Delivered at “Trauma and Nightmare”, 6th International Interdisciplinary Conference, 16th – 17th March 2023, Virtual Conference.

An important theory raised within Michelle A. Massé’s study of trauma and gothic novels is the lack of separation between waking and dreaming. Much as in real trauma, within the gothic text, ‘the [traumatic event] exists not only in the past but also in the present and in the implied future of the narrative, when the heroine wakes from a dream of trauma to find it re-presented in the real world’.

While gothic novels are plagued with terrifying dreams, perhaps the most compelling (and most heavily analysed) are found within Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. Both mark the entry of the supernatural into their respective gothic texts, as well as being filled with traumatic imagery of injured children and oedipal embraces largely responsible for the novels’ controversies. While the nightmare in which a child spectre of Cathy attempts to break into her old chamber is certainly traumatic for Lockwood, however, it must not be mistaken for Lockwood’s own traumatic dream. Similarly, Victor’s dream in Frankenstein reveals to the reader the interplay of death and birth which forms the basis of his own psychological trauma – and, if read through a trauma-theory lens, can also be argued to have helped express the anxieties of its author.

Massé argues that ‘repetition [allows the narrator] to identify and master her predicament’, an autonomous act rather than a neurotic and subconscious ‘attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available’. By examining the dizzyingly cyclical dreams and plot events which repeat themselves within both novels, this paper will seek to examine the underlying traumas processed by Brontë and Shelley throughout their texts.