ABSTRACT
The intense fear provoked by the newly awakened Catholic minority, which in the eyes of many started to aspire to the status of majority, as well as by dangerous Catholicizing tendencies within the Anglican fold, brings to mind the category of "unheimlich" introduced by Freud in his famous essay on "The Uncanny". This chapter discusses the disruptive influence of Catholicism on the Protestant present. Victorian Protestant novelists often warned in their texts against the dangers of the imminent Catholic takeover of the power. The foreign looks of Roman Catholics, even the English-born ones, are often emphasized in Protestant novels. While English Catholics were marked as alien and uncanny, the Anglican religion was portrayed as an innate part of English national identity. One of the best-known images of the uncanny is that of the automaton, an inanimate machine passing as the living human being. The comparison between Catholicism and heathenism is of course an old trope.
