Abstract
As a genre which attempts to speculate human reactions towards present and future technological advancement, science fiction shares an affinity with the gothic genre wherein various “uncanny” themes left unexplained by the Enlightenment appeared. While modern science fiction might involve robotics, artificial intelligence, or biotechnology in response to the implications of scientific development, gothic fiction of the 18th and 19th centuries instead used various supernatural elements—automata, dancing dolls, and ghostly apparitions—to create the uncanny effect. Therefore, this thesis will attempt to determine the appearance of the uncanny effect within three texts to further the argument that early science fiction’s lineage might be traced to Gothic works which deviated from the supernatural pattern established since Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. This project will first utilize Terry Castle’s definition of the uncanny from The Female Thermometer to read Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, and establish said effect as the return of the repressed. The thesis will then move on to examine the inadequacies of Freud’s essay from a literary context with E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman, and how Hoffmann’s story began to utilize non-supernatural themes to present the uncanny effect. The final chapter will end with an analysis of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, a text already established as the first science fiction novel—yet also an exemplary gothic novel—to argue that though the use of scientific elements, early science fiction expanded and continued the uncanny legacy of gothic fiction.