SOURCE: Bierman, Joseph S. “Dracula: Prolonged Childhood Illness, and the Oral Triad.” American Imago 29, no. 2 (summer 1972): 186-98.

[In the following essay, Bierman contends that Dracula “mirrors Stoker's early childhood in that it is essentially a tale of medical detection of puzzling illnesses, of obscure diagnoses, and unusual cures in which the phenomenon of the ‘undead’ person is prominent.”]

In the early summer of 1895, Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, had a nightmare which he attributed to eating too much dressed crab at supper one night. He dreamed about a vampire king rising from the tomb to go about his ghastly business (Ludlam, 1962). Inspired by this dream, he set to work writing the novel, Dracula. By the fall of 1895, he was writing his first draft. Since it first appeared in London in 1897, Dracula has not been out of print. I would like to present one key answer, summarized from a wider study, to the question of what enabled and forced Stoker to write Dracula. The answer is based on an analysis of two autobiographical stories from an earlier book for children that can be considered as associations to his dream novel. The material of Dracula, and these stories, lend themselves to the application of Lewin's concept of the oral triad—i. e., the wish to eat, be eaten and sleep.

Stoker's distinctive early childhood is mirrored in both Dracula and one of these short stories. The distinction is that Stoker was expected to die from the moment of birth on. He himself says: “In my babyhood I used, I understand, to be often at the point of death. Certainly, until I was about seven years old, I never knew what it was to stand upright (Stoker, 1906).” Bram Stoker, whose given name was Abraham, was born in 1847 in Clontarf, a small seaside suburb of Dublin. He was the third child of Abraham and Charlotte Stoker. Abraham Sr. was a Civil Servant who worked in Dublin Castle. By the time young Stoker was able to walk at age seven, the Stokers had had their four additional children. The nature of this very long illness is unknown, and is made all the more puzzling by the fact that recovery was so complete that Stoker was to become the Athletic Champion of Dublin University.

Dracula mirrors Stoker's early childhood in that it is essentially a tale of medical detection of puzzling illnesses, of obscure diagnoses, and unusual cures in which the phenomenon of the “undead” person is prominent. A brief synopsis of the novel will demonstrate this.

In order to invade England and spread his vampirism, Dracula summons a young English barrister, Jonathan Harker, to Castle Dracula in Transylvania. Harker has been hired to arrange for the shipment by boat of fifty great boxes of earth to London that are to be Dracula's daytime resting places. Harker only slowly realizes that Dracula is a vampire who plans to leave him imprisoned in Castle Dracula in the clutches of his three vampire wives while he sails for England in one of the great boxes. Dracula departs, but Harker escapes to Budapest where he is put in a hospital suffering from brain fever.

Dracula comes ashore amidst a horrible storm and immediately starts to vampirize a young woman, Lucy Westenra. Lucy presents a very puzzling picture. She starts to walk in her sleep. Although she becomes increasingly weak and pale, the analysis of her blood is normal. Her canine teeth become elongated and sharp. The diagnosis baffles a close friend and rejected suitor, Dr. John Seward, a psychiatrist, who runs an insane asylum in London. Dr. Seward calls in his former teacher, a specialist in rare diseases, Dr. Abraham van Helsing. Van Helsing is also puzzled at first but, after he sees two small wounds on Lucy's neck, it dawns on him that she is the victim of a vampire. He commences to treat her with blood transfusions and garlic, but to no avail. Dracula succeeds in drawing too much life blood from her. After her death, she in turn becomes a vampire. Van Helsing with difficulty persuades Dr. Seward and two others, Quincey Morris, another rejected suitor, and Lucy's fiancee, Arthur Holmwood, that Lucy is now a vampire who is victimizing young children. Together, they cure her of her vampirism by “operations of life and death” in which they drive a stake through her heart and cut off the head with a “post-mortem knife.”

It turns out that Lucy's best friend, Mina Murray, who was with her for part of her vampire illness is Jonathan Harker's fiancee. Mina is summoned to Budapest by Jonathan's nurse before Lucy's death. There, she marries him and brings him back to London. While a prisoner in Castle Dracula, Harker had kept a diary that Dr. Van Helsing now reads. The elderly physician realizes that Dracula is the very same vampire who had bled Lucy. Further investigation reveals that Dracula has rented an old house adjacent to Dr. Seward's insane asylum. One of Dr. Seward's patients is a Mr. Renfield with the strange and interesting illness of “zoophagous mania.” He eats flies, and spiders that have eaten the flies, and even birds that have eaten the spiders, but he vomits the birds up. He keeps a notebook in which he jots down columns of figures about his prey. He becomes agitated at night. His motto is “the blood is the life.” Renfield falls under Dracula's spell and finally affords Dracula entrance to the madhouse where Mina and Jonathan Harker are now staying as guests of Dr. Seward. While Van Helsing, Harker, Seward, Morris and Holmwood are out searching for Dracula, the vampire is beginning to make Mina his next victim. This becomes apparent when Van Helsing is immunizing everyone in the group by touching their foreheads with a holy wafer. Mina's forehead is burnt by the Host, leaving her with a red scar. The only way to cure Mina before she turns into a vampire like Lucy is to find and kill Dracula. The chase begins. Dracula gets cornered but escapes and books passage on a ship back to Transylvania. The group follows by the Orient Express across Europe. At the last possible moment before sunset, they kill Dracula in a great box of earth with the battlements of Castle Dracula in the background. At the moment of his death, the scar on Mina's forehead disappears. She has fully recovered, and no trace of her illness remains.

The short story referred to earlier that also has a medical detection theme reflecting Stoker's childhood illness is contained in a book for children that he wrote in 1881—fourteen years before the vampire dream. To better understand the meaning of this book to Stoker at that point in his life, it will be helpful to have some additional biographical information.

After Stoker recovered from his long illness, he went to a private religious school in Dublin and then went on to Trinity College of the University of Dublin. There, he took honors in writing, science and mathematics. After graduation, he joined his father as a Civil Servant in Dublin Castle. In the next few years, he earned a Master of Arts degree, worked as an editor of the newspaper, wrote some “cliff hangers” for a newspaper, and also became the drama critic for one of the dailies in Dublin. In December 1878, he joined Henry Irving, who was then the foremost Shakespearean of his time, as the acting manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London. He was to be Irving's factotum and alter ego for the next 27 years. His duties included reading and editing plays, accounting, being in charge of arrangements for tours, and greeting guests. Among the celebrities he was to meet in these 27 years was Sir Richard Burton, the famed orientalist, translator of the Arabian Nights and also translator of a book of Indian vampire stories. Stoker was to write later how impressed he was by Burton's canine teeth (Stoker, 1906). Right before joining Irving in London in 1878, Stoker married a girl from Clontarf, and a year later, the couple had their only child, a son named Noel. It was to this son that Stoker dedicated his first book of fiction—in 1881—a collection of short stories for children entitled, Under the Sunset (Stoker, 1882).

Under the Sunset is the land that people visit in their dreams. “A beautiful country which no human eye has ever seen in waking hours.” All of the stories take place in this land in which live both a good king with his palace and people and the King of Death with his castle. One of the stories, “The Castle of the King,” is about the King of Death and has some phraseology that is repeated almost verbatim in the description of Dracula's castle. In this story, a poet dies when he sees the face of the King of Death. The dedication of the book to Stoker's son would seem to refer to this story—To My Son Whose Angel Doth Behold the Face of the King—and reveals some death wishes toward his son. Themes from Under the Sunset are recognizable in almost all of Stoker's 14 books. It is as if he had to tell these stories again and again.

I shall relate two stories from Under the Sunset that help explain the blood sucking, madness, the psychiatrist and the insane asylum, the sleep disturbances, and the constant feeling of approaching horror in Dracula.

The first story is “How 7 Went Mad.” It contains blood letting, madness and sleep disturbances and, at the same time, manages to be quite humorous. It is about a school boy named Tineboy and his lame pet raven, Mr. Daw. One day, Tineboy was at his sums in school, and instead of tending to what he was doing, he was trying to make his pet raven come in through the window. His problem was to multiply 117, 649 by seven. After struggling unsuccessfully, he then said, “Oh, I don't know—I wish number seven had never been invented.” “Croak,” said Mr. Daw. Tineboy suddenly became very sleepy and had a dream in which his teacher was about to tell the story about how 7 went mad. The raven kept his head on one side, “closed one eye—the eye nearest the school room so that they might think him asleep—and listened harder than any of them. The pupils were all happy—all except three—one because his leg went to sleep; another because she had her pocket full of curds and wanted to eat them and couldn't without being found out, and the curds were melting away; and the third, who was awfully sleepy, and awfully anxious to hear the story, and couldn't do either because of the other.” The teacher's story starts out with the alphabet doctor being called in to see a patient at night, poor number seven. The alphabet doctor attended to “the sicknesses and diseases of the letters of the alphabet”—like a capital A with a lame leg.” No. 7 “is mortal bad. We don't think he'll ever live through it. He was foaming at the mouth and apparently quite mad. The nurse from the grammar village was holding him by the hand, trying to bleed him. The footsmith, the man who puts the feet on the letters and numbers to make them able to stand upright without wearing out, was holding down the poor demented number.”

The doctor then examined 7. He used the stethescope, telescope, microscope and horoscope “to find the scope of the disease.” Tineboy asked what “the horror scope” is, and was corrected and told to look it up in the dictionary. In this prophetic pun, horror is attached to the activities of the doctor and to the horoscope. This exchange is italicized in the book.

After this examination, the doctor interrogated No. 7 and found out what makes him mad. No. 7 said the treatment he got made him mad. He was: “wrong added, wrong divided, wrong subtracted, and wrong multiplied. Other numbers are not treated as I am and besides they are not orphans like me.” No. 7 said he was a number without kith or kin. Tineboy asked, “How can he have no skin?” “Kin, my child, kin, not skin,” said the teacher. “What is the difference between kin and skin?” asked Tineboy. “There will be but a small difference,” said the teacher, “between this cane and your skin if you interrupt.”

At that time, Tineboy had a change of heart. “I want poor old 7 to be happy. I will give him some of my lunch and share my bed.” (This interchange is also italicized.) By the end of the teacher's story, No. 7 had promised not to be mad, and he got better. Ruffin, the bully boy, then told the teacher that he didn't believe the story and, “if it is true, I wish he had died. We would be better without him.” Mr. Daw, the raven, who did not like Ruffin, then stayed in school that night stealing all the number sevens with his beak and swelling to seven times his natural size. Because the raven had stolen all the number sevens, seven o'clock was missing the next morning, and neither the teacher nor the pupils could even remember that there was a number seven. The teacher accused Ruffin of causing this state of affairs by wishing No. 7 had died in a madhouse. After Mr. Daw started to drop the sevens from his beak, the students were then able to use them for multiplication. After the third seven was dropped, the raven began to swell. At this point, very close to the end of the story, Stoker makes a slip. When the raven dropped the fourth seven, which will give seven to the fourth power, the spelled out answer given is wrong. Stoker has done what number seven complained of—wrong multiplied. The mistake is substituting a three for a four.

The parallels and similarities of this story to parts of Dracula are very apparent. In Dracula, there is the mad man who is in an insane asylum and who actually dies in an insane asylum of broken bones; there is the doctor who treats the mad man; there is even an alphabet doctor in Dracula, an assistant of Dr. Seward's, “Patrick Hennessey, M. D. M. R. C. S. L. K. Q. C. T. K. etc. etc.” Dracula is seen as a “big bird” when he is in the form of a bat. “How 7 Went Mad” is, of course, another tale of medical detection. Number seven represents Stoker as a child with his near mortal illness, his inability to stand on his two feet, and the feeling of being different from his siblings. The story, then, if one assumes this parallel between No. 7 and Stoker, gives a hint as to the kind of medical treatment which might have been instrumental in laying the groundwork for Stoker's dreaming about a vampire. That is, Stoker might have been bled just as No. 7 was bled. This was a practice that was extremely common in Ireland in the 1840's. The association in the story between madness and bleeding would then suggest that Stoker became “mad” when he was bled. Certainly in Dracula the “zoophagous mania” combines madness and blood.

There is another theme in addition to the one of Stoker as the sick, different child that is furnished by an analysis of the slip in the multiplication of seven to the fourth power in which a three is substituted for a four. The swelling and shrinking in size of the raven, the stress on kith and kin, and on the horoscope suggest very strongly that the powers of seven represent the birth order of the seven Stoker children. After the third power the raven swells, and then starts to shrink to his natural size after the fourth seven is dropped. In oral terms this sequence suggests his mother's pregnancy with the fourth born Tommy who was delivered when Stoker, the third born, was twenty-one months old. This mathematical error by a man who had received honors in mathematics at Trinity College implies not only that he felt Tommy was a mistake, who should have been “wrong multiplied” as No. 7 was, but also that Tommy, number four, should not have been the product of the multiplying, i. e., should not have been born, but that he, number three, should have taken his place. In fact, when we look at the original sum that causes Tineboy to wish that number seven had never been invented, we find that it is seven to the seventh power which would represent George, the youngest brother, who was born when Stoker was seven. Stoker must have wished, as Mr. Daw did, that George would croak, a word which in Victorian England, also, meant ‘die.’ This wish is carried out by eating and swallowing and is undone by regurgitation. The death wishes toward his baby brothers, Tom and George, may be found in Dracula in the form of three instances of infanticide by eating and sucking and the frequent usage of the names Tom and George for different minor characters and events. For example, Harker arrives at Dracula's castle on St. George's Eve. Even the novel itself is dedicated to a Tommy—to Thomas Hall Caine, a novelist friend of Stoker's.

After Tineboy wishes that number seven had never been invented—that is, after he wishes George were dead—he uncontrollably falls asleep, and even in his dream, the students have some sleep disturbances, including a girl who wants to eat her milk curds. This combination of killing, which is equated with eating in the dream, milk and sleep brings to mind Lewin's oral traid of the wish to eat, be eaten and sleep. There is a very striking passage in Dracula that demonstrates the concept of the oral triad at work and that refers back to another story in Under the Sunset called “The Wondrous Child.” In this passage in Dracula, the following action takes place. After Renfield warns that Mrs. Harker has looked like “tea after the teapot had been watered,” Van Helsing and his group break into Harker's room.

On the bed beside the window lay Jonathan Harker, his face flushed and breathing heavily as though in a stupor. Kneeling on the edge of the bed, facing outwards, was the white clad figure of his wife; by her side stood a tall, thin, man … the Count … his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white night dress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man's bare chest which was shown by his torn open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten's nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink.

Mina had taken a sleeping draught and Dracula had awakened her. He had first put Harker in a stupor and then sucked blood from Mina who strangely enough “… did not want to hinder him.” Dracula says to her, “and you are now to me, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood; kin of my kin; my bountiful wine press for a while.”

He then pulled open the shirt and with his long, sharp nails, opened a vein in his breast. When the blood began to spurt out he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight, and with the other seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so I might either suffocate or swallow some of the—oh, my God, what have I done?

The reader by this point in the novel has become used to Dracula doing the sucking, but not to Dracula being sucked and specifically at the breast. The oral triad is represented here by Dracula eating and being eaten, by Mina being eaten and then eating after sleeping, and by Jonathan Harker sleeping. It is also a thinly disguised primal scene in oral terms. Mina's head being held to the breast for sucking just like a child forcing a kitten's nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink is referred to as a “baptism of blood” and is very reminiscent of part of the story of “The Wondrous Child” in Under the Sunset.

This story concerns a brother, Sibold, and sister, May, who want to have a baby of their own on the day that a baby brother arrives in their home. The older brother has a theory that babies are to be found on a bed of parsley after they have come from over the sea. After having a picnic lunch of the new baby who is called the King of the Feast, they fall asleep amidst scarlet poppies and dream that they find a baby brother on an island and placed on a bed of parsley. They become angry with each other over whose baby he is. These angry thoughts cause the baby to die. Only when they repent does the baby come alive again. Wondrously, the baby begins to talk to his brother and requests that May sing to him. When a cow suddenly appears, May thinks that the baby wants to be fed. But both she and her brother have forgotten how to milk a cow. Then follows the part that woud seem to be referred to in Dracula. “All at once, without knowing how it came to pass, she felt herself pouring milk out of a watering pot all over the baby, who lay on the ground, with Sibold holding down its head.” The baby then proves to be additionally wondrous in his ability to tame wild beasts, such as a dragon and snake. This story contains themes similar to those in “How 7 Went Mad.” There is the death of the baby brother and his revival, an oral theory of birth, the sleeping and dreaming after eating, even the falling asleep associated with scarlet—the color of blood.

There are, of course, other references to “The Wondrous Child” in Dracula, such as Dracula himself being called a child and wondrous.

Parts of the novel and the two stories that are associations to it suggest that Dracula concerns itself with death wishes toward younger brothers, nursing at the breast, and primal scenes expressed in nursing terms. All are associated with sleep disturbances. Lewin's concept of the oral triad—the wish to eat, be eaten and sleep—and the manic defense against sleep because of the fear of dying and being eaten suggest the way to synthesize these themes. Lewin (1950) feels that the genetic linkage of the three wishes of the oral triad causes them to be reactivated together, i. e., “the reactivation of one would be the reactivation of all three.” Sleep, as expressed in Harker's stupor, would be a first line of defense against being awakened by the primal sounds, but the wishes to eat and be eaten would also arise; and thus the stage would be set for intercourse being seen in terms of sucking and being sucked. Stoker, like Harker, or Dracula might have been in the parental bedroom and would have wanted to get rid of the baby-making sounds in order to stay asleep. At age twenty-one months, Tommy was born and Stoker would have seen him nursing at the breast. This would have aroused great feelings of rivalry and the wish to get rid of Tommy, the wish that he would die. Because of being bedridden, Stoker would not have had the usual outlet of motility for his aggression but would have had to express it orally. Killing would have been seen as eating up, as was the case in “How 7 Went Mad.” The eating up wishes would also have activated the other two parts of the triad—the wish to be eaten and to sleep. Because of their unacceptability to young Stoker, these passive wishes would in turn have generated anxiety and fear of sleep and death, i. e., a feeling of approaching horror. Perhaps this was another part of his and No. 7's night madness. The fears attendant on falling asleep are well described by Mina in connection with the primal scene episode: “I took a sleeping draught … but for a long time it did not act. I seemed to become more wakeful and myriads of horrible fantasies began to crowd in upon my mind—all of them connected with death and vampires, with blood and pain and trouble.” Being bled must have been interpreted by young Stoker as being eaten up. Sucking blood and eating are equated in Dracula. After the Count has sucked Mina's blood in the aforementioned scene, Van Helsing remarks, “… last night he banqueted heavily and will sleep late. …” Due to the genetic linkage of the wish to be eaten with the wish to eat and to sleep, being bled would have become linked to the latter two wishes. Milk would no longer have been white, but blood red.

Stoker was to experience the birth of four children before he himself was able to get out of bed. The last birth, the birth of George, coincided with his leaving his bed. This may account for Tineboy's remark about sharing his lunch and bed with Number Seven. The reluctance to give up the baby position to George when he was finally able to walk must have accentuated his hostile rivalrous feelings toward this younger brother.

We are now in a position to analyze the association to the vampire dream—that it was caused by eating too much dressed crab. The two stories, “The Wondrous Child” and “How 7 Went Mad” furnish us with a basis for this analysis, by combining the fantasy of the baby coming from over the sea and being found on a bed of parsley with the stress on the horoscope. Dressed crab was classically served in England at that time on a bed of parsley. Crab, when viewed horoscopically for this horror tale, is that sign of the Zodiac that covers the period between June 23 and July 23. George, Stoker's youngest brother, was born under the sign of the crab on July 20th. Eating the dressed crab meant, unconsisciously eating up and killing baby George.

Something then, in the spring of 1895, must have happened that generated some rivalrous feelings in Stoker and brought into play earlier rivalries toward his son and brothers. I would propose that the ‘something’ was the act of Queen Victoria bestowing knighthood in that spring on both Henry Irving for his acting, and on Dr. William Stoker, Bram's older brother, for his accomplishments as a physician. There are several lines of evidence in Dracula that the knighting was the stimulus for the dream and novel. In Dracula, Arthur Holmwood succeeds to the title of Lord Godalming. Dracula, of course, is of royal blood. Three of Stoker's brothers were physicians, including George who was an ear, nose and throat doctor. Three physicians are to be found in Dracula. There are also indirect references to both William Stoker and Henry Irving. In fact, Irving might be associated with George through the crab, since Irving was known to his intimates as “The Crab.” From the beginning of their friendship, Irving had been associated in Stoker's mind with the theme of fratricide as expressed through the biblical story of Cain and Abel. In their first meeting in 1876, Stoker was overcome with a sudden sense of weakness when Irving recited a poem with a Cain and Abel theme. In fact, this theme is scattered throughout Stoker's writings over the years and connected to Irving and acting. Stoker even inserts it in his first entry in Who's Who in 1898. He writes that his recreations were “pretty much the same as those of other children of Adam,” who were, of course, Cain and Abel (Who's Who, 1898). This theme is found in Dracula. Renfield, the madman, compares himself to Enoch who was Cain's son. In the beginning of the novel, Dracula is hit on the forehead with a shovel and receives a scar. Mina also has a scar on her forehead. The mark of Cain is classically thought to have been on the forehead.

In summary: When Queen Victoria knighted both Stoker's actor-employer and physician-brother, she revived memories of earlier times when he felt the threat that he would lose the favors of his family Queen to his younger brothers. These memories had been put in story form when they had been revived by the birth of his son, his new rival; and, in this form, they were available for his dream and novel. In his dream, he could be the King who would be entitled to have a Queen of his own; and in his novel, he could appropriate for his sucking pleasure the women of other men, and have them feel threatened with the loss instead of himself. But Stoker was too threatened by his own wishes—and thus the nighmare quality of the dream. To find relief, Stoker had to write his novel in which the vampire's victim could rise, disgorged from the tomb, while the Dracula in Stoker could be laid to eternal rest, unable to rise again to go about his ghastly business.

Works Cited

Lewin, Bertram D. (1950): The Psychoanalysis of Elation. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., Page 118.

Ludlam, Harry (1962): A Biography of Dracula. London: W. Foulsham and Co., Pages 99-100.

Stoker, Bram (1882): Under the Sunset. London: Sampson-Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington.

——— (1906): Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving. New York: The MacMillan Co., Vol. 1.

Who's Who (1898). London: A and C Black.