ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the typecasting of the alligator and the crocodile as orally sadistic monsters is a projection of human desires and fears on to these non-human beings. These desires and fears of an oral nature are tied up with what Freud calls 'the uncanny'. For Freud, the alligator and the crocodile portrayed as orally sadistic monsters are vehicles and vectors of the uncanny. The monstrous uncanny is also associated with the colonial unconscious, whether it be with William Bartram's and John Muir's encounters with an alligator in a Florida swamp, or Val Plumwood's and Sigmund Freud's accounts of stories about crocodiles in a New Guinea swamp. William Bartram in the late eighteenth century travelled to a Florida swamp where he encountered 'the subtle, greedy alligator' about to devour 'the voracious trout', the eater eaten, the preyer predated by a larger predator: His enormous body swells.
