'gothic Is About Making The Familiar Strange' (jackson).

To say that an entire genre could be defined by one feature, the familiar becoming strange, would be to leave too much unsaid. Although it is my opinion that this is a prevalent aspect of the Gothic, I would like both to explore this idea and to contrast other themes that play important parts in defining what is Gothic literature, such as violence (specifically against women and children), death, or fear itself. In his essay 'The Uncanny', Freud explores what is unsettling in Gothic literature through particular investigation of E.T.A. Hoffmann's The Sandman, concluding for the most part that repetition and repressed childhood feelings (specifically Oedipal and the fear of castration), are the foremost themes.

Making the familiar strange can mean several things in terms of Gothic literature. It could mean taking what should be comforting and loving (namely, the home) and making it something estranged, violent, or opposite; it could mean taking what is shown to be innocent, vulnerable and sweet and making it evil. There is no fixed answer. For the most part in The Sandman, much of the Gothic element is the subversion of the home as a place of fear - fear of the sandman, or Coppelius or, I would like to suggest, Nathanael's father. Freud argues that 'Coppelius and [Nathanael's] father represent the two opposites into which the father-image is split' (Freud 1919: 384), one good one bad. I would argue that while Freud takes them as two people who each take on characteristics of the father, they may in fact be the same person - there is enough ambiguity in the text to suggest that Coppelius is simply a shade of his father's personality, and the sandman himself is a story to explain to a child how drink or madness can change a man. For example, Nathanael's father not having his own name, and Coppelius disappearing after the confrontation with Nathanael and only reappearing moments prior to his father's death, which itself left enough unanswered questions to have occurred at his own hand, when he was in his 'Coppelius' state. This would also relate to what David B. Morris says in his work 'Gothic Sublimity', that 'Gothic fiction creates a situation in which known impossibilities and self-evident falsehoods nonetheless can inspire terror' (Morris 1985:318). Although the reader is told that Coppelius and Nathanael's father are two different people, there is enough ambiguity in the way they interact, firstly with each other and secondly with Nathanael and the family, to throw confusion over the situation, which is what is arguably more striking, and more akin to Gothic literature.

In some instances perhaps it would be better to say that the more familiar something gets, the stranger it can feel. Freud talks extensively about repetition provoking a feeling of the uncanny in his essay on the subject. His examples include walking in an unfamiliar place, losing your way, and always ending up back in the same place (in his anecdote, this is the Red Light District), or a specific number coming up repeatedly.

'The uncanniness . is not just that [an] event is so new and strange but also because it is so old and familiar. (As Sigmund Freud defines the uncanny, it is "nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression")' (Hattenhauer 2003:64)

In The Sandman, the familiar childhood horror story comes back and haunts Nathanael's adult life. He sees it everywhere (Coppola), and is followed by his own fear of eye-mutilation - or castration, according to Freud (Coppola makes eyeglasses, Spalanzani throws Olympia's eyes at Nathanael, and the eyeglasses turn him back to madness even after he initially recovers, and lead him to attack Klara then kill himself).

However, 'making the familiar strange' is only one Gothic theme, and while it is certainly underlying in The Sandman, it is not the only aspect we could call 'Gothic' within the text. For example, much of what lies at the heart of Gothic comes from our preoccupations with death, and fear of the dead themselves. This is not exclusive to Gothic writers in the 18th and 19th centuries, either. Even to modern readers there is a continued fascination with death, dying, the spirits of the dead, and the bodies of the dead. Although death is not a major theme in Hoffmann's The Sandman, there are still arguably three deaths in The Sandman: Nathanael's father, Nathanael, and Olympia. A text is not Gothic if it does not contain death. However, the preoccupation in The Sandman is more to do with 'uncertainty whether a particular figure.is a human being or an automaton' (Jentsch, cited in Freud 1919: 378). This is what is so unnerving about Olympia, with whom Nathanael falls in love, and who turns out to be a doll.

Violence against children and women is also, in many Gothic texts, a prevalent theme (for example, Stoker's Dracula sees violence against women, Goethe's The Erl-King sees violence against children, and Shelley's Frankenstein contains both). These, and acts of violence that characters commit unto themselves, are the most common in Gothic literature, and there are instances of all of these in The Sandman. The basis of the story arises out of a child's fear of pain, violence and, according to Freud, castration. There are many interpretations of the role of Nathanael's father. There is merit to the argument that his father plays a different role in Freud's idea of the child's fear of castration. He talks about Oedipus, who blinds himself, as performing 'a mitigated form of. castration' (Freud 1919: 383), suggesting that the eyes are representative of the testes. During the confrontation with the sandman Coppelius, Nathanael, and his father, Nathanael's father plays a feminine role in beseeching Coppelius to spare his son's eyes - '"Master! Master!" he cried, "leave my Nathanael his eyes!"' (Hoffmann 1816: 142). Kittler and Lehman note here Nathanael, 'perceiving the mother to lack the phallus.begins to fear being similarly castrated by the father' (cited in Kuzniar 1989: 8). Additionally, although the women in this Gothic text are, uncharacteristically, not the focus of the story, they still experience violence at the hands of the men: Nathanael tries to 'hurl [Klara] from the tower' (Hoffmann 1816:166), and Olympia has her father and Coppola 'twisting and tugging her this way and that' (Hoffmann 1816:161).

I would argue, also, that the Gothic is not necessarily about simply making the familiar strange, but instead the strange, or frightening, becoming familiar. In the case of The Sandman, there is a fear (as mentioned by Freud and discussed above) of losing one's eyes. However, I would like to suggest that part of what is truly terrifying and inherently Gothic about this story is the sense of becoming what we fear. Alice A. Kuzniar suggests that 'Coppelius. is an imaginary phantom, whose identity Nathanael assumes at the end when he dies with Coppola's words.('pretty eyes'), on his lips' (Kuzniar 1989:8). It therefore becomes clear that, though Nathanael's fear of losing his eyes is what drives him through this story, what actually transpires is that he himself becomes the sandman, shown by him quoting Coppola in his fullest madness. The suggestion is that we as the readers, who are carried through Nathanael's journey with him, are fully at risk of becoming, in our fear, what we find most frightening or repulsive. The events of The Sandman are not alone in suggesting that this fear is one of the driving forces of Gothic; one could also consider the events of other Gothic novels such as M.G. Lewis's The Monk (Ambrosio's transformation from impeccable piety, to committing incest, rape, and murder, and finally selling his soul to Lucifer in the final pages), or Dracula, where the plot is driven by a need to crush the fearful entity that is Dracula himself, before he turns the protagonists into what they fear (vampires).

Nathanael's fear of becoming the sandman can be taken in conjunction with Freud's argument that Coppelius (the sandman) is a metaphorical representation of the bad father-figure, because of Melanie Klein's idea of 'projective identification'. Freud's argument rests around the 'ambivalence of the child's feeling' (Freud 1919: 384), or in other words, his projection of his confused feelings towards his father and Coppelius; Klein further argues that 'the person projecting feels `at one with` the object of the projection' (cited in Ogden 1979: 357). This implies that Nathanael is afraid of a part of himself, which he projects out onto the character of the sandman, in an attempt to, in T.H. Ogden's words, '[expel] a part of the self' (Ogden 1979: 358). Ogden also describes the difference between projection and projective identification - projection separates that part of oneself the projector sees elsewhere from the projector, whereas projective identification leaves a connection between the projector and what he has projected onto. In the end, Nathanael's madness and final words - '"nice-a eyes"' (Hoffmann 1816: 167) - would suggest that he has recognised that the sandman is the part of himself that he was afraid of as a child (what is sometimes called 'taking back the projection'). It is likely, due to the much closer relationship of Nathanael to his mother than to his father, he seeks a reason to justify wanting to kill him (in Oedipal fashion), by making his father the sandman. The sandman part of Nathanael himself manifests itself more subtly as he grows up - for example, if we take eyes to represent knowledge, when Nathanael asks Lothar to stop 'giving her lessons in logic' (Hoffmann 1816:147), he is committing a sandman-like act upon her, removing her authority to gain knowledge.

The conclusion to be drawn from this may then be that one of the important themes in Gothic literature is the ambiguous relationship between the familiar and the strange, rather than a specific one becoming the other. Having said this, I stand by my argument that few literary genres can be defined merely by a single feature. There is nothing inherently wrong with the statement 'Gothic is about making the familiar strange', however I would prefer to conclude that an underlying theme in Gothic is the ambiguity of the relationship between what is familiar and what is strange, and although the genre is often haunted by this idea, there are more typically Gothic, more prevalent themes that define Gothic literature as a genre.

Works cited: Hattenhauer, D. (2003) 'Shirley Jackson's American Gothic' State University of New York Press: 64 Kuzniar, A.A. (1989) ''Ears Looking at You: E. T. A. Hoffmann`s "The Sandman" and David Lynch`s "Blue Velvet" South Atlantic Review, 54, (2): 8. Morris, D.B. (1985) 'Gothic Sublimity', New Literary History, 16 (2): 318 Ogden, T.H. (1979) "On Projective Identification" International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 60:357-73

Main texts: Freud, S. (1919) 'The Uncanny' Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud trans. Strachey J. et al, 17, London Hogarth Press 1955 Hoffmann, E.T.A. (1816) 'The Sandman' The Selected Writings of E.T.A. Hoffmann ed. Leonard J. Kent, 1, Chicago and London