Suicide, spectral politics and the ghosts of history in Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian

This article examines Elizabeth Kostova’s 2005 Gothic novel The Historian, a vampire novel that undermines its fantasies of a wholly accessible past by repeated assurances that history is always fabricated. The novel in fact presents not just Dracula but the past itself as a ghostly amalgam of absence and presence. This spectralization of the past is a symptom of the narrator’s own traumatic past, and Dracula becomes a mask for a repressed family narrative of suicide. In Kostova’s handling, however, the Gothic also becomes a way of engaging larger societal traumas when the novel presents Dracula as a figure for the suicidal terrorist. This post-9/11 novel ultimately points to and represses the fears and complexities surrounding terrorism since 9/11, especially the overwhelming fear that US efforts at counter-terrorism are turning America into the very thing it is trying to fight.