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The concept of the uncanny according to s. freud
The concept of the uncanny according to s. freud
The concept of the uncanny according to s. freud
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2.2 The Gothic Monster As my main focus of this paper is the motif of the double and transformation in the film Black Swan, Fin de Siècle Gothic is of most interest here. In these turn of the century Gothic works, the monster is a recurring and very integral theme. Gothic monster as such are Doubles, Vampires, and Shape Shifters or other forms of transformed part humans.
“What is the Gothic? Few literary genres have attracted so much critical appetite and opprobrium simultaneously.” (Wright.p.1) is the first line in the Gothic Fiction, Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism by Angela Wright, published in 2007, which opens a lot of questions and doubts about this movement. The literary movement focused on terror, death, decay, chaos, ruin, and passion over rationality and reason grew in response to the sociological, historical, psychological and political context. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the world witnessed the rise of gothic literature, a new movement, also known as an anti-transcendentalist movement.
A theory known as the uncanny valley blurs the lines between death and life, dipping into a sort of limbo in which one is never sure of what is in fact alive. Its focal point is on the familiarity of an object and how natural it seems in terms of human features and characteristics. This concept of the uncanny valley interconnects with several aspects of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Through the lens of the uncanny valley, Clarisse’s character exudes the natural aspect of life while the Mechanical Hound deviates from viability entirely, portraying the disturbing facet of synthetic life.
Allusions to Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in Shelley’s Frankenstein. Mary Wollstonecraft is widely accepted as one of the mothers of Feminism. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, her most famous book, Wollstonecraft identifies many of the key issues concerning feminist ideology. Her daughter, Mary Shelly, was undoubtedly influenced by her mother’s feminist ideology. Many parts of the feminist ideology Shelley presents in her famous novel Frankenstein.
In her book “The Bloody Chamber and other short stories” writer Angela Carter explores the idea of “nightmarish terrors” with the way she portrays both the mystical monster-like creatures she writes about and the behaviour of her human characters. The story The Bloody Chamber explores the theme entrapment and isolation by forming a relationship between a “dominant male aggressor” and a more passive female “victim”, which affirms the gothic genre. She incorporates this theme of entrapment in the way she forms the words the girl uses to describe the Marquis’ actions towards her. The short phrase “He stripped me,” followed by her description of him being the “gourmand” that he was while relating her sexual encounter with him to be as if he were
Thus, as the wild nature thrusts itself into a place where it originally does not belong, it becomes unheimlich and endows the whole place with an uncanny quality. It produces a feeling of the uncanny in the countess, inspiring fear in her. As soon as the uncanny dread is awakened she is again reminded of “a dark page in the history of the family” (LeFanu), that is, the murder that the owner of Carrickleigh Castle was accused of. This clearly shows how the manifestation of the unheimlich in the external world leads to the reemergence of a sense of the uncanny in the mind of the heroine, evoking in her mind the dreadful murder, which in itself has a highly unheimlich character, capable of arousing “dread and creeping horror” (Freud
Have you ever read a story that causes chills or your emotionally invested in a character. The story’s Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and The mysteries of udolpho by Ann Radcliffe are literature that are centered in fear. These story’s cause suspense or has ghost or some type of monster. A gothic is a great example of fear in literature. The settings, characters, and story line has a way of making the reader invested by hooking to their emotions.
In gothic literature, the elements used by the author depicts how the piece of work is going to unfold. Authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Washington Irving depict the themes of psychological issues and entrapment through the short stories: “Black Cat”by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven”by Edgar Allan Poe, and “The Devil and Tom Walker” by Washington Irving. The gothic theme of entrapment is commonly used across various pieces of literature. Entrapment is the idea of being contained by something either physically, mentally, or emotionally.
Modern artists today generally use images of physical and mental illness in literature. In The Tell-Tale Heart and The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe, both short stories show the usage of illness, madness, and fear. The narrators in both stories try to convince the readers that the characters are physically and mentally ill. Edgar Allen Poe creates these vivid characters which successfully assist the building of plot and ideas. Poe demonstrates how a person’s inner turmoil and terror can lead to insanity through illustrative language.
Dead women, entombed women, threatened women: many have argued that a fear of the feminine is at the root of much Gothic fiction. Outline how this fear of the feminine is present in, or perhaps challenged by, 2 of the gothic fictions we’ve looked at this semester. The fear of the feminine is a constant in gothic fiction, especially during its infancy; women were the unknown; the world of the maternal and feminine was engulfed by male paranoia, ignorance, and fear. This universal trepidation is a defining connection between the tale of Bluebeard and its female-centred 1979 retelling The Bloody Chamber, written by Charles Perrault and Angela Carter respectively.
Influenced heavily by such texts as The Bible, the works of Shakespeare, sermons and graveyard poetry, the Gothic is a genre that is laced with both horror and history. It is a genre that includes topics on taboo subjects such as gender inequality, ‘lust, murder, incest, and every atrocity that can disgrace human nature’ . Therefore Gothic novels were not typically received well within a religious and patriarchal society; this did not stop Walpole, Lewis, Bronte, Dickens and the many other authors of Gothic texts. Within these texts there is a consistent theme of madness, especially in women, but what does it mean to be mad in Gothic novels and does gender really play a part in madness or is it all just coincidental? The definition of ‘madness’
Psychoanalysis of Frankenstein and His Creation When doing a literary analysis using the psychoanalytic type A criticism, the reader must solely look to the work itself and exclude externalities. One may interpret, “Dr. Frankenstein and the monster as embodying Sigmund Freud’s theory of id and ego” (Telgen). The theory is based upon the idea that a character’s personality can be divided into three parts. The id which is the basic desire for what each person wants. The superego which is the opposite of id, it houses our sense of guilt.
This unsettling evokes some of the key features of the Gothic, such as the use of phantasmagoria, transgression, and excesses, all of which disturbed the reader by surrounding them with dark reflections of a reality portrayed through fiction. Pacts with the devil to obtain one’s desires, monks and aristocrats who revel in luxury — even if this means they must stain their hands with blood —, vampires and mad scientists: all corrupt one’s morals, all corrupt the false appearance of serenity. Likewise, the female vampires who torment Jonathan Harker disturb the harmony of the domestic sphere and unsettle the delicate balance between the private and the public domain. These vampiric women are marked by heightened sensuality and tacked to other fatal women that permeate art and European literature at the end of the nineteenth century. In this novel, fear and desire are often confused, a clue modern anxieties surrounding desire toward sensuous but degrading bodies.
Gaining Empowerment Through the Gothic and Horror Genres The dark beauty of the gothic and horror genres continues to enrapture the hearts of many to this day. They create a safe container to explore other dark realms from which we can gain introspection on the darker and hidden parts of our psyche. It transports us to experience heightened situations and to be able to explore and answer taboo questions that we may otherwise be reluctant to explore in our daily lives. I argue that the gothic and horror genres continue to thrive because of their ability to allow us to explore our psyches through heightened dark worlds that empower us to face the deeper shadows that haunt our day-to-day lives.
In many stories and poems; such as the Tell Tale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado, The Raven, Annabel Lee, The House of Usher, and so many more timeless works, Edgar Allan Poe has been captivating his audiences with spine tingling thrillers through the words and style of his own twisted ways. The only way to describe where Poe’s writing belongs in history, would be classified as gothic genre. From the start of the 1800’s to present day and the future of literature, through irony, repetition, imagery, and symbolism Poe has been bewitching readers with his gore and insane writings. Poe’s life inspired so many of his poems, from focusing on taboo topics, such as death, revenge, love and loss. Poe’s life was painful and heartbreaking that
