SOURCE: "Deserts, Ruins, and Troubled Waters: Female Dreams in Fiction and the Development of the Gothic Novel," in Genre, Vol. X, No. 4, Winter, 1977, pp. 529-72.

In the following excerpt, Doody elaborates on ways that Barker's descriptions of the dreams of her female characters emphasize the women's unheroic and subjective lives.

My Harriet has been telling me how much she suffered lately from a dream, which she permitted to give strength and terror to her apprehensions from Mr. Greville. Guard, my dear Ladies, against these imbecillities of tender minds. In these instances, if no other, will you give a superiority to our Sex….¹

So says Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, airily dismissing Harriet's disturbing sequence of nightmares. Sir Charles voices the accepted rational and masculine view. In eighteenth-century English fiction, until the appearance of the Gothic novel, it is women, not men, who have dreams. Masculine characters rarely dream; those...