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Dickens and the Wolf Man: Childhood Memory and Fantasy in David Copperfield

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Robert E. Lougy
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Abstract

This essay draws on Freud's case history of the Wolf Man (From the History of an Infantile Neurosis; 1918), which presents one of the most famous dreams in the history of psychoanalysis, in order to consider a moment in David Copperfield (1850) that constitutes the earliest childhood memory in Dickens's fiction. These two moments in Freud and Dickens occupy problematic sites that seem to slide between fantasy on the one hand and dreams on the other, and an examination of them helps open up the question of how texts remember—or fantasize—childhood and its power to structure adult experience.

Type
Victorian Cluster
Information
PMLA , Volume 124 , Issue 2 , March 2009 , pp. 406 - 420
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2009

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