Topic: Frankenstein

Subtopic: The Element of the Uncanny

As mentioned on page 6 of Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture by Jerrold Hogle, the
uncanny forms a significant aspect of Gothic fiction. Our principal source of information about
the Gothic is Sigmund Freud’s 1919 Essay on the Uncanny, where he speaks detail about this
psychological experience from the perspective of psychoanalysis. If we are to locate the uncanny
in Frankenstein, the most potent section of the text which we need to look at is in Chapter 5,
when Victor roams around in the streets of Ingolstadt, after having brought the creature to life.
At this point, Victor is overcome by a deep fear—he anticipates that the creature he has just
brought to life is following him around. Mary Shelley puts in Victor’s lips a quote from The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

Like one that on a lonesome road,

Doth walk in fear and dread,
And, having once turned round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.

[Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner.”]

This is the strongest marker of the uncanny feeling in the entire novel. We will read these lines
vis-à-vis Freud’s Essay on the Uncanny, and then try to identify whether the novel Frankenstein
has any other instance of the uncanny in it.

Let us understand the context of the quotation from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. As you are
definitely aware, the mariner went on a voyage to the North Pole and their ship was stuck amidst
the icebergs. They were rescued by an albatross: the ice split subsequent to its arrival, and the
ship could sail out. But the mariner killed the albatross in a fit of caprice, and that invited a
multitude of retribution upon the unfortunate men, who were almost two hundred in number.
They ran out of drinking water and favourable wind; the sea seemed to rot and glisten with
obnoxious gases and repulsive creatures of the deep. Several ghost ships came their way, and
they caught sight of ghastly, spectral figures. Even the men dropped down dead—all except the
mariner, and were later revived, when they went about their duties on the ship while still in an
undead existence. The quoted words attempt to portray the Mariner’s state of mind when he
stared out on to sea after waking up in a trance, when he had heard two voices in his sleep. They
had mentioned this:

The spirit who bideth by himself

In the land of mist and snow,
He loved the bird that loved the man
Who shot him with his bow. (Part VI)

The Mariner seemed to have enraged a spirit of the icy realms of the Pole through his gruesome
act of murder. HE had unleashed his rage on the entire company. Even at an earlier point, we
find:
And some in dreams assurèd were
Of the Spirit that plagued us so;
Nine fathom deep he had followed us
From the land of mist and snow. (Part II)

It is at this point that we must turn to Freud’s essay. In the introductory section, Freud makes an
etymological study of the word ‘uncanny’, whose German equivalent is ‘unheimlich’. It is the
opposite of ‘heimlich’, which means ‘familiar’. However, through a detailed comparison of
meanings of equivalents from other European languages, Freud comes to the following
conclusion:
Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops towards an ambivalence, until it
finally coincides with its opposite unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other, a sub-
species of heimlich. (Page 4)
Apart from ‘familiar’, the word ‘heimlich’ has another meaning: “concealed or kept from
sight”. This is where it coincides with its opposite: ‘unheimlich’. In short:
 ‘Unheimlich’ is the name for everything that ought to have remained…hidden and secret,
and has become visible. (Page 4)

Further, Freud notes that:

…everything is uncanny that ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes
to light. (Page 4)

To round up the matter, this last observation would be contextual:

…the unheimlich is what was once heimlich, homelike, familiar; the prefix ‘un’ is the
token of repression. (Page 15)
First, we notice from these observations that the concept of the uncanny is very much grounded
in culture, and the way it evolves. What was once familiar, becomes alien and fearsome at a later
point in time. Freud remarks: “the uncanny is that class of the terrifying which leads back to
something known to us, once very familiar.” (Page 2) Secondly, the fact that the uncanny brings
back to memory something which was long forgotten establishes a strong link between itself and
the entire genre of Gothic fiction. I had mentioned in the introductory lectures Hogle’s
observation that Gothic fiction normally unfolds in a secret, unconventional space like a
laboratory, a subterranean crypt, a palace, a graveyard and so on—

Within this space, or a combination of such spaces, are hidden some secrets from the past
(sometimes the recent past) that haunt the characters psychologically, physically or
otherwise at the main time of the story. (Page 2)

Therefore, a long-standing secret is bursting to emerge in light. Thirdly, this aspect of the
uncanny also links it to the definition of the monster, which comes from the Latin verb
‘monstrum’ which means to ‘remind, foretell, warn’ and so on. Fourthly, the concepts of primal
repression and taboo are bound to come into play with connection to the uncanny. In the case of
a taboo, something is considered so sacred that it is banished from the realm of the acceptable,
and later, it takes up fearful or gruesome connotations. In case of primal repression, some
thoughts are entertained in the infantile phase, which are forcefully driven away from the
conscious mind, but they thrive in the Id, only to resurface at times to irk us in many forms—the
uncanny being just one of them.
How, then, do we apply the Freudian take on the uncanny to the poem by Coleridge, and then to
the novel by Mary Shelley? In the immediate context of the Mariner, the misfortunes of the
Mariner and his shipmates reveal the presence of a spirit of the icy Poles who has been highly
offended by the slaughter of the blameless albatross. His rage has set afoot an array of
supernatural incidents—these secrets of nature would have remained hidden had the albatross not
been slain. To that effect, this is ‘unheimlich’.
But those six lines from Ancient Mariner are much more impactful than to be a simple reference
to an enraged spirit who wishes to bring retribution on an unscrupulous man. Can we not regard
this ‘frightful fiend’, who is pursuing the lonesome traveler on a deserted road, as a
manifestation of his own sense of guilt? The Mariner may simply have been scared by the
magnitude of his sin—therefore, he may simply be afraid of his past self which had not repented,
and was capable of monstrous deeds. In that context, the question of the double becomes very
important to be considered in lieu of Frankenstein, and thence, we shall move on to those
sections of Freud’s essay where he situates the uncanny in death, resurrection and artificially
animated beings.
Freud uses the term ‘doppelganger’ in German for ‘double’. About the double, he has to say the
following:

For the ‘double’ was originally an insurance against destruction to the ego, an “energetic
denial to the power of death”, as Rank says; and probably the immortal soul was the
first double of the body. This invention of doubling as a preservation against extinction
has its counterpart in the language of dreams…Such ideas, however, have sprung from
the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism which holds sway in the
mind of a child as in that of primitive man; and when this stage has been left behind, the
double takes on a different aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, he
becomes the ghastly harbinger of death. (Page 9)
At this point, we need to remind ourselves that Victor was indeed inclined upon banishing death
and disease from the human frame. He was essentially struck by the death of his mother and
was intent upon making a stand against the ruthlessness of fate which has separated every human
being from their loved ones. Therefore, he intended to attempt “the creation of a being like
myself”—this is consummate proof of the double angle. While the double needs to similar
appearance, it was not the case here, and so, the demon becomes more of Victor’s other than a
double. However, the idea of creating the being is essentially entrenched in that desire for
transcending death as Freud explains—to try and prolong existence after death, and better still, to
banish death altogether. However, the double soon ‘becomes the ghastly harbinger of death’
once the primary fascination with it is over. Freud further observes:

The idea of the ‘double’ does not necessarily disappear with the passing of the primary
narcissism, for it can receive fresh meaning from the later stages of development of the
ego. A special faculty is formed there, able to oppose the rest of the ego, with the
function of observing and criticizing the self and exercising a censorship within the mind,
and this we become aware of as our ‘conscience’. (Page 10)

It is strongly possible that Victor had suffered from the pangs of conscience once he had brought
the creature to life. In Chapter 6, we see that Victor “had conceived a violent antipathy event o
the name of natural philosophy”. In Chapter 9, Victor ‘wanders like an evil spirit’—however,
Justine and William were both dead by that time, and he was blaming himself for these deaths.
What is this other than remorse? And from whence could it have proceeded if not from a guilty
conscience? Here we see the double angle strengthened.
Why did Victor feel the desire to “create a being like himself”? Our first surmise is that since he
was playing God, and God had created His best creation, human beings, in His own image. Let
us see what Peter Conrad has got to say about this in Creation: Artists, Gods, Origins:

In 1817, Coleridge added an extra term to the lexicon. The word he made up was
‘esemplastic’, and—as he said when using it in Biographia Literaria—it purported to
explain the ‘nature and genesis of imagination’, which is a ‘plastic power’. It served as a
surreptitious synonym for God because for Coleridge, the imaginative faculty represented
‘in the finite mind…the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’. In Exodus, Moses
asks the voice in the burning bush its name. It replies “I AM THAT I AM”. God simply
 exists and is not required to give further particulars. Coleridge, even though he so often
used aliases or pseudonyms or the pretence of anonymity, endowed the poet with the
same power of self-declaration. The esemplastic activity meant a moulding together,
an act of unification. It was also the replica of the original creation: a Latin hymn
addresses ‘Plasmator Deus’, God the maker of man.

Don’t we see in this ‘moulding together’ a shadow of Victor’s creation of the being from dead
body parts sewn together? Also, according to Coleridge, every poetic act of creation echoes the
supreme act of creation—that of man by God. Victor’s creation too ultimately harks back to that
primordial act of creation. But I am sure that Freud would argue that this focus on God as
exclusively the maker of man (a being in His own image) is a human wish-projection, just as
Feuerbach contended that the very idea of God is human wish-projection. If God is omnipresent
and immortal, He does not need to try and prolong his existence in the form of a being that looks
like Him. That is exclusively a human idea. In the film Lucy, it is argued that the basic purpose
of every cell—the most basic unit of life, is to pass on the information it carries to a younger cell.
Therefore, when the protagonist Lucy wonders what to do with the exceptional knowledge she
has obtained by inadvertently consuming the drug CPH4, the character played by Morgan
Freeman simply advises her to ‘pass it on’. Therefore, we may conclude that God creating man
in His own image, and thus the idea of the importance of the human race, may be seen as an echo
of that innate human desire to prolong life beyond death through doubles—a kind of animism.
Regarding the uncanny, Freud further writes in his essay:

Jentsch has taken as a very good instance “doubts whether an apparently animate being is
really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact inanimate.”
(Page 5)
Freud is getting at the idea of automatons here; according to him, beings which have been
animated in an artificial manner also evoke a feeling of uncanny in the mind, for this is an
intellectual experience:
 …particularly favourable condition for awakening uncanny sensations is created when
there is an intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not, and when an
inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one. (Page 8)
This reminds us of the alchemists’ involvement with the creation of the elixir of immortality and
the raising of spirits and creating golems. The modern golem, created by the ‘modern
Prometheus’ is undoubtedly a pastiche of body parts salvaged from corpses. The ghastly
reminder is that these parts once belonged to a living being, but now, they were simply
participating in a semblance of life. Therefore, their potential for creating the uncanny is
undoubtedly strong.
A third manifestation of the uncanny according to Freud is the repeated appearance of a person
or a number in one’s life. We find no such overt instance in the novel under discussion, if one
does not consider the occurrence of thunderstorms. In the initial portion of the novel, we find
three occurrences, each one creating realizations in Victor’s mind. The first one was when he
was a teenager—a bolt of lightning reduces a mighty oak to cinders and this is also the moment
when he is introduced to the principles of current electricity. Secondly, he was crossing Lake
Geneva in the boat, and he saw lightning playing on all the surrounding peaks. It is during one of
the flashes that he catches sight of a hideous creature, and the idea enters his head that the
monster may have been responsible for the death of William. Thirdly, he is ascending the peak of
Montavert through a tempest. It is then that he reflects on the ultimate futility of all human
endeavour, and within moments, the monster confronts him and regales him with a detailed
account of his wanderings. Storms, especially thunderstorms seem to bring epiphanies to Victor.
Thus we have examined the nature of the uncanny, and related it to the novel in terms of the
double, death, re-animation, artificial animation and repetition of numbers. We have linked these
aspects to the genre of Gothic fiction, the definition of the monster and also the nature of the
alchemical pursuit. We have also considered that the human conscience may be a manifestation
of the human double, and the creation of man in God’s own image a simple human wish-
projection.