ABSTRACT
We commonly perceive the “stranger” as someone from elsewhere (OED, 1.a.) or as someone “else.” The distinction arises from the domestic social structure wherein the stranger circulates. This act of identification combines the appropriation and segregation of otherness, the hosting and holding hostage of otherness. It implies the psychological process of a “disowning projection” (English and English 1958, 3), that is, a “projection onto the venerated or despised other of human possibilities not yet developed or rejected for the sake of something else by the defining group” (Fiedler 1973, 44). Strangeness thus understood broadly includes the “foreigner” whose status of alterity also depends upon the dichotomy of the insider/outsider. “Strangeness” and “foreignness” may be interchangeably used when denoting a person who originates from (or owes allegiance to) a country that is not his country of residence. However, it is interesting to note that “the word foreigners is not at all common in the sixteenth century; strangers is the normal expression. Indeed the first three examples of the former word in OED (that is, up to 1637) are all qualified by the latter word, as if to provide a clue to the meaning” (Hunter 1964, 412 n.). Adding to this linguistic footnote, Hoenselaars contends that “in The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London [Robert] Wilson is the first author before 1637 to use the concept of ‘foreigner’ (‘Foriners,’ line 54) without simultaneously qualifying the term by referring to strangeness” (1992, 253–54 n.). This piece of evidence, dating back to the 1580s, shows how the word “foreigner” seems ready to branch off from the umbrella term “stranger,” perhaps because both words are considered to be synonymous and of equal strength; perhaps because their recognized difference in meaning signals an increasingly vexed conflation. A case in point is Sir Thomas More (1592–93), where we are made aware of the original ety-mologically grounded meanings of “stranger,” “foreign,” and “alien.” Indeed, “the terms ‘stranger’ or ‘aliens’ denoted those from overseas, whereas ‘foreigners’ meant those who were not free of the City; the latter were not permitted to trade within the City boundaries although they did so extensively in suburbs like Southwark” (Hill 2005, 12–13). At the very least, these linguistic distinctions adumbrate the complex relationships that the notions of foreignness and strangeness entertain with the English domestic landscape.
