6 - Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde: all points east

Summary

“I want to know why you didn't obey me ordhers?” sez the Saint. …

“I didn't obey,” sez he [the King of the Snakes], “because I thraverse the jurisdiction.”

“How do ye mane?” asks St. Pathrick.

“Because,” sez he, “this is my own houldin',” sez he, “be perscriptive right,” sez he. “I'm the whole govermint here, and I put a nexeat on meself not to lave widout me own permission,” and he ducks down agin into the pond. …

So the Saint stood on the edge of the empty lake an' held up his crozier, and called on the Shnake to come forth. And when he luked down, lo! an' behold ye! there lay the King iv the Shnakes. … Then the Shnake raised his head, and, lo! and behold ye! there was no crown on to it. …

“An' till ye git me crown I'm king here still, though ye banish me. An' mayhap, I'll come in some forrum what ye don't suspect, for I must watch me crown. An' now I go away – iv me own accorrd.”

Bram Stoker, The Snake's Pass (1890)

In Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and Stoker's post-Dracula fiction, most notably The Lady of the Shroud (1909) and The Lair of the White Worm (1911), the gothic not only serves as a means of articulating the “dawn of simulation,” as Hogle has compellingly argued in relation to Dracula, but also as a vehicle by which Stoker and Wilde co-opt the globalism of modernity to reveal the emptiness of collection and revalue the hybrid subject of colonialism.