The Museum as 'Dream Space': Psychology and Aesthetic Response in George Eliot’s Middlemarch
Victoria Mills
19 Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century April 5, 2011 DOI: 10.16995/ntn.596 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Citations | 5 |
| Key points | Argues that in Middlemarch the museum functions as a 'dream space' where female subjectivity and unconscious mental life can be explored, drawing on Victorian psychological theories of trance, double consciousness, and will. Eliot's depiction of Dorothea's responses to Rome's museums engages contemporary debates about consciousness and spontaneous individual will, extending Sheldon Annis's notion of the museum as 'dream space'. |
Abstract
This essay explores the relationship between aesthetics and psychology through the idea of the museum as a ‘dream space’ in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. It begins with a discussion of Charles Dickens’s Amy Dorrit and Hilda in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, two women who, like Dorothea Brooke, dream their way around Italian museums and the fragment-rich spaces of Rome. Pregnant moments of female subjectivity take place in museum spaces characterised by their oneiric qualities. Such fictional depictions extend Sheldon Annis’s notion of the museum as ‘dream space’, taking account of a variety of sleep states associated with the museum that include mesmeric trance and double consciousness. Middlemarch, in particular, draws on contemporary psychological accounts of such phenomena developed by John Addington Symonds, Enaeas Sweetland Dallas and Frances Power Cobbe. Eliot’s depiction of Dorothea’s responses to the museum of Rome engages with theories of consciousness and debates about the nature of spontaneous, individual will. In Middlemarch the creative potential of the unconscious mind is explored through the idea of the museum as a dream space.