How might we think of The Haunting of Hill House as a response to Freud’s theory of the uncanny? How does she stage the idea of the “unheimlich,” and to what end?
The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
Link to text: https://www.fadedpage.com/books/20180856/html.php
This novel is about a group of ghost hunters who stay at the malevolent Hill House to gather research about the supernatural forces at work there. Read Freud first, and keep an eye out for all the ways in which the “family” is rendered uncanny in this novel.
Sigmund Freud
“The Uncanny” (1919).
One of the challenges of reading this famous essay is that Freud tends to bring a lot of his ideas about the uncanny back to theories that he already established in other writings. You will find that he refers here to potentially unfamiliar ideas like the “pleasure principle,” the “Oedipus complex,” the “death drive,” the “castration complex,” etc. Don’t worry too much when you encounter these, as we can still understand what he’s trying to accomplish here with a bit of very broad background.
Broadly speaking, Freud argues that human experience – our mental development and our social interactions – can be reduced to competing internal “drives,” or buried instincts that we often aren’t even aware of. This is the realm of the UNCONSCIOUS. Freud first developed his theory of the unconscious through his analysis of dreams, which he argued represent the fulfillment of unconscious wishes and desires, usually of a sexual nature (and a lot of what Freud theorized came back to sexual drives). And he’s always looking for ways that the repressed content of the unconscious – the stuff that we want to do, but we’re not even aware that we want to do it – bubbles to the surface. This is the work he continues here with the UNCANNY, which he theorizes as the “return of the repressed.” The uncanny is the return of familiar things in unfamiliar forms, something inanimate that appears animate, or something long forgotten returning to haunt us in new ways. Like a creepy doll.
