Abstract

Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay “The Uncanny” deals with strange occurrences and events which is beyond the realm of what we understand as familiar or known. Literature has often transgressed the known universe and has created places which are very different from the one in which we live. Using Freud’s theory, I would like to critically examine the two novels, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The novels trace the lives of upper-class aristocratic men who deviate from their normal existence as they discover ways to unleash their desperately evil nature without facing any consequences. But their actions ultimately catch up to them, bringing them down. Uncanny plays out in these novels in the way these men change, their actions becoming foreign to their close friends and even to themselves and them losing a part or whole of their identity to their destructive selves which they are unable to tame or control until that finally takes over. What also happens in the course of the novels is the blurring of the binaries between good and evil until they are merged into one person. A human being can never be a complete saint or be completely evil. It is always a mixture of both, and as a person matures, they learn to distinguish between these two traits, and that is what creates a functioning society. But a person might not always choose to listen, or sometimes they are compelled to do the wrong. In my paper, I would explore the split of a person between their good and evil selves, how they are affected by their transformation into a psychological double which is the evil self and yet unable to resist it.