The Uncanny

The colloquial meaning of the word uncanny—denoting that which is supernatural or merely mysterious by known standards—has been eclipsed in Gothic criticism by a specific Freudian deployment of the term. In a 1919 essay titled “Das Unheimliche” (“The Uncanny”), Sigmund

Freud (1856–1939) distinguishes between the Heimlich (literally, “the homely,” and by implication, the familiar) and the Unheimlich (literally, “the unhomely,” and usually translated from the German as “the uncanny”).

The latter is capable of inducing fear precisely because it is not known or familiar to the perceiver, though Freud extends the range of fearfulness by suggesting that unknown (and thus fearful) things may lie concealed within the most familiar of environments, institutions, and individuals.

Thus, the Unheimlich may be an ambivalent, possibly occluded but certainly frightening, aspect or component of the Heimlich.

The Unheimlich is a concept that is widely applied in modern Gothic criticism because of the genre’s historical associations with the representation of concealment and deceit, its frequent recourse to dramatic modifications in character or behavior, and its effective interposition of the supernatural or the marvelous as a functional presence in the supposedly normal world.

Arguably, the most Unheimlich institution of all is the human body— always on display and yet concealing not merely its mechanisms but its projected disorders also. The body’s uneasy oscillation between health and illness, life and death, and its liminal status as nominally part of humanity yet individual in its destiny, also align it psychoanalytically with the whole mechanism of abjection.

Hughes, W. (2012) Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature. Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press