The Shadow of a Dream

that they tell us must always remain a wilderness, with all its extraordinary phenomena irredeemably savage and senseless. Spoken by Faulkner, one of the central characters, these words in their anticipation of one of the fundamental assumptions of psychoanalysis provide a valuable hint about the most useful critical approach to William Dean Howells' novel The Shadow of a Dream (1890).' This short novel of about forty thousand words deals with the tragic consequences of a recurrent dream as it affects the lives of Douglas Faulkner, his wife Hermia and his dearest friend, the clergyman James Nevil. Having known Faulkner slightly ten years before, the first-person narrator Basil March, a character familiar from other of Howells' novels, next meets him when Faulkner is suffering from a severe heart condition. Faulkner's illness, which has continued for several years and which kills him on the day the Marches pay their visit, is greatly exacerbated by a recurring dream in which he sees his own funeral and the marriage of his wife and best friend taking place at the same time. The dream, which seems to him to reveal that Hermia has betrayed him with Nevil and wishes his death, is so painful that, as the other characters argue, it hastens or even causes his death from a heart seizure. After

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• The Cambridge History of the Gothic

  Open Access•A Warwick, Catherine Spooner et al.•Cambridge History of the Gothic•2020

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