The Transcendental Uncanny

Abstract

Derangements of the familiar in the direction of the supernatural produce an uncanny reading effect. This procedure exactly describes the literary methods of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who specialised in writing a sort of domestic deviance that creates a space between the real and the fantastic into which some of the narrative slips. Or should we say, out of which something slips? Hawthorne’s writing is disquieting even when it appears to be at its most bland and unproblematic, as D. H. Lawrence recognised when he called Hawthorne ‘such a blue-eyed darling’. The crafty smile on the face of Wakefield as he bids his wife goodbye for what turns out to be an absence of twenty years rather than a single night — an exercise in voyeuristic sadism: he takes up lodgings nearby, and watches his wife’s ‘widow-hood’ from that close but almost infinite distance — might well be the smile of the author as he constructs ingenious displacements of everyday experience to frustrate and undermine the expectations of his readers. The effect is not always uncanny, it frequently is merely of an irritating ambiguity, but there are occasions when the complicated depletions of meaning result in estrangements and alternative perspectives beyond the reach of any of his peers.