The Uncanny and the Breakdown of Certainty in Hamlet and Fra…
The Uncanny and the Breakdown of Certainty in Hamlet and FrankensteinBoth Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein use the uncanny—figures or events that are both familiar and frightening—to unsettle characters’ sense of reality and to expose deeper anxieties about identity, morality, and human limitation. In Hamlet, the Ghost is at once a father figure and a terrifying supernatural presence whose ambiguous motives disrupt the prince’s trust in memory, justice, and reason. In Frankenstein, the Creature embodies a similar uncanniness: created from human parts yet rejected as something monstrous, he forces Victor (and readers) to confront blurred boundaries between life and death, nature and invention, the human and the unhuman.Write a 200–300 word response analyzing how both Hamlet and Frankenstein use an uncanny figure—the Ghost or the Creature—to challenge characters’ assumptions about truth, morality, or personal identity. In crafting your response, you may consider:how the Ghost’s unclear origin (“spirit of health or goblin damn’d”) destabilizes Hamlet’s ability to acthow the Creature’s human intelligence paired with his unnatural form evokes fear, guilt, or fascinationways each text uses the uncanny to reveal psychological fractures in Hamlet or Victorhow encounters with the uncanny disrupt social norms, family bonds, or inherited systems of beliefwhat the uncanny ultimately suggests about human attempts to control or understand forces beyond their comprehensionYour response should make a clear, arguable claim and support it with at least one well-chosen reference from Hamlet and one from Frankenstein. Explain how these examples show that both texts, though separated by centuries, use the uncanny to dramatize the fragility of rational certainty and the dangerous consequences of confronting what should not exist.
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