Mapping the Unhomely in Edna O’Brien’s The Little Red Chairs

Abstract

Sigmund Freud elaborates the conceptualization of the unhomely (uncanny) from a psychoanalytical perspective in his 1919 essay “Das Unheimliche.” Thereafter, Martin Heidegger, in Being and Time, probes the idea from a philosophical aspect, asserting that the unhomely is an existential–ontological state of human existence; and subsequently, Homi K. Bhabha has identified the political significance of the concept. In her 2015 fiction The Little Red Chairs, based on the war crimes of a Bosnian Serb leader, Edna O’Brien, as a literary cartographer, maps and appraises historical figures and events in the spaces of the imaginative and the real. The novel powerfully exemplifies the theorization of the unhomely and illuminates Judith Butler’s theories of precariousness and interdependency through the delineation of displacement, violence, and characters’ psychological movements.