““The Horror! The Horror!”: Narrative Intersections between Gothic Fiction and the Embodied Experience of Chronic Pain and Disability in Christina Crosby’s A Body, Undone

Abstract

In A Body, Undone: Living On After Great Pain (2016), Christina Crosby establishes a critical dialogue between horror fiction and her own experience of spinal cord injury and chronic neurological pain. In the chapter “The Horror! The Horror!” Crosby gives a phenomenological meaning to the Freudian concept of uncanniness (Unheimlich), a narrative element in horror stories that dislocates readers from their familiar world. Considering Edgar Allan Poe’s Gothic short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” as the prototypical terror tale that challenges logic and rationality, Crosby reflects on how quadriplegia and chronic pain abruptly threw her into the unfamiliar world of dependence and loss. This article analyses the experience of uncanniness in the context of bodily dysfunction and the fear resulting from the uncertainty about the future after permanent damage to the central nervous system. The concept of “uncanny” will be expanded beyond its Freudian connotations to explore the symbolic and phenomenological meanings of the (body) double and the relationship between sublimity, horror and pain.

Keywords

• gothic horror; disability: pain; uncanny; sublimity