A slight or a stinging ache?: The Freudian uncanny in Harold Pinter's a Slight Ache

Date

2016

Author

GÜNDAY, Merve

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Set in a country house's relaxing atmosphere of a modest breakfast scene accompanied by a cup of marmalade, Pinter's A Slight Ache 1959 seems to present a world of utmost simplicity over where a sense of complete tranquility and utter nakedness rule. However, as claried by a reading of the play in the light of Sigmund Freud's “The Uncanny”, Pinter presents not a world of simplicity but a convoluted world of bewildering complexity, impending danger, and emotional repression, hiding beneath the 'slight ache' of its characters 'a stinging ache' that vigorously resists both denition and resolution. Based on this, the present study analyzes Pinter's one-act play A Slight Ache from the perspective of Freud's psychoanalytic concept of 'the uncanny' and aims to show that although the play gives the impression of reecting simplicity for its such known characters as a married couple set at a modest breakfast table or a matchseller silently standing on their back gate, it arouses uncanny feelings beneath the surface because its 'familiar' characters are uncovered to be potentially dangerous and battling towards each other with their repressed intentions and evil thoughts relating to their blurred pasts guised in an illusionary veil of ordinary-looking words.

Subject Keywords

The Freudian Uncanny, Uncanniness, Harold Pinter, A Slight Ache, Emotional Repression, Insecurity, Menace, Simplicity versus Complexity, The Freudian Uncanny, Uncanniness

URI

https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/pub/dtcfdergisi/issue/66792/1044410
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/114614

Collections

Department of Foreign Language Education, Article