Dream-Representation in Wuthering Heights, Crime and punishment, and War and Peace

Interested in how closely these dreams resemble actual dreams, particularly in te light of post – Freudian dream research; how successfully something that is unreal by definition is made part of the fabric of a referential narrative; and how successfully dreams are made to serve authorial intentions – to contribute to the thematic, symbolic and affective ends of the narratives that contain them with out losing their verisimilar quality

1. Allegorical interpretation, a critical procedure validated by Freud ‘ Most of the artificial dreams are constructed by imaginative writers, they reproduce the writer’s thoughts under a disguise which is regarded as harmonizing with the recognize characteristics of dreams 2. Considers dreams as a literary device, dreams are considered in relation to fictional characterization, narrative structure the articulation of the author’s themes.

Both approaches have their strong points they also have their pitfalls 1. Allegorical interpretaition depends on a manifest-latent model and presupposes a hidden or secret meaning. While this may be true of some dreams it is by no means true for all. 2. emphasis on authorial technique in the other approach can lead commentators to assign the origin and generation of dreams not to the mental life of the dreamer but to the author – read into it too much

Common dreams Dickens shrewdly observed that “taking into consideration our vast differences in point of mental and physical constitution” “there is a remarkable sameness to our dreams” eg. “We all fall off the tower, we all take unheard of trouble to go to the theatre and never get in” Dickens describes various scenarios for anxiety dreams Frequently occurring motif is that something menacing outside ins trying to get inside to where the dreamer is situated. Eg. The female waif ‘Cathy’ tyring to break through the window in Lockwood’s dream Another less common kind of dream is hypnagogic dreaming this occurs in a twilight setting that mixes normally separate features of sleep and wakefulness, often ending in an external situation that terminates the dream eg. The zealous preacher rapping on the boards of his pulpit at the climax of Lockwood’s first dram, which is discovered to be the sound of a tree branch knocking against the window Day remnants – dreams where what we perceive in the day transfers into our dreams ‘ Nineteenth century realist fiction is particularly well suited to show the presence of day remnants in dreams and consequently both to augment the reality effect and to link these representations with the narrative’

Lockwood's dreams Forced by bad weather to spend the night at Wuthering Heights, Lockwood notes that the name Catherine has been scratched on the ledge three times, each time with a different last name. He also discovers books inscribed Catherine Earnshaw with white spaces of which have been used for a child's diary entries. Just before falling asleep he notices that one of the works is a pious discourse by the Reverend Jabe Branderham. First dream = Day remanet = Lockwood attends a sermon of Branderham on the same subject as the printed discourse, the dream is lifelike as Lockwood has read in Catherine’s diary of a three hour religious service she had been forced to attend Kermode observed that the dream was a trick as its role seems merely to suggest through contiguity that Lockwood’s next dream is a similarly convincing dream representation Second dream = anxiety dream – Catherine tries to break through the window and enter the panelled bed. This dream has thematic implications, raises subject of the existence of transcendent spirits A naturalistic explanation is that she exists only in Lockwood’s dream, supernatural possibility is that the spirit of Catherine lives and that Heathcliff may one day be reunited with her. Dream seems inauthentic. ‘it has a feeling of a literary device intended to reveal secrets about the past before the novel begins, and to set a particular emotional tone..and is not convincingly a product of Lockwood’s psyche” and would be more plausible if assigned to Heathcliff – White Lewis Lockwood’s dreams look like intense signifying nodes demanding the reader’s closest attention, but upon examination they are found to by of limited import and limited impact. Although the second foreground an important theme, its equivocal status dilutes its import concerning the equivocal status of transcendent spirits. And while there is plenty of sound and fury in both dreams, there is not enough signifying to justify the pyrotechnics.