Dreams of Authority: Freud and the Fictions of the Unconscious

Although dream episodes appear in countless novels throughout the nineteenth century, there has been little attempt to advance an overview of the English use of this literary device. Ronald R. Thomas strives to fill that gap with this cogent revision of his doctoral thesis. In Dreams of Authority, Thomas examines literary dreams in a selection of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts. His goal is to show the dialogical relationship of these novels to Freud’s theories of the unconscious. He intends first to demonstrate “how dreamers express their dreams in language, how they make use of literary operations to confront the dream material, how they appropriate that material as their own and then convert it into the story of their lives” (p. 7)—that is, how they achieve “authority” over both their dreams and their lives. Second, and perhaps more persuasively, he intends to argue “the implied novel contained in Freud’s theory of dreams...to demonstrate how Freud’s appropriation of certain discursive models to describe human consciousness was facilitated and informed by their prior appropriation in the novel” (p. 3). This dual thesis yields some astute insights, but suffers from an insufficient consideration of the historical and literary contexts of the dream episodes themselves.

Thomas groups the novels he examines along roughly generic lines, devoting a chapter each to gothic, “fictional autobiographical,” and detective novels, with two or three representative examples of each genre. This method of organization allows him to discuss many of the most prominent literary dreams in British nineteenth-century novels, including those found in Frankenstein, The Confessions of an English Opium Eater (not, strictly speaking, a novel, but nevertheless a central text for this subject), Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Great Expectations. An initial chapter demonstrates the application of his methodologies in Alice in Wonderland, A Christmas Carol, and Wordsworth’s Dream of the Arab in The Prelude —important dream texts that do not precisely fit the later arrangement by genres. A chapter devoted to modernist fiction appears, somewhat awkwardly, at the end of Dreams of Authority.

Thomas’s critical methodology is primarily psychoanalytic, although in combination with other currently popular concerns. For example, he links a particular “organizing metaphor for the psyche” (p. 12) to each genre, with medical terminology dominant in the gothic, economic in the fictional autobiographical, and political (or imperialist) in the detective genre. This strategy enables him to appropriate other critical discourses, with mixed results. Perhaps the most successful is his discussion of Pip’s deluding dreams of wealth and the “essentially capitalist psychology” of Great Expectations. Yet his discussion of the same theme in Jane Eyre tends to lead Thomas away from the actual dream episodes in the novel, a problem that recurs later in his reading of The Moonstone. The latter novel is an odd choice, since Franklin Blake’s “dream” is not at all a typical oneiric episode, but is instead an incident of somnambulism viewed only by observers, and completely unremembered by the “dreamer.” A more representative dream episode from Collins’s novels occurs in Armadale, but since that dream scarcely supports Thomas’s expressed agenda of revealing anxiety over imperialism, it is not surprising that he omits it.

Thomas succeeds most convincingly when he discusses the influence of the novel on Freud’s writings. He argues that The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) “implies an incipient autobiographical novel” (p. 8), he clearly establishes Freud’s numerous references to popular novels, and he lucidly examines the intertextuality of the dreams Freud claims he had while composing his masterwork. This section effectively places psychoanalytic theories within broader social, historical, and literary contexts, and displays a sensitive reading of the novelistic tendencies in Freud’s writings. Thomas also uses this section to validate his overarching emphasis on “authority” in the literary dreams he explores. He notes that Freud dismissed the traditional views that dreams are either divinely inspired revelations or meaningless physiological phenomena...