Olive Schreiner's Allegorical Dreams and the Late Nineteenth-Century Woman Questions

In nineteenth-century England, there was a significant rise in the culture of interpreting and representing dreams in public life, literature, and scientific studies before the publication of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). The culture of dream interpretation was tremendously popular among the women, especially towards the end of the century. Dream interpretations and representations were divided between the age-old Biblical, prophetic, or supernatural, and the contemporary scientific or medical. The very act of dreaming was considered a feminine practice within Victorian androgynous ideology. It was a common belief that women subscribed to irrational, revelatory theories of dreams. Rhoda Broughton, a popular late-Victorian woman writer of sensation stories, represented and promoted this concept through her tales of dreams in Tales for Christmas Eve (1873). She supported this from a feminist perspective as a tool to counter the male rational ideology. However, her representation of dreams was unscientific and regressive. In this context, Olive Schreiner’s approach to dreams becomes crucial. This article examines her allegorical dreams of the late Victorian period and seeks to explore, through textual hermeneutics, whether her dream representations were binary both to popular beliefs about dreams vis-à-vis women and to Broughton, an English woman writer’s representations. It also seeks to examine how her representations of dreams served the woman's issues of the time, in relation to the same of Broughton.