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Uncanny, the From Freud’s translation of the German term das Unheimlich, the uncanny designates both a concept and a feeling and is primarily associated with a profound sense of unease about both ourselves and the world we inhabit. Precariously located in the liminal space of the in-between, it calls into question established norms and boundaries, especially those between the familiar and unfamiliar, imagination and reality, inside and outside (psychical and material realms) and self and other. As have so many others who have written on the uncanny, we must turn to the realm of literature in order to illustrate the disorienting effects of such destabilization. In chapter 16 of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), Lucy Snowe – having collapsed in the street – awakens in a house that is rendered strange precisely through its familiarity. Caught between the states of sleep and wakefulness, she surveys her surroundings and struggles to reconcile the presence of objects long familiar and intimately associated with her own childhood with the unfamiliar context of a strange house in a foreign country. Such objects appear as ghosts of a past life and a former self, effectively splitting her identity while blurring the boundary between the inner realm of her own psychical existence and the real world. What makes this episode specifically uncanny, as opposed to simply frightening, is, in part, related to its setting. Uncanny effects are most likely to be produced where they are least expected, within, for example, the confines of a comfortable home where one would normally expect to feel safe and secure. But, above all, the

uncanny effect of Lucy’s experience results from the conjoining of the familiar and the strange. To subtract either element would be to rob the scene of its uncanny quality. Moreover, as this example suggests, the uncanny is intimately bound up with the mode of representation. If the same events had occurred within a fairy tale or ghost story, the effect would not be uncanny. In order to be experienced as such, they must be situated within a narrative of ordinary material reality.