초록 열기/닫기 버튼
In his seminal essay “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud defines the “uncanny” as “that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar.” Likewise, Gothic novels are filled with uncanny effects where perceived objects are unfamiliar yet strangely familiar at the same time. In his notorious Gothic novel The Monk. Matthew Gregory Lewis repeatedly evokes feelings of uncanny as the return of past repressions by blurring the demarcation between the familiar and the unfamiliar. The characters of The Monk are unable to see beneath the surface, and fear arises from the fact that the object one is seeing may not be its true identity. In this paper, I aim to demonstrate how uncanny effects as a Gothic trope are evoked as the revival of past repressions in The Monk through a close reading of the text and the theoretical lens of Freud’s uncanny. Through the external manifestations of the characters’ internal repressions and the blurring of the distinction between two identities, Lewis evokes fears in not only the characters but also the readers: fears that our past repressions will come back to haunt us.
