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Dracula 35
5. Bram Stoker, Dracula (New York: Dell, 1974), 103–104. All
subsequent references will be to this edition and will appear
parenthetically.
6. While it is not my concern in this paper to deal biographically
with Dracula, the Harry Ludlam biography (a book which
is admittedly anti-psychological in orientation despite its
provocative title, A Biography of Dracula: The Life Story of
Bram Stoker) includes some suggestive comments about Bram
Stoker’s relationship with his mother. Ludlam remarks an
ambivalence toward women on the part of Charlotte Stoker
who, on the one hand, decried the situation of poor Irish girls
in the workhouse which was “the very hot-bed of vice” and
advocated respectability through emigration for the girls and,
on the other, “declared often that she ‘did not care tuppence’
for her daughters.” Too, Charlotte told her son Irish folk tales
of banshee horrors and a true story of “the horrors she had
suffered as a child in Sligo during the great cholera outbreak
that claimed many thousands of victims in Ireland alone, and
which provoked the most dreadful cruelties” (New York: The
Fireside Press, 1962, p. 14). I cannot help but wonder how old
Stoker was when his mother discussed these matters with him.
Certainly, they made a vivid impression, for later, Charlotte
wrote her story down and Bram based his own “The Invisible
Giant” on his mother’s tale of the cholera epidemic in Sligo.
7. Richardson, p. 419.
8. C. F. Bentley, “The Monster in the Bedroom: Sexual Symbolism
in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Literature and Psychology, XXII, 1
(1972), 29.
9. Joseph S. Bierman, “Dracula: Prolonged Childhood Illness and
the Oral Triad,” American Imago, XXIX, 194.
10. Bentley, p. 270.
11. See Tsvetan Todorov, The Fantastic, trans, Richard Howard
(Cleveland: Case Western Reserve, 1973), pp. 136–39.
12. Richardson, p. 427.
13. MacGillwray, p. 522.
14. Richardson, p. 428. The Oedipal fantasy of the destruction of
the father is reinforced by a number of additional, and actually
gratuitous, paternal deaths in the novel. See also MacGillwray,
p. 523.