Freud’s
The Uncanny:
Here’s
one possibility.In his essay, “The
Uncanny,” Freud does something rare and talks directly about literature,
and dedicates himself to talking about weird and scary images in literature,
or what he calls “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something
long known, to us once very familiar.”He
argues that these scary images are weird because they remind us of something
we have tried to forget, and that “everything is uncanny that ought to
have remained hidden or secret, yet comes to light.”In
other words, an uncanny image is “a hidden, familiar thing that has undergone
repression and then emerged from it.”Things
that scare us are projections of ourselves.
Here
are some characteristics he refers to.See
how many of these appear in Alice in Wonderland, and also in the
sequel, Through the Looking Glass:
-intellectual
uncertainty – “one does no know where one is, as it were”
-doubt
about whether an apparently animate being is really alive, or conversely,
whether a lifeless object might not in fact be animate
-imagery
of wax figures, artificial dolls, robots
-imagery
of having your eyes torn out – “a morbid anxiety connected with the eyes
and with going blind”
-doubts
about whether it is “a succession of events which are to regarded in the
story as being real” or a “delirium”
-the
image of the “double” – “persons, therefore, who are to be considered identical
by reason of looking alike” – the “self confounded”
-reflections
in mirrors
-recurrence
of the same, endless repetition – “the idea of something fateful and unescapable”
– seeing the same number over and over – “repetition compulsion” – repetition
is often a way of working through trauma
-“that
sense of helplessness sometimes experienced in dreams” – finding yourself
back in the same place, running in circles
-a
dread of “the evil eye” – a projection of envy – that others are looking
at the thing you most covet
-a
feared “secret intention of harming someone”
-“omnipotence
of thoughts” – wish fulfillment – feeling like your wishes are immediately
coming true in the world around you
-anxiety
in relation to the return of the dead (“the insufficiency of our scientific
knowledge about it”) – “the old belief that the deceased becomes the enemy
of his survivor and wants to carry him off to share his life with him”
– fear the dead will come to get you
-the
fear of being buried alive while appearing to be dead
Well,
some don’t appear in these books, but I think you get the idea.I
think this spirit is in Alice, and so if the scary things Alice
sees are parts of her unconscious mind, what might they represent for her,
and for that matter, about childhood itself?