ABSTRACT
The domestic version of absolute terror, the uncanny, is a central motif in Edgar Allan Poe’s work. Like Hans Christian Andersen and E. T. A. Hoffman’s dark romantic Künstlermärchen, Poe creates a sense of frightful dread by contrasting his protagonists’ apparently secure home with the invasion of something alien, often in the symbolic form of an animal. As discussed by Sigmund Freud in his essay "The Uncanny" (1919), the invasion of something strange or unfamiliar into domestic space gives rise to anxiety and terror, which transform the perception of home (Heim) into the direct opposite (das Unheimliche, i.e. the uncanny). Freud argues that on a psychological level this invasion produces estrangement, a sense of loss of self, and claustrophobia. The anxiety of space, in other words, produces estrangement on several levels. This paper will examine domestic space in relation to the uncanny by comparing and contrasting two short stories by Poe, “The Black Cat” (1843) and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), which both feature animals as the agents of evil that lead to brutal murder in domestic spaces. Furthermore, the murder victims in both stories are women whose mutilated bodies are disposed of within the walls of their own homes, thus exposing the complicity between the symbolic meaning of home as ambiguously feminized, intimate space and the perverse violence embedded in its social parameters.
Keywords: Poe, Uncanny, Animal, Home, Estrangement.