My Harriet has been telling me how much she suffered lately from a dream, which she permitted to give strength and terror to her apprehensions from Mr. Greville. Guard, my dear Ladies, against these imbecillities of tender minds. In these instances, if no other, will you give a superiority to our Sex….¹

So says Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, airily dismissing Harriet's disturbing sequence of nightmares. Sir Charles voices the accepted rational and masculine view. In eighteenth-century English fiction, until the appearance of the Gothic novel, it is women, not men, who have dreams. Masculine characters rarely dream; those who do are usually simpletons whose dreams can be jocosely interpreted. Heroes are not dreamers.

This certainly marks a change from earlier literature. In Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, for instance, men have very vivid dreams. In the seventeenth century all sorts of men regarded dreams as significant, bearing a message from God. Men with diverse religious views, such as Laud and Bunyan, thought their dreams worth recording. The credit given to dreams became associated with religious wars, fanaticism, and all kinds of irrational and useless behavior. In the eyes of later generations, reality is the thing. Defoe alone among the novelists maintains an old tradition, believing in the spiritual import of dreams and prophetic apparitions. His central characters, male and female, have revelatory dreams. But Defoe was considered a writer for the low, the unenlightened. In polite eighteenth-century fiction, men—if they are admirable, if they are strong—must be shown to be in touch with reality; they exert rational control without idiosyncratic private assistance from the Voice of God and without any awkward manifestations of the unconscious self. Men belong to the scientific world rather than to that of superstition; hence, they do not have prophetic dreams or premonitions. They exercise masculine authority in a world whose ways, even if sometimes distasteful, are comprehensible. They are either essentially in control, or they are failures, deserving of pity or contempt. The strong man does not have the dreams or nightmares which reveal self-division or perturbation. The only real exception is Lovelace, whose remarkable dream is a sign of (deserved) disintegration and dereliction, and who appears in a novel which has its roots in seventeenth-century comprehension of experience. Even there, the dream is connected with, and serves as a punishment for, Lovelace's moral madness. As Michael DePorte has shown, eighteenth-century psychology saw dreaming and madness as closely connected, and was frightened of both.

The mystical view of dreams implies a high correlation between subjective and objective: it insists that the universal can be manifested in the most personal experience; it validates idiosyncratic insight. The view of dreams as temporary madness, on the other hand, reflects a profound distrust of subjectivity. Again and again Augustan writers identify the tendency toward insanity with the tendency toward the subjective…. The lunatic is typically represented as … a person with no sense of limit. In this respect the eighteenth century's attitude toward madness is almost exactly the reverse of that of modern psychiatry, with its growing stress on the connection between insanity and an underdeveloped sense of self.²

Masculine novelists must show the world of men as objective, not subjective. The same considerations do not apply, or not quite in the same way, to the presentation of women. Richardson, whose guiding interest was in the subjective, necessarily wrote about women. Clarissa, in her dreams and madness, is not morally reprehensible. Grandison, more completely a novel of its time than Clarissa, has a hero who is supposed to epitomize all the current conceptions of good masculinity; it is the women around the hero who have weaknesses and perturbation. It is the women who have dreams. Sir Charles teases Harriet about having allowed herself to be affected by "a dream, a resverie," and the embarrassed heroine confesses apologetically, "I own I should have made a very silly, a very pusilanimous [sic] man" (III, 248). Dreaming is feminine; men are not to be subjected to inner terrors.

Women, weaker than men, not in control of their environment, are permitted to have dreams. The censorship of dreaming doesn't quite apply to them. Officially, in the eighteenth century, women are thought of as weak and superstitious; they have something of an archaic consciousness, not enjoying the full benefits of masculine reason and masculine knowledge of reality. Their dreaming is not necessarily insanity, nor is it the sign of an unbecoming and ignoble weakness. A female character can be shown as dreaming—or having nightmares or delusions—without forfeiting the reader's respect. The "imbecillities of tender minds" are not unattractive. A female dreamer does not seem comic, nor need the fact that she dreams be interpreted as a distasteful psychic dereliction. Women are often seen as living an inward life rather different from that of men, whose consciousness is more definitely related to the objective world and to action within it. Women, less able to plan and execute actions, are seen as living a life closer to the dream-like, and closer to the dream-life.

That this is so can be seen in Pope's presentations of both Belinda and Eloisa. The dreams of both are related to their sexual natures, and to disturbances about their sexual nature. It has often been pointed out that the imagery in Eloisa to Abelard prefigures the Gothic manner:

This imagery—the imagery of the sublime—is certainly present in the national consciousness, but can be used freely here precisely because the poet is dealing with a woman's experience. When we read The Dunciad we may wonder if the sublime and the dream-like are not both thought of as dangerously associated with the feminine; it is the "mighty Mother" who threatens masculine rational objectivity. In Eloisa Pope treats his subject sympathetically. There is no need to ask about meaning or sense aside from the psychological. Eloisa need not be asked to do anything in the objective world because she cannot. There is no event in the poem; the poem is Eloisa, that passive victim and active dreamer whose sexual nature is inseparably associated with pain, dread and guilt. When the feminine is feminine, there is no need for hostility. We do not need to ask, while reading about Eloisa's dream, if the character is evincing the inferiority of her sex and the superiority of the other—ultimately, she is, perhaps, but we need take her only as she is, attending to her experience. The poem was popular with women, especially with the ladies of the town, who must have taken the work as a vindication of feminine passion.

When women writers themselves describe feminine dreams, the effects are both similar to and different from those in Pope's poems. 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. Unlike Defoe, they do not follow the old tradition which relates the dream to the promptings of God or the Devil. 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. The reader's sympathetic understanding of the dream rises from an understanding of the character in her situation. The dreams delineated by women writers are much lonelier and more complex than those which Pope describes. What gives rise to the dream may not be quite what we expect, and the dream-content is powerfully related to the sense of individuality under attack. Women's heroines usually are not as simply hopeful as Belinda or as simply griefsticken as Eloisa. In an apparently placid situation the heroine's relationship to a lover or to marriage may be fraught with anxiety amounting to dread. The heroine has a strong but divided sense of self, and the self is usually suffering from something more complicated than simple desire or simple grief. Some sort of good self-realization is being thwarted, and tension and terror arise from a sense of incomplete and unsatisfactory alternatives. The pain is related to the woman's sexual nature; the sexual nature and the whole sense of identity do not coincide satisfactorily, and the individual is threatened with severe loss.

One of the most interesting examples of the disturbing feminine dream occurs in Jane Barker's Love Intrigues: The History of the Amours of Bosvil and Galesia (1713). The heroine is in a constant state of uneasy suspense about her relationship to Bosvil and his on-again-off-again courtship (if that is what it is). When Bosvil appears to have abandoned her, the heroine goes for solitary rambles and begins to write poetry. Deciding to dedicate herself to her work, she writes verses on an ash tree in a grove:

Methinks these Shades, strange Thoughts suggest,
Which heat my Head, and cool my Breast;
And mind me of a Laurel Crest.

Methinks I hear the Muses sing,
And see 'em all dance in a Ring;
And call upon me to take wing.

We will (say they) assist thy Flight,
Till thou reach fair ORINDA 's Height,
If thou can'st this World's Follies slight.

…. .

Then gentle Maid cast off they Chain,
Which links thee to thy faithless Swain,
And vow a Virgin to remain.

After this self-dedication, Galesia devotes herself to poetry and study: "Thus I thought to become Apollo's Darling Daughter, and Maid of Honour to the Muses."³ Her activities become important in themselves, but when Bosvil returns and appears to be on the point of a declaration she drops her studies. Things are apparently going prosperously, but she is still in a state of suspense about herself and her future. While in this state of suspense, she has an important dream:

I thought my self safe landed on Love's Shore, where no cross Wind, unseen Accident, cou'd oppose my Passage to Hymen's Palace, or wrack me in this Harbour of true Satisfaction…. Now my Thoughts swam in a Sea of Joy, which meeting with the Torrent of the foresaid Vexations, made a kind of dangerous Rencounter, ready to overset my Reason. I pass'd some Nights without Sleep, and Days without Food, by reason of this secret Satisfaction. At last, being overcome with a little Drowsiness, I fell asleep in a Corner of our Garden, and dream'd, that on a suddain, an angry Power carried me away, and made me climb a high mountain: at last brought me to that Shade where I had heretofore writ those Verses on the Bark of an Ash, as I told you, in which I seem'd to prefer the Muses, and a studious Life, before that of Marriage, and Business. Whereupon,

—My uncouth Guardian said,

—Unlucky Maid!

Since, since thou has the Muses chose,
Hymen and Fortune are thy Foes. (pp. 32-33)

In a later edition of this novel (1719) the dream is more surprisingly revealing:

… a mountain where I met Bosvil, who endeavour'd to tumble me down, but I thought the aforesaid Power snatch'd me away, and brought me to that Shade….⁴

The dream is not related only to Galesia's lover, or even primarily to her repressed passion for him. The dream is related to her own sense of an enforced choice, and to a decision she must make about her own nature. If she is "Apollo's Daughter," she must give over the desire for marriage, for sexual fulfillment. She recognizes and fears the penalty of sexual frustration even while her own sense of herself makes her unhappily reject the man she loves. Her own will does not govern the nature of the alternatives. In the second (and unexpurgated?) version of the dream, the high mountain represents a freedom from anxiety, a sexual aspiration fulfilled—but it cannot be obtained after all; she is transported back to the "Shade" of her intellect. In some fashion she knows that the affair with Bosvil will never mature (as it does not—the subtitle of the story is ironic). What makes the dream terrifying is the helplessness, the sense of being "snatch'd away" from fulfillment and being compelled to confront the truth about herself. A modern psychological allegorist must inevitably see the "power" as representing not just Fate (though external conditions make this division inevitable), nor the irresistible power of Apollo, but Galesia's inner nature which makes a bitter choice her will does not know how to make. She had made a life for herself without Bosvil, and this has been more than a substitute for him. She had decided on a single life (in which she could use her intellect)—although she didn't expect herself to take her at her word. Her dream-journey travels over the landscape of her divided self—and the dream vision powerfully intimates anxiety and loss.

In the sequel, A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723), loss and perturbation are repeated. Here the heroine is living her single life, in fulfillment of the prophecy. The kind brother with whom she studied medicine, her only intellectual companion, dies. The heroine is disdainful about the superstitions of other girls, which include "Our little Follies of telling our Dreams; laying Things under each other's Heads to dream of our Amours … drawing Husbands in the Ashes; St. Agnes's Fast; and all such childish Auguries,"⁵ but she is impressed by her own dreams of the lost brother, remembering "that I even wish'd for that which is the Horror of Nature, that I might see his Ghost" (p. 13). Telling dreams is a silly feminine pastime, the mature Galesia indicates—but what about the force of experience in some dreams? The life Galesia knew seems lost. She has to go with her widowed mother to London, where she spends most of her time working in the garret, or on the roof of their humble lodging, gazing over the city:

Out of this Garret, there was a Door went out to the Leads; on which I us'd frequently to walk to take the Air, or rather the Smoke…. Here it was that I wish'd sometimes to be of Don Quixote's Sentiments, that I might take the Tops of Chimneys, for Bodies of Trees; and the rising Smoke for Branches; the Gutters of Houses, for Tarras-Walks; and the Roofs for stupendous Rocks and Mountains. However, though I could not beguile my Fancy thus, yet here I was alone, or, as the Philosopher says, never less alone. Here I entertain'd my Thoughts, and indulg'd my solitary Fancy. (p. 67)

Such reverie is not like that of Eloisa, simply and strongly connected with erotic passion; rather, it is connected with a sense of solitary identity, both losing and finding itself. Galesia contemplates London rather as Mrs. Radcliffe's Ellena will contemplate the mountains and valleys from her turret in the convent; imprisoned, the self can create meaning from inner impressions. Galesia's mountaintop in her dream has now become the rooftop where she finds herself, and, in looking down from her height, she can transcend reality for a while, although not without a fear of that outer world which would be too powerful for her if she were to descend to it….

Notes

¹ Samuel Richardson, Sir Charles Grandison (Oxford English Novels Edition, London, 1972), Part III, p. 242.

² Michael V. DePorte, Nightmares and Hobbyhorses: Swift, Sterne, and Augustan Ideas of Madness (San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1974), p. 31.

³ Jane Barker, Love Intrigues (New York: Garland Press Reprint, Foundation of the Novel series), pp. 14-15.

⁴ Barker, The Entertaining Novels of Mrs. Jane Barker (2 vols., London: 1719), II, 29.