In the Sandman, the uncunniness of the tale could be perceived in two directions--the first being that of intellectual uncerainty and the other is that o f psychoanalytical experience and namely the ideas of Freud. In order to de scribe the uncanny experience in Hoffmann's The Sandman and Shelley's Frankenstein it is idispensible, however, to explain and define beforehand what is the connotation of Unheimlich. In my further analysis of the uncanny, I relate the two works and stress on the obsession of the two characters which explains the uncanniness in them. Moreover, I focus on the surrounding environment in the face of the society because it is pertinent to the discussion of the uncunniness. The unconsciousness is also palying a major role in the description of the uncanny. Thus we attribute the uncanny to the collapsing psychic boundaries of conscious and unconscious, self and other, living and dead, real and unreal. These rec urrent themes, which trigger our most primitive desires and fears are the very hallmarks of Shelley's and Hoffmann's fiction. Before continuing with the analyasis of this topic, I would like to clarify and define the meaning of t he word "uncanny" in the way I understand it. This word come s from the German Unheimlich which means "unhomely", unfamiliar, uncomfortable, uneasy, and at the same time gloomy, ghastly, deamonic and gruesome. According to Freud, this word justifies the need of a special conce ptual term, which is to express certain things that lie in t he field of what is frightening but at the same time leads back to what is known of old and familiar. Freud, however, argues that the "uncanny" is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar. . When we read the tale of Hoffmann, we are undoubtufully left in utter uncer tainty of whether what is happening to Nathaniel is real or a fruit of his deranged subconsciousness. Thus, the uncanny is entangled in the ambivalence of the tale . Moreover, we could clearly notice that Hoffmann is puropesly creating such uncanny effects as to leave the reader in uncertainty. For instance, when Hoffmann enters the "personage" of Olympia, he does not mention whether she is a human being or a doll and in such a way the reader is not immediately acquainted with the truth and his attention is thus not directly focused on this uncertainty . It is noteworthy that this way of constructing the tale creates quite an unparalleled emotional effect. Freud, however, argues that at the end of the tale we come to know the truth, that is Coppola is, in fact, Coppelius and therefore the Sandman. He argues t hat the theme of Olympia and the succession of the events in the story could not be the only underlying factors in evoking this extraordinary atmosphere of uncunniness. For Freud, the reason could be discerned in Nathaniel's fear of losing his eyes * an obsessive fear haunting him from his very childhood. This anxiety about his eyes is according to Freud enough a substitute for the dread o f being castrated. Freud proves his thesis by replacing the Sandman by the dreaded father at whose hands castration is expected. According to him, this image of the father has an inimate connection to Nathaniel's anxiety about his eyes. It seperates Nathaniel from Clara and from his best friend--her brother; it destroys Olympia--the second object of his love , and drives him into suicide when he has returned to the happiness of normal life with Clara. In Shelley's Frankenstein we see the same symptoms in the character of Frankenstein. His unforunate creation deprives him of his little brother, his beloved Elizabeth, and in fact brings ruin to his whole family. Like Nathaniel, he is incapable of loving a woman. The reason for this impotence in Nathanial could be well attributed to his castration complex, as Freud contemplates, "[Olympia] could be nothing else than a materialization of Nathaniel's feminine attitude towards his father in his infancy" . Similarly,
the reason for Frankenstein's inability to love Elizabeth is hidden in his fear of incestuously loving what he assumed throughout his life to be his cousin/sister. His unconscious incestious repressed desire is, in fact, that of loving his mother, as revealed from his dream, "I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the loom of health, walking in the streets of Inglostadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms" . In Frankenstein, the uncunny is frightening because it marks the return of repressed psychic material that confronts narcissistic fantasies of immortality through self-duplication with a double that is a ghostly "harbinger of death" . Similarly, the Sandman story arouses uncunny fears of t he idea of a "living doll", the idea that we will not be able to distinguish wheter an object is alive or not. Frankenstein falls into a complete oblivion due to his obsession of reanimaing dead matter . He does not notice the change of seasons * something he used to observe with utmost delight. Although he realizes the mistake and consequences of this horrifying acts, he does not do anything to correct them, not even after the deaths of his most dear beings, but again falls into the abyss of inhuman obsession expressed in his maniac and ineffectual pursuit of his creature. In the case of Nathaniel, we discern the same type of detr imental obsession although, due to the shortness of The Sandman and its purposeful mysticism, we do not have enough information to judge Nathanial's actions. The result, nevertheless, is strikingly similar. Nathanial, incapable of recovering from his first obsession about the Sandman is only to fall into another e xtremity * his love towards the lifeless Olympia. How ironic are his own words, "O you glorious profound nature ... only you, you alone, understand me completely" In his actions, Frankenstein behaves obsessively, frightfully, uncanny: he acts so in creat ing the monster and at the end as well, when he is pursuing his own creation, "obsolutelly" confident that only its revengeful death would provide a solution. It should be noted that during t he rest of the time, Frankenstein is rather inactive and passive, always providing a moral exc use for that. He does not realize the deceitful nature of his behavior when he undergoes one his regular spasms of desire to return to the virtues of domesticity, "the amaibleness of domestic affection". Nathaniel, as well, exhibits the futileness of his passive response to his condition when he dec eivingly thinks that a return to a normal, domestic life will efface all his nightmares as revealed from his letter before returning home, "I shall be with you in a fortnight ... the ill mood which (I confess it) threatened to overcome me ... will then be thrown away." It is the pursuit of the uncanny, the search for more freedom and fulfillment that motivates Nathaniel and Frankenstein in their departure from the world of banalness and domestification. Instead of becoming passive citizens in a dull bourgeois society they act according to their unconscious drives for finding an answer to the uncanny secrets o f their nature and identity. In doing so t hey become transcibers of their unconscious desires but that automatically makes them str angers, outlaws to their society because they transgress rules and norms of the community in which they are living. Indeed, as their conscious minds are incapapble of being reaffirmed, the conflict between unconscious wishes and the values of community is becoming prevalent. This constant inability to resolve this conflict or, in other words, the failure to curb the wishes of the unconscious, which turns to be ruinous for both Shelley's Frankenstein and Hoffman's Nathaniel. The uncanniness of the two charactrers starts from
their childhood and continues to their death.The implicit moral of both stories is the that we must live in a comparative moderation of our desires if we want sanity. In fact, we need to consciously control the disturbing effects of the unconscious. In search of this difficult balance one inevitably comes upon the the intricacy and uncunniness of human nature. If we want to see the reasons for this uncunniness, we have to unvail the truth that is conce aled in the very depths of the unconsciousness which leads us to an inevitable complication associated with the difficulty of dealing with it. It is not surprising that das Unheimliche is so ambiguous in meaning, because it is a connotation to something we do not understand and would probably be never able to really understand. In conclusion, I would say that the power of literature is connoted exactly in this unparalleled symbolic order of language that can never produce or pin down a definite meaning but nevertheless passes on "the desire and curse of meaning" . It is what the transcendant signification of the text that leaves the reader always anticipating and curious and at the same time delighted from the pleasure this play of the authors brings to her/him. On the other hand there is always this uncanny component of meaning that cannot be clarified or rationalized but nevertheless is an intrinsic part to our reading experience.
