Madeleine L 'Engle's Essay The Uncanny'

A Wrinkle in Time: Two Critical Approaches
In his essay entitled, “The Uncanny,” Freud begins his definition with an explanation of the German word heimlich, which most often means ‘homely’ or familiar’ but has another, less common meaning of ‘hidden’ or deceitful’ (595). Freud connects this word with its two not quite opposite meanings with the notion of the uncanny, loosely defining it as something which is appears familiar but is understood to be hiding something (596). In A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, the planet of Camazotz, where the evil IT rules, is characterized by a pervading sense of the uncanny from the very beginning.
One of the tools L’Engle employs to create the effect is emphasizing repetitive patterns. Everything

The most straightforward example of this is Mrs. Whatsit, a character who literally changes shape over the course of the text. When she is first introduced, her identity is entirely obscured under her clothes and Meg observes that “age or sex was impossible to tell, for it [Mrs. Whatsit] was completely bundled up in clothes” (16). This confusion of identity anticipates Mrs. Whatsit’s later transformation “a creature more beautiful than any Meg had ever imagined,” a winged creature “something like a horse” with “a nobly formed torso, arms, and a head resembling a man’s” (64). The children are confused by this transformation, unsure if the creature is a “She? he? it?” (65). Calvin asks “But what do we call you now?” but Mrs. Whatsit simply answers “You can’t go on changing my name each time I metamorphose”

In Alice, Deleuze tells us, the transformations “have one consequence: the contesting of Alice’s personal identity and the loss of her proper name” (472). In contrast, when Mrs. Whatsit transforms, she maintains her proper name and after a brief moment of confusion, Meg and the others fully accept the creature as Mrs. Whatsit. Indeed, affirmation of personal identity is a key theme of L’Engle’s text. Deleuze might say that in this rather than the “infinite identity” leading to the collapse of identity, it instead expands the notion of identity past external markers. In fact, Deleuze tells us outright that “[paradox] … destroys common sense as the assignation of fixed identities” (473, emphasis mine). What L’Engle does is draw attention to the possibility of identities which are unfixed to shape. The Mrs. Whatsit that Meg sees is “not Mrs. Whatsit herself” and in fact it is “only the tiniest facet of all the things Mrs. Whatsit could be” (93). Thus Mrs. Whatsit becomes an embodiment of the idea of “becoming.” Even when in the shape of an old woman, the shape she takes most often with Meg and the others, she retains the sense of the forms she has been, the forms she will be and the forms she can be. Her present shape is no more her “self” than the clothes she wore when she first