Multiple Personality in “Dracula” by Bram Stoker (post 7): Sleepwalking of Dracula’s first victim, Lucy, may have been a symptom of childhood incest.

Bram Stoker did not use Lucy’s sleepwalking from her home to demonstrate Dracula’s power to get access to her, because if Dracula could have done that, it would have circumvented and nullified Stoker’s rule that vampires must be initially invited.

For example, Dracula did not use his telepathic hypnotic powers to get Mina to come out, but had to use Renfield to get an invitation into the building where Mina was staying.

Moreover, the reader is assured that Dracula did not cause Lucy to be a sleepwalker, since she had been a sleepwalker from childhood, and her father had been a sleepwalker, too.

So what was Stoker’s purpose in not only making Lucy a sleepwalker, but in making her father a sleepwalker, too? It would seem that Stoker wanted to make something out of Lucy’s childhood.

Did Stoker imagine a backstory in which, when Lucy was a child, her mother had found her husband in Lucy’s bed, and he attributed his being there to his problem with sleepwalking?

Why would Stoker suppose that Lucy’s later multiple personality (her regular personality and her hypersexualized, vampire personality) might have originated as a reaction to childhood trauma? In the 19th century, had anyone connected multiple personality to childhood trauma?

Psychiatry did not make that connection until the 20th century. But 19th century novelists like Mark Twain had already made the connection, as illustrated by Huckleberry Finn, a story in which Huck had been abused by his father, and then throughout Huck’s subsequent adventures he adopts numerous alternate identities. (Search “Mark Twain” in this blog for many past posts.)