, in his foundational essay *Monster Culture (Seven Theses)*, argued that the monster is always a cultural body — that it encodes the fears, desires, and anxieties of the society that produces it. Harriet Brandt is a case study in that thesis so precise it might have been designed for it. She is what Victorian Britain feared: the product of colonial transgression, of the sexual violence of the plantation, of the racial mixing that empire made inevitable and polite society refused to accommodate. She cannot be integrated. She cannot be redeemed. The novel resolves her story the only way its logic permits.

The Blood of the Vampire is an unusually explicit example of something that runs, with varying degrees of visibility, through the entire Western Gothic tradition.

Dracula arrives from the East, bringing with him the threat of contamination — racial, sexual, civilizational. The anxiety his foreignness produces in the novel's British characters is not merely supernatural; it is the anxiety of an empire that has been everywhere, touched everything, and now fears what might come back. Frankenstein's creature is described in terms that nineteenth-century readers would have associated with the racially othered body — enormous, dark, outside the social contract, ultimately unredeemable despite his eloquence and his genuine moral claims. Poe's horror is saturated with the anxiety of a slaveholding society: the return of the buried, the collapse of the house under the weight of its own secrets, the narrator who insists on his own rationality while everything around him gives way.

These are not coincidences. They are the trace of a historical moment — the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when European colonial expansion was at its height, when the Enlightenment's claims about universal reason and human progress existed in unresolved tension with the practice of slavery, extraction, and conquest. Gothic fiction was, from its origins, a genre for processing what could not be processed in polite discourse. And what could not be processed — what had to be simultaneously acknowledged and denied, exploited and kept at a distance — was the colonial encounter itself.

The Gothic absorbed all of this and transformed it into horror. But horror that kept the political safely displaced. The threat comes from Transylvania, not from the slave trade. The darkness is supernatural, not historical. The monster is Other in a way that the text does not have to examine too carefully, because its otherness has already been naturalized by the world that produced the text.

This is what it means to say that the Gothic is a colonial genre — not that every Gothic text is a direct apology for empire, but that the genre's foundational structures of fear and otherness were shaped by colonial categories of human difference. Those categories do not disappear simply because the author was writing about vampires.

Here is where Tropical Gothic becomes not just a supplement to the Western canon but a genuine challenge to it.

Because in the Gothic traditions of colonized worlds, the monster does not come from outside. It comes from inside — from the land itself, from the history embedded in the soil, from the spirits of those who died without justice and have not been properly mourned. And it does not threaten the social order from beyond its borders. It enforces an order that colonial society deliberately dismantled.

The Caipora does not threaten European civilization. It protects a relationship to the forest that European civilization destroyed. The spirits of Afro-Brazilian tradition are not foreign invaders; they are presences of those who were brought to Brazil in chains and whose spiritual lives survived — transformed, syncretic, undefeated — despite every effort to eradicate them. The haunting in Tropical Gothic is not the haunting of the unknown arriving to disturb the known. It is the haunting of what was always here, insisting on being recognized.

This inverts the Gothic's colonial logic entirely. In the Western Gothic, the monster is what threatens civilization. In Tropical Gothic, civilization — specifically, colonial civilization — is frequently what created the conditions for haunting in the first place. The horror is not what lurks outside the plantation house. The horror is the plantation house.

Place Harriet Brandt alongside the figures of Tropical Gothic and something shifts in how both are read. Harriet is monstrous, in Marryat's novel, because she carries the colonial encounter in her blood — because the violence of the plantation produced her and the social order cannot absorb her. The spirits of Candomblé, the forest guardians of Brazilian Indigenous tradition, the Iara sovereign in her river — these figures carry the same colonial encounter, the same plantation history, the same refusal to be absorbed. But they are not monstrous. They are the moral reckoning. They are what insists on remaining after the civilization that tried to erase them has moved on.

Read together, these traditions do not cancel each other out. They illuminate each other — and they illuminate, more precisely than either tradition could alone, the political history that produced them both.

To teach Gothic fiction with this awareness is not to turn the literature classroom into a political seminar. It is to teach the texts fully — to give students the historical and theoretical context that allows them to read with genuine critical sophistication, rather than accepting the genre's own framing of who is frightening and why.

It means asking, when teaching *The Blood of the Vampire*, what it tells us that Harriet's monstrousness is located in her racial heritage rather than in any act she commits. It means asking, when teaching Dracula, what it means that the threat comes from the East. It means asking, when teaching Frankenstein, whose body is coded as monstrous and what that coding tells us about the society that found it monstrous.

And it means pairing these questions with texts that answer them from the other side — texts that encode the perspective of those who were cast as monsters by the colonial imagination, that show the haunting from the haunter's point of view, not as horror but as justice, as memory, as the refusal to be erased.

Harriet Brandt did not choose her heritage. She did not choose to be what the colonial world made her, and she did not choose the verdict that world passed on her. That is, in its way, the most Gothic thing about her — and the most human. Students who learn to read her story with that clarity are students who have been given something the curriculum rarely offers: the experience of watching the monster look back, and recognizing, in that gaze, not threat but history.

Who gets to be the monster?

In the Western Gothic canon, the answer has been, with depressing consistency: the foreign, the dark, the colonized, the female, the sexually transgressive — those whose difference from the norm was already encoded as threatening by the society that produced the texts.

In Tropical Gothic, the question is answered differently. Here, the monster is frequently the system. The violence. The colonial structure itself. The haunting is not individual but historical; the horror is not personal but political; and what persists, when the horror has done its work, is not the destruction of the threatening Other but the reckoning of a society with what it has done and what it owes.

These are not incompatible visions. They are a conversation — one that the curriculum has been preventing by only teaching one side of it.

Florence Marryat gave us Harriet Brandt in 1897 and called her a monster. Tropical Gothic gives us the Caipora, the Iara, the spirits of the terreiro — and calls them witnesses. The difference between those two framings is not merely literary. It is the difference between a curriculum that teaches students to fear the Other, and one that teaches them to ask who decided the Other was frightening, and why, and what it cost.

That question belongs in every serious literature classroom. It has been waiting long enough.

References:

- Marryat, F. (1897). *The Blood of the Vampire*. Hutchinson & Co.

- Cohen, J. J. (1996). *Monster Theory: Reading Culture*. University of Minnesota Press.

- Punter, D. & Byron, G. (2004). *The Gothic*. Blackwell.

- Young, R. J. C. (1995). *Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race*. Routledge.

- Paravisini-Gebert, L. (2002). *Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic: The Caribbean*. In D. Punter (Ed.), *A Companion to the Gothic*. Blackwell.

- Morrison, T. (1992). *Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination*. Harvard University Press.

- Botting, F. (1996). *Gothic*. Routledge.

- Hogle, J. E. (Ed.) (2002). *The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction*. Cambridge University Press.