Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- PART I WOMEN AND DREAMS: AN ONEIRIC FEMININE LITERARY TRADITION
- PART II DREAMS, ALTERITY AND THE DIVINE
- PART III DREAMING (OF) MONSTERS: DREAMS, CREATIVITY AND AESTHETICS IN MARY SHELLEY’S FICTION
- PART IV BEYOND FRANKENSTEIN
- Postscript: A Jigsaw of Dreams
- Index
Chapter 7 - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Approach to Dreams and Dreaming in Her Fictional Works Frankenstein, Valperga, Matilda and ‘The Dream’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 February 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- PART I WOMEN AND DREAMS: AN ONEIRIC FEMININE LITERARY TRADITION
- PART II DREAMS, ALTERITY AND THE DIVINE
- PART III DREAMING (OF) MONSTERS: DREAMS, CREATIVITY AND AESTHETICS IN MARY SHELLEY’S FICTION
- PART IV BEYOND FRANKENSTEIN
- Postscript: A Jigsaw of Dreams
- Index
Summary
In Frances Burney's last novel, The Wanderer; Or, Female Difficulties (1814), dreaming is used by Elinor Joddrel to dispel – as in Hamlet – the fear of death and thus justify her repeated suicide attempts: ‘Dreams, I must own, Albert, are strangely incomprehensible. How bodies can seem to appear, and voices to be heard, where all around is empty space, it is not easy to conceive!’ (Burney 1991, 758). As Frances Burney's novel illustrates, dreams and metaphysics and dreams and visions are strongly evocative of one another in women's writing of the Romantic period. Dreams figure largely in Gothic fiction and tend to be the prerogative of female characters. Already in the eighteenth century, women writers tended to introduce dreams frequently and as a means of portraying female characters’ psychology, as has been pointed out by Margaret Anne Doody:
In writing novels the women writers, although dealing with the objective everyday world, felt free to include dream experience as part of the heroine's life. […] Female novelists interest themselves in the psychology of the heroine; her subjective life has meaning, and her dreams cry out for interpretation, but not the old religious meaning or spiritual interpretation. (Doody 2004, 74)
In nineteenth-century novels by women, dreams are equally paramount. Thus, references to dreams, real or imaginary, abound in Mary Shelley's works. Yet critical readings have largely focused on Victor's dream in Frankenstein, and these readings have typically invoked a Freudian or post-Freudian approach. This chapter focuses on the cultural context of Mary Shelley's interest in dreams and explores the hypotexts that underlie her use of them and their narrative function. The corpus analysed includes the novella Matilda (writ. 1819, pub. 1959), the short story ‘The Dream’ (1832) and the novels Frankenstein (1818) and Valperga (1823). I will show that, while serving different narrative functions in these texts, dreams also reveal Mary Shelley's interest in the contemporary psychology of dreaming.
The Philosophical, Medical and Literary Hypotexts of Dreams in Frankenstein and Valperga
Mary Shelley employs dreams as a narrative device in Frankenstein and in Matilda. Composed at an interval of approximately two years, these texts contain important analogies both in terms of themes discussed and of narrative techniques.
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- Dream and Literary Creation in Women’s Writings in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries , pp. 125 - 142Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2021