The Interplay of the Domestic and the Uncanny in Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

Abstract

Abstract. This article examines the effects resulting from the interplay of the domestic and the uncanny in Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, a novel that boldly blends the conventions of the novel of manners and Gothic fiction. Analysing the selected key elements of the story, it is argued that while the uncanny is domesticated for a considerable part of the narrative, in the Gothic layer of the novel the mechanism of the uncanny is used to bring to light repressed voices. In the process, the long-established sources of inspiration for fantasy literature are rejected, and the nineteenth-century tradition of women's writing, in both its realistic and Gothic threads, is used to reinvigorate the thematic and structural repertoire of the genre.Key words: uncanny, domestic, Gothic fiction, fantasy literature, Susanna Clarke.A reader of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004) is confronted with an extensive three-volume novel that evades straightforward generic classifications and plays with a number of literary conventions. This novel not only reveals traces of such (sub)genres of fantasy as alternative history, historical fantasy, and fantasy of manners, but can also be read as an exquisite pastiche of nineteenth-century literary traditions, especially the novel of manners, characterised by its emphasis on the domestic sphere, and Gothic fiction, from which the supernatural elements of the novel are derived. Interestingly, these two dominant traditions are not juxtaposed against each other but carefully interwoven, which draws critical attention to the interplay of the domestic and the uncanny in the novel, and invites one to examine the effects and meanings resulting from such a unique approach to writing fantasy fiction.First, it should be observed that Clarke's 'signature play' with the realistic and the supernatural, familiar and unfamiliar, evokes connotations with the concept of the uncanny as developed in "The Uncanny" (1919) by Sigmund Freud, who grounds his conceptualization of the term in the lexical ambiguity of the German words heimlich (familiar) and unheimlich (uncanny). Obviously,