Revisiting Freud's Uncanny in The Oblong Box of Poe

The short stories of Edgar A. Poe elevate fear and tension to the highest level while exploring the dark side of humanity. The Oblong Box (1844) is one of Poe’s gothic stories. The story is about an unfortunate man who attempts to send his wife’s corpse in a pine box to her mother. The text evokes in the reader a sense of ambiguity between life and death as well as a feeling of fear. This fear is a state of uncanny that occurs when things that seem familiar, harmless, and normal become foreign and dangerous in the human consciousness, thus arousing fear. The primary source of the uncanny is the remembrance of unwanted events and feelings, creating a profound sense of unease in the individual. Freud, who developed theories examining human consciousness and neurotic situations, also considers alienation and uncertainty to be important factors in evaluating the stages at which the feeling of the uncanny emerges. Hence, reading the story in light of Freud’s theories not only prompts us to reconsider Poe’s style but also enables us to reevaluate the common aspects of universal human behavior through the influential use of death, mourning, and fear themes in Gothic literature. From this perspective, although the text appears to be a conventional Gothic story, it also possesses the characteristic of being a suitable narrative for evaluating the relationship between Gothic fiction and psychology. Therefore, this study aims to analyze The Oblong Box through the lens of Freud’s theory of the uncanny.