This strange little short story was nothing more than a tease. Mia, the mother, was harboring deep feelings of guilt for not having wanted her first born. She looked for danger where there was none and blamed herself whenever Felix was in harm’s way. There was a lot of foreboding and unfulfilled foreshadowing in the story for nothing to happen.

Dan, Mia’s husband, Rosie, Felix and her have come to the States for a great aunt’s funeral. Their SUV has broken down, leaving them stranded at a little third rate family owned motel. They sarcastically call the owners the Earl and Mrs. Earl. Mia is unnerved when the owner keeps coming into their room whenever they’re gone. This builds suspicion and a sense of dread.

Combine this with her overactive guilt feelings and the tension builds.

Mr. Earl speaks to Felix once and tells him to stay away from the geese because they’ll peck his eyes out. Then when the youngster tells her that Mr. Earl has no eyes, the reader is left with a sense of impending doom.

On the first morning when Mia is out for an early stroll, she thinks that Mr. Earl is floating dead in the pool, although he shocks her by popping up his head. This appears to be a foreshadowing of disaster.

The following morning little Felix is missing. The reader presumes that either the geese got him or he’s drowned in the pool. Tension mounts even higher when Mia sees the pool gate open. The child is sleepwalking by the pool, however, and she scoops him up and carries him home.

Macleod pulled us into this era by setting it in a motel in New England with an in ground pool and emergency road service. She pulled us even closer with the use of required baby seats and air conditioning. The glass baby bottle dates it into the sixties—unless they’re still using them in England.

Mia’s guilt and the Earl’s eccentric personality helped to lend an eerie feeling to this piece; however, there was nothing uncanny about it. It did not succeed in giving the reader the slightest goose bump of fear. It actually left one wondering if a few pages might be missing.

Based on Freud’s premise it had potential that was never developed. It caught the reader’s attention several time, but then lost it in the ordinary.

This story teaches us that by today’s standards, the uncanny is lost in the mundane. It only whets the appetite for more, while teasing us with less.

The fourteen writers were asked to use the essay and the tropes outlined as a guide in writing works of short fiction for the compilation. Of these eight common tropes, Woodward’s focus was primarily on Freud’s discussion of the Double and the intentional blurring between reality and imagination.

The psychological creation of The Double, as a trope or archetypal pattern outlined by Freud, is “insurance against the destruction of the ego” and is coupled with a “belief in the soul and with the fear of death.” Woodward’s narrator becomes obsessed at an early age with a doubled world he enters by viewing the real world turned upside down. He “desperately wants to explore this exotic [world]” and is “profoundly disappointed” every time he’s forced to return to reality at his parents’ behest.

As an adult, he realizes he can finally create his upside-down world and prevent his own death. The story then becomes a How-To manual for creating our narrator’s double world. He describes various features of his model room upstairs and how he goes about duplicating the doubled (and reversed) features in the room immediately beneath it. First he duplicates/reverses his model room’s dimensions, then the floor, the rugs, the furniture, and even the curtains and chandelier.

Freud says this desire for doubling springs “from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism which dominates the mind of the child.” The story’s narrator supports this when he says “[it] was as though my life was a reflection in a pool…as though narcissus [sic] could indeed embrace his own reflection.”

Freud goes on to discuss that the manner in which the Double operates is reversed as a child matures. “[When] this stage has been surmounted, the ‘double’ reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.”

The story’s narrator follows this same maturation process as he decides to duplicate, not just a single room, but the entire house. This process will take him “many, many years, and … I may not live long enough to complete [it].” The Underhouse has become the ticking clock of the narrator’s own mortality. But Freud’s “harbinger of death” portends a death that has prospects of being a grand adventure.

And as Freud notes, “there are also all the unfulfilled but possible futures to which we still like to cling in phantasy[sic].” And so our narrator ponders what would happen if he finished The Underhouse and it collapsed upon itself. “One must suppose that the two would cancel each other out…I would have folded myself out of existence. A rather attractive thought.” Our narrator is no longer immortal, and is now enthralled by the very real possibilities of his own impending mortality.

So how are we to make sense of the story in context? While Gerard Woodward’s “The Underhouse” is an interesting narrative that finds a clever way to implement a discussion of Sigmund Freud’s concept of the Double as outlined in “The Uncanny,” I’m not sure it elicits the unnerving or uncanny feelings that Freud identified in his essay. As a reader, I would have been willing to follow Woodward further into the story, if he were to have taken the narrative past his current jumping-off point and explored this doubling concept in greater detail, hopefully achieving the desired uncanny effect.

As the story unfolds, we begin to understand that Sue has been directly manipulated by Ruthie as another character of the game, such as when she feels her exciting new boyfriend‘s questions “[seem] like moves in a game [she] does not want to play anymore” (Cottrell, 210). Sue’s visit to their home was likely directed by Ruthie, because maybe she wanted to see Sue. She was the one responsible for showing Ruthie how to play her video game in the first place. Only because Ruthie wanted her home life to go back to the way it was and stay that way forever had she removed Sue from Peter’s life so he would remain at home. However, she does not dislike Sue so she gives her some enjoyment in the form of other boyfriends, even if Sue is unable to stay with them and find everlasting happiness.

This story could be an admonishment against disregarding the effects of major life changes on children. Everyone around Ruthie went on with his or her own life plans and had no understanding of what the things that were happening meant to her. Had someone taken the time to explain why her parents were splitting up and why her father was getting a new wife and why Peter had to leave home to attend college, perhaps her frustration would not have morphed into an obsession with her video game, where she controlled the world and the events in it. Although Ruthie’s ability would not belong to a real child in our culture, there are many more diversions available in which a kid could drown their confusion.

Works Cited:

Cottrell, Frank. “Continued Manipulation.” The New Uncanny. Ed. Sarah Eyre and Ra Page. Great Britain: Comma Press, 2008. 207-219. Print.

Freud, Sigmond. “The Uncanny.” Rohan Academic Computing. 2 October 2009. http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~amtower/uncanny.html