Last year during the month of October, I switched into ~ Spooky Mode ~ for this newsletter and it was very fun so I’m doing it again this year. You can read last year’s stories here and here and here and here.
Though I have long enjoyed works of chilling fiction (thanks to my mom for giving me a copy of Christine when I was like 11), I’m not the biggest fan of Bram Stoker or Dracula or vampire lore in general. It’s just not anything I’ve gravitated toward.
But in thinking about scary stories and spooky works of fiction - and their intimate relationship to our perceptions of mental illness - I was thinking about the inspiration for a character like R.M. Renfield, Dracula’s crazy little friend/minion/man servant. Whereas Dracula is polished, controlled, and generally with it, Renfield is not. Renfield is clearly a person living with complex mental illness.
This is what I think is interesting about Dracula: While vampirism isn’t exactly endemic in modern society, mental health issues are. And the ways that Stoker describes Renfield feel pretty familiar. But how? How did Bram Stoker, a business man’s assistant, a theater critic, and a guy who was privately educated due to a mysterious childhood illness, know so much about ailments which look a lot like bipolar disorder and psychosis?
The Other Stoker
Renfield, who is a patient at an insane asylum, is described as both “sanguine” and prone to “periods of gloom.” He’s also characterized as “morbidly excitable,” which feels alarmingly similar to how someone might describe me. He is delusional, he eats bugs in order to take their “life force,” and he communicates (without any actual examples of tangible forms of communication) with Dracula from within his captivity.
But the book was published in 1897 - long before most people had even a working knowledge of the potential diagnoses that someone like Renfield might have received today. The early and middle 1800s were a big time for asylum-based care (or “care,” because those places were GRIM). Patients with clear mental illness were essentially warehoused, often in restraints, and generally viewed as incurable. Someone like Renfield was considered a societal cast-off, barely worthy of notice (we see this from the merciless cruelty to which Renfield is subjected), let alone character study by the average Irishman.
In a 2010 paper on the subject of Stoker’s surprisingly in-depth and nuanced characterization of a person with mental illness, Dr. Elizabeth Winter noted that Stoker had a clear personal connection.
Examination of the original Dracula manuscript demonstrates that it was clearly edited and commented upon by Bram Stoker’s brother Thornley... Through intimate experience and medical knowledge gleaned from having contact with residents of the Richmond Lunatic Asylum in Dublin, Thornley likely provided Bram Stoker with an excellent characterization of mental illness.
Sir William Thornley Stoker was not only a medical doctor and surgeon who specialized in psychiatric practices, he was also married to a woman named Emily who, herself, was described as suffering from delusions.
Again, Dr. Winter:
Thornley’s personal life was significantly less ordered. His wife Emily was mentally ill, and correspondence and descriptions of Emily’s behavior from the time, including a passage in a memoir by a close personal friend and doctor, Oliver St. John Gogarty, indicate a behavioral pattern grossly synonymous with Renfield’s.
It’s an accepted fact that the medical procedures in Dracula - like transfusions and trephination (i.e. drilling a hole in a person) - were the result of conversations with and notes from Thornley. But it’s possibly that the Renfield’s eerily realistic symptoms and displays were also gleaned through Stoker’s brother, as well.
In many ways, Renfield is a more empathetic character than most in his situation - he is clearly under the control of Dracula, and he is also clearly without all of his mental faculties. This feeling of being a victim of mental illness - whether through control of another or due to some internal issue - is kind of novel for the period, and feels like it stems from a personal understanding of the way a person can feel oppressed by their own delusions.
A very, very close read could potentially paint Dracula as a metaphor for the source of mental illness (either a medical disease or other condition which created it) and Renfield as the product. Rather than seeing Renfield as a pathologically broken individual whose own moral failings made him crazy, he is at the mercy of the many outside forces working upon him.
Or, he could be a veiled reference to Stoker’s own fear of losing is mind.
Oh good, more syphilis talk
Listen, you really can’t get around syphilis when talking about mental illness and any period prior to like, World War II. It’s going to come up! It’s just going to! Because it’s like a sleeper cell of psychosis living right inside the body!
And indeed, it’s something that Bram Stoker may have experienced.
When Stoker died at 64, it was with little fanfare. The Titanic had just sunk less than a week before, and anyway, he’d had a stroke prior to his death and had spent his last days at home. However quiet his actual passing, though, there are some sensational facts about his death, including (but not limited to) the potential that he had syphilis and that’s what did him in.
In 1975, more than 50 years after his death, Stoker’s nephew, Daniel Farson, published a biography called The Man Who Wrote Dracula. In it, Farson states that Stoker’s listed cause of death - “Locomotor Ataxy 6 months” - was a euphemism for syphilis.
This came as a surprise to all of the people who thought that Stoker, married to his wife for many many years, couldn’t possibly be exposed to a sexually transmitted disease. But he could be…if he and his wife were in some kind of a very proto throuple-type arrangement with Oscar Wilde.
Yes, that Oscar Wilde. The one who may or may not have also had and/or died of syphilis.
Florence Balcombe was a great beauty and, before she married Stoker, had dated Wilde. After they broke up and she married Stoker - who had been schoolmates and friends with Stoker - they had a falling out which didn’t last long. And, some scholars think, it they patched it up in an unconventional way.
David J. Skal’s Something In The Blood is a bit of an adventure in conspiracy and speculation. Skal, who has done more research and close-reading of Stoker’s work than maybe anyone else alive, uses letters, historical context, and lot of reading from the text itself, to piece together his theory of Stoker’s life. And, he concludes, Stoker was at least a passing acquaintance of Dorothy.
So many - especially after Wilde’s death - Stoker became more afraid of “bad blood” and what lurking diseases could bring out in a person. Maybe he viewed his own lunacy as imminent, as though mental illness can potentially come for all of us (it can). Maybe Dracula is one big, gorgeous, creepy, overtly sexual letter to the future Stoker was hoping to avoid.
Because like, horror media is a fantastic encapsulation of whatever we’re most afraid of. And at the time when homosexuality was illegal and crazy people were being let out of their bondage, the Victorians were pretty spooked about disease, death, blood, and, you know, impaling.
Stay tuned for more weird stories this month!
Hello! It’s a truly abysmal time to be a writer. Corporate overlords have robbed us of just about every method of self-promotion available, most paid sites have metered their rates down to the penny, and traditional publishing is LOL. So we have to do things like newsletters where we personally ask you for money so that we can keep doing our little word things.