Dream and Literary Creation in Womens Writings in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

By Anthem Press

This edited collection deals with dream as a literary trope and as a source of creativity in women’s writings. It gathers essays spanning a time period from the end of the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, with a strong focus on the Romantic period and particularly on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which dreams are at the heart of the writing process but also constitute the diegetic substance of the narrative. The contributions re-examine the oneiric facets of the novel and develop fresh perspectives on dreams and dreaming in Mary Shelley’s fiction and on other female authors (Anne Finch, Ann Radcliffe, Emily and Charlotte Brontë and a few others), re-appraising the textuality of dreams and their link to women’s creativity and creation as a whole.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781785277542

Book preview

Dream and Literary Creation in Women’s Writings in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Dream and Literary Creation in Women’s Writings in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Edited by

Isabelle Hervouet and Anne Rouhette

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2021

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© 2021 Isabelle Hervouet and Anne Rouhette editorial matter and selection;

individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

without the prior written permission of both the copyright

owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021938846

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-752-8 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-752-9 (Hbk)

Cover image: Mary Shelley (1797–1851), sculpture by Camillo Pistrucci (1811–1854).

Purchase, Wrightsman Fellows Gifts, 2019. The Met Fifth Avenue, New York.

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

Part I. WOMEN AND DREAMS: AN ONEIRIC FEMININE LITERARY TRADITION

Chapter 1. ‘Delicate Females’ and Psychedelic Creation in the Scientific Experiments of Thomas Beddoes and Humphry Davy

Kimberley Page-Jones

Chapter 2. Treading in Camilla ’s Footsteps?: Oneiric Experience and Women’s Voices in Julia De Vienne (by a Lady, 1811) and Tales of Fancy (Sarah Harriet Burney, 1816–20)

Lucy-Anne Katgely

Chapter 3. The Passing on of Dreams: Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and the Diana Figure

Audrey Souchet

Part II. DREAMS, ALTERITY AND THE DIVINE

Chapter 4. ‘[A]‌s Somtimes Poets Dream’: Liminality and the Female Writer in the Poetry of Anne Finch

Debapriya Basu

Chapter 5. The Theology of Radcliffe’s Dreams

Holly Hirst

Chapter 6. Providential Thinking: Dreams and the Rhetoric of Romance in The Old English Baron and The Romance of the Forest

Victor Sage

Part III. DREAMING (OF) MONSTERS: DREAMS, CREATIVITY AND AESTHETICS IN MARY SHELLEY’S FICTION

Chapter 7. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Approach to Dreams and Dreaming in Her Fictional Works Frankenstein , Valperga , Matilda and ‘The Dream’

Antonella Braida-Laplace

Chapter 8. The Monster of Their Dreams: The Night-Mare and Sleep Disorders in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and ‘Introduction’ (1831)

Mathilde Giret

Chapter 9. Henry Fuseli’s Nightmare(s) in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)

Fabien Desset

Part IV. BEYOND FRANKENSTEIN

Chapter 10. Dreaming Up Monsters: The Affective Intensity of Dreams, Nightmares and Delirium in Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights

Anne Nagel

Chapter 11. ‘And This Shall Be My Dream Tonight’: Dream as Narrative in Wuthering Heights

Tricia Ayrton

Chapter 12. Dreams in Jane Eyre

Isabelle Hervouet

Postscript: A Jigsaw of Dreams

Margaret Anne Doody

Index

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank the CELIS for its support, both moral and material, as well as the Société des Amis de l’Équipe Lumières et Romantismes du CELIS, which helped make this volume possible. All our thanks also go to Megan Greiving at Anthem Press, whose patience we sometimes sorely tried but who has always remained supportive of our project.

Notes on Contributors

Tricia Ayrton was a teacher and subsequently an Assistant Head teacher in Special Education in the north of England. She received an MA by Research from the University of Leeds in 2000. The subject of her thesis was Emily Brontë’s engagement with her contemporary intellectual world. Her PhD thesis on ‘Studying the Post Genetic: Emily Brontë’s EJB Notebook, 1844 to the Present’ was published by the University of Edinburgh in 2018. She has contributed to a University of Leeds online resource to support the University’s Special Collections and she also led workshops for postgraduate students on the Brontë Manuscripts in the University of Leeds Special Collections. She has presented on ‘Changes in the Feminist Reading of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre from 1847 to the Present’, and on ‘Place and Personality in the Textual Authentication of Emily Brontë’s EJB Poems’. She has reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement and is currently working on Emily Brontë: Poet and Thinker, a volume which addresses Brontë’s contextual presentation of her poems and the evidence that this provides for her as yet unacknowledged contemporary intellectual engagement.

Debapriya Basu is Assistant Professor in English at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Guwahati, India. Her interests are early modern English women’s writing and digital textualities. She was Project Supervisor in the ‘Bichitra Tagore Online Variorum’ (www.bichitra.jdvu.ac.in) and is a contributor in Bichitra: The Making of an Online Tagore Variorum (ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri, 2015). Her digital scholarly edition of the ‘Examinations of the first female English Protestant martyr Anne Askew’ (www.anne-askew.humanities.uva.nl) was funded by an Erasmus Mundus fellowship to the University of Amsterdam, supported by IIT Guwahati’s Start-Up Grant, and received the Moore Institute Fellowship at the National University of Ireland Galway for 2018.

Antonella Braida-Laplace completed her D.Phil at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. She published two volumes on the reception of Dante: Dante and the Romantics (2004) and Dante on View, co-edited with Luisa Calé (2007), and also co-edited a volume with Giuliana Pieri – Word and Image across the Arts (2003). She was lecturer in Italian at the University of Durham till 2005, when she moved to France. She is now lecturer in English at the Université de Lorraine, Nancy, and member of the research centre IDEA. Her research concerns Anglo-Italian relations and women writers. In 2017, she organized the one-day conference ‘Beyond Frankenstein’s Shadow’ and a workshop in honour of Professor Jean de Palacio, and she has edited the volume Mary Shelley and Europe (2020).

Fabien Desset is Senior Lecturer at the Université de Limoges, and a member of the EHIC (Human Spaces and Cultural Interactions) and SERA (the French Society of Studies in English Romanticism) research groups. He is currently working on art and ekphrasis in the Shelleys’ poetry and prose, and has published several articles on Romantic Hellenism, mythopoeism, intertextuality, travel, art and ekphrasis, including ‘Ekphrasis et lieux architecturaux dans Frankenstein’ (Représentation dans le monde anglophone, special issue on Frankenstein, 2018), ‘Transtextual Transformations of Prometheus Bound in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound: Prometheus’ Gifts to Humankind’ (Brill’s Companion to Aeschylus, 2017), ‘Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Transtextual Map to Venice’ (2016), ‘Winckelmann’s Contribution to P.B. Shelley’s Philosophy of Art’ (2015) and ‘Shelley’s Uneasiness about Colour in his Poetry and Ekphrasis’ (2013). He has also edited a collection of essays, Transparence romantique (2014).

Margaret Anne Doody is a Professor of Literature (now Emerita) at the University of Notre Dame and has taught in a number of distinguished universities including Princeton and Vanderbilt. She is known for her work in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, and for her discussions of the novel. Her many critical works include Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (1988), The True Story of the Novel (1998) and Jane Austen’s Names: Riddles, Persons, Places (2015). She is the author of the ‘Aristotle Detective’ series of mystery novels published in Italy by Sellerio; the most recent (forthcoming, 2022) is Aristotle and the Mountain of Gold. A new detective hero, a Grub Street hack writer, will make his appearance in A Winter’s Murders.

Mathilde Giret is a doctoral student working on a thesis exploring the interactions between medicine and the supernatural in nineteenth-century fantastic British literature, following a Master’s thesis dealing with ‘Science, Religion and Madness in Dracula by Bram Stoker’. After working as a teaching and research assistant in English studies at Bordeaux Montaigne University for three years, she is now teaching English to high school students in Périgueux.

Isabelle Hervouet is Senior Lecturer in British Literature at the University of Clermont-Auvergne, France, and a member of the CELIS research team. She wrote her PhD on the Gothic novel in Britain (1764–1824) and has published a few articles on the persistence of the Gothic in the Victorian novel. Her research now focuses on Dickens and Charlotte Brontë. She has co-edited The Grotesque in the Fiction of Charles Dickens and Other 19th-Century European Novelists (2014) and has published several articles on Brontë’s fiction, notably ‘Polyphonie et hantise dans Villette: quelques aspects du pacte de lecture’, Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens (2016), ‘She made mouths at me instead of speaking: Marie Broc, l’idiote de Villette’, L’Atelier (2017), ‘Pris entre romance et réalité, le corps de la lectrice dans Shirley de Charlotte Brontë’, in Le Corps du lecteur et ses représentations littéraires, L’Harmattan (ed. Fabienne Gaspari, 2018).

Holly Hirst received her PhD from Manchester Metropolitan University in 2020 for her thesis on ‘The Theology of the Early British Gothic: 1764–1833’. She is an Associate Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University and also works as a Teaching Fellow at Leeds University in the Language Centre. Her research primarily involves interdisciplinary study of contemporary theology and literature with a focus on the Gothic, and she has a number of chapters forthcoming on the theology of Gothic dreams and the supernatural. She also runs the online project ‘Romancing the Gothic’, which provides a programme of free education on Gothic subjects with collaboration from academics and experts all over the world.

Lucy-Anne Katgely is completing a PhD in eighteenth-century English literature at the University of Strasbourg. Her research revolves around the novels of Sarah Harriet Burney as well as those of the Burney school, that is to say books which were explicitly compared to Evelina and Cecilia in major critical reviews at the time of their publication between 1778 and 1820. She is interested in defining the Burney brand and notably tries to examine how pseudo-anonymous novelists who signed their books ‘by a lady’ imitated and transformed the ‘Burney slang’. Her work also centres on the notions of tangible and intangible cultural heritage in relation to the literary canon. She is currently working as a French lector in the Department of Politics, Languages & International Studies at the University of Bath.

Anne Nagel is a lecturer and doctoral candidate in English, specializing in nineteenth-century British literature and critical theory at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Her dissertation explores the affective intensity in dreams, dreamlike spaces, and sleep disorders in Romantic and Victorian novels and poetry. One of her other projects has been co-curating and co-authoring the editorial introduction for ‘The George Eliot Portrait Gallery: Perspectives on the Writer,’ which appears on the Central Online Victorian Educator, a refereed scholarly site. For the same site, she is co-editing an annotated scholarly edition of E. M. Forster’s short story ‘The Machine Stops’. Additionally, she was selected to represent her university as their 2019 speaker for the Big Ten Emerging Scholars lecture series, for which she gave a talk titled ‘Deleuzian Virtuality in the Dickensian Bedroom’ at the University of Minnesota. She has been awarded the Robert L. Hough Lecturer Teaching Award and the Ted Kooser Instructional Award. Her educational background includes a master’s degree in English literature, with a certificate in Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies, from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and a bachelor’s degree in English and philosophy, with a minor in French, from the University of Nebraska at Kearney.

Kimberley Page-Jones is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale. She has worked particularly on S. T. Coleridge’s Notebooks and is the author of Énergie et mélancolie. Les entrelacs de l’écriture dans les notebooks de S. T. Coleridge (2018). She has also published several articles on Coleridge’s images, on his figuration of the nocturnal and on his sketches. She works also on other Romantic writers such as Dorothy Wordsworth, John Thelwall, William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt and Humphry Davy as part of a research project on sociability in the Enlightenment, recently co-editing volume 6 of the Transversales collection dedicated to this project.

Anne Rouhette is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century British Literature at the University of Clermont-Auvergne, France, and a member of the CELIS research team. Her main field of interest is women’s fiction from the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries and she has published on Frances Burney, Jane Austen and Mary Shelley. She also works on the theory and practice of translation, with, for instance, an essay on the first translation of Frankenstein by Jules Saladin (1821), and on reception studies. She translated into French and edited Mary Shelley’s The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck and the Shelleys’ History of a Six Weeks’ Tour.

Victor Sage is Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the School of Literature, Drama, and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom. He has written extensively on the Gothic and Religion. He is the author of a collection of short stories, Dividing Lines and two novels, A Mirror for Larks and Black Shawl. He is the editor of Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas and Mathurin’s Melmoth the Wanderer for Penguin Classics, and he is the author of the monograph, Le Fanu’s Gothic: The Rhetoric of Darkness (2004). Recent work has centred on the cultural transmission of the Gothic in Europe: he has an essay on Scott, Hoffmann and the persistence of Gothic in Persistances Gothiques, (ed. Lauric Guillot and Gilles Menegaldo, 2008); an essay on Frankenstein’s education in the collection Le Savant fou (ed. Hélène Machinal, 2013); and an essay on Dickens and the Grotesque Body in The Grotesque in the Fiction of Charles Dickens and Other 19th Century European Novelists (ed. Isabelle Hervouet-Farrar and Max Vega-Ritter, 2014). Among his more recent works are a study of the transmission of the Elementary Spirits in the European Gothic in Romantic Gothic: The Edinburgh Companion (ed. Angela Wright and Dale Townsend, 2016) and an essay on Le Fanu and the ‘Romantic Grotesque’ in the bicentennial celebration Inspiring a Mysterious Terror: 200 Years of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (ed. Jarlath Kileen and Valeria Cavalli, 2016).

Audrey Souchet teaches English at the Université de Caen and is the author of a PhD thesis on Mary Shelley. She works on the relationships between aesthetics and ethics in nineteenth-century women’s novels. Her essay on Frankenstein was published in 2018 in the online journal Représentations dans le monde anglophone (‘Comment (se) représenter l’émotion: L’influence du roman sensible anglais sur Frankenstein’). She also wrote an essay on the aesthetics of emotion in some of Mary Shelley’s novels (‘L’écriture de l’émotion dans quelques romans de Mary Shelley: circonvolution(s) d’une œuvre’) in Inconstances romantiques: Visions et révisions dans la littérature britannique du long XIXe siècle (ed. Sophie Laniel-Musitelli, Antonella Braida-Laplace, and Celine Sabiron, 2019). Another essay on the influence on the Marquis de Sade on Frankenstein was published in November 2020 in a book investigating Frankenstein’s position in the Enlightenment and its endurance in literature and the visual arts (Frankenstein: le Démiurge des Lumières, ed. Michel Porret and Olinda Testori).

INTRODUCTION

Anne Rouhette

Literature, particularly the novel, has always had an affinity with dreams. This was already true long before dreaming became a serious object of inquiry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many major works of Western fiction include the narration of one or several dreams. Some consist entirely in the description of a dream, like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), while others supposedly derive from one of their author’s actual dreams, as is the case for Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818; 1831).¹ Whether that relation rests on an actual basis or whether it is a fiction invented afterwards matters little;² novelists resort to this trope because it discloses the fact that, like artworks, dreams enable human beings to ‘make contact with imagination and with the imaginative element in all consciousness’, in Margaret Anne Doody’s words (Doody 1996, 407). What you are reading was created by a human mind, those dreams seem to say almost explicitly, a suggestion which reflects upon the creative works they belong to and raises the question of their origin. As Ronald R. Thomas writes of the famous dream related in Mary Shelley’s ‘Introduction’ to the 1831 version of Frankenstein,

It is as if the telling of this story of authorial origin were the purpose for which the entire text was written – its end as well as its beginning. In a novel that tells a whole series of conflicting dreams of origin, this dream takes its place as the fundamental one and provides an interpretative frame for the others. (Thomas 1990, 9)

In Frankenstein as well as in other dream narratives of the types described above, the imaginative act of creation in which the literary work originates is thus figured in a displaced form. This is also the case of course in another, more common type: the narration of a character’s dream.

Many fictional characters dream, and either they or the narrative voice relate their oneiric experiences. A few examples from the time period this volume focuses on include Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Roxana (1724), Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), M. G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796), Frankenstein, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). In a novel or in another literary form, the relation of a dream is bound to have a meaning within that work, dreams being very rarely gratuitous. While they are usually no longer prophetic in today’s literature, they may serve to help the reader understand a character’s psychology – in both remote and modern times, for instance, intense dreaming is associated with illness.³ A novelist focusing on dreams shows interest in the human psyche since a character’s dream reveals a part of that character, ‘the soul talking to itself’ (Doody 1996, 410). Alternatively, dreams may reveal elements of a secret kept by a character, as when Defoe’s Roxana has nightmares about the daughter she probably had murdered. But whatever the part played by the dream, it is never fully explained; there is always something elusive about it. It brings the reader back to his or her experience of dreaming, of the inner chaos felt then, and to the elusive part in each human being. Even when the dream is analysed, there remains a residue of extraneous details that both characters and readers have to take into account. Of particular concern are the exact words used to relate the dreams, not just the storyline (the plot in novelistic terms): by definition, a person or a character telling about his or her dream puts a mostly non-verbal experience into certain specific words whose choice is anything but arbitrary, as Freud famously showed. In literary terms, dreams entice readers to move away from the diegesis and turn their attention to the narration itself, as well as towards the elements in the work which do not seem to fit with the others. The critical distance that readers are invited to take from the literary work they are reading is arguably inherent in the oneiric experience, be it in novels or in real life. As Norman Holland explains, ‘[dreams] start as experiences, but at a certain moment, they become something to be analyzed. It is not enough for us humans just to experience something. We feel we need to know why’ (Holland 1993, x). Dreamers in novels often endeavour to ‘know why’, to find an explanation for their dreams, either by themselves or with the help of another character, a friend or a more or less official dream interpreter. As Holly Hirst demonstrates in Chapter 5 of this volume, an author like Ann Radcliffe even uses her characters’ reaction to their dreams as a means of tackling this key issue of interpretation, describing appropriate practices in The Romance of the Forest (1791) and erroneous ones in The Italian (1797). An interpretative act is thus commonly carried out within the diegesis, mirroring that which is implicitly required from the reader: beyond character level, dreams in a novel beg for the reader’s interpretation,⁴ assigning him or her a hermeneutical task. The critical attention devoted to the character’s dream echoes that which the reader must pay to the work as a whole in the act of reading. In both cases, it is a narrative which he or she is invited to interpret.

Two novels from the first half of the eighteenth century open with the relation of a woman’s dream, later revealed to be proleptic. In a thinly veiled manner, these dreams herald the career awaiting the soon-to-be-born heroes – for these dreams originate in the protagonists’ pregnant mothers. Here is the first paragraph of Daniel Defoe’s Memoirs of Cavalier (1720):

It may suffice the Reader, without being very inquisitive about my Name, that I was born in the County of SALOP, in the Year 1608; under the Government of what Star I was never Astrologer enough to examine; but the Consequences of my Life may allow me to suppose some extraordinary Influence affected my Birth. If there be anything in Dreams also, my Mother, who was mighty observant that Way, took Minutes, which I have since seen in the first Leaf of her Prayer Book, of several strange Dreams she had while she was with Child of her second Son, which was my self. Once she noted that she dreamed she was carried away by a Regiment of Horse, and delivered in the Fields of a Son, that as soon as it was born had two Wings came out of its Back, and in half an Hour’s Time flew away from her: and the very Evening before I was born, she dreamed she was brought to Bed of a Son, and that all the while she was in Labour a Man stood under her Window beating on a Kettle-Drum, which very much discomposed her. (Defoe 2009, 33)

The Cavalier’s mother records her dreams carefully; the last two together read like a blueprint for the novel to follow. As Ian Haywood comments, ‘Defoe’s references to Stars, Astrologer, and Influence make clear the function of the dream and the basic message is so obvious as to obviate being made explicit: the son will be a soldier and will leave home in search of martial glory’ (Haywood 1982, 72). However ‘discomposed’ she may be, this mother requires no explanation; she needs no help to ‘re-compose’ herself or make sense of her dreams.

Not so thirty years later in Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748) when Roderick’s pregnant mother is so ‘discomposed’ – the word is Smollett’s this time – by a dream, in which ‘she was delivered of a tennis-ball, which the devil […] struck so forcibly with a racket that it disappeared in an instant’ before returning (Smollett 2008, 1), that she and her husband seek out a seer to interpret it: ‘their first-born would be a great traveller; […] he would undergo many dangers and difficulties, and at last return to his native land, where he would flourish with great reputation and happiness’ (Smollett 2008, 1). As in Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier, the mother’s dream turns out to be prophetic and sums up the future of her unborn son, but here, a masculine figure makes sense of the chaotic and apparently senseless feminine dream, imposing order on what seemed incoherent and disconnected, or more accurately, identifying a pattern underneath a random surface. The intervention of a male interpreter in the novel from the 1740s marks a dichotomy between the messiness of the female dream and the female mind which this dream discomposes and the rationality of the male understanding. This corresponds with what Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, in their analysis of the emergence of the modern subject based on dream narratives, describe as ‘the gendering of the irrational’ (Armstrong and Tennenhouse 1990, 478). Samuel Richardson was largely responsible for this gendering to which Smollett contributed, as the opening of Roderick Random makes clear, and which the second half of the century develops and theorizes:

[I]‌n the century elapsing between Locke and Malthus, authors developed the cultural space opened by dreams in order to determine a new basis for human identity. Essentially opposed to reason, this space was implicitly female. Within its boundaries, however, a virtually infinite number of distinctions would be made, distinctions between race, class, and ethnicity, as well as distinctions of gender. (Armstrong and Tennenhouse 1990, 471)

It is precisely within this time span, corresponding approximately to what is known as the long eighteenth century, that most contributions in this volume are situated. They all deal with this female ‘cultural space’, more precisely with the articulation between dreaming and female creativity, a connection which these introductory pages will try to render more explicit.

In the extracts from Defoe and Smollett quoted above, the protagonists’ mothers dream while their fathers do not. As Margaret Anne Doody remarks of the first half of the eighteenth century, ‘[d]‌reaming is feminine; men are not to be subjected to inner terrors’ (Doody 2004, 72). The ‘discomposition’ sometimes caused by dreams affects female characters like Harriet Byron in Sir Charles Grandison (1753) – certainly not the hero himself.⁵ Yet in neither Defoe’s nor Smollett’s novels is the pregnant woman’s dream dismissed. It deserves to be recorded in a prayer book or related to a respected masculine figure – the ‘uncorruptible’ seer is called an ‘attentive sage’ (Smollett 2008, 1) – who takes it seriously. This emphasizes the prophetic value of the dreams sent by the two god-like novelists to a woman, the mother-to-be, not to a man, in a deviation from the traditional biblical dreams both works of fiction covertly or overtly allude to.⁶ Beside, since the two novels are fictional autobiographies, the mothers’ dreams encapsulate not only the lives of their sons, but the very narratives that constitute the novels, all the more so as the paratactical structure of these dreams parallels the loosely connected series of adventures which will befall the heroes in the subsequent pages. Defoe’s and Smollett’s choice of opening their novels with these dream relations draws the reader’s attention to the artistic dimension of their works, for a literary dream differs from a real person’s partly on account of its rhetorical and aesthetic dimension, of the recognition of the poiesis its creation involves – a distinction drawn by George Steiner (1983, 14–15) among others, of which Enlightenment authors were well aware (Engel 2003, 46). Thus, in its incipit, Roderick Random does more than gender irrationality; like Memoirs of a Cavalier, it also genders creativity. In other, blunter words, the male author’s work is the female character’s dream.

Yet Defoe and Smollett both quickly dispose of their heroes’ mothers. If she is the first parent mentioned in Memoirs of a Cavalier, the mother receives very little further attention and disappears behind her husband. Even her love for her son seems but a consequence of his, mentioned first: ‘he [my father …] most passionately loved me’ is as it were taken up in the following paragraph with ‘My Mother, who lived in a perfect Union with him, both in Desires and Affection, received me very passionately’ (Defoe 2009, 34). Furthermore, the echo sounds weaker, as his ‘most passionately’ is slightly toned down to her ‘very passionately’. She then fades away from the narrative, in the first few pages of which the father features prominently. In Roderick Random too the mother soon vanishes, this time by dying a few days after giving birth to Roderick, while the father, presumed dead, returns spectacularly at the end of the novel. The female characters have dreamt and delivered both son and narrative pattern: these ghostly figures have fulfilled their function – their essential, their fundamental function of sending their literal and metaphorical progenies, hero and narrative, into the world – and they are no longer needed, the link between femininity and creativity, more specifically with fiction writing, thus being acknowledged and repressed at the same time. As has been convincingly argued by Anne Mellor in particular, the plot of Frankenstein, of Mary Shelley’s ‘hideous progeny’ (Shelley 2012, 169), relies greatly on this tension which the present volume aims at exploring: it relates the story of a man who wants to make a baby without a woman, with disastrous consequences. Metaphorically, it dramatizes the impossibility of creation without the feminine, and it does so by way of a dream. As Mellor explains,

The destruction of the female implicit in Frankenstein’s usurpation of the natural mode of human reproduction symbolically erupts in his nightmare following the animation of his creature, in which his bride-to-be is transformed in his arms into the corpse of his dead mother. (Mellor 1988, 115)

In this famous passage from Frankenstein, dreams, creation and femininity are linked in an inextricable manner which several contributions to this volume, using different approaches, try to unravel.

Some chapters refer to Mary Shelley’s dream of March 1815, in which she rubs her dead baby by the fire and it comes back to life – a dream which is a more likely source for Frankenstein than the probably made-up one related in the 1831 ‘Introduction’ to the novel (Moers 2012, 324–25; O’Rourke 1999, 376). Other genuine dreams find their way into this volume. Tricia Ayrton (Chapter 11) studies the link between Emily Brontë’s approach to her own dreams on the one hand, and her poems and the oneiric sequence in Wuthering Heights on the other; Isabelle Hervouet (Chapter 12) analyses what she calls Charlotte Brontë’s ‘sister dream’ and the traces it left on Jane Eyre, while Victor Sage (Chapter 6) briefly looks at the oneiric origin of Walpole’s Otranto in his discussion of Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest and Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1777). As these examples show, authentic dreams are focused on only in the light of their connections with literary works.⁷ It is through the prism of the literary representations of dreams that we wish to explore the diversity of female creativity, mostly but not exclusively in the realm of prose fiction: Debapriya Basu and Tricia Ayrton, respectively, look at Anne Finch’s poetry (Chapter 4) and Emily Brontë’s poetry notebooks (Chapter 11).

Even though our approach is clearly gendered since this volume analyses works by female authors, well-known or anonymous, our purpose is not to inquire into the potential existence of a specifically male or female unconscious giving rise to specifically male or female dreams. Some authors claim that a woman’s dreams are essentially different from a man’s,⁸ but if there is indeed a ‘common language of women’s dreams’, as Carol Schreier Rupprecht proposes (Rupprecht 1985), the differences between men’s and women’s dreams are more often considered to be acquired than innate. ‘Cultural influence’ thus predominates in Anthony Shafton’s survey of the twentieth-century studies on dreams, particularly in the scientific field (Shafton 1995, 297), without discarding the possibility of innate characteristics. He notes for instance that researchers found no differences in dreams dreamt by