Racial discourse in Frankenstein and The Island of Dr Moreau

6. Discuss the trope of the Undead or inhuman as a figure for narrativizing history.

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?—
Paradise Lost (x. 743-5)[1]

Are we not men?—
The Island of Dr Moreau[2]

Contained within the ideological discourses of the novels Frankenstein and The Island of Doctor Moreau is a question that was hotly debated by nineteenth-century British society – the question: ‘What is a man?’ This question did not have a simple answer as it was inextricably linked to formative ideas of class, nationalism and race during a century of aggressive imperialism, expanding boundaries and scientific change. I wish to take a New Historicist approach to these texts and examine the way in which European society sought to define itself in relation to the ‘other’ and the way that demonizing the Other into something inhuman was a way for them to narrativize history in order to present their actions as acceptable and to express the fears and doubts contained within society; specifically, the ‘other’ set into relationship with Imperial Britain was racial. Changing attitudes towards race and the way that this affected British interaction with other races, especially in their colonial enterprises, can be traced through public debates, scientific texts and through the literature consumed by the public where overtly xenophobic racial fears are displaced onto an imaginary field.[3]

The term ‘race’ entered the English language in the sixteenth century but its definition was vague, and its usage equally varied; for instance, it was used to describe people with a common occupation or wines that shared a characteristic flavour.[4] However, imperialistic expansion over the next two centuries meant that as words like ‘tribe’ and ‘nation’ emerged, understanding of the term ‘race’ began to change in relation to these. As new colonies were added the English people had a greater idea of themselves as being part of a nation and, more importantly, as being part of an empire where they were the ruling elite. Imperialism required the old medieval inspired hierarchies of societal order, chiefly based on civility and rank, to be re-examined in light of the new hierarchies of coloniser and colonised, of rulers and ruled, of masters and slaves, and the key to this new hierarchical concept was that of race.[5] By the end of the eighteenth century ‘black’ and ‘white’ had ceased to be adjectives and had become racially connotative nouns, as skin colour became a primary signifier of human difference.[6]

The nineteenth century emerged as an age of enlightened, rational thought that applied empirical science, natural history and analytical systems of classification not only to natural phenomenon but also to society and humanity. In 1795 Johann Friedrich Blumenbach argued that humanity was one species and that it consisted of five racial variants: Caucasian [European], Mongolian [including Inuit], Ethiopian [Africans], [Native] American, and the Malayan [including Pacific Islanders].[7] Furthermore, he argued that Caucasians were the most pure and superior race from which the other races had descended.[8] Blumenbach’s beliefs were not unquestioningly accepted, however, his ideas reflect a change in intellectual thinking and focus.[9] The prevailing belief that had taken hold in Europe was that race was defined by physical characteristics and these physical differences were intrinsically linked to intellectual, behavioural and moral qualities.[10]

These ideas of race were taken hold of in Britain to develop a racial myth of superior English origin; this was used to show that Anglo-Saxons were culturally dominant in order to reinforce social identity and sanction societal attitudes towards the ‘lower orders’.[11] Tim Barringer argues that this myth of superiority required ‘respectable society’ [the upper and middle-classes] to define itself through “a series of structured oppositions by which any group thought to adhere to different concepts of social and sexual behaviour, of work and time discipline, of value and religion, was accorded the status of an inferior and potentially hostile other.”[12] Shearer West adds that this meant that the English middle-class therefore considered themselves as more civilized, physically perfect and morally correct than not only non-European peoples but also the other Europeans, non-Protestant religions and the working class.[13] However, the most powerful trope of otherness was that of race, which in both a geographical [spatial] and cultural sense represented the peripheral of the cultural norm.[14]

Thus, as English identity became defined in relation to the ‘other’, represented racially, the concept of ‘otherness’ underpinned imperial and colonial discourse and white middle-class English identity was conflated to represent Europe and superior civilization.[15] Race was used as a justification for subjugation as arguments arose that ‘lesser races’ required the guiding hand of civilized Englishmen.[16] However, the nature of this ‘guidance’, and the responsibility of master to slave, was much disputed.[17] Some felt that slaves should be given a full secular and religious education but the plantation owners felt that knowledge was power and that withholding it was a highly symbolic action representative of the master-slave relationship.[18] It also seems likely that they felt a subtle fear of what might happen if the slaves became aware of their permanently subordinate position and exclusion from European society regardless of any attempts they made to bridge cultural gaps. H. L. Malchow argues that plantation owners also refused to baptise slaves because baptism, like education, would decrease cultural differences and because it would be difficult to justify enslaving fellow Christians.[19] As the abolitionist debate raged, heightening in intensity with the Barbados slave revolts in 1816, those in favour of slavery sought to use racial fears to demonize the slaves and thus define [civilized] humanity by the seemingly inhuman; they found the language of the Gothic ideally suited to evoke such racially motivated terror, revulsion and alienation.[20]

Gothic literature was used by the anti-abolitionists to frame their discourse on slavery by using the monstrous, inhuman, figures within these texts to represent a demonized slave population onto which European fears of repressed anger, leading to violent rebellion, were projected. As the abolition debate progressed there was a mutual influence between it and contemporary Gothic literature, leading to the gothicization of racial discourse and the racialization of Gothic fiction.[21] One of they key texts to be appropriated by the abolitionists into the forum of public debate was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, first published in 1818. For example, in 1823 George Canning spoke out on behalf of the London Committee of West India Merchants and Planters, effectively a political lobby group, against abolition. As part of his reasoning, he compared the slave population and their potential threat to society as being the same as that represented by Frankenstein’s monster.[22]

In considering racial discourse within Frankenstein it is difficult to look back and know if Mary Shelley intended an overt racial or imperial reading to her novel. However, growing up at home she was exposed, through her father’s writing and houseguests, to the hotly contested issue of slavery.[23] Also, her diary indicates that in 1814-5 she read several volumes relating to race and plantation politics, for instance by Bryan Edwards.[24] Debbie Lee argues that the events of 1816, the year Mary began writing Frankenstein, must have had a significant influence on her novel.[25] It was the year of the major slave revolt in Barbados, one of England’s most lucrative plantation islands, and a year of heated public debates over slave emancipation. It was also as Mary had just begun her novel, before the creature has been introduced, that Matthew Gregory Lewis stopped to visit the Shelleys and Byron on his way home from his Jamaican plantation. He fascinated them with stories of his trade and with his poem, The Isle of Devils, which centres on a rejected African, called ‘demon, fiend and monster’, who is a creature of painful ugliness, longing and sad rejection.[26] It seems likely that slavery was at least one of the ideas consciously, or unconsciously, embedded within the text, as it became a topic permeating society.

A close examination of Frankenstein, taking into account the social and political climate within which it was received, reveals why it was so easily seen by the public as narrativizing concerns about slavery and race relations. The novel has a Russian doll narrative structure with Robert Walton providing the authoritative voice for the frame of prologue and epilogue. The prologue establishes and confirms the English myth of civilized authority being white, male and Anglo-Saxon. Furthermore, Robert’s narrative also establishes the superiority of this demarcated authority by the condescension that he displays in regards to the crew of his ship as he bewails the lack of a “cultivated…capacious mind” as suitable companion.[27] Robert also fulfils an important role in the prologue by establishing that Victor Frankenstein remains within a privileged position despite his “expression of wildness, and even madness.”[28] We are introduced to Frankenstein by being told that he is not “a savage inhabitant of some undiscovered island, but an European,” furthermore, he possesses the virtues of ‘respectable society’ by being ‘noble’, ‘poignant’, ‘gentle’, ‘wise’, ‘cultivated’ and eloquent.[29]

Frankenstein, however, does not recognise his creature with similar welcoming joy, instead, upon the moment of the nascent creature opening his eye, he realizes that the new species he has formed is not beautiful, it is not of likeness to him, but instead it is repulsive.[30] The relationship of physiognomy determining characteristics and racial type had already been established.[31] Frankenstein’s reaction to the Creature is one based upon aesthetic appearances and of an instinctive recognition of ‘otherness’ and the threat that it poses. The Creature is visually coded to suggest the non-Europeans, united under the term ‘Negroid’, that were used as colonial British slaves.[32] He is larger and stronger than a European, he has ‘dull yellow eyes’, ‘lustrous black hair’ and “teeth of a pearly whiteness.”[33] His racial status and the way this encodes him as a separate, threatening, inhuman species is emphasised throughout the novel. Everyone that he meets is European and he is judged according to the racial stereotypes that he visibly connotes by his ‘otherness’.[34] Thus the rustic is unable to believe that the Creature is trying to save the drowning girl’s life, children run, women faint and little William believes that the Creature means to eat him because Negroids represented the threat of savage impulses, cannibalism and rape.[35]

The Creature further conforms to the xenophobic fears present in early nineteenth century racial discourse by showing a duality of nature that Negroids were believed to have as intrinsic to their character.[36] He is shown as affectionate and anxious to please, such as when he collects firewood for the De Lacey family, but he also shows a readiness to exact bloody vengeance when he is harmed or scorned, such as when he murders Elizabeth.[37] In addition, the image of him maniacally dancing around a house that he is burning down, or of him murdering a wife and a child, resonates with images, common in literature describing the West Indies plantations, of rebelling slaves.[38] In order to neutralize the threat that the Creature represents, and to emphasize his dependency upon his master for existence, it is a narrative necessity that he commits suicide after finding Frankenstein dead. The Creature thus accepts his inexorable separation from society, as a result of being the racial ‘other’ permanently excluded by it, due to oppositionally defining it, and his suicide, fittingly, also involves binary opposites, those of fire and ice.

However, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein doesn’t accept the apologists’ stance in the debate about slavery without critique. The title page includes a quote from Paradise Lost and it reminds readers that although the apologists claimed that the inferior races beseech the aid of their superiors,[39] that this wasn’t necessarily true, and having taken on the responsibility of ‘moulding men’ there is something horrible about the way that both Frankenstein, and the British plantation owners, admit a paternal feeling but deny paternal responsibility and affection.[40] Mary deliberately gives the Creature an intelligent and emotive voice in the novel. He is abandoned, cursed, and denied a heritage, a community and even a Christian name – instead he is called ‘wretch’, ‘daemon’, ‘animal’ and ‘abhorred monster’.[41] Yet, he still feels the strength of his connection to Frankenstein and speaks in feudal-vassalic terms that express his expectation of what this entitles him to; “I am thy creature, and I will be even mild and docile to my natural lord and king, if thou wilt also perform thy part, the which thou owest me.”[42]

Unfortunately for the Creature, both the world within and external to the narrative are reliant upon sight as humans’ most powerful mode of understanding, even though human vision is often ideologically blinkered. The only sympathy that the Creature receives is from blind old De Lacey and from Frankenstein when he metaphorically has his sight taken by the Creature and this sympathy is only temporary.[43] In Britain sympathy for the ‘racial other’ was also limited in its extent. Slavery was legally abolished in the British colonies in 1834 but the indentured labour that replaced it didn’t necessitate an improvement in conditions or a change in attitudes. Instead, ideas of racial difference hardened as the nineteenth century wore on.[44] The height of British imperial power was reached but as England’s geopolitical borders expanded, and contact with non-Europeans increased, fears about maintaining real and imagined borders, including race, multiplied.[45] At the same time, Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution arose and became widely disseminated. His ideas were often used to show that non-Europeans were near the bottom of the evolution chain, like animals, yet the idea that races were not separate species and that Anglo-Saxons had quite possibly arisen from Africans also created a heightened sense of unease because it suggested that the borders between races and between human and inhuman were possibly not as distinct as previously assumed.[46]

This fear of collapsing boundaries and of decreasing distinction between ‘self’ and ‘other’ can be seen in H. G. Well’s novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau, published in 1896. Moreau, an educated Englishman, can be regarded as representing the furthest expansion of British imperialism, as he takes for his domain an unknown and unnamed island. He also represents British colonialism, in light of new beliefs in scientific naturalism, taken to its extreme as he reserves the right to take any action to improve the ‘lesser orders’. Scientific naturalism argued that humans were ‘natural objects’ subject to the universal laws of nature and obliged to work on ‘race instinct’; by submitting to the idea of ‘survival of the fittest’ the moral onus, and the need to feel compassion or responsibility, was removed from the colonizer’s role.[47] Thus Moreau, as a superior European, need feel no remorse in subjecting lesser creatures to the “bath of burning pain” in order to “make a rational creature” like himself.[48]

The creatures upon which Moreau experiments reveal the way that non-Europeans had become conflated in European eyes to represent a threatening racial ‘other’. There are the “amazingly ugly” brown men wearing turbans and cloths like men of the East, there is the Ape Man with his “black Negroid face”, and there is “the black-faced man”, M’Ling.[49] He also represents a Negroid, one suggestive of Neanderthal man or ‘the missing [evolutionary] link’, with his “thick coarse hair”, “big white teeth” and his “facial part projected, forming something dimly suggestive of a muzzle.”[50] The racial discourse of the start of the nineteenth century is still present at its end as Prendick, and the captain of the Ipecacuanha, judges according to physical appearance and the creatures are cast in the role of “the diabolical” and of the old racial stereotypes of devils and cannibals.[51]

However, the Beast Folk can also be considered as representing an additional racial fear that had gained strength over the nineteenth century that of diluted racial purity leading to degeneration, due to miscegenation. The Beast Folk are the mulattoes of the plantations, considered half-breeds whose loyalties could not be trusted and whose mixed heritage made them unstable, unnatural and dangerous in public opinion.[52] They blur the implicit and fundamental distinction between the biological and political differences of master and slave, black and white.[53] The Beast Folk provide a grotesque parody of European society in their ‘upward striving’ to follow the teachings of the missionary who visited.[54] Yet even in their attempts to follow European societal and religious customs, the very structure of their recital of the Law, with each line of prohibition followed by the question of “Are we not men?”, sets up a disjunction that suggests that imitation is not enough to alter their inhuman nature and lesser [non-European] status.[55] As Prendick describes them these slaves ‘stumble in the shackles of humanity, live in a fear that never dies and are fretted by a law they could not understand.’[56] Ultimately, the Beast Folk will regress and give in to their natural racial instincts.

The Beast Folk follow stereotypical conventions of nineteenth century racial discourse. They rebel, they result in the death of their white master thanks to the black puma, they burn down the structures of colonial oppression and they then die or regress. However, Montgomery and Prendick reveal increasing fears that despite concepts of race becoming increasingly rigid that some members in ‘respectable society’ were overly friendly with the lesser races. There were fears that constant association with non-Europeans, as Britain’s borders expanded, could result in a blurring of racial boundaries due to taint or becoming accustomed to the ways of the ‘other’.[57] In Prendick’s case the Beast Folk aren’t even sure if he is an ‘other’ to them and he returns to London unsure if ‘taint’ is racial or, if we are all descended from one origin, whether we are not all tainted with something primitive and bestial.[58]

The racial ‘other’ conceptualised in nineteenth century British discourse was a way of asserting Anglo-Saxon ideas of superiority as the British empire grew, but perhaps it was also a way of displacing fears of the dark interiors that could lie within any human soul. Savage practices, unnatural desires and diabolical natures were projected onto a racialized, non-European, ‘other’ that could be viewed as standing in binary opposition to the civilized Briton thus establishing a unified, pure, moral, civilized European ‘self’. The ideology of race was used to stratify society based on beliefs about the innate inequality of certain human groups, thus justifying actions such as slavery.[59] English Gothic literature written during the nineteenth century is deeply encoded with allusions to the empire and to these concerns with race that permeated society. This literature provided an ideal way to narrativize racial discourse as it examined the boundaries between human and inhuman, between [good] men and [evil] devils and, like the racial discourse found within public debates, insisted upon the ability to read signs of depravity and the demonic in physiognomy, dress and mannerisms.[60] However, the Gothic also provides an ideal model for the conflation of opposites as boundaries between self/other, heimlich [familiar] and unheimlich [uncanny], collapse into each other so that racial coding and commentary becomes polysemic and as we see, for instance, “old Moreau, white and terrible…[with a] hand that was smeared red” we are forced to question just how fixedly distinct our conceptions are of what is civilized, of what should be valued and what makes a man.[61]

Works Cited

--, ‘Race’, Wikipedia [online encyclopedia], <>, accessed 9th October 2005.

Barringer, Tim, ‘Images of otherness and the visual production of difference: race and labour in illustrated texts, 1850-1865’, The Victorians and race, ed., Shearer West, Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996.

Brody, Jennifer Devere, ‘Deforming Island races’, Making Humans, ed., Judith Wilt, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2003.

Bryden, Inga, ‘Reinventing origins: the Victorian Arthur and racial myth’, The Victorians and race, ed., Shearer West, Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996.

Christensen, Timothy, ‘The “Bestial Mark” of race in The Island of Dr Moreau,’ Criticism, v.46, no.4, 2004, pp. 575-595.

Elbarbary, Samir, ‘Heart of Darkness and late-Victorian fascination with the primitive and the double,’ Twentieth Century Literature, v.39, no.1, Spring 1993, pp. 113-128.

Ellis, Markman, The history of Gothic fiction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd, 2000.

Freud, Sigmund, ‘The Uncanny’, The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 14, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985, pp. 339-76.

Hannaford, Ivan, Race: the history of an idea in the West, Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Lee, Debbie, Slavery and the Romantic imagination, Philadelphia: University of Pennyslvania Press, 2002.

Lorimer, Douglas A., ‘Race, science and culture: historical continuities and discontinuities, 1850-1914, The Victorians and race, ed., Shearer West, Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996.

Malchow, H. L., Gothic images of race in nineteenth-century Britain, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Malchow, H. L., ‘The half-breed as Gothic unnatural’, The Victorians and race, ed., Shearer West, Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996

Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism, London: Vintage, 1994.

Shelley, Mary, ‘Frankenstein’, Making Humans, ed., Judith Wilt, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2003.

Smedley, Audrey, "Race, Concept of", The Oxford Companion to United States History, ed., Paul S. Boyer, Oxford University Press, 2001. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Auckland University, , accessed 9 October 2005 .

Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes, ‘Introduction: the Enlightenment Gothic and Postcolonialism’, Empire and the Gothic: the politics of genre, ed., Andrew Smith and William Hughes, New York: Palgrave MacMillan Ltd, 2003.

Wells, H.G., ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’, Making Humans, ed., Judith Wilt, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2003.

West, Shearer, ‘Introduction’, The Victorians and race, ed., Shearer West, Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996.

Wheeler, Roxann, The complexion of race: categories of difference in eighteenth-century British culture, Philadelphia: Philadelphia University Press, 2000.


[1] Mary Shelley, ‘Frankenstein’, Making Humans, ed., Judith Wilt, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2003, p. 19
[2] H.G. Wells, ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’, Making Humans, ed., Judith Wilt, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2003, p. 213.
[3] H. L. Malchow, Gothic images of race in nineteenth-century Britain, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996, p. 38.
[4] --, ‘Race’, Wikipedia [online encyclopedia], <>, accessed 9th October 2005.
[5] Roxann Wheeler, The complexion of race: categories of difference in eighteenth-century British culture, Philadelphia: Philadelphia University Press, 2000, p. 7.
[6] Ibid. p. 2, 98.
[7] Ivan Hannaford, Race: the history of an idea in the West, Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996, pp. 207-8.
[8] Ibid. p. 208.
[9] Ibid. p. 213.
[10] M. Banton, The idea of race, Boulder: Westview Press, 1977, referenced by Wikipedia, loc. cit.
[11] Inga Bryden, ‘Reinventing origins: the Victorian Arthur and racial myth’, The Victorians and race, ed., Shearer West, Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996, p. 141.
[12], p. 34.
[13] Shearer West, ‘Introduction’, The Victorians and race, ed., Shearer West, Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996, pp. 8-9.
[14] Barringer, pp. 34, 37.
[15] Samir Elbarbary, ‘Heart of Darkness and late-Victorian fascination with the primitive and the double,’ Twentieth Century Literature, v.39, no.1, Spring 1993, p. 113.
[16] Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, London: Vintage, 1994, p. 8.
[17] Malchow, Gothic images of race in nineteenth-century Britain, p. 27.
[18] Ibid. p. 28-9.
[19] Ibid. loc.cit.
[20] Andrew Smith and William Hughes, ‘Introduction: the Enlightenment Gothic and Postcolonialism’, Empire and the Gothic: the politics of genre, ed., Andrew Smith and William Hughes, New York: Palgrave MacMillan Ltd, 2003, p. 1.
H. L. Malchow, ‘The half-breed as Gothic unnatural’, The Victorians and race, ed., Shearer West, Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996, p. 102.
[21] Malchow, The Victorians and race, p. 102.
[22] Debbie Lee, Slavery and the Romantic imagination, Philadelphia: University of Pennyslvania Press, 2002, p. 182.
[23] Malchow, Gothic images of race in nineteenth-century Britain, p. 14.
[24] Ibid. p. 16.
[25] Lee, p. 171.
[26] Lee, p. 172.
[27] Shelley, p. 26.
[28] Ibid. p. 30.
[29] Ibid. p. 29 and 31; I have added the underline.
[30] Ibid. pp. 50-1.
[31] Audrey Smedley "Race, Concept of", The Oxford Companion to United States History, ed., Paul S. Boyer, Oxford University Press, 2001. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Auckland University, , accessed 9 October 2005.
[32] Malchow, Gothic images of race in nineteenth-century Britain, p. 18.
[33] Shelley, pp. 48, 51.
[34] Safie, as an Arabian, could have fallen outside of this communal image of civilized Europe except that Shelley specifically states that she is fair and the daughter of a Christian Arab (p. 94, 99). Since she lived in Constantinople (p. 99) there is a strong suggestion of her being descended from the [white, European] Christian crusaders.
Old De Lacy is an exception in his reactions but I will discuss the ramifications of his blindness later in the essay.
[35] Shelley, pp. 86 and 112. Malchow, Gothic images of race in nineteenth-century Britain, pp. 24-5.
[36] Malchow, Gothic images of race in nineteenth-century Britain, p. 17.
[37] Shelley, pp. 90 and 151-2.
[38] Malchow, Gothic images of race in nineteenth-century Britain, p. 23.
[39] Said, p. 8.
[40] Lee, pp. 185, 192.
[41] Shelley, p. 51, 64, 65, 81, 96-7,
[42] Ibid. p. 82.
[43] Shelley, p. 83.
[44] Jennifer Devere Brody, ‘Deforming Island races’, Making Humans, ed., Judith Wilt, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2003, p. 343.
[45] Ibid. p. 343.
[46] Ibid. p. 345.
[47] Douglas A. Lorimer, ‘Race, science and culture: historical continuities and discontinuities, 1850-1914, The Victorians and race, ed., Shearer West, Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996, pp. 25-9.
[48] Wells. p. 228.
[49] Ibid. pp. 177 and 190.
[50] Ibid. pp. 179-80.
[51] Wells, pp. 182, 187, 197.
[52] Malchow, The Victorians and race, p. 105. Malchow, Gothic images of race in nineteenth-century Britain, p. 233.
[53] Markman Ellis, The history of Gothic fiction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd, 2000, p. 216.
[54] Wells, pp. 228-9.
[55] Timothy Christensen, ‘The “Bestial Mark” of race in The Island of Dr Moreau,’ Criticism, v.46, no.4, 2004, p. 581.
[56] Wells, pp. 241-2 [tense altered].
[57] Ibid. pp. 233, 242.
[58] Ibid. pp. 213, 234, 267-8.
[59] Smedley, loc. cit.
[60] Malchow, The Victorians and race, p. 102.
[61] Smith, p. 3. Wells, p. 207.
A full definition of the heimlich and uncanny can be read in Sigmund Freud’s treatise ‘The Uncanny’, The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 14, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985, pp. 339-76.