Introduction:
The Uncanny
We cannot discuss the ‘uncanny’ without first looking briefly at Freud’s essay on this very topic: “On this topic we find virtually nothing in the detailed accounts of aesthetics, which on the whole prefer to concern themselves with our feelings for the beautiful, the grandiose and the attractive – that is to say, with feelings of a positive kind, their determinants and the objects that arouse them – rather than with their opposites, feelings of repulsion and distress” (Freud 123). The uncanny involves these negative impressions and emotions. Instead of the beautiful, we are faced with the grotesque or repulsive—that which “repels,” “force[s] back,” or “drive[s] away” (“repulsive, adj.). The uncanny brings about unease in the person experiencing it, no matter which sense detects its presence (sight, sound, touch, or even some ineffable feeling, intuition or animal instinct): “There is no doubt that this belongs to the realm of the frightening, of what evokes fear and dread. It is equally beyond doubt that the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, and so it commonly merges with what arouses fear in general” (Freud 123). It may pose some threat though we may not be certain of the nature of that threat. Other words that we often treat as synonymous with ‘uncanny’ are ‘creepy,’ ‘eerie,’ ‘haunted,’ and ‘unnerving.’ The word ‘uncanny’ itself eludes definition, mimicking the very feelings it evokes.
More recently, the literary scholar Nicholas Royle wrote a text that studies this extremely complex word. He unpacks the term ‘uncanny,’ examining different aspects of this elusive concept: “This is the strangeness of the uncanny, a flickering moment of embroilment in the experience of something at once strange and familiar. Uncanniness entails a sense of uncertainty and suspense, however momentary and unstable. As such it is often associated with an experience of the threshold, liminality, margins, borders, frontiers” (Royle vii). The ‘uncanny’ is a merging of known and unknown, familiar and unfamiliar. The German word that Freud uses in his essay is unheimlich, which is often translated as the ‘uncanny.’ In the German though unheimlich relates to the home, meaning unhomely, and, according to Blanco and Peeren, “the German ‘an unheimlich house’ cannot be translated otherwise, in English, than as ‘a haunted house’” (Blanco and Peeren 5). The ‘uncanny’ is a disruption of home, of that which we think is safe, and, as Royle points out, it can come from the “threshold” and the in-between space (Royle vii). The permeability of this threshold implies vulnerability and the threat that something unfamiliar can enter the home. The ‘uncanny’ “can consist in a sense of unhomeliness uprooted, the revelation of something unhomely at the heart of hearth and home” (Royle 1). This violation—even the mere possibility of this violation—upsets everything connected to the home:
More recently, the literary scholar Nicholas Royle wrote a text that studies this extremely complex word. He unpacks the term ‘uncanny,’ examining different aspects of this elusive concept: “This is the strangeness of the uncanny, a flickering moment of embroilment in the experience of something at once strange and familiar. Uncanniness entails a sense of uncertainty and suspense, however momentary and unstable. As such it is often associated with an experience of the threshold, liminality, margins, borders, frontiers” (Royle vii). The ‘uncanny’ is a merging of known and unknown, familiar and unfamiliar. The German word that Freud uses in his essay is unheimlich, which is often translated as the ‘uncanny.’ In the German though unheimlich relates to the home, meaning unhomely, and, according to Blanco and Peeren, “the German ‘an unheimlich house’ cannot be translated otherwise, in English, than as ‘a haunted house’” (Blanco and Peeren 5). The ‘uncanny’ is a disruption of home, of that which we think is safe, and, as Royle points out, it can come from the “threshold” and the in-between space (Royle vii). The permeability of this threshold implies vulnerability and the threat that something unfamiliar can enter the home. The ‘uncanny’ “can consist in a sense of unhomeliness uprooted, the revelation of something unhomely at the heart of hearth and home” (Royle 1). This violation—even the mere possibility of this violation—upsets everything connected to the home:
The uncanny involves feelings of uncertainty, in particular regarding the reality of who one is and what is being experienced. Suddenly one’s sense of oneself (of one’s so-called ‘personality’ or ‘sexuality’, for example) seems strangely questionable. The uncanny is a crisis of the proper: it entails a critical disturbance of what is proper (from the Latin proprius, ‘own’), a disturbance of the very idea of personal or private property including the properness of proper names, one’s ‘own’ name, but also the proper names of others, of places, institutions and events. It is a crisis of the natural, touching upon everything that one might have thought was ‘part of nature’: one’s own nature, human nature, the nature of reality and the world. (Royle 1)
The ‘uncanny’ plays with knowledge or, more specifically, with what we think we know, which results in questions. We begin to question everything: ourselves (“I must be going crazy.”), our eyesight (“My eyes must be playing tricks on me.”), our hearing (“I must be hearing things.”), experience and reality itself (“Did that really just happen?” or “That could not have happened.”). Naturally, this uncertainty is unsettling. It is, in fact, uncanny.
The uncanny is a regular feature in the poems of Emily Dickinson. There are poems about haunted houses, graveyard, death and death-like states. All of these undoubtedly provide a sense of the uncanny. I will look at three Emily Dickinson poems and how they relate to the uncanny: F360, “The Soul has Bandaged moments –”; F775, “Suspense – is Hostiler than Death–”; and F440, “I Years had been from Home.”
The uncanny is a regular feature in the poems of Emily Dickinson. There are poems about haunted houses, graveyard, death and death-like states. All of these undoubtedly provide a sense of the uncanny. I will look at three Emily Dickinson poems and how they relate to the uncanny: F360, “The Soul has Bandaged moments –”; F775, “Suspense – is Hostiler than Death–”; and F440, “I Years had been from Home.”