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Not at Home: Servants, Scholars, and the Uncanny

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Brian McCuskey
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Abstract

In “The Jolly Corner” (1908), Henry James locates the uncanny in the servants' quarters at the top of the house, where the genteel protagonist finally corners his ghostly double. James thus prompts us to reread Freud's “The Uncanny” (1919) with a pair of questions in mind. First, how does class identity bear on the uncanny; and, second, how in turn does the uncanny bear on class identity? Steering well clear of servants in his discussion, Freud apparently dodges the issue altogether; a closer look, however, reveals that he cannily represses the social value of the uncanny so as to hold it in reserve. James, on the other hand, documents how and why psychoanalysis converts bourgeois anxiety about servants into “the uncanny,” an abstraction that floats freely across the twentieth century from séance to academic circles, where it continues to function as a ghostlier demarcation of class. (BMcC)

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 121 , Issue 2 , March 2006 , pp. 421 - 436
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2006

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