The Vampire as the Gender and Racial Construction of Western Capitalism's White Masculinity in English and American Gothic Literature

The vampire is a cultural construct that impersonates the Gothic, man-focused power discourse, shaped as the economical symbol of Western white man's capitalist identity. It has developed through the aristocratic vampire characters such as Polidori's Lord Ruthven, Rymer's Sir Varney, or Stoker's Count Dracula; and has evolved into portraying the predatory patriarchal conceptions of white economy in Marxist, gender, and colonial redefinitions of masculinity and whiteness that Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga has come to depict, as departures from traditional constructions of masculinity and its new gender and racial assertions