Bram Stoker’s Secret Code in ”Dracula”.

The Mozart Effect. Does listening to Mozart’s music make you smarter?The Mozart Effect. Does listening to Mozart’s music make you smarter?Dracula is one of those novels that create the feeling that there is something deep in its pages, something underground that is expressed symbolically in the story. This fascinating aspect has justified the production of a large number of studies that presume to have found “evidence” in the life of Bram Stoker to explain this subtext, a somewhat problematic exercise, given the many gaps in the author’s biographical sources ( see: Coppola’s Dracula and Stoker’s Sewers)

On the one hand, we are asked to accept that Bram Stoker was an inexhaustible source of neurosis that overflowed the pages of Dracula, but all these conclusions are based on more or less flimsy evidence, when not directly false; For example, that the author was a victim of child violence, abuse, that he was secretly in love with Henry Irving, that his wife was frigid, that the author had syphilis, that the Oscar Wilde trials provided inspiration, and that he was even inspired in the sadistic nature of Vlad the Impaler.
Let’s start with the childhood of Bram Stoker, which unfortunately – or fortunately for those who often analyze it – is shrouded in mystery. Bram Stoker wrote about it:

I understand that in my childhood I used to be on the verge of death. Certainly, until the age of seven, I never knew what it was like to stand. This early weakness, however, passed over time and I became a strong child.

No researcher has been able to decipher the exact nature of this presumed childhood disease, although there has been no shortage of conjecture. Some theorists propose surprising psychological conclusions as a result of this disease; for example, that Bram Stoker had an unusually strong paternal fixation, and that Dracula’s core lies in the author’s childhood illness, along with his pent-up feelings of rivalry towards his siblings. In this sense, the first psychoanalytic glances of Dracula propose that the novel is based on the concept of oral triad: the desire to eat, be eaten and sleep.
In this context, the fact that he secretly harbors death wishes for his siblings is less impressive than the hypothesis that Dracula, and in particular his use of vampires, symbolically express primal scenes linked to breastfeeding. More recently, however, this proposal has been broadened towards the idea that Dracula’s dominant motives have their origin in the bleeding treatments, caused by Bram Stoker’s childhood discomfort t)

Medicinal bleeding, theoretically applied to the sick little Bram Stoker, would have been experienced first as the sensation of being eaten and then as a castration threat. This, in theory at least, would set the stage for increased castration anxiety and regression to oral fantasies after the prostrate boy managed to remain upright, both in a physical and phallic sense. On the other hand, Bram Stoker experienced the birth of four siblings before the age of seven, which gave him several opportunities to see his mother pregnant, his brothers breastfeeding, and to shape his feelings of rivalry and anger towards them
That’s how reckless some of these guesses are.

However, there are other hypotheses, less oedipal than gastric. In the 60s of the last century academic rumors circulated that evaluated the possibility that Dracula had its origin in a nightmare. However, Bram Stoker’s dream would not have arisen from a revelation, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or even from intense physical pain, like the work of Robert Louis Stevenson; but from a too generous portion of seasoned crab.

Apparently, this was the anecdote that Bram Stoker told anyone who asked him the origin of his novel. It was probably a false story, or an exaggerated one, but it allowed her to elegantly avoid a lengthy explanation. However, some scholars were reluctant to admit such a banal reason, so much so that Joseph S. Bierman, in the essay: Dracula: Prolonged Childhood Illness, and the Oral Triad, risks a symbolic and ominous meaning for that crab:
Crab, in the horoscope, constitutes the sign of the Zodiac that covers the period between June 23 and July 23. George, Stoker’s younger brother, was born under the sign of the crab on July 20. Eating the crab meant, unconsciously, devouring and killing baby George.

Oddly enough, Bierman is not alone in this wild line of unsubstantiated conjecture. Seymour Shuster, in a 1972 article published in the British Journal of Medical Psychology, entitled: Dracula and surgically induced trauma in children, states that Dracula is the result of repressed anxiety related to the author’s childhood experience with physicians. And he adds that Jonathan Harker’s terror and helplessness in Dracula’s castle are analogous to those of the boy who has been left by his mother in a hospital to undergo surgery or medical bleeding treatment.
In this context, the baby that Dracula gives to his three vampires represents Bram Stoker himself; being the vampire’s bite a symbolic representation of the needle prick in the terrified child,

Dracula — we don’t need to be told — is the Doctor! After all, Bram Stoker often referred to the earl as “Drac,” which sounds like “Doc,” and the first two letters of his name form the abbreviation “Dr.”

The problem with all of this is that no medical records of Bram Stoker’s alleged childhood illness have been found, which is why no one knows if he spent any time in the hospital. On the other hand, the similarities between “Drac” and “Doc” are questionable to say the least.

In the study: The Vampire Myth, Stoker’s Dracula, and Psychotherapy of Vampiric Sexual Abuse, the clinical psychologist Daniel Lapin finds that the defenselessness of that baby delivered by Dracula it is analogous to the helplessness of a young Bram Stoker whose illness was none other than being the victim of some kind of abuse.

I wonder how many doctors came to that boy’s bedside, couldn’t explain his illness, couldn’t specify his mechanism, and decided that he wasn’t really sick.

Lapin further postulates that Jonathan, Lucy and Mina (see: Bloofer Lady: the transformation of Lucy Westenra) function as representations of a brother and two sisters of Bram Stoker, for whom he would have assumed a protective role; and also risks the identity of that alleged abuser:

The original abuser in Stoker’s life, from whom our fictional Earl was derived, was undoubtedly a man of many positive qualities, as parents often are.
Lapin’s theory is based on a biased interpretation of the novel, according to him, made by a professional in the treatment of victims of abuse (see: Failed motherhood in “Dracula”). According to Lapin, the images and recurring language patterns in Dracula are similar to the testimony of his patients. This, and in the absence of real evidence, have convinced many that their theory is sound. Students of the Gothic genre, on the other hand, will probably find other causes for the recurrence of images, something to be expected in a work that falls within a literary genre with certain parameters.

Much more widespread in academic circles is the thesis that Dracula is inspired by Bram Stoker’s unfulfilled homoerotic longing for his employer, Henry Irving. Bram Stoker himself provides much information about the actor in Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving), published in 1906, that is, nine years after the appearance of Dracula.
If one takes the text at face value, there is no doubt about the affectionate feelings towards Irving. Bram Stoker adored him, not in a brotherly sense, but out of genuine admiration (see: This man belongs to me!). On his initial encounter with Irving, Bram Stoker records the following:
From that hour began a friendship as deep, as close, as lasting as can be between two men. I never found his appearance, demeanor, or manners other than the best. My love and admiration for Irving was such that nothing I could say to others, nothing I could remind myself of, could diminish his worth.
The Irving-Dracula bond is based on the idea that hero worship is often accompanied by ambivalence, and that it has its opposite side. In other words, Bram Stoker contributes to the cult of his personal hero, Irving, in Reminiscences, but at the same time masks what he could not admit to himself: that he resented the low man in whose shadow he had worked for so long. For many, this was a signal to explore Irving as the prototype of Count Dracula
By the way, Nina Auerbach comments on the following:
There was always something wicked about Irving, something not just cunning, but cruel: Bram Stoker’s devoted Reminiscence erases the sinister and invasive magnetism that turned his Dracula into an unforgettable Irving caricature.
In other words, the relationship with Irving was composed of a mixture of adoration, fear and hatred. As expected, this relationship has also been analyzed in emotional terms. In this context, the general hypothesis would be the following: writing Dracula allowed Bram Stoker to symbolically load into the story all the confusion, frustration and pain that he suffered because he could not recognize that he was in love with his friend. Interesting, no doubt, but only a guess.

Then we have the “Oscar Wilde Hypothesis”; that is, the notion that Oscar Wilde was a great influence on Dracula. Is this likely? Of course, but the eagerness to establish a connection has caused a malicious distortion of the facts. Florescu and McNally, in Dracula: Prince of Many Faces (Dracula, Prince of Many Faces), affirm that the London atmosphere at that time was permeated by the scandal that caused Wilde’s trial, remember, for entering into a romantic relationship with another man . Wilde spent two years in prison, from 1895 to 1897, precisely the period of time that Bram Stoker wrote Dracula.
Unfortunately, this theory is false.

While it is true that Bram Stoker wrote Dracula in the same boiling period for Wilde’s trial, the truth is that he spent five years planning the novel, and according to the surviving notes from that planning period, Dracula’s profile it already existed, roughly the same as the final version, in the spring of 1895, long before Wilde was indicted.

Reading Dracula in the light of Victorian anxieties is perfectly legitimate, but it is another thing to misrepresent the facts. Bram Stoker knew Oscar Wilde well, a Dubliner like him; in fact, Wilde had courted Stoker’s wife, Florence Balcombe, long before the couple met. On the other hand, they were both men of the theater, so their paths surely crossed from time to time. Bram Stoker may have had The Picture of Dorian Gray in mind when he included a painter in his first notes for Dracula, but to claim that the entire novel is based on the fear that Wilde’s overt bisexuality aroused in London society is foolhardy.
We also have the rumor of the failed physical relationship between Bram Stoker and his wife as inspiration for Dracula. Many authoritative opinions hold, without disheveled, that Florence Balcombe was “frigid as a statue.” Who are these “authorities”? Among them are Daniel Farson and Ann Stoker, Bram Stoker’s great-nephew and granddaughter respectively. It was they who publicly spread all kinds of family gossip. But how reliable is the information that depends on family folklore?

While it is permissible that Bram Stoker may have neglected his wife, Florence Balcombe’s frigidity is a matter of guesswork. This rumor is so widely accepted that it has served as a premise for other bold conclusions, for example, that Florence, who supposedly had an unsatisfactory married life, also suffered from a severe menstrual disorder. Was it any of these everyday images that subliminally imprinted on Bram Stoker the idea of ​​a myth of formidable power, based on the ferocity of a frustrated woman who bleeds and burns with unacknowledged impulses?
It is certainly possible, but that would force us to admit the absurd possibility that Bram Stoker’s Dracula is just an unconscious attempt to understand the dysmenorrhea that was ruining his marriage.

But reckless theories don’t end Florence Balcombe’s supposed coldness. It follows that desperate Bram Stoker turned to professional women to alleviate a desire that his wife could not satisfy, with the uncomfortable result that he contracted syphilis in the process. The rumor spread like wildfire, and Florescu and McNally exploited it without much scruples:
Florence refused to sleep with him since their son, Noel, was born in 1879. Stoker did what Victorian men did: he turned to prostitutes. In those flirtations he contracted syphilis. When he began working on Dracula in Cruden Bay, Scotland, in 1895, one can imagine him as a prematurely aged man, ravaged by disease.

Reading vampirism in Dracula as a metaphor for syphilis is, again, a valid exercise, which in fact had a particular resonance in the 1990s with the spread of HIV; but it is another thing to defend this theory at all costs based on flimsy biographical information. Even if Bram Stoker had contracted the disease, which we don’t know, it likely wouldn’t have happened early enough to have influenced Dracula.

Indeed, it is not certain that Bram Stoker suffered from this disease. In fact, there is not even conclusive data on his cause of death. His death certificate uses the term Locomotor Ataxia, believed to be a prudent medical description of tertiary syphilis. However, this is also not conclusive. Even if the treating doctor was referring to syphilis, he could well have made a mistake in the diagnosis, something quite common at the time. We must also bear in mind that Bram Stoker suffered from other ailments that could have contributed to his death: two strokes and Bright’s disease. Since the dead don’t tell stories, we may never know what exactly he died of.

Finally, there is the connection to the historical Dracula, Vlad the Impaler, whose fondness for impalement has led some to speculate about his influence on Bram Stoker’s novel. But what exactly is it that makes Vlad such a fitting model for Dracula? Several things, to begin with, but these theories don’t have much to do with reality. It is unlikely that Bram Stoker knew of the horrors Vlad experienced while incarcerated in Turkey; in fact, the existing historical records in this regard are vague; and it is equally unlikely that he knew of Vlad’s fondness for impalement.
Is it to say that the similarity between the method of killing a vampire and Vlad’s favorite means of execution is just a coincidence?
Yes.
Bram Stoker’s main source regarding stakes is clearly found in earlier vampiric literature and folklore.
In fact, there is concrete evidence that invites us to deduce that Vlad the Impaler was not the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, or at least not the most powerful influence.