Midnight Sun: A Revitalized Teen Romance or an Ode to Freud’s Uncanny?
“Midnight Sun” steps quietly into the place of its predecessor, singing the same tune with different words.
One hundred pages in to the newest addition to the Twilight series, I am overwhelmed by the feeling of the unheimlich, the feeling that something is off.
Perhaps this is the lingering effect of too many horror novels. I recently re-read Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House,” where the unheimlich (re: uncanny) permeates through the storyline, journeys ending in lovers meeting and doors shutting no matter how many times they’re propped open. Stephen King’s “The Shining” achieves this too, the shrubs of the Overlook coming to life to bound toward Danny Torrance, teeth bared, the usually-empty elevator suddenly full of life and party poppers.
In his essay titled “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud explains that “the “uncanny” is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar” (Freud, 1–2). He continues on to state that “the German word unheimlich is obviously the opposite of heimlich, heimisch, meaning “familiar,” “native,” “belonging to the home”; and we are tempted to conclude that what is “uncanny” is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar. Naturally not everything which is new and unfamiliar is frightening, however; the relation cannot be inverted” (2).
Essentially, the concept of the unheimlich boils down to that something’s-off feeling that we get when something is close to what we know and yet radically wrong.
It’s Coraline crawling through a tunnel to find her home mirrored on the other side, only it’s brighter and her Other Mother has the wrong eyes. It’s the index finger on a wax hand suddenly twitching to life. It can be repulsive, distressing, and frightening.
Yet, I do not hold firm to the belief that the uncanny has to be inherently terrifying. Unease plays just as big a role as fear within this trope of horror. The concept of the familiar becoming suddenly unfamiliar or otherwise skewed is directly relevant to “Midnight Sun,” a book that steps quietly into the place of its predecessor, singing the same tune with different words.
“Midnight Sun” is the fifth Twilight book (not including “The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner,” a novella, or “Life and Death,” author Stephenie Meyer’s gender-swapped retelling of the first book, which is perhaps its own concept of the uncanny entirely). It is “Twilight” re-told from Edward’s perspective. The dialogue remains the same and many of the chapters are titled the same. All of the important plot points from the 2005 book are relevant still, with a few extra scenes here and there to account for what Edward was up to when Bella was asleep, at her house, or elsewhere.
As a Twilight fan — at 14, I owned an Edward Cullen cardboard cutout, and I am not ashamed of this — I am of course thrilled that there’s more content in the series. Meyer has grown as a writer in the last 15 years, and her craft is quite obvious in the book. She’s infused the original story with details that make sense to her readers/fans and given Edward’s struggles the spotlight that Bella’s perspective couldn’t. It’s a good book, and I’m happy it exists.
But!
To call “Midnight Sun” a simple revitalization of a teen romance would be a disservice to the grounding concept of this novel.
It is “Twilight” retold, indeed, but it’s more than that. Within the new narrative perspective lays a novel replete with a new anguish, new desires, and deeper (sometimes even stronger) storytelling. The reason that it’s uncanny is because “Twilight” is such a familiar ground for readers, a stagnant frame of reference in Forks, Washington where A, B, and C happens each time they revisit the book. Suddenly, D and E happen before B, and since we already know that C is coming, F, G, and H feel strangely disruptive, welcome as the new details may be.
Perhaps it isn’t the same vein of the horrifying as actual horror novels, but the unease of revitalization is nonetheless relevant in categorizing the book. It belongs to the home, but doesn’t.
This could be a symptom of the frame itself, an unavoidable consequence of bringing a plot back to life after more than a decade of stagnation. It’s like a movie you’ve watched forty times only to find that the main actor has been replaced with someone who looks nothing like them, and no one is saying anything.
Refer to page 10 of Freud’s essay (original title: “Das Unheimliche”), where he dissects Otto Rank’s ruminations on the idea of “the double” in literature, life, and folklore:
“The quality of uncanniness can only come from the circumstance of the “double” being a creation dating back to a very early mental stage, long since left behind, and one, no doubt, in which it wore a more friendly aspect. The “double” has become a vision of terror, just as after the fall of their religion the gods took on daemonic shapes” (10).
In part responsible for the “the impression of the uncanny,” this concept of a double, a distorted reflection, lends itself to the feeling elicited by “Midnight Sun.” It is a once-comfortable melody sung by a different voice, a doubling of the familiar in such a way that makes room for new feeling.
Still, I am thoroughly enjoying the read. See you all in 600 pages.
Reference: Freud, S. (n.d.). The “Uncanny”. Retrieved August 07, 2020, from http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf
