Abstract - Jhonelle Johnson

This paper examines the characters of Estella, from Dickens’s Great Expectations, and the Creature of Shelley’s Frankenstein to show that both characters are representations of the Uncanny, and that understanding the reactions of the other characters to them as such allows us to see them as reflections of the most important element of the human experience. This analysis draws on the definition of the Uncanny by Ernst Jentsch, Freud and Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori to argue that the Uncanny can be defined as the sensation of strangeness evoked by the juxtaposition of the strange and the familiar, which the two characters present through the inverse relationship of outward appearance and inner reality. In the case of the Frankenstein Creature, this is demonstrated by the contrast between the strangeness of the Creature’s distorted appearance and the familiarity of his intellect and emotions, which identify him to the reader as a sympathetic character. Dickens’s Estella demonstrates this relationship in the opposite way. While her appearance is that of the ideal woman, her inner reality is disturbing to the reader in its unfamiliarity; Estella’s inability to love or feel affection places her outside the pale of the recognizably human, especially considering this inability in the context of Victorian expectations of the ideal woman as a loving, nurturing ‘angel in the home.’ In response to Mori’s research, roboticist Karl MacDorman proposed using study participants’ reactions to the Uncanny to determine the basis for their perception of the flaws in the robots’ behavior which identified them as non-human, or made participants uncomfortable. In this way, the Uncanny could be used as a mirror to identify our own perceptions of the most important element of the human experience. This paper uses the idea of the Uncanny in such a way to identify what these characters lack which sets them apart as being somehow inhuman, and concludes that this defining characteristic can be found in their inability to form social connections and participate in the chain of human interaction in their respective novels.

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