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 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.