Contrasting Dream Sequences In Woolf And Poe: Example Essay By An Expert Writer To Follow

Dream sequences have appeared as an element in various media since at least the time of the Ancient Greeks, with Aeschylus seemingly using the device in his play The Persians, but it was Hollywood which really brought the idea of the dream sequence into common knowledge. These sequences, in both film and books, are used for a variety of reasons: they can be used as a means of gaining insight into a character’s mental state, or some event of their past which has bearing on the present happenings. Alternatively, dream sequences may be used as a means of expanding on the atmosphere as a whole, whether by contrasting with it, or by allowing the author to show their readers and viewers the difference between what is happening now versus what used to happen in the area.
Woolf’s story A Haunted House features a woman (the narrator) and her husband as they attempt to find out what two ghosts are looking for in their house – despite the presence of searching ghosts, and a house which seems to be alive in some way, the story itself is quite a peaceful one. This contrasts strongly with Poe’s story The Tell-Tale Heart, which, while it features an (unnamed) narrator who remains calm and collected until a certain event at the end of the story, nonetheless is more actively chilling and stress-inducing than Woolf’s tale. This paper will examine the differences in the pair of dream sequences with reference to the differences inherent in both storylines, in hopes of showing in what way the two sequences are different.
Perhaps the most obvious difference between the dream sequences of Woolf and Poe is their overall tone. The narrator talks from the beginning about the tangible presence of the ghosts who are opening and closing doors, and moving through the building, but there is never any trace of alarm in her words. As befits a story which involves ghosts, and yet is quite peaceful and almost pastoral in nature, the dream of the narrator is one which is reminiscent of her (and possibly her husband’s) mental state: they are aware of the ghosts moving through the house, interacting with various objects and even talking to each other, but the narrator feels no fear- indeed, she is so calm that she can converse with the ghosts with no indication of feeling any fear whatsoever. This is entirely different from the narrator’s experience in Poe’s work, where his manner is so frantic in the framing of his dream as to be called frenzied, the rest of the narration notwithstanding. Indeed, perhaps it is the contrast between this framing and the rest of his narration which adds to the feeling of nervous tension which emanates from every word.
In an extension of the discussion of tone, the language used in both dream sequences is also something which differentiates them from each other. It is known that Poe was a writer of horror and suspense, while Woolf kept to a narrower slice-of-life approach to writing, but while this will account for some of the differences in narration, it does not account for everything. Woolf’s narration is calm and like a dream in that the narrator seems to accept implicitly that there are ghosts moving around in her house, whereas the narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart is clearly extremely nervous, talking of his perception of the noise he can hear (and that he assumes others can hear), as well as his own reactions to it, and narrating events in the extreme calm of someone who is thoroughly petrified – and mad in a way that he claims he is not.
Interestingly, while Woolf and Poe both differ dramatically in the tone and content of their respective dream sequences, they are both alike in one particular respect: both dream sequences flout common dream sequence convention, and strictly relate to the matters at hand for the characters – the ghosts for Woolf’s female narrator, and the murder for Poe’s male narrator. As was briefly discussed above, dream sequences are normally used to create an interlude in the story, as a means of exploring the nature of a character, and why they became the people they are in the book\film. This is not the case for either of the short stories which are discussed in this paper, since the dreams directly relate to the matters at hand. Perhaps it is this similarity which throws greater light on the many differences which exist between the two sequences.
The two dream sequences which have been examined are different in very fundamental ways, despite the similarities which we discussed in a preceding paragraph. To reiterate, it is possibly those self-same similarities which throw the differences into even sharper relief, giving as they do a background of sameness. The differences between the two sequences include separate tones, over and above those which separate the two genres that the authors inhabit, possibly create the most striking contrast between the two excerpts, but the language used by Woolf, when put into direct opposition with the language used by Poe, is another striking difference. It is surprising that both dreams should be so similar in terms of their relation to the plot, given the differences, but this perhaps serves to heighten the contrast.