Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2004 Haunted by the uncanny - development of a genre from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century Alexandra Maria Reuber Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Comparative Literature Commons Recommended Citation Reuber, Alexandra Maria, "Haunted by the uncanny - development of a genre from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century" (2004). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 1937. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/1937 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. HAUNTED BY THE UNCANNY – DEVELOPMENT OF A GENRE FROM THE LATE EIGHTEENTH TO THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Interdepartmental Program in Comparative Literature by Alexandra Maria Reuber Intermediate Examination, RWTH - Aachen, Germany, 1996 1st State Examination, RWTH - Aachen, Germany, 1998 2nd State Examination, Bezirksregierung Arnsberg, Dortmund, Germany, 2001 August 2004 © Copyright 2004 Alexandra Reuber all rights reserved ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First of all I want to thank my family for supporting and encouraging my career aspirations. They have always been a source of love and strength to me and, as such, have given me the inner peace to achieve and accomplish my desired goals. I also want to thank Annette Seng, Angelika Roy-Goldman, and Brian Marx. They not only supported my academic pursuits but more importantly, they offered encouragement and friendship, and made my stay here in Baton Rouge a very pleasant experience. I want to express my thanks to my professors at the Louisiana State University and at the Rheinisch-Westfälische-Technische-Hochschule, Aachen, Germany. Dr. Wenzel of Aachen first introduced me to gothic studies in English literature and taught me to approach literature from a comparative point of view. My special thanks goes to the members of my thesis committee Dr. Adelaïde Russo, Dr. Anne Coldiron, Dr. John Pizer, and Dr. Joseph Ricapito who have helped me to formulate new ideas, to support them with already existing concepts, and to critically express new approaches in literature. I want to thank them especially for their openness and helpfulness during more difficult phases of my stay at Louisiana State University. This dissertation could not have been completed without the financial support of three LSU-Board of Supervisor’s Scholarships and the LSU Dissertation Fellowship Award. iii PREFACE: THE UNCANNY IN LITERATURE – PRESENT STATE OF RESEARCH Many books have been published on the literary development of Gothic fiction or on la littérature fantastique in the latter half of the twentieth and at the beginning of the twenty-first century, for example The Gothic Tradition in Fiction (1979) by Elizabeth MacAndrew, The Literature of Terror (1980) by David Punter, Histoire de la littérature fantastique en France (1985) by Marcel Schneider, La littérature fantastique (1997) by Jean-Luc Steinmetz, Gothic Radicalism: Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis in the Nineteenth Century (2000) by Andrew Smith, or The Uncanny by Nicholas Royle (2003). Elizabeth MacAndrew presents a very good overview of the Gothic novel, focuses on the genre’s protagonists, and displays their difficulties, troubles and inner conflicts. Although she defines Gothic literature as “a literature of nightmare” (MacAndrew 3) and points towards a psychoanalytical reading of the characters, she deals with the characters’ inner / outer problems in too general a way and she does not support their mental disturbance by grounded scientific understanding and explanation. She refers for example to the figure of the double and the provoked uncanny feelings without explaining the psychoanalytical idea or theory standing behind this phenomenon. Sigmund Freud’s perception of the double should have been, at least, mentioned. Since uncanny phenomena, especially the confrontation with the double, provokes the sensations of fear and terror, we should assume that David Punter’s The Literature of Terror (1980) will treat the important element of the uncanny and will give a psychoanalytical explanation of the exaggeration of characters’ fears resulting in terror. The Literature of Terror outlines the literary development of terror. The notions of fear, anxiety, terror, and horror are the author’s main points of interest. Unfortunately, Punter’s treatment of these sensations remains iv even more superficial than MacAndrew’s character analysis, since he does not support his statements with any psychoanalytical background knowledge. Although the title of Marcel Schneider’s book Histoire de la littérature fantastique en France (1985) seems only to reconsider the fantastic tradition in France, the book is comparative in nature. The enormous German and American influence on French literature in the nineteenth- century by E.T.A. Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe is clearly displayed and set in relation to the genre’s development. Schneider describes the main characteristics in fantastic fiction and opposes it indirectly to Gothic fiction, by stating that the genre of la littérature fantastique “ne se caractérise pas par les revenants, les fantômes et les esprits, ni même [...] par le surnaturel. Le fantastique explore l'espace du dedans; il a partie liée avec l’imagination, l’angoisse de vivre et l’espoir du salut” (Schneider 150). As we will discover later, Schneider is mistaken to separate the supernatural, i.e., the uncanny form without, from the uncanny from within. However, Schneider is right in stressing the genre’s enormous psychological component and his theoretical treatise on the fantastic is a very valuable and important contribution to literature when working on the phenomenon of the uncanny and its resulting sensations. In this respect, Jean-Luc Steinmetz’s treatise, entitled La littérature fantastique (1997), needs to be mentioned. Steinmetz begins with Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and traces the genre’s development until recent times. In contrast to Schneider, Steinmetz combines the world of the uncanny from outside with the uncanny from inside, presents several theories on the fantastic, and also dedicates one chapter of his book to Sigmund Freud’s article The Uncanny. In doing so, Steinmetz stresses the psychological component of the genre. Like Schneider, Steinmetz also underscores Hoffmann’s and Poe’s influence on fantastic writing. Andrew Smith, in his excellent book Gothic Radicalism (2000), also points towards the importance of Freud’s understanding of the uncanny with reference to literature. He focuses his v reading on nineteenth-century Gothic fiction and the understanding of the sublime in connection with the uncanny. After analyzing Longius’, Burke’s, Kant’s and Weiskel’s perception of the sublime, Smith combines the concept of the sublime with psychoanalysis and takes Freud’s understanding of the uncanny into consideration. In relating the philosophers’ theoretical approaches on the sublime to nineteenth-century Gothic fiction, Smith illustrates “how the Gothic rewrites the sublime and the uncanny in such a way that it radically critiques the status of nature, language and subjectivity” (Smith 8). Nicholas Royle in his recently published book entitled The Uncanny (2003) first describes Freud’s and his own understanding of the term, then applies it to literature. However, Royle’s tedious theoretical elaboration on the uncanny with its different implications of darkness, mysteriousness, arousal of the death instinct and of premature burial, just to name a few, has yet to be demonstrated successfully in its literary application. Royle limits his demonstration of the term’s applicability in literature to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story Der Sandmann (1817) and, thereby, only re-writes what Freud had discussed eighty-four years early in his psychological treaty on The Uncanny (1919). As we can see, literary critics have more or less considered the importance of the element of the uncanny. It is present in all theoretical treaties mentioned above. However, the term’s psychological character and connotation is only revealed and more or less elaborated in the later theoretical works by Steinmetz, Smith, and Royle. All three literary critics describe the phenomenon of the uncanny and its importance in literature. Unfortunately, they neither give a detailed nor a comparative illustration of the term’s understanding and development in literature from the late eighteenth until the late nineteenth-century. In missing this opportunity, they support the well-established opinion hold by literary critics that gothic, fantastic, and uncanny writing have to be assumed to be culturally and temporally independent genres. Within this vi detailed elaboration on the ‘Literature of the uncanny’ I do not only attempt to correct this misperception, but will point out that these apparently independent fields of literature actually build on each other and are important components of the ‘Literature