Extimacies: Strange Attachments in James Hogg, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Margaret Oliphant

Abstract

The intense, uncanny relationship between intimacy and exclusion, homeliness and strangeness finds evocative expression in the Gothic tales and ghost stories of James Hogg, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Margaret Oliphant. Their narratives resist and open themselves to haunting, with the supernatural alterity they encounter proving oddly familiar and posing fundamental questions about knowledge and subjectivity. In these moments, distinctions between inside and outside in psychic, social and environmental terms are radically unsettled. Using Jacques Lacan’s notion of ‘extimacy,’ an ‘intimate exteriority’ that constitutes an estranged attachment to the stranger within, this article examines the unresolved struggle in Hogg and Stevenson with this intimate yet agitating sense of otherness that disrupts the assertion of identity. Contrastingly, Oliphant attempts to accommodate the extimate, and embraces her obligations to that which haunts.