“Dracula” by Bram Stoker (post 2): Dracula’s debt to Svengali; and Dracula’s metamorphosis as metaphor for switching among alternate personalities.

“Also at Whitby in that summer of 1890 was George du Maurier, who had featured the Stokers [Bram and his wife Florence] in a Punch cartoon…Du Maurier was completing his second novel, Trilby (published in 1894), which introduces the mesmerist [hypnotist] Svengali, an enduring mythic character to rival Dracula. Surely the two writers had tea at the spa and discussed their protagonists as the band played softly. Was Dracula born from Svengali, as critic Nina Auerbach suggests, with his powers still further extended over time and space? There are striking parallels between the two novels. Both deal with the fear of female sexuality and the loss of innocence, and with brave men who rescue the mother figure from a foreigner’s embrace…Svengali and Count Dracula—both looming mesmerists and demon lovers…” (1, pp. 227-228).

Although Trilby is usually thought of as a novel about hypnosis (Svengali’s hypnosis of Trilby), it is also a novel about multiple personality, since Trilby has two personalities: one when under, and the other when not under, Svengali’s influence. At the end of the novel, Trilby reverts to her regular personality. Hypnosis is a cover story for the issue of multiple personality.

I am less than half way through Dracula, but the character’s amazing metamorphosis—e.g., from older man to younger man (after he has drunk blood), and from human to bat, and back—would seem to be a metaphor for the switching among alternate personalities.

1. Barbara Belford. Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996.