“DREAMING TRUE”: EMBODIED MEMORY, TRANSUBJECTIVITY, AND NOVELTY IN GEORGE DU MAURIER'S PETER IBBETSON

Extract

In Confessions of an EnglishOpium Eater (1821), Thomas De Quincey famously describes the mind as a palimpsest upon which inscribed memories are never truly lost to the passage of time. These memories, especially of childhood, lurk under the conscious surface of the mind, waiting to be rediscovered during intervals of intensified desultory memory that are made possible for De Quincey by opium-induced dreaming. Opium is utilized during these dreams as a perception-altering technology; memories of childhood are not only recalled while under the influence of the drug, but are revivified in a way that extends beyond the dreamer's normal mental capacity. The formulation of dreaming as a state in which memories buried under the palimpsest of time were retrieved and “relived” was important to a wide array of philosophers, medical doctors, and psychologists over the course of the long nineteenth century, culminating in Freud's seminal The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899. Alongside the theorization of ‘dream science’ in psychological and medical contexts, the Victorian literati provided their own contributions in both sensation novels and realist fiction. Reciprocally, as has been discussed in much recent work within Victorian studies, well-known characters and scenes from contemporary literature were often used to illustrate dream theories, neurological conditions, and philosophical conceptions of the self in scholarly journals and medical textbooks. The most fantastical literary treatment of dream space as a wholly separate realm within which the dreaming subject can fully recover and even surpass the sensations associated with earlier memories occurs in George Du Maurier's oft-overlooked Peter Ibbetson (1891). Over the course of the novel, the titular narrator reveals (inconsistently and in sometimes contradictory ways) dream space to be a world in which the habitual reliving of childhood events is an endlessly satisfying, novel, and strangely embodied experience for the protagonist and his lover, while also possessing connections to human evolutionary precursors and the afterlife. In Peter Ibbetson, habit is not the deadening enemy of novelty and experience that is so often portrayed in contemporary interpretations of Victorian literature. Rather, habit qua the mental technology of “dreaming true,” a form of intense, consciously-directed dreaming practiced by the novel's central characters, is paradoxically portrayed as a method by which the freshness of sensation associated with an original event can be endlessly recreated and even surpassed within a dream of that event. Contrary to twenty-first century depictions of dreams as events that help the subject to become habituated to emotional stresses, Du Maurier presents dreaming true as a practice that intensifies rather than inures the dreaming subject's emotional relationship to vivid or traumatic childhood events (Hartmann 2). Inherent in this reading is a radical formulation of the relationship between habit and novelty as understood in the late Victorian novel, revealing the generative power of habit that is disclosed within dream space.