The Modern Uncanny and Christina Stead's 'The Marionettist'

Abstract

This paper argues that Christina Stead's short story, 'The Marionettist,' a story from her 1934 collection, The Salzburg Tales, is felt as uncanny. This paper is in part a response to a 2003 paper by Michael Ackland, which traces the debt 'The Marionettist' owes to E.T.A. Hoffmann's writing. This is a debt which, Ackland argues, does not extend to producing uncanny effects. This paper takes a different view, arguing that not only is 'The Marionettist' felt as uncanny, but that it derives its uncanny effects from various sources. Some of these sources correspond to the different classes of uncanny identified by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay, 'The Uncanny.' These classes are the repressed, the surmounted, and the death drive. My reading of Stead's story emphasizes Freud's suggestion that uncanny effects are dependent on timeless, or archaic, processes. In making this point a distinction is made between the content of the processes (for example, what is repressed), and the processes themselves (the act of repressing), and it is argued that only the content is historically susceptible. The paper proposes that this complicates a tendency by recent writers on the uncanny to limit the uncanny to modernity.