The Uncanny Thesis

To complete my dissertation, I decided to continue with a story I began in my Fiction for Young Readers course. I originally submitted the piece for a final assessment this past spring, however, the original piece has gone through some major changes. I intended for the story to be completed in the amount of words required, but as I began rewriting I realized that it would take more than that for it to be finished and ended up with only an excerpt. After several of my own revisions and one thorough revision with the help of my supervisor, I was able to come up with a final product that I feel shows my growth as a writer from the beginning of this program up until now. I know I have much more to learn as a writer, but this piece has become something

Unheimlich is the opposite of the term heimlich, and according to Freud “we are tempted to conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar. Naturally not everything that is new and unfamiliar is frightening, however; the relation is not capable of inversion. … Something has to be added to what is novel and unfamiliar in order to make it uncanny. (Freud, 220-221).” This is the case in the three creative texts I decided to explore, as well as, my own work of fiction for young adults. In all three texts; The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi (1883), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865), Cuckoo Song by Frances Hardinge (2014), and my own work, Pinelopi, anthropomorphism plays a huge role. Anthropomorphism, according to the Cambridge Dictionary, is defined as “the showing or treating of animals, gods, and objects as if they are human in appearance, character, or behaviour.” The concept in itself is uncanny. In the story by Collodi, the character Geppetto is given an unfamiliar piece of wood that has somehow gained the ability to talk, he eventually turns the wood into a marionette and

I believe that this juxtaposes magical realism with the uncanny because it shows their willingness to accept something that cannot be explained. Magical realism can be characterized by two conflicting perspectives, one based on a so-called rational view of reality and the other on the acceptance of the supernatural as prosaic reality. Magical realism differs from pure fantasy primarily because it is set in a normal, modern world with authentic descriptions of humans and society (Moore). One important characteristic of magical realism is that it merges different realms which means that in order to develop magical realism in stories, adding uncanny elements can be beneficial (Faris, 7). While, my own work does not fully immerse my character into a different realm, much like Collodi’s story, which includes a witch with an unknown origin that merges her unknown world with my otherwise mundane one through magic. My main character, Pinelopi, has a hard time coming to terms with the fact that a witch exists, even though she gets the information from a talking doll that she now sees as a part of her everyday life. One could argue that the Toymaker’s home that Pinelopi and Mona travel to could be considered a different realm all of its own due to how out of place it is amongst the “tall buildings and what appeared to be newly-built