‘for the Little
People, what shall I say they are but just my Brownies, God bless them! who do
one half my work for me while I am fast asleep, and in all human likelihood, do
the rest for me as well, when I am wide awake and fondly suppose I do it for
myself. That part which is done while I am sleeping is the Brownies' part
beyond contention; but that which is done when I am up and about is by no means
necessarily mine, since all goes to show the Brownies have a hand in it even
then.’
Robert Louis
Stevenson’s ‘A Chapter on Dreams’ (1892) firmly situates the creative impulse to
write in the subconscious – an area of mind outside the writer’s control. For
Stevenson, visualising the birth of his creative processes is easier if he
peoples his brain (humorously) with ‘brownies’ – elf creatures famed for their
helpfulness. His playful conceit can even redirect critics to the ‘brownies’
when they seek to apportion blame to his work (‘For the business of the powders, which so
many have censured, is, I am relieved to say, not mine at all but the Brownies’).
But the idea – and the essay – are not solely light-hearted. In the passage
quoted above Stevenson hints that locating creativity in a dreamland can have
negative effects for the appreciation of the artist, be this in terms of
self-satisfaction (which can only come from ‘fondly suppose[ing]’) or from the
praise of others (his presumed reader). More than this, in a way reflecting emerging
theories of psychology, dreaming is troubling, and born of trauma. Stevenson’s
exposure to the strictures of extreme Protestantism as a child is linked to the
stories his night time brownies bring – stories which often, if not always
(Stevenson says his dreams are occasionally a ‘surprise’), have a frightening
edge.
Stevenson is not
the only nineteenth-century writer of Gothic who talks about creativity in this
proto-Freudian way. Take the following passage from Bronte’s (earlier) Jane Eyre (1847) when Rochester looks
through Jane’s portfolio of pictures. Jane responds to Rochester’s questions
about how she felt when painting the disturbing images like so:
‘To paint them, in short, was to
enjoy one of the keenest pleasures I have ever known.’
Rochester is dismissive about the
exposure she can have had to pleasures but says:
‘you did exist in a kind of
artist’s dreamland while you blent and arranged these strange tints.’
This argument is meant to explain
the intensity of feeling working creatively has inspired in a girl with no
experience of passion. What is more, as Jane doesn’t have the skill to execute
her work to higher standard, her ideas – her dreams – must have been all the
more extraordinary. Rochester says:
‘you have secured the shadow of
your thought; but no more, probably. You had not enough of the artist’s
skill and science to give it full being: yet the drawings are, for a
school-girl, peculiar. As to the thoughts, they are elfish.’
Like Stevenson, he draws on the
language of the supernatural to explain the workings of the brain. Immediately
after this he sends Jane to bed, so disturbed is he by the peculiar drawings.
Jane’s paintings are passionate and suggestive of sexual passion, and they also
seem distinctly masochistic. She was ‘tormented’ by her perceived failures, she
worked on them for whole days without respite, her pleasure was ‘keen’, walking
the line between enjoyable and painful sensation. Jane, like Stevenson, is a
victim of childhood trauma – and so her imagination is a source of protection and
further (self-)violence.
![]() |
Edward Nash's portrait of Robert Southey |
As Jane, so Charlotte. Take this
passage from a letter written from poet Robert Southey to Bronte in 1837:
‘The day dreams in
which you habitually indulge are likely to induce a distempered state of mind;
and, in proportion as all the ordinary uses of the world seem to you flat and
unprofitable, you will be unfitted for them without becoming fitted for
anything else.’
Southey’s advice is tempered by his views on gender – he doesn’t believe
women should write or they will not be ‘fitted’ to their roles. Charlotte can
produce creative work, but only to the detriment of her mental health. In her
reply, Bronte does not refute this – she makes out that she prefers her inner world, one she has, with her siblings, populated like
Stevenson has his own:
‘It is not easy to dismiss from my imagination the images
which have filled it for so long; they were my friends and my intimate
acquaintances, and I could with little labour describe to you the faces, the
voices, the actions, of those who peopled my thoughts by day, and not seldom
stole strangely even into my dreams at night. When I depart from these I feel
almost as if I stood on the threshold of a home and were bidding farewell to
its inmates.’
Bronte’s explanation relies on the blurring of realities – different
states of consciousness – and the time we have dedicated to each. Stevenson’s
brownies seem relatively well-behaved compared with those of Charlotte Bronte
and her Jane who can appear un-summoned in the day. The flavour of her analysis
is Gothic – the ‘home’ of her brain becomes a self-made prison with ‘inmates’ –
but the conclusions we draw are psychological.
Psychoanalysing authors is not the only response we can have
to this. We can also see both Stevenson and Bronte identifying themselves in a
tradition by which authors of Gothic seek to mystify their own writing
processes – a tradition which finds a particularly potent example in Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). This
is a text with long-reaching influence over the Gothic genre, whose inception
(thanks to the ‘Author’s Introduction’) is a key part of its legend.
![]() |
Richard Rothwell's portrait of Mary Shelley |
Shelley recounts how she conceived her story when she, her
husband (P. B. Shelley) and Byron each set out to write a ghost story in the
summer of 1816. To start with she:
‘felt that blank incapability
of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull
Nothing replies to our anxious invocations.’
She argues:
‘Invention, it must be humbly admitted,
does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must,
in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless
substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.’
The
‘dark, shapeless substances’ clearly suggest a dream world and this is,
finally, where material for her novel is found:
‘Night waned upon this talk, and even the witching hour had
gone by, before we retired to rest. When I placed my head on my pillow, I did
not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My
imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me,
gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond
the usual bounds of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision, —I
saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put
together.’
Frankenstein’s monster is born
and, fittingly for a work which questions creation, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein becomes a model for the
tortured psychology of the writer.
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