The Ambivalent Nature Of The Uncanny

Alice Neel and Egon Schiele were some of the most daring artists of their time. Neel was especially known for her uncaring attitude of what was “in” at the time, while Egon Schiele was similarly known to paint some of the most bold nude figures of his time. Both painted what they wanted, not a thought towards what was socially acceptable. They both focused on painting people around them, or in Neel’s case, random people on the street, and Schiele was often compared to Picasso in his obsession with self-portraits. Either way, while Alice Neel and Egon Schiele were from opposite sides of the planet, they shared a remarkably similar style of painting and rendering of the subjects in those paintings.

In the short allegory “The Birthmark”, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, a newly-wed couple becomes consumed by the existence of a small birthmark on the wife’s face. When the wife, Georgiana, allows her husband Aylmer, a scientist, to remove the birthmark, both realize that Georgiana will inevitably sacrifice her life for the sake of its removal. As the story progresses, so does the confliction of the newlyweds as they realize exactly what the birthmark symbolized to and for each other. Hawthorne’s hallmark use of symbolism also provides a ‘perfect’ glimpse into the mindset of two themes of psychological conflictions: perfectionism and codependency. Hawthorne seems to share this story as a possible moral of the hidden pathos we place upon the ones we love, and the invisible marks or standards we place upon ourselves for the ones we love.

Reading a narrative from a psychoanalytic perspective can prove to be a sometimes frustrating experience. Psychoanalysis often disregards the actual texts and verbal context of a piece of literature in favor of the Freudian and Lacanian ideas, which seek to find encrypted motifs in the depths of every creation in order to reveal the author’s unconscious mind. Nevertheless, the critiques of psychoanalytic interpretation of literature claim that such interpretations focus on the content of the text at the expense of the literary form and temporal dimension, which can reduce the literary plots to lifeless machinations. Furthermore, psychoanalytic interpretation of a text may tell us less about the author’s unconscious mind and more about the

When a person experiences chills or goose bumps as a reaction to something strange or unusual, they are being affected by a sense of uncanniness. The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud endeavored to explain this feeling of uncanniness in his essay entitled “The Uncanny”. Freud’s theory focuses around two different causes for this reaction. Freud attributes the feeling of uncanniness to repressed infantile complexes that have been revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs that have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed. The first point of his theory that Freud discusses in the essay is the repression of infantile complexes that cause an uncanny experience.

Sigmund Freud coined this term when trying to explain something strangely familiar yet unfamiliar. It speaks to seeing or experiencing new but also takes us back to our own psychological past or something within the material world. It is suddenly recognizing something that seems unfamiliar and in fact, has an identity

The main character of Get Out is an African American male named Chris Washington. From Chris’s perspective, we see the narrative unfold and many uncanny events occurring that he experiences throughout the film. Chris is visiting and meeting his white girlfriend, Rose Armitage’s parents for the first time. Rose’s parents are a neurosurgeon and hypnotherapist. Everyone attempts to make Chris feel welcome, after acknowledging the fact that Rose never told them he was African American. Get Out connects a castration anxiety to racism when Rose’s family meets Chris, not knowing that he is black.

In his early 19th century narrative The Sandman, E.T.A. Hoffmann attempts to express the possessiveness and obsessiveness of man that derives from appearance and sexuality. Hoffmann in particular utilizes Klara and Olympia to exemplify Nathaniel’s objectification of either of them and his sub-conscious ownership over both women. While Hoffmann degrades the standing of the women in the narrative, he subsequently draws on an obsession with outward appearance and beauty that is comparable to the Pygmalion myth. As Pygmalion attempts to have physical possession over the beauty of his sculpture, Hoffmann similarly paints Nathaniel as irrationally pursuing the possession or ownership of beauty through the female characters. Through the symbolic objectification of the female characters and the obsessive sexualized actions of Nathaniel, Hoffmann draws a parallel to the Pygmalion myth as beauty, grace, and sexuality become the apparent paramount measure of value and also reveals the pitfalls created by such obsessions.

Comparison of Primitivist imagery in Wilfredo Lam’s Untitled, 1953 and Matta’s Untitled (Flying People Eaters), 1942.

In addition to the modest downcast eyes, Lehmbruck exhibits modesty by displaying his subject to still be slightly covered. Instead of seeing a fully nude subject like in Aphrodite of Knidos, the viewer observes the subject in the act of undressing. In doing this, Lehmbruck applies the suspense of the moment before the body is fully revealed, adding to the drama of the piece. By employing traditional aspects displayed in pieces such as Aphrodite of Knidos, Lehmbruck presents the viewer with a familiar subject matter before confronting them with the unexpected, abstracted features of the subject’s

An Austrian painter named Egon Schiele redefines beauty during the expressionism movement. Born in June 12th, 1890 in Tuln an de Donau near Vienna, Schiele spends most of his life in Vienna and dies on October 31st, 1918. After recognition from one of his primary art schoolteachers, Schiele decided to take a formal training at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts where Gustav Klimpt had attended. He admired Klimpt’s work out of all artists and found a mentor-mentee relationship that had a great impact on Schiele’s development as a young artist. He underwent through a phase of work inspired by Klimpt then later found his own ways of creating art that forever changed how they viewed beauty throughout 1900 Vienna. At age of twenty, Schiele studied his own naked body in a series of self-portraits and discovered his own definition of body figures in painting. In his painting Self-Seer I, a nude double portrait of Schiele represents autoeroticism, which was not the norm in Vienna society. The background carries no decorations as it carries

Although he acted as protege to Gustav Klimt, a symbolist painter, he himself is characterized in a figurative and early expressionist style. Figurative by definition indicates a work created according to a real source, model or object. While almost all of Schiele's works are modelled after people, they are not entirely realistic; whether that be by definition of colour, line, form or space. Schiele's association with early Expressionism comes through his evident divergence of realism, seen through his starkly contrasted colour palette and distorted, emotional lines (Schmidt 1988). Besides the extremely risquee subject matter for a conservative pre World War I Austria, Schiele experimented with the angles of his pieces. There are a handful of his works featuring more than one model, but the relationship between the models is almost disconnected by a lack of linear perspective (Fischer 2004). In images such as Three Girls (1911) it is unclear whether three separate models are interacting with one another, or rather one model who was drawn three times in different positions and perspectives. Schiele is said to have drawn from atop a ladder to gain a "bird's eye view" per say of his subjects (Fischer 2004). Through this process he could easily gain a sense of the sometimes unnatural contortion of the bodies and adjust them accordingly. A more recognizable work to consider is that of Seated Woman with Bent Knee (1917). While

Sigmund Freud’s says that the uncanny “undoubtedly belongs to all that is terrible- to all that arouses dread and creeping horror, it is equally certain, too, that the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with whatever excites dread.”(Freud), he also says that what makes something specifically uncanny is that it is opposite of what is familiar. . Certain components of the short stories “The Lottery”, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, and “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”, highlight Freud’s definition of the uncanny. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Freud’s definition of the uncanny appears continuously throughout the story, especially when the woman believes that she is the figure lurking behind the wallpaper. Also, in the short story “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, Freud’s definition of the uncanny occurs within the mysterious plot and how the end revealed that the “winner” of the lottery had to be beaten to death with citizens of the city throwing stones at them. Lastly, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is connected to Freud’s definition of the uncanny since the story gives the reader a false sense of security, which makes the reader feel the horror and unfamiliarity that it brings

“For the concept of the monstrous feminine, as constructed within/by a patriarchal and phallocentric ideology, is related intimately to the problem of sexual differences and castration.” (Creed, 1993, p.2) Creed takes an interesting approach to Kristeva theory of abjection and Freud’s theory of castration and applies it to horror film. Taking Kristeva’s theory of the abject and the archaic mother, she constructs monstrous representations of the abject woman. The monstrous womb which is the representation of mans fear of woman’s maternal functions. “Fear of the archaic mother turns out to be essentially fear of her generative power. It is this power, a dreaded one, that patrilineal filiation has the burden of subduing.” (Kristeva, 1982, p.77) Freud argued that woman terrifies because she is castrated. “Castration fear plays on a collapse of gender boundaries” (Creed, 1993, p.54) She suggests, that Freud misread Han’s fear in the Little Hans and that Han’s viewed his mothers as the castrator not his father, that his mother’s lack of phallus is seen not as a castrated organ but that of a castrating organ. The mother-child border is entangled in the complex and multi-faceted image of the castrating mother. According to Freud, man fears that of the mother as castrated and as that of the cannibalistic all devouring mother. “Construction of a patriarchal ideology unable to deal with the threat of sexual differences as it is embodied in the images of the feminine as archaic mother and is seen as the castrated mother.” (Creed, 1993, p.22) Kristeva suggests that the notion of the castrated women is to ease mans fear of woman, who has the power to psychologically and physically castrate him. The archaic mother as the monstrous womb and the castrating mother can be used as a way of understanding the work of Mona Hatoum and AIne Phillips, both

The Human Condition, or La condition humaine was two paintings created by Rene Magritte, one in 1933 and the other in 1935. Both contain many formal similarities, yet the main point of the painting is that there is a painting of a landscape, yet that painting perfectly fits with, or completes, the landscape, as if it was perfectly drawn. In this analysis, I will be analyzing Magritte’s first painting, made in 1933. Magritte’s works often include objects hiding behind others, such as with Magritte’s The Son of Man, where a man in a bowler hat is hiding his face behind a floating apple. Magritte does this also in the Human Condition, yet to express a different meaning. Magritte is one of the major spearheads of the surrealist movement, a type of modernism, in which the fabric of realism and definitions are questions. One of Magritte’s more famous works, The Treachery of Images, Magritte shows a picture of what obviously is a pipe, yet, written in French beneath the image, states “This is not a pipe.” This was the dawn of a philosophy which would take the western art world by storm, called structuralism/post-structuralism. This is the philosophy where ideas/words and their meanings can be flexible depending on the viewer or the circumstance. This philosophy believes in the subconscious identification with images/colors that people have with art. In Magritte’s Treachery of the Images, his statement that “this is not a pipe” can be interpreted in different ways. One could say,

about the world around us, even just for a moment. This boldly claims a kind of autonomy for art, but one that is distinct from Theodor W. Adorno’s conception and more in-line with the affirmative notions the aesthetic impulse. As such, the kind of aesthetics that I am eluded to here is not just a state of contemplation. It is much more. As Cramerotti describes in his aforementioned essay, ‘it is rather the capacity of an art form to put our sensibility in motion, and convert what we feel about nature and the human race into a concrete (visual or bodily) experience’. It is useful to introduce Deleuze’s categories of the ‘actual’ and the ‘virtual’ and put them into motion. In his 1968 text ‘Difference and Repetition’, Deleuze explains that ‘the virtual is not opposed to the real; it possesses a full reality by itself. The process it undergoes is actualisation. It would be wrong to see only a verbal despite here: it is a question of existence itself’. Deleuze’s category of the ‘virtual’, the realm of affects and Paterson’s documents of darkness are united in their intangibility and their capacity to move the spectator beyond the familiar. Collectively, these forces harness the ability to transport the viewer to another time and place.