"The Sandman" and Freud's "The Uncanny"

Order of the Narrative of "The Sandman"

Stage 1: barometer dealer triggers memory (1st letter narrative of primal scene of terror: Coppola=Coppelius=Sandman); climaxing with death of the Father
Stage 2: Nathaniel's struggle with Klara about credibility of his uncanny experience: climaxing with the Poem (fire, circle, etc) and rejecting Klara ("You damned, lifeless automaton")
Stage 3: return to University: fire has placed his residence opposite Professor Spalazini's house: the reappearance of Coppola--buys a telescope; observes and falls in love with Olympia (forgetting Klara); climaxing with dismemberment of Olympia and incantation: "Whirl, shirl, whirl! Circle of fire! Circle of fire!..."
Stage 4: return home for recovery, marriage to Klara (cured of trauma): climaxing with the reappearance of Coppelius/ Coppola, attempt to murder Klara, and the suicide death of Nathaniel
What is the common thread to the Sandman nurses's story, Coppelius's threat when discovering Nathaniel, the scene in the Poem, the discovery of Olympia as object of struggle, and the final scene the story?
Key interpretive issues for the whole story:
1: What pushes Nathaniel forward through each stage of the narrative to the next?
2: What would be the "rational" explanation for Nathaniel's fate?
3: Does the narrator and the text support this explanation?

 




What does Freud's investigation of the double etymology of "heimlich" (home-like, familiar) and "unheimlich" (eeirie, strange) suggest?
To put is very simply: Freud is fascinated by this history of the word, because it suggests that the most strange, eeirie and scary comes not from what is far away from our experience and feelings (the exotic, foreign, the utterly new and alien) but from what is close to home, the private and the familiar which has been rendered secret through repression, but then returns.
How does Freud reassemble the key elements of Hoffman's story (eyes, the Sandmand, Coppelius, the father"The Sandman") so as to explain their hidden relationship?
Nathaniel's experience Childhood scene; traumatic but repressed: both fantasy and real Adult life: there is a sense of fatality...of being haunted
Confronts 2 fathers the good, mild father / evil Coppelius Professor Spalanzini / Coppola
Feels dread and fascination: about "the Sandman" of nurses's tale in childhood in spite of her strangeness Nathaniel courts Olympia... would finally marry Klara
Exploring the mystery: hiding in closet to see the Sandman (romantic love is the way deeper into the mystery): writes poem describing Coppelius's power to win/ animate Klara
Cure offered after disaster: by mother twice by Klara, as rational, good, nuturing woman
Punishment: arrival of the Coppelius as castrating threat of blinding, death of father Olympia as automoton dismembered....when Coppelius reappears, he hurls himself off tower
READ: 27-28, 383-384. The repressed threat of castration returns in a chain of fearsome father figures.
What, according to Freud, produces the effect that something is "uncanny" (both familiar yet strange, secret but suddenly revealed)? How is the past a network that can exercise controlling influence upon us in the present?
Uncanny = effect comes from the supervening of the earlier unconscious event upon a later one: the subject experiences something as that which is both strange and familiar, odd but intimate, alien but all too "close"