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Series Editor:
ROBERT T. TALLY JR., Texas State University
Series description:
Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies is a new book series focusing on
the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. The spatial turn in
the humanities and social sciences has occasioned an explosion of innova-
tive, multidisciplinary scholarship in recent years, and geocriticism, broadly
conceived, has been among the more promising developments in spatially ori-
ented literary studies. Whether focused on literary geography, cartography,
geopoetics, or the spatial humanities more generally, geocritical approaches
enable readers to reflect upon the representation of space and place, both in
imaginary universes and in those zones where fiction meets reality. Titles in
the series include both monographs and collections of essays devoted to lit-
erary criticism, theory, and history, often in association with other arts and
sciences. Drawing on diverse critical and theoretical traditions, books in the
Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series disclose, analyze, and explore
the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world.
Titles to date:
Cosmopolitanism and Place: Spatial Forms in Contemporary Anglophone
Literature
By Emily Johansen
Literary Cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative
Edited by Robert T. Tally Jr.
The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said: Spatiality, Critical Humanism,
and Comparative Literature
Edited by Robert T. Tally Jr.
Spatial Engagement with Poetry
By Heather H. Yeung
Literature’s Sensuous Geographies: Postcolonial Matters of Place
By Sten Pultz Moslund
Geoparsing Early Modern English Drama
By Monica Matei-Chesnoiu
Africa’s Narrative Geographies: Charting the Intersections of Geocriticism and
Postcolonial Studies
By Dustin Crowley
Women and Domestic Space in Contemporary Gothic Narratives: The House as
Subject
By Andrew Hock Soon Ng
Women and Domestic Space in
Contemporary Gothic Narratives
The House as Subject
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the
World, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers
Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is lovingly dedicated to my grandmother,
Madam Law Ah Kheng (1913–2013),
whose love and gift of stories will always be my greatest inheritance.
C o n t e n ts
List of Illustrations ix
Series Editor’s Preface xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: The Subject of the House in Gothic Narratives 1
1 Housing Treachery: Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop
and Love 25
The spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has occasioned
an explosion of innovative, multidisciplinary scholarship. Spatially
oriented literary studies, whether operating under the banner of
literary geography, literary cartography, geophilosophy, geopoetics,
geocriticism, or the spatial humanities more generally, have helped
to reframe or to transform contemporary criticism by focusing atten-
tion, in various ways, on the dynamic relations among space, place,
and literature. Reflecting upon the representation of space and place,
whether in the real world, in imaginary universes, or in those hybrid
zones where fiction meets reality, scholars and critics working in spa-
tial literary studies are helping to reorient literary criticism, history,
and theory. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies is a book series
presenting new research in this burgeoning field of inquiry.
In exploring such matters as the representation of place in literary
works, the relations between literature and geography, the histor-
ical transformation of literary and cartographic practices, and the
role of space in critical theory, among many others, geocriticism
and spatial literary studies have also developed interdisciplinary or
transdisciplinary methods and practices, frequently making productive
connections to architecture, art history, geography, history, philos-
ophy, politics, social theory, and urban studies, to name but a few.
Spatial criticism is not limited to the spaces of the so-called real world,
and it sometimes calls into question any too-facile distinction between
real and imaginary places, as it frequently investigates what Edward
Soja has referred to as the “real-and-imagined” places we experience in
literature as in life. Indeed, although a great deal of important research
has been devoted to the literary representation of certain identifiable
and well-known places (e.g., Dickens’s London, Baudelaire’s Paris,
or Joyce’s Dublin), spatial critics have also explored the otherworldly
spaces of literature, such as those to be found in myth, fantasy, science
fiction, video games, and cyberspace. Similarly, such criticism is inter-
ested in the relationship between spatiality and such different media
or genres as film or television, music, comics, computer programs,
xii S e r i e s E d i t o r ’s P r e f a c e
and other forms that may supplement, compete with, and potentially
problematize literary representation. Titles in the Geocriticism and
Spatial Literary Studies series include both monographs and collec-
tions of essays devoted to literary criticism, theory, and history, often
in association with other arts and sciences. Drawing on diverse criti-
cal and theoretical traditions, books in the series reveal, analyze, and
explore the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and
in the world.
The concepts, practices, or theories implied by the title of this series
are to be understood expansively. Although geocriticism and spatial
literary studies represent a relatively new area of critical and schol-
arly investigation, the historical roots of spatial criticism extend well
beyond the recent past, informing present and future work. Thanks to
a growing critical awareness of spatiality, innovative research into the
literary geography of real and imaginary places has helped to shape
historical and cultural studies in ancient, medieval, early modern, and
modernist literature, while a discourse of spatiality undergirds much of
what is still understood as the postmodern condition. The suppression
of distance by modern technology, transportation, and telecommuni-
cations has only enhanced the sense of place, and of displacement,
in the age of globalization. Spatial criticism examines literary rep-
resentations not only of places themselves, but of the experience of
place and of displacement, while exploring the interrelations between
lived experience and a more abstract or unrepresentable spatial net-
work that subtly or directly shapes it. In sum, the work being done in
geocriticism and spatial literary studies, broadly conceived, is diverse
and far reaching. Each volume in this series takes seriously the mutu-
ally impressive effects of space or place and artistic representation,
particularly as these effects manifest themselves in works of litera-
ture. By bringing the spatial and geographical concerns to bear on
their scholarship, books in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Stud-
ies series seek to make possible different ways of seeing literary and
cultural texts, to pose novel questions for criticism and theory, and to
offer alternative approaches to literary and cultural studies. In short,
the series aims to open up new spaces for critical inquiry.
These essays have all been revised and modified, with additional mate-
rials introduced, in order to facilitate the comparative nature of this
study.
Introduction
* * *
Because my study more or less maps a psychoanalytical structure onto
the house (I will further explain below), it also begs the question if
it does not end up performing what I have criticized in the preced-
ing paragraphs, that is, the tendency to transfigure domestic space
into primarily a symbol. Admittedly, in some of the texts discussed in
T h e S u b j e c t o f t h e H o u s e i n G o t h i c N a r r at i v e s 7
Because, indeed, she does not stand just for home and hearth and
Ithaca, woman is not just the name for what drives homewards, what
brings movement and history to a stop, to rest and peace. Woman also
lures into the woods and the sea and the night, she invites to danger and
death. Woman also embodies the Virtues, even Truth. The meaning of
“femininity” is very complex . . . . Does the house dominate femininity?
Is woman put in her place there? Linking femininity and domestic-
ity or house can only come down to a simplification and limitation
when one presupposes that the house is simple, and that domesticity
is simple—that it is nothing more than “place” and “centre”.
(Vershaffel: 288)
* * *
For this study, I deploy and amalgamate a range of theoretical perspec-
tives from the disciplines of literature, architecture, cultural studies,
gender studies, and philosophy as framework to guide my analysis of
the fictional house in the Gothic. To keep my reading of domestic
space varied, dynamic, and pertinent to the texts under discussion, no
single interpretative trajectory is privileged; instead, I draw on what-
ever theories (and their corresponding concepts) I deem best suits
my investigation in order to elicit interesting insights into the subject
(in both meanings of the term) of the house. The chapter-by-chapter
summary below will provide the reader with an idea of the diverse
theoretical articulations informing my discussion.
Despite my eclectic approach to theory, there are nevertheless
distinct positions that inform this study’s overall interpretive direc-
tion, one of which is the perspective on interiority consolidated
from various scholars that I have discussed earlier. The other broad
12 W o m e n a n d D o m e s t i c S pa c e
Buildings, as such, are not simply available either to the critical theories
that uncritically leave them behind nor to the discourse that claims them
as its own . . . . This sense that buildings precede theory is a theoretical
effect maintained for specific ideological reasons. Likewise, and it is the
relation between them that is the issue here, the sense of a building’s
detachment from sexual politics is produced by that very politics.
(Wigley: 331)
fact that subjectivity realizes, in the same vein, its own materiality
“through movement” in space, such as through manipulating objects.
Thus, subjectivity also acquires specific properties for itself from the
way it functions within space.
From the standpoints proposed in the preceding paragraphs, a
reconsideration of the object as an epistemological category, especially
with regard to the (female) subject as materiality, would also be use-
ful. While objectifying the female body is often viewed with intense
(and justified) derision by some feminists, it is my view that it need
not necessarily be equated with reduction if carefully conceptualized
within the framework of Merleau-Ponty and Grosz’s observations.
These theorists’ insights seek to show that the phenomenological
body is foremost an object in communion with other objects; it is
a body less affected by the cogito than by its spatial surrounding,
with which it is “actively and continually in touch,” and by which
it is affected (Merleau-Ponty: 61–62). For Merleau-Ponty, it is pre-
cisely the moment when the body is “sentient and born together
with a certain existential environment” (Bigwood: 61) that articu-
lates its meaningfulness most emphatically. In this way, despite its
objectification, the body nevertheless acquires “a ‘certain living pul-
sation’ that is not its own, but that it lives through and that also
lives through it, [thus becoming the subject’s] body’s being of the
moment” (Bigwood: 62). By plotting the body alongside its imme-
diate environment and rendering them both objects, we can then
begin to appreciate that although “our body is our medium for hav-
ing . . . any world at all . . . yet its anchorage in the world nonetheless
consists of an interconnected web of relations with the human and
nonhuman, the cultural and natural” (Bigwood: 65). Thus, the body
may be what confers the self with a subject position, but it is funda-
mentally through its status as object that the body is able to extend
the self beyond the limits of her subjectivity and connect her to the
world.
One ostensible shortcoming with an interpretive approach that
subscribes to a theoretical premise intersecting phenomenology and
psychoanalysis is a predisposition toward allegations that are decon-
textualized from specific social discourse and practices. From the
discussion thus far, it is quite evident that Merleau-Ponty’s view of
space and Grosz’s ascription of the gaze to it are both dissociated
from history—a problem often attributed to psychoanalytical criticism
as well—that would, to an extent, also render my reading of the house
questionable, since the house, notwithstanding its fictionality in this
study, is an architectural presence profoundly marked by history. Related
T h e S u b j e c t o f t h e H o u s e i n G o t h i c N a r r at i v e s 17
the social spaces from which the representation is made and its recip-
rocal positionalities. The producer is herself shaped within a spatially
orchestrated social structure which is lived at both psychic and social
levels. The space of the look at the point of production will to some
extent determine the viewing position of the spectator at the point
of consumption. This point of view is neither abstract nor exclusively
personal, but ideologically and historically constructed.
(Pollock: 66)
* * *
I explained at the start of this introductory chapter that a reason for
my study’s focus on Gothic narratives is due to the prominence of
the house as a trope in the genre. A more integral reason, however, is
the fact that the Gothic is where the subject/space dialectic customar-
ily finds its most extreme and potent expressions, thereby conducing
T h e S u b j e c t o f t h e H o u s e i n G o t h i c N a r r at i v e s 19
H o u s i n g Tre ac h e ry : A n g e l a
C a r t e r ’s T h e M a g i c T o y s h o p
and Love
patriarchy is the tacit assumption that the women in the novel are
disempowered and imperiled, and that their salvation would there-
fore lie in escape or in the house’s destruction.6 In The Magic Toyshop,
Philip’s house does perish in the end, but its extirpation is less a fig-
urative reflection of its owner’s defeat than it is, I opine, the result
of its betrayal. In this sense, as a symbol of patriarchal authority, the
house nevertheless also subverts this authority, thereby complicating
any simplistic alignment between the house and patriarchy: the house
may be recruited by Philip to assert his will and domination, but it is
also the site his family members, especially his wife, Margaret, quietly
appropriate to dismantle them and, in turn, assert their subjectivities
and desires to surmount their oppression. As such, while it may appear
to embody its proprietor’s ideology by aiding and abetting his pun-
ishing authority, the house is, on another level, also working toward
undermining and ultimately abrogating it.
Philip’s house, however, is not the only domestic space featured
in The Magic Toyshop; before the family tragedy that forced the toy-
maker’s niece and the novel’s protagonist, Melanie, along with her
siblings to move into his house, the children lived in a house reminis-
cent of a fairy-tale mansion, or at least in the way Melanie regards it.
With nouveau riche parents who are mostly absent, Melanie whiles her
time away in vain, idle pursuits, constructing a self-image that is pred-
icated on an illusion. She is exceptionally preoccupied with her body,
constantly turning to the mirror to seek reassurance and validation
that its image corresponds with her expectation of it, thus reinforcing
her illusion further. Her parents’ death and the children’s subsequent
eviction from the house will, however, bring Melanie’s fantasies to an
abrupt end. She will discover that in her uncle’s home, there are no
mirrors. Mirrors proliferate in Melanie’s original home, but it is my
view that the house is the ultimate, albeit figurative, mirror to which
she refers in order to coordinate of her subjectivity. The romanticized
view she entertains of her self-image is to a large degree motivated by
the bohemian extravagance of her domestic interior, thus demonstrat-
ing a dialectical, possibly unconscious, relationship between subject
and space in which the former shapes an idea of itself according to the
contours of the latter. This scenario is a curious inversion of the dialec-
tical connection between Philip and his house, whereby the latter is
(allegedly) outlined according to the contours of the former. In either
case, however, what is obvious is the house’s capacity to reflect the
subject’s desire. By juxtaposing both the houses in the novel, I will
show how domestic space is capable of directly influencing the coding
and performance of subjectivity, especially with regard to gender and
28 W o m e n a n d D o m e s t i c S pa c e
sexual identity. To this interpretive end, I find the spatial theories pos-
tulated by Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre especially pertinent
because both thinkers also recognize the reflective and transgressive
propensities of space.
If the house in The Magic Toyshop is a patriarchal establishment with
ambiguous loyalties, the flat that serves as domestic interior in Love
is an impersonal environment with no loyalties at all. Its function as
accommodation belies a highly capricious nature, which simultane-
ously invites and resists its occupants’ identification with it. In this
post-sixties realist novella, the house is a crucial element in delineat-
ing subjectivity; the way with which the three main characters, Lee
(the owner), Annabel (his girlfriend and later, wife), and Buzz (his
brother), negotiate with the house reveals profound insights into their
desires and psyches. Its significance is less to do with how it is inscribed
by their desires than it is with how it enables them to realize, only
to subsequently invalidate, their desires. The house, in this sense, is
arguably like a stage that apparently encourages its actor to express, as
performance, otherwise repressed dimensions of his subjectivity, but
forces him to repress them all over again when the performance comes
to an end. Able to accommodate multiple, even competing, desires,
the house will, however, spurn any attempt to coerce it into sustain-
ing any one, and be therefore made to subscribe to a single subjective
position. In my analysis of the novel, I consider how Lee, and later
Annabel’s, attempts to do so will inevitably fail, and in the latter’s case,
even end in absolute self-dissolution. To substantiate my interpreta-
tion of Love, I turn particularly to architectural theories developed
by Mark Wigley and Beatriz Colomina, whose intriguing perspectives
on, respectively, the link between the modern home’s conventional
white walls and the gendered dweller’s unconscious desires, and the
house as a figurative theater box, are distinctly applicable to the novel,
and thus resonate with my reading of the flat as a white space that
predisposes the subject toward certain unconscious performances of
sexuality, and as stage upon which a Grand Guinol is under way and
slowly transforming its actors into abject bodies.
Unlike my treatment of The Magic Toyshop, whereby focus remains
largely with Melanie even after she is relocated to her uncle’s house,
my discussion of Love equally considers all its three main characters
because of their symbiotic bond to each other that is somewhat con-
nected to—even determined by—the house. As such, discussing one
character must necessarily implicate the others, because the constitu-
tions of their subjectivities can only be delineated when juxtaposed
against each other and when framed against the “specific properties”
H o u s i n g Tre ac h e ry 29
(Grosz 1995: 92) these characters individually derive from the flat
that they attempt to manipulate (or disavow) to reflect their desires.
Take, for example, the walls of the flat, whose unblemished white-
ness early in the novel serves to indirectly refract Lee’s ambivalent
sense of masculine prerogative and his emotional apathy. Annabel’s
arrival, however, will change this as her encroachment into Lee’s pri-
vate life will be corresponded with her growing influence over the
house, including the transformation of its walls to expose her hus-
band’s fragile masculinity and hence, his emasculation. Annabel, who
is adverse to, and unable to negotiate with, reality, projects her anxiety
onto the flat’s interiority by inscribing its walls with a fantastic mural
and cluttering its floors with junk. In this way, Lee’s neat and orderly
world is converted into a messy environment, which now serves as a
kind of “magic circle” (to borrow Walter Benjamin’s term) reinforc-
ing and protecting Annabel’s tenuous subjectivity. Ironically, however,
in relying on things to buttress selfhood, Annabel gradually becomes
a thing herself to culminate in absolute objectification: death. Her
investment of disarray in the domestic interior fundamentally belies
the messiness of her own interiority, as her lived space eventually
overwhelms and reduces, before finally disqualifying her from its pres-
ence. Only Buzz is unaffected by the subtle impressions of the flat;
his deliberate disavowal of space implies a refusal to give the flat any
definition lest it exposes, as a result, his subjective position (or lack
thereof) to the others and, especially, to himself. Accordingly, neither
Lee nor Annabel, in their manipulation of space, can absorb him into
their personal mythologies, for although he occupies space, he remains
unrelated to it.
But such gaudiness is not limited to only this one room, but more or
less defines the entire house. Here, like in an enchanted kingdom, time
seems to have ceased, and objects acquire a certain otherworldly aura.
It is the wonderland where Melanie not only inhabits, but with which
she identifies as well, thus making her self-image equally fantastical.8
Pointedly, what the house reflects, to draw on Lefebvre’s obser-
vation, is Melanie’s ego’s “own material presence, calling up its [the
H o u s i n g Tre ac h e ry 31
ego’s] counterpart, its absence from—and at the same time its inher-
ence in—this ‘other space’ ” (Lefebvre: 185). Like a mirror, the house
provides Melanie’s ego with a degree of definition that is paradoxi-
cal because it is an ego that is both determined (“its inherence,” in
that it is reflected by) the house and not (“its absence,” in that it
is distinctively separate from the house). But as Lefebvre goes on to
argue:
the absence of the ordinary that renders all its contents (including
the people) somehow fictive, and, second, a metonymic association
between its structure and its owner that paradoxically inscribes the
house with human dimensions while investing the human with archi-
tectural and/or mechanical ones. The former, as briefly noted earlier
in my discussion, is further evidenced by Melanie’s curious tendency
to view her uncle as a character in a film (76, 132) instead of a real
person. While possibly a case of psychological disassociation effected
as a defense mechanism, Melanie’s perception of the toymaker in such
terms could also be interpreted as a reification of the house’s fan-
tastical nature. Here, the distinction between reality and unreality is
so blurred that Melanie’s experience of derealization will increasingly
overwhelm her:
She too, was already forgetting their precise and real selves. Their
figures [her siblings] were dissolving in her mind, their features blur-
ring, till they became as subtle and ambiguous as Mr. Rundle himself;
and, romantically tinged with melancholy because of the death of
their parents, they became dream children, good and beautiful. Which
dreamed it? (94–95)
when he lit it” (117). Inferred from this example is the fact that even
when he is not at home, the rest of the family continues to suffer
deprivation of basic amenities such as hot water for bathing during
winter because the house, like a faithful servant, complies only with its
master’s desires, and would thus reify his cruelty. In this regard, it is
arguable that, modifying Marjorie Garber’s perspective to accommo-
date my interpretation, the “anatomy of the” toyshop does indeed
“point toward organic wholeness” with not the entire household,
but the toymaker alone; in a symbiotic relationship that transform
them into an organism, man and house “work together ‘naturally,’ to
make the organism—and the house/household—function” (Garber:
75) according to the former’s will.
But what is perhaps an even stronger reason underscoring the
house’s derealizing tendency is the way it seems to physically take
after its owner. Philip’s oppressive presence, which is announced by his
colossal physique and brooding demeanor, is replicated by the house
in terms of its bulky contents (there is “much heavy furniture” [46])
and the monotonous brown of its walls (59, 94) that lends it a somber
atmosphere. But if the house both reasserts its owner’s ideology and
structurally resembles him, it also provides him with definition as well.
Over time, Melanie will increasingly notice how Philip does not merely
inhabit his house, but actually resembles it, as if taking to a logical, if
bizarre, extreme Lefebvre’s observation that “A body so conceived,
as produced and as the production of a space, is immediately sub-
ject to the determinants of that space: symmetries . . . axes and planes,
centres and peripheries, and concrete (spatio-temporal) oppositions”
(Lefebvre: 195). Among the spatial determinants evident in Philip,
for example, are his ominous silence, which “had bulk, a height and
weight” that “filled the room” (168), and his head, which “is quite
square,” and whose “disarrangement of pale hair” functions to delin-
eate its “corners” (143). If Philip is recast as a built structure, he
would most distinctively be represented as a box-like construct, which
is also the most common shape of houses. In a curious twist of fate,
Melanie’s fear of the Jack-in-a-box she received as a Christmas gift
from Philip when she was a child that subsequently caused her par-
ents estrangement from him proves to be prescient of the terror she
will later experience when living with a real-life Jack in his surreal,
oppressive box.
to exercise more volition than the human occupants, and walls that
reveal more than they conceal, the house is clearly both a dwelling
and its inversion. In this manner is the house invested with a further
degree of ambiguity as qualities traditionally associated with domes-
tic space, and parodies of these qualities, are collapsed into a single
continuum, thus becoming indistinguishable.
But an even more important reference that determines the house’s
theatricality is its centerpiece, an elaborate puppet stage installed in
the basement where Philip subjects his family on a weekly basis to
one of his plays, which are often based on his family life, and thus
sadistically reenacts for his dependents’ viewership the very humilia-
tion, abuse, and degradation they routinely suffer under his oppressive
regime. Inferred from this is an unsettling scenario whereby the pup-
pet stage and its wooden actors are meant to serve as the model for
the house and the household, respectively, and not the other way
round; in forcing his dependents to watch his shows, Philip is fun-
damentally coercing their identification with the puppets in order
to eventually divest them of their subjective positions, and therefore
complete the process of their objectification. Indeed, one of Lefebvre’s
observation with regard to the analogical connection between space
and mirror, when applied to this scenario, describes Philip’s objective
accurately: “by means of such theatrical interplay,” Philip endeavors
to psychologically manipulate, even coerce, his family into submitting
their “bodies” to him so that he can gradually uproot them “from a
‘real,’ immediately experienced space” for relocation to “a perceived
space—a third space . . . [that is at] once fictitious and real” (Lefebvre:
188). Philip’s goal, in other words, is to render his family members’
subjective reality increasingly tenuous to culminate in absolute detach-
ment from it by inducing a derealizing experience through his puppet
shows. The surreal quality of the house is, in this regard, merely an
extension from the heterotopic puppet stage that is designed to con-
fuse their spatial coordinates, and by extension, the coordinates of
their subjective positions.
But because Philip’s subjection of the family to his penetrating gaze
is so highly concerted, he fails to notice that, on the one hand, he is
also turning himself into fiction before his family, and on the other, his
identification with the house is also turning him into a function. In this
regard, the narrative indirectly reinforces Philip and his niece’s roles
as each other’s double, for in identifying his ego to the image of his
house, Philip is also derealized and has figuratively become an exten-
sion of the house, not the other way round. In an effort to reduce
his subordinates to automatons, what he does not apprehend is his
H o u s i n g Tre ac h e ry 41
own reduction that makes him the automaton par excellence whose
function is to ensure the smooth, effective operation of his machine
for living in. That he is more fictional than real to Melanie is, on
yet another interpretive level, suggestive of an artificiality underscor-
ing his humanity, while his reticence (Philip rarely speaks in the novel)
coupled with his rigid observation of routines further imply he is more
machine than human. Moreover, in attempting to gradually detach his
dependents from their subjective reality through his weekly plays, he
fails to note that he is also part of that reality. In an ironic sense, then,
his success would potentially also mean his failure, since his depen-
dents will then no longer register fear of, or subject themselves to, his
authority, because the reality in which they did would then no longer
exist for them.
Clearly, any endeavor to regulate a site that is inherently heterotopic
according to one’s own desire will inevitably be disappointed. The
theater stage, in Foucault’s assessment, is a particularly slippery
heterotopic space due to its capacity for accommodating a plural-
ity of sites that at once compromises the reality of the stage. The
stage, or any heterotopic site, will, in other words, always exceed
the “symmetries . . . axes and planes, centres and peripheries, and con-
crete (spatio-temporal) oppositions” (Lefebvre: 195) with which it is
accorded. This unpredictable nature of heterotopic space, however,
also endows it with utopic signification, thereby transforming what is
otherwise a foreboding nonplace into a place of hope and salvation.
In my view, what underpins the duplicity of Philip’s house toward
the end of The Magic Toyshop is the propensity for disavowing any
fixed ideological coordinates that is characteristic of a heterotopic site.
A heterotopia may appear to subscribe to the subjective manipulation
of an individual but is in actual fact working to undermine him as it
confuses his reality by inverting it with unreality. In Carter’s narrative,
Philip’s house will be destroyed by a massive fire in the end, but not
before asserting one final derealization that will reveal Philip’s reality
for a lie. All the while assured of his absolute authority at home, he
cannot possibly foresee that the house would allow the expressions of
desires other than his own; hence, when he inadvertently learns of a
shocking family secret—that his wife has been carrying on an inces-
tuous affair with Francie under his very roof all along—his reaction
is uncompromising. In rage, Philip wrecks the house before setting
fire to it with the aim of trapping his family “like rats and burn them
out!” (197). But underscoring his retaliation is more than just anger
at his household, for he is also angry at his house, as evinced by his
direct and violent assault against the building rather than his family.
42 W o m e n a n d D o m e s t i c S pa c e
She could see her own face reflected a little in the black pupils of his
subaqueous eyes. She still looked the same. She saluted herself . . . . She
felt the warm breath from his wild beast’s mouth softly, against her
cheek. She did not move. Stiff, wooden and unresponsive, she stood in
his arms and watched herself in his eyes. It was a comfort to see herself
as she thought she looked. (105)
final sentence, “At night, in the garden, they face each other in wild
surmise” (200), may be interpreted as confusion over what had hap-
pened, but could equally imply the uninhibited possibilities that are
now available to them as they begin a new life together.
Love
Published after The Magic Toyshop, Love is arguably the only novel
in Carter’s oeuvre that is explicitly realist. Unlike The Magic Toyshop,
which is punctuated frequently with the surreal, Love, as if deliberately,
desists from discursive turns that would detract the reader from its
realistic representation of three individuals living in a cramp London
flat in the seventies. In terms of mood, Love is also a bleaker, more
hopeless novel: here, the family unit is revealed for its claustrophobic
and monstrous propensities as the occupants—especially Annabel—
attempt to negotiate with the interior for the purpose of manipulating
each other, but only end up destroying themselves. Despite these
differences, however, both novels share a similar focus on the rela-
tionship between bodies, sexuality, and space, which moreover are
foregrounded using comparable motifs. As such, Love can be read as
an extension and intensification of Carter’s meditation, which began
with The Magic Toyshop, on how the domestic interior illustrates the
intimate link between subject and space in profound, discomfiting
terms.
At the risk of drastically oversimplifying this spare but complex
novel, I proffer a brief summary here to help contextualize my analysis
thereafter. Love recounts the troubled relationship between Annabel
and her boyfriend-cum-husband, Lee (who works as a schoolteacher),
further exacerbated by the presence of Lee’s peculiar half-brother,
Buzz. One similarity that all three share is tendency for the theatrics.
Lee, for example, has a different smile for different occasions and cries
easily; Annabel, as her husband puts it, is in the habit of “perform-
ing symbolic actions” such as eating her wedding ring and tattooing
her husband to make a point (101).14 And Buzz, who lives behind his
camera, is a textually vague presence; the reader must rely on how he
is being described and discussed by others in order to form an impres-
sion of him because the narrative rarely allows excursions into his
thoughts and emotions. An attempted suicide by Annabel (she caught
her husband copulating with another woman at a party) subsequently
leads to Buzz’s eviction from the flat because his presence, accord-
ing to a psychiatrist, is hazardous to Annabel’s recovery and delicate
health (60). But by this time, the three of them have already formed
46 W o m e n a n d D o m e s t i c S pa c e
Emasculating Space
The setting where most of Love transpires is a small “flat [which com-
prises] two rooms separated by flimsy double doors and a kitchen, par-
titioned off by a hardboard from the room at the front of the house”
(13). This front room belongs to Lee. Before Annabel’s arrival, the
flat’s “walls and also the floorboards were painted white” (14):
[H]is room was always extraordinarily tidy, white as a tent and just as
easy to dismantle but this was not ascetic barrenness. Because of its
whiteness and uninterrupted space, the room was peculiarly sensitive to
the time of the day, to changes in the weather and to the seasons of the
year. It changed continually and without any volition on Lee’s part at
all. There was nothing inside it to cast shadows but the movements of
Lee himself and his brother . . . .
Furnished entirely by light and shade, the characteristics of the room
were anonymity and impermanence. There were no curtains at the win-
dows for the room was so indestructibly private there was no need to
48 W o m e n a n d D o m e s t i c S pa c e
hide anything, so little did it reveal. In this way, Lee expressed a desire
for freedom . . . . (14)
white surface actively assists the eye by erasing its own materiality,
its texture, its color, its sensuality, as necessarily distracting forms of
dirt . . . . Neither material nor immaterial, it is meant to be seen through.
By effacing itself before the eye it makes possible, it produces the effect
of an eye detached from what it sees.
(Wigley: 360)
In this sense, Lee’s home, detached and stripped of its materiality and
sensuousness, becomes merely an “object available for appropriation
by [his] detached eye” (Wigley: 360), which is, of course, the prerog-
ative of masculine visual pleasure. Whiteness domesticates the house
for the male gaze precisely by installing the latter as detached and
penetrating.
But as Merleau-Ponty and Grosz have noted (see Introduction),
such a detachment is an impossible fantasy because the gaze is retroac-
tively also a condition of the space it penetrates. As is characteristic
of Carter’s writing, which is always astutely aware of patriarchal
manipulations, Love quickly deconstructs Lee’s brittle masculinity by
attacking the space he inhabits. Before Annabel’s arrival, Lee’s home
is without ambiguity: the walls are unwaveringly white and doors are
always either opened or closed. Her arrival soon changes the configu-
ration of this dwelling space. For a time, she “sat in his white, empty
room all day gazing at the wall” (15). But one morning
while he was at a lecture, she took her pastel crayons and drew a tree
on the section of the wall at which she habitually stared. She drew with
such conviction she must have been sketching the tree in her mind for
a long time for it was a flourishing and complicated tree covered with
flowers and many coloured birds. (15)
does not stop Annabel from reconfiguring (or “invad[ing]” [29]) his
room because it is an indirect acknowledgment of her visionary power
(a power of which she is unaware at this point); he can only help-
lessly witness his truthful reflection unfolding upon his once white
wall. Variously, Annabel draws him as “a herbivorous lion” and a
“unicorn devouring meat” (34) to suggest his sensitive and hyper-
masculinity, both of which are, in the end, a carefully constructed
mythology (in the Barthesean sense). One of her last drawings of him
is “a unicorn whose horn has been amputated,” executed after she dis-
covers her power to “[unshell] the world” and render it, like plasticine,
into whatever form she wishes (77). By this time in the narrative,
Annabel has already taken complete possession of Lee’s world. Under
her orders, Lee evicts his brother from the premises, after which he
becomes increasingly dependent on her emotionally, thus implying
the thoroughness of his symbolic castration.
The spatial refraction of Lee’s transformation by Annabel (and
Buzz) is evidenced not only by the walls of his home but textually
as well. To put it differently, the way Lee is spatially situated in the
text also suggests his increasing lack of presence in his home, even as
his wife and brother progressively invade and alter his space. He is no
longer the main actor on the stage of his house, but merely an oblique
character that glues the threesome together. He voices this recogni-
tion to a psychiatrist at the hospital to which Annabel is admitted after
her attempted suicide:
I’m the plus, aren’t I? . . . One plus one equals two but first we must
define the nature of “plus.” They [Annabel and Buzz] have a world
which they have made so they can understand it and it includes me
at the centre; somehow I am essential to it, so that it can go on. But
I don’t know anything about it or what I’m supposed to do except be
bland and indefinable, like the Holy Spirit, and see the rent gets paid
and the bloody gas bill and so forth. (60)
Materializing Space
Lee strives to keep his flat pristine, but Annabel radically transforms
it. His room quickly takes on the appearance of a surrealist paint-
ing, which hints at Carter’s fascination (albeit ambivalent) with space
as a specifically surrealist canvas recording subjective distortions and
oddities.18 Max Ernst is Annabel’s favorite painter (30–31), and as the
narrative’s surrealist artist, her warped, grotesque drawing on the walls
corresponds, in the words of critic Aidan Day, to “a Dadaist anar-
chist refusal of sense and order, and of the comparable, though not
identical, surrealist principle of subverting rational and logical thought
by allowing the unconscious to express itself—strategies which man-
ifested themselves in artistic practices such as collage” (Day: 61).
By infusing the walls with her weird art, Annabel attempts to trans-
form her world “by imagination and desire” alone (Carter “Alchemy”:
70). Like the walls, the rest of the house too becomes “littered” with
an odd mix of things, so much so that “one had to move around
the room very carefully for fear of tripping over things” (7). Messy
as it is, “this heterogeneous collection [nevertheless] seemed to throb
with a mute, inscrutable, symbolic life; everything Annabel gathered
around her evoked correspondences in her mind so all these were
the palpable evidence of her own secrets . . . ” (7). Indeed, Grosz’s
argument that space has meaning by virtue of its content takes on
H o u s i n g Tre ac h e ry 53
asserts, “In this cavernous, mysterious room . . . where she and her fur-
niture were sunk together in the same dream, she had at least a shape
and an outward form; she had the same status as a thing” (27).
Corresponding to Annabel’s fetishizing is her acting. Annabel, who
derives her presence from and through things, must also occupy
the status of thing(s). Hers is a liminal space between being sub-
ject (seer/fetishist) and object (seen/fetish). Roe describes Annabel
as “living in pieces [and she therefore] cannot do more than iden-
tify with the desire to transgress, positioning herself somewhere in
the inarticulable between: between subject and object, seer and seen,
she must draw (the world to) herself. She does it by looking and
modelling” (Roe: 73). Modeling is a form of acting, and Annabel
is, unconsciously, acting “thingification”—act(h)ing—or, to state it
more directly, she is acting (in order) to become thing. This logic is
further clarified when we consider the strategy underlying it: to act is
to be both subject and object at the same time. Only a subject can act
(because acting implies willfulness and agency), but acting also renders
the subject objectified/fetishized by the gaze of an other. Moreover,
acting places the subject within a liminal space of reality and unreality.
In Annabel’s case, she acts the malleable, plasticine-like thing, deriv-
ing a definition “composed of impervious surfaces” (27) from others,
including her husband and his brother, both of whom she has incor-
porated into her mythology. Apart from occupying the status of thing,
she also learns to fake her husband’s smile (92), and to play the passive
role to complement her brother-in-law’s subjective, camera eye. Her
artistry evidently goes beyond merely drawing, for she can assume a
different role/thing to suit different individuals and needs.
Capitalizing on her alleged acting ability, Annabel “embark[s] upon
a new career of deceit and she knew, if she were clever, she could
behave exactly as she wished without censure or reprimand, almost as
if she were invisible” (75). What is ironic in this statement, however, is
that Annabel has always been “invisible” because of her blending with,
and her abstraction by, space. Furthermore, the space that she is con-
stantly defining defines her as well. Its artificiality must be maintained
in order to serve, metonymically, as Annabel’s own artificiality (in that
she is not real), as well as to ensure her subjective, detached position
(in that she is, in the sense of Benjamin’s collector, real). This perhaps
explains why she could easily “belong” in the ballroom where she later
works. The narrative describes the ballroom as an “incongruous place”
where “everything around her was artificial.” Here, Annabel can care-
fully contrive, albeit tentatively, a “reconstruction of herself as a public
object [that] passed for a genuine personality” (78). In other words,
H o u s i n g Tre ac h e ry 55
[S]he [the voyeur] is caught in the act of seeing, entrapped in the very
moment of control. In framing a view, the theatre box also frames
the viewer. It is impossible to abandon the space, let alone leave the
house, without being seen by those over whom control is being exerted.
Object and subject exchange places.
(Colomina, “Split Walls”: 82)
[S]he looked like nothing so much as one of those strange and splendid
figures with which the connoisseurs of the baroque period loved to
decorate their artificial caves, those atlantes composés fabricated from
rare marbles and semi-precious stones. She had become a marvellous
crystallization . . . this new structure . . . No longer vulnerable flesh and
blood, she was altered to inflexible material. She could have stepped up
into the jungle on the walls and not looked out of place beside the tree
with breasts or the carnivorous flowers . . . . (104)
Disavowing Space
Of the three characters, the narrative is least explicit about Buzz’s rela-
tionship with the flat. Both Lee and Annabel unconsciously project
H o u s i n g Tre ac h e ry 57
their self-worth (or lack thereof) onto the space they occupy, but
Buzz’s sense of belonging is tenuous, almost as if he sees space as a
threat that must be discreetly resisted. In other words, although Buzz
manipulates, and moves in, space, these activities are performed more
out of resistance against than intimacy with it. On the one hand, the
contents of his room suggest a hypermasculine occupant (“packed full
of his fetishes, which included knives, carcasses of engines salvaged
from the scrapyard . . . ” [28]). It is also perpetually in darkness so that
he can develop his other, equally phallic-oriented fetish, photography,
which explains his attachment to the camera. But, on the other hand,
his room “was like a doodling pad [and] the many objects which filled
it were so eclectic in nature and lay about so haphazardly where he
had let them fall that it was just as difficult to gain any hints from
it towards the nature of whoever lived there” (28–29). It is perhaps
not surprising, then, that while the narrative explicitly foregrounds
the relationship Annabel and Lee have with the flat, it is almost silent
about Buzz’s, as if implying that the house rejects this “obscure being”
(66). His room suggests this ambiguity of belonging; while he marks
his presence via his fetishes, he also refuses inscription by that space
through deliberate messiness and accumulation of eclectic objects.
To an extent, he is Annabel’s double in their shared interest in collect-
ing junk. But while Annabel’s fetishizing is an attempt to define herself
through objects and space, Buzz’s performance is an attempt to dis-
avow space. Unlike Annabel, who seeks to mold space into a fantastic
configuration where she can then find belonging, Buzz’s “eclecticism”
is a ruse to disidentify with the space he inhabits. His things do not
add up and, failing to “mean,” they hide Buzz in his obscurity. His
presence is further attenuated by his deployment of the camera eye,
but more than a disembodied way of seeing, it is a mechanical means
of perceiving that ensures an absolute separation between seer/subject
and seen/object. Buzz, in this sense, represents the ultimate gaze, a
gaze that cannot be returned.
When we first meet Buzz, he has returned from a mysterious trip
to North Africa to find a stranger living with his half-brother. Upon
arriving home from work, Lee discovers him sitting “on the floor at
right angles to the wall in the recesses of a black, hooded, Tunisian
cloak which concealed every part of him but for long fingers which
drummed restlessly against his knee” in antagonism against Annabel,
who is sitting “[o]n the other side of the room . . . in a similar position,
shielding her face with her hair” (5). Classical architectural discourse
posits angles as masculine (while curves are feminine), and Buzz’s
choice of a corner is the narrative’s way of consolidating his (hyper)
58 W o m e n a n d D o m e s t i c S pa c e
She wandered about picking things up and putting them down again.
She examined Buzz’s clothes which were kept spilling out of a tea chest,
60 W o m e n a n d D o m e s t i c S pa c e
could not [in the end] draw anything anymore and so was forced to
make these imaginative experiments [of creating her world] with her
own body which were now about to culminate, finally, in erasure, for
she had failed in the attempt to make herself the living portrait of a girl
who had never existed (103).
Chapter Conclusion
If both Lee and Philip’s houses contain, as this essay maintains, an
ambiguous, and therefore menacing, property because it blurs the
distinction between real and unreal, the familiar and otherwise, it is
possible to argue that the various characters’ symbiotic relationships
with the space of their dwellings express their desire for personal
utopia, which will, however, always be threatened with unsustain-
ability already because utopia is underscored, as Foucault shows,
by heterotopia. This capacity to accommodate opposing desires and
ideologies that are, moreover, profoundly gendered has long been
integral to the domestic interior, as the treatise of the premodern
architect Alberti already evinces. Mark Wigley observes that Alberti’s
notion of home is premised on the view that “man is attracted to
[the] myth of himself” (Wigley: 376), and one important correla-
tion of this myth is the control of female sexuality. The way dwelling
space is therefore envisioned even in premodern times makes appar-
ent that subjectivity exceeds space; that is, space is “no more than a
prop” (Wigley: 383) against which the subject frames his desires. But
in using the term “myth,” Wigley already implies the tenuousness of
such a masculinized position. The house, in the final analysis, is really
“a world of dissimulation,” whose function to instill (masculine) order
and control ultimately “speaks of an unattainable order beyond it.”
Wigley continues in his assessment of Alberti’s treatise: “The building
masquerades as order. Order itself becomes a mask. This mask of order
uses figures of rationality to conceal the essential irrationality of both
individuals and society” (Wigley: 379). Evidently, the ideology behind
the premodern home finds direct resonance in the modern ones inhab-
ited by Philip and Lee in Carter’s novels, and unsurprisingly, it is a
woman who will eventually shatter, consciously or otherwise, the myth
that these dwellings are meant to accommodate. The toyshop may
be designed to assert Philip’s order and control of his household’s
sexuality, but it is in fact dissimulating them precisely to sabotage
Philip’s utopic vision. Aptly termed “crazy” by Finn (162), the house’s
contradictory nature makes it not only ambiguous but treacherous as
well, as Philip will discover in the end. Similarly, in Love, Lee’s effort
at orienting space to reflect his masculine prerogative will prove futile
when Annabel’s manipulation of his house quickly unravels it, thus
revealing how tenuous and fragile is his subjectivity and relationship
62 W o m e n a n d D o m e s t i c S pa c e
with space. Annabel thereafter takes over the house, but will also be
subsequently overwhelmed by the space she seeks to control. In desir-
ing mastery over her domain, she unwittingly becomes entrapped by
it and is slowly reduced to another one of its constituents before being
rejected by it altogether.
I have mentioned in the previous chapter that Walter Benjamin
once wrote: “to live means to leave traces” (Benjamin 1986: 155).
In the interiority of lived space, Benjamin contends, the inhabitant can
transform objects from their commodity status to aesthetic ones hav-
ing private meanings for her. While the outside, social space, “besieged
by technology” (Benjamin 1986: 154–55), has increasingly “dere-
alize[d]” her (Benjamin 1986: 155), home becomes “not only the
universe but also the etui of the private person,” a place where the
inhabitant can realize herself (as though living in “a better” world
[Benjamin 1986: 155]) and, more importantly, leave an impression to
mark her having “been” at all. Without problematizing Benjamin’s
view with my position regarding the derealizing experience of the
domestic interior, what he posits clearly applies to Melanie, Philip,
Lee, Annabel, and even Buzz, who in their own ways attempt to
inscribe markers of their subjectivities onto the space of their home.
But living entails being marked by one’s space of sojourn as well.
That is, subjectivity not only leaves impressions on space but becomes
space’s trace through the act of living. In a sense, then, and paradox-
ically, to occupy space is also to be occupied by space, in that what is
projected onto spatiality eventually takes on a separate existence that
could either invigorate one’s sense of presence further or function as
the catalyst initiating the intrusion of the inadmissible to rupture its
occupant’s meaningfulness. In Love and, to a lesser degree, The Magic
Toyshop, this intersection between subjectivity and spatiality, under-
girded by an unconscious dynamic of sexual politics, impels the various
characters to manifest violence (to both self and others). Both novels
seem to warn that underlying the hearth of the house is always poten-
tially a heterotopia that can draw its dwellers’ unspoken perversity to
the open, and thus render the hearth moot.
Chapter 2
even the apparently sympathetic and humane, and its “impact on the
most intimate aspects of lives and relationships” (Donaldson: 275),
corresponds directly with a thematic concern that consistently pre-
occupies Martin’s fiction. In Property, to Manon’s personal conflict
is also added a constant anxiety over an impending uprising by the
slaves. Thus, while Manon and her husband may be subscribers and
perpetrators of the institution of slavery, they are, at the same time,
also imprisoned by it. As W. H. Foster notes with regard to Martin’s
tragic heroine,
Property
In Property, the large house (163) belonging to Manon’s husband
evinces a French West-Indies influence (21), popular in New Orleans
during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the
American South before it was supplanted by Greek and Gothic–revival
inspired architecture.6 As usual with middle-class homes, its interior
was clearly marked by gender differentiation through key domains like
the masculine-inflected dining and business rooms and the feminine-
inflected bedroom.7 While men and women were not prohibited from
entering or occupying each other’s domains, the gendered specifica-
tions of these rooms clearly identify their purposes. To quote Lynne
Walker out of context, these rooms clearly reveal how the “unspo-
ken role of space . . . tells people where they can and cannot be, which,
in part, defines what people feel about who they are and how they
feel about each other” (Walker: 829). A direct effect was the interior
design of these rooms to reflect the “feel” and “look” appropriate to
their gendering: austere and imposing for the masculine rooms; dec-
orative and stylish, sometimes to the point of excess, for the feminine
ones. As architectural historian Juliet Kinchin explains,
He prides himself on being different from his neighbors, but his office
looks exactly like every planter’s office in the state: the good carpet,
the leather-topped desk, the engravings of racehorses, the Bible with
the ribbon marker that never moves, employed as a paperweight, the
cabinet stocked with strong drink . . . . When I went in he was sitting
at the desk poring over his account books. He does this by the hour,
totaling up long lists of supplies and others of debts. (9)
As with the dining room, the apparent restrained of the office envi-
ronment serves to subtly mask its opulence (“good carpet,” “leather-
topped desk”) and masculine indulgence (“engravings of racehorses,”
“cabinet stocked with strong drink”). The unopened Bible is an ironic
reference to her husband’s hypocrisy, as religion is nothing more than
a mark of social status he upholds befitting his identity. Both the din-
ing and business rooms in the novel undoubtedly correspond with
Kinchin’s postulation regarding the most substantial rooms in middle-
class homes, thus indirectly implying a bias for the masculine despite
the association between the home and femininity. The objective of this
gender ideology is, in part, to stabilize the meaning of interiority, but
as I have been arguing throughout my study thus far, such an endeavor
is necessarily dicey because domestic space is fundamentally ambigu-
ous, volatile space that repudiates any fixed associations, and the house
in Property is no different. These rooms that are meant to reinforce the
prerogative of masculinity, as I will show, will also subtly undermine
it as the narrative intimates the growing sense of a divided subjectivity
experienced not only by Manon’s husband, but as she comes to realize
in retrospect, by her late father as well, that is somehow related to the
way they unconsciously interact with their homes.
Manon’s reticence with regard to her husband’s house pointedly
suggests the extent to which she views him and his home as a single
72 W o m e n a n d D o m e s t i c S pa c e
are also the easiest to hurt. Notably, the narrative’s subtle exposure
of its characters’ moral corruption and perversion is carefully asserted
through the way it represents the key room’s devaluation. As the com-
munal situation at home and the racial tension beyond worsen, so will
these rooms’ symbolic functions be increasingly undermined. In this
way, Property reveals not only the intricacy of a network of power that
links class, race, and gender, but the instability and vulnerability under-
scoring it as well. In the following section, I will demonstrate how the
gender ideology operating in the house inevitably invites transgres-
sion; however, what signifies as transgression is not necessarily defined
by an oppositional position to an ideology because transgression can
also be effected by over-identifying with that ideology itself, thus taking
it to its (il)logical extreme. In Martin’s novel, what I see as Manon’s
transsexual desire reflects precisely such a circumstance, which is most
vividly expressed in the homoerotic episode where Manon laps milk
from Sarah’s breast. While the shock value of this incident is due to its
suddenness, careful reading of the narrative will reveal that Manon’s
subjectivity has all along been structured by such a desire, which
further explains her disgust for her husband, whom she constantly
compares to her superlative father that she hardly knows.
Unmasking Architecture
In Property, the juxtaposition between the plantation house and the
cottage illustrates the opposing gendered imperative that dwelling
spaces can reflect. Although both homes are compartmentalized into
masculine or feminine rooms, the former is palpably associated with
masculinity, and vice versa. Such distinctiveness, however, also makes
them, especially the plantation house, a target of irony, which the
narrative constantly expresses in terms of the dialectical relationship
between subject and space. For example, Manon tells the reader
that her husband “drained the color from every scene” (66) in his
home; the irony here is understood when considered in light of
Kinchin’s observation of the “severe” and “grave” color types usu-
ally allied with masculine interiority in the nineteenth-century house
(Kinchin: 23). In this regard, the novel is possibly suggesting an ironic
correspondence between austerity and seriousness with dullness and
inertness.
On a more profound level, the textual irony directed at the house
is achieved through implicating the structure as a paradox within the
system of slavery.13 The narrative opens with the protagonist’s hus-
band in the middle of a perverse, sadistic activity. Viewing through
74 W o m e n a n d D o m e s t i c S pa c e
over time, two bastard children, one of whom is dumb and mute, and
whom the sugar planter only tangentially acknowledges. Manon, on
the other hand, despite her hatred for her slave for the same reasons,
would nevertheless use her slave, whom she knows equally despises
her husband, to aggravate his misery. To Manon, Sarah is little more
than an instrument she can wield to hurt her husband. This is evinced
very early in the novel: speculating aloud that Sarah may be poisoning
him (5), the sugar planter then leaves the house, after which Manon
immediately relays this information to Sarah (6). Manon, of course,
knows that his complaint is baseless, and her intention is mainly to
taunt Sarah. But when we consider that she has been secretly hoping
for his death (18) for some time now, her intention could then also
be construed as a kind of invitation and/or suggestion to Sarah with
regard to how they can be rid of him.
Evidently, Sarah is treated like a tool by both Manon and her hus-
band to provoke each other and satisfy their whims. In this regard,
however, is also their failure to note that Sarah is therefore privy to
their personal feelings and their disappointment with each other, and
that this knowledge enables her a degree of power over them as well.
Indeed, this is likely implied by the ambiguity surrounding Sarah’s
role on the night of the mutiny that will leave Manon physically and
horrifically deformed, and her husband dead. The situation with Sarah
directly identifies the principal limitation of the panoptic machine that
can only police what surrounds, but not within, it. In focusing its
policing gaze on those working in the fields, the house, metaphorically
speaking, fails to realize that mutiny is brewing inside it. But return-
ing to my earlier point, in subjecting the slaves to its surveillance, the
house fails to realize that it can also be subjected to their surveillance.
Days before the mutiny, Manon notices someone in the yard look-
ing into her sleeping chamber; upon investigation later, she discovers
that this spot serves as “[q]uite an excellent command post” (45) for
anyone who wishes to monitor the movements within the house. She
looks up to her own bedroom window at that moment, and to her
surprise, sees Sarah standing there with her baby: “[Sarah] saw me
once, but she didn’t start or turn away. She just stood there . . . looking
down coolly at me. She’s a nerveless creature, I thought. There really
is something inhuman about her” (45). Sarah’s presence and reac-
tion (or lack of) here are certainly enigmatic. It is possible that she
may not have seen her mistress at all (thus explaining the lack of reac-
tion), despite Manon’s claim; on the other hand, however, it is also
equally possible that Sarah is expressing tacit defiance based on a pri-
vate knowledge about what is to come. It is also possible, to attempt
76 W o m e n a n d D o m e s t i c S pa c e
damaging the furniture, the rebels not only are metaphorically inval-
idating the sugar planter’s authority over the house and his ability
to defend it, but are vicariously injuring him as well. However, in
their decision to turn the dining room into a makeshift headquarters
for further strategizing, the rebels indirectly demonstrate their sub-
scription to the gender ideology of nineteenth-century architecture
that designates the dining room as a domain related to “masculine
conventions.”
The aftermath of this night is extensive: the sugar planter is dead,
his wife horribly wounded and disfigured for life, and his plantation in
disarray. Sarah, however, has escaped, which serves to cast more suspi-
cion on her as being possibly complicit in the previous night’s attack.
The house has obviously sustained “ample” (145) damages, but what
the narrative chooses to emphasize when describing the extent is again
telling: “The spyglass was dismantled and lay in pieces on the carpet,
there were gashes in the dining table . . . . In my husband’s office there
were shot holes in the wall just behind the door” (145). In view of the
symbolic significances represented by the spyglass, the dining table,
and the office, that they are singled out for mention is perhaps perti-
nent to establish in absolute terms the sugar planter’s disposal and the
end of his panoptic oppression. Soon after, Manon will sell the house
to her brother-in-law and return to her mother’s cottage (which she
has since inherited) in New Orleans. Here, she will begin a diligent
and concerted pursuit of recapturing her escaped slave. As the cost
escalates and Manon’s relatives begin to question if Sarah is worth
all the trouble, the reader will also begin to sense that underlying
Manon’s valid but mundane reason—that Sarah is her property—is
perhaps something more insidious.
a desire she cannot admit, and thus has been repressed deep into
her psyche. To pursue this interpretation, I will first set some theo-
retical parameters here to help direct my analysis later. My attention
to how Manon’s unconscious possibly intersects with domestic space
was first drawn when reading Victor Burgin’s essay on what he terms
paranoiac space. This concept, with some modification, usefully encap-
sulates the way Manon experiences her husband’s home that exposes,
at the same time, the presence of an unspeakable desire lodged within
her psyche and becomes symptomatically translated as spatial identifi-
cation. Burgin does not, of course, claim that space can be paranoid;
although this point is, admittedly, never clarified, his argument implies
that paranoia is a property projected onto space by the subject.15
He begins his discussion with the description of paranoia offered
by Edward Said’s well-known essay “Reflections on Exile,” which
equates the condition with “a feeling of persecution unjustified in
reality” (in Burgin 1996: 118). Although Said’s position concerns
the experience of diasporic people, his point that paranoia “rests on
a logic of exclusion/inclusion” (Burgin 1996: 118) is clearly per-
tinent to any individual or group that is located in liminal space
where belonging is ambiguous, and therefore threatens the individ-
ual/group’s sense of well-being. As a result, the individual/group
undergoes “changed reason,” or, in Greek, para nous, from which
the word “paranoia” originated (Burgin 1996: 121).16 This obser-
vation directly leads back to the main trajectory of his argument:
that space can be invested with paranoia by its inhabitant when her
“fantasy image[s]” (Burgin 1996: 133) of what constitute “us/self”
from “them\other” are confused. Where once it was a porous inter-
val, space is now, as a consequence of paranoia, cordoned by visible
and invisible borders meant to “[tell] people where they can and can-
not be” (Walker: 829). I deliberately rehearse here a quote by Lynne
Walker I had earlier used to segue from Burgin’s argument as short-
hand to demonstrate how the nineteenth-century middle-class home
potentially exemplifies a paranoiac space; but in Martin’s novel, it is
unmistakable that the plantation house is paranoiac. As noted in my
discussion earlier, Manon’s “feeling of persecution” has no real jus-
tification because the blame for her unhappy marriage lies, in truth,
with her and the “changed reason” that is purportedly directed by her
devotion to the father’s memory. For this reason, her husband will
always be, to Manon, on the side of exclusion, while his house, con-
trasted against her ordered and spirited childhood home, can only be
perceived by her as equivalent to a “madhouse” (96) and a “burnt-out
house” (166).
Housing the Unspeakable 81
[lean] forward until my mouth was close to her breast, then put my
tongue to capture the drop. It dissolved instantly, leaving only a trace
of sweetness. I raised my hand, cupping her breast, which was lighter
than I would have thought. It seemed to slip away from my fingers, but
I guided the nipple into my mouth and sucked from my cheeks. This is
what he does, I thought. (82)
His failing wasn’t his refusal to perform his marital duties and engender
more children for the general slaughter, though that was doubtless a
symptom. It was something else, something Mother knew but never
told, something he had always with him, and took with him, something
behind his smile and his false cheer, and the charade of feelings he clearly
didn’t have. He pretended to be a loving father, a devoted husband, but
he wasn’t really with us, our love was not what he required, he did not
long for us as we longed for him.
He was an impostor . . . .
My aunt was right, he was obsessed by the negroes, he wanted them to
admire him, to adore him, and my mother was right as well; they had
killed him. (197)
Housing the Unspeakable 83
single-minded hunt for Sarah. Despite the evident drain on her already
circumscribed resources and the likelihood that Sarah will mount
future attempts even if captured, Manon refuses to relinquish her
pursuit. The explanation she gives—to punish her slave—while true,
is only a surface reason that disguises a deeper conviction of which
she is unaware. With her unconscious relocated to a new objet a,
her subjectivity must also shift accordingly to align itself with not a
new desire, but a new locus of desire, one that is premised on her
husband’s image. It is in this regard that Sarah is fundamental to
Manon. Not only is the slave her remaining link to her husband,
but as his object of desire and her property, Sarah also embod-
ies the site to where Manon can hereafter channel her transsexual
desire, especially since this has already happened once, without fear
of reprisal.17
just like a mother, the architect also has to be a nurse, and with “love
and diligence” he will help the building grow to its completion. And
just as a mother who loves her sons and with the help of the father
tries to make them good and beautiful, the architect should make his
buildings good and beautiful.
(quoted in Agrest: 34)
Housing the Unspeakable 87
Beloved
Space is a prominent feature in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and com-
pels a hermeneutical appreciation as to how and what it signifies.
For example, 124 Bluestone is unmistakably an architecture that rei-
fies pastness and entrapment. Here, Sethe and her daughter, Denver,
are locked in a persistent memory that refuses to set them free. The
Clearing, the backyard over which 124 Bluestone overlooks, is, as its
name suggests, a place of renewal. This is where Baby Suggs, Sethe’s
mother-in-law, encourages the black people to reacquaint themselves
with their bodies that have been violated by slavery (88).19 There is
the ironically named Sweet Home, a place which only evokes painful
memories for those who once sojourned there. But the novel also
references figurative space to speak of memories, emotions, and some-
times ideology. Paul D’s heart, for example, is spatially configured as
88 W o m e n a n d D o m e s t i c S pa c e
“a tobacco tin lodged in his chest” into which his traumatic memories
are placed; as a result, “nothing in this world could pry it open” (113).
In this way, he protects himself from being overwhelmed by the per-
petual loss (of subjectivity, of family and friends) he has experienced.
Sethe sees memory as gaps filled with sorrow (or “empty space” as
she calls it [95]). And finally, the whitefolk’s fear of, and desire for,
power over their slaves are metaphorized as a jungle of their own
creation (198–99). As much as space functions metaphorically in the
narrative, it is also undeniable that space, especially place, is also a
literal, material, and geographical reality which carries social and psy-
chological significances. Criticisms of Beloved, however, tend to, for
example, underplay 124 Bluestone as also a place where Sethe and her
daughter live, and whose very presence as architecture refracts the two
women’s uncanny, and their hopes. To cite three examples: in an essay
by Samira Kawash (2001), apart from postulating that “the danger
signaled by ‘haunting’ derives from the very structure of the house,
not from some external element” (Kawash: 74), the essay has actually
very little to say about the house’s materiality, and the way it influ-
ences its dwellers. Instead, the house is read as a prison metaphor,
which Kawash associates with the system of slavery. Like Kawash,
Liliane Weissberg (1996) also focuses on the metaphoricity of 124
Bluestone; although her article does pay some passing attention to the
house’s material relationship with its inhabitants, it mainly emphasizes
the figurative alignment between the architecture and racial/familial
history. Similarly, despite J. Hillis Miller’s (2007) innovative focus
on boundaries and space in Morrison’s novel, his essay merely uses
the novel as a launching pad to meditate on contemporary US poli-
cies on national security and international relations. Undeniably, such
scholarship attests to the dexterity of the novel to invite multiple inter-
pretations and meditations on various levels, but as essays discussing
space, they fall short of actually delving into space as, quite frankly,
space in itself.
Much of Beloved takes place at 124 Bluestone (henceforth 124).
The narrative consistently represents its “aliveness,” especially through
personification. For example, we are told early in the novel that “124
was spiteful” (3), which directly grants the architecture an identity.
Not just an address, 124 is an entity with a name, and along with
it, tyrannical attributes that render its inhabitants fearful and helpless.
Sethe’s two sons have “snatched up [their] shoes and crept away”
(3), while Denver and Sethe have submitted to the house, doing only
“what they could, and what the house permitted” (4) in order to
continue living there. As an address, moreover, the house’s num-
bers are significant. For William Handley, they imply the inevitable
Housing the Unspeakable 89
respond to Paul D’s (who had just arrived) suggestion that she and
Denver move out, “Something in the house braced” (15), as if it too
is waiting in anticipation for what Sethe may say. From that moment,
the house diverts its spite toward Paul D. He begins to tremble, but
soon realizes that “his legs were not shaking because of worry, but
because the floorboards were and the grinding, shoving floor was only
part of it. The house itself was pitching” (18). Indeed, this physical
movement is the consequence of the house’s anger, but this anger
also mirrors Sethe’s own resentment at Paul D’s indiscretion. For
Sethe, the house symbolizes ownership—of “having” something at
last, of “claim[ing] herself” (95), and being able to “manage every
damn thing” (97); it is not “a little thing” from which she can easily
walk away, as he seems to assume (23). Sethe is of course aware that
the house is haunted, but fails to realize that she is the source. The
haunting, in other words, is a refraction of Sethe being there. Denver,
on the other hand, actually realizes that the haunting is connected to
her mother, although she does not know why (because she was too
young to remember when Sethe murdered Beloved). This revelation
came to her “an autumn long before Paul D moved into the house
with her mother”:
Shivering, Denver approached the house, regarding it, as she always did,
as a person rather than a structure. A person that wept, sighed, trem-
bled and fell into fits. Her steps and her gaze were the cautious ones
of a child approaching a nervous, idle relative (someone dependent but
proud). A breastplate of darkness hid all the windows except one. Its
dim glow came from Baby Suggs’ room. When Denver looked in, she
saw her mother on her knees in prayer, which was not unusual. What
was unusual (even for a girl who had lived all her life in a house peo-
pled by the living activity of the dead) was that a white dress knelt
down next to her mother and had its sleeve around her mother’s
waist . . . . The dress and her mother together looked like two friendly
grown-up women—one (the dress) helping out the other. (29)
it was inconceivable that any historical insider could remove herself suf-
ficiently from the contaminating power of the event so as to remain
a fully lucid, unaffected witness, that is, to be sufficiently detached
from the inside to stay entirely outside of the trapping roles, and the
consequent identities, either of the victim or the executioner.
(Laub: 66)
She moved closer with a footfall he didn’t hear and he didn’t hear the
whisper that flakes of rust made either as they fell away from the seams
of his tobacco tin. So when the lid gave he didn’t know it. What he
knew was that when he reached the inside part he was saying, “Red
heart. Red heart,” over and over again. (117)
Yet Paul D’s healing is complicated by fear and anxiety, not because it
is Beloved who is bending him at last to his desires, but because the
experience proves overwhelming. Paul D has learned to store away his
traumatic memories deep in his psyche for so long that he is unpre-
pared for their retrieval. Meanwhile, the misreading of Beloved is
curiously equaled by her growth in stature (242). If she is the con-
centrated focal point at which 124 arrives in order to foreground the
trauma of its inhabitants, now it is as if she is trying to exert her
size in order to force them into recognition. It will soon become
evident, however, that she cannot achieve this aim. Instead, Paul D
flees the house and Sethe plunges deeper into paralyzing guilt, even as
Beloved continues to grow larger. Sethe’s disintegration, as opposed
to Beloved’s amplification, is also captured in spatial terms as Sethe
becomes “confined . . . to a corner chair” (250), implying not only her
diminished place, but her gradual relegation to furniture (a “thing”)
as well.
Denver, who alone recognizes the symbiotic relationship between
Beloved and the house, realizes that her mother’s misrecognition of
Beloved is fueling the latter’s debilitating energy. To save her mother
(and herself), she must “step off the edge of the world” (243) to
connect their history to the rest of the community’s in order to invig-
orate communication. If her mother cannot face her trauma, then the
community must articulate it on her behalf and bring to fruition at
last what Beloved intends. Denver must, in a way, help transform
what is otherwise a “solitary activity” with “no social component”
(van der Kolk and van der Hart: 163) to something communal and
historical. Thirty women respond to Denver’s plea for help, includ-
ing Ella, whose past also hints of infanticide. Together, they walk
“slowly, slowly toward 124” (257), and as they near the house, “Ella
hollered . . . . In the beginning there were no words. In the beginning
was the sound, and they all knew what that sound sounded like”
98 W o m e n a n d D o m e s t i c S pa c e
Sethe ever lived there (259), it accrues a haunted quality only when
Sethe brings to it her other “fields.” Moreover, Smith’s view also
reinforces Vidler’s point about space as historically (and culturally)
determined. The significance of space is dependent on how a subject
embodying previous space-dependent fields comes to view her cur-
rent position as “spaced.” And because the subject is always limited
to the extent of her body and dwelling, her experience of space is
always reduced to that of place, both past and present. A new place,
when arrived at, will signify based on how she has experienced pre-
ceding places. Comparison between places becomes inevitable, as the
subject’s residual memories (and feelings) of previous experience(s)
of place(s) are juxtaposed with present ones. This can result in either
an affirmative or unsettling sense of belonging, a circumstance clearly
reflected in my reading of Property, for example, especially with regard
to Manon’s derision against her husband’s mansion that is influenced
by her unconscious attachment to her father’s house.
On the other hand, Beloved also suggests that space can inherit
an “identity” of its own, one that, despite being shaped by human
activities and memories, ultimately transcends them. To put it differ-
ently, there are places that preserve memories indefinitely, including
memories that are independent of their original inhabitants but which
can affect subsequent inhabitants nevertheless. Such a configuration of
place is implied in the notion of “rememory.” As Sethe tells Denver,
If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays,
and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world . . . I mean,
even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew,
or saw is still out there . . . . Someday you be walking down the road and
you hear and see something going on . . . . And you think it’s you think-
ing it up . . . . But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs
to somebody else. Where I was [Sweet Home] before I came here, that
place is real. It’s never going away . . . if you go there—you who never
was there . . . it will be there for you, waiting for you. So Denver, you
can’t never go there. Never. Because even though it’s all over—over and
done with—it’s going to always be there waiting for you. (36)
Chapter Conclusion
The ambiguous nature of architectural space in both Martin and
Morrison’s novels can perhaps be further elucidated when framed
against Kuntze’s architectural perspective, which I introduced at the
start of this chapter. In manifest terms, both the plantation house and
124 Bluestone subscribe to Kuntze’s notion of architecture as virtual-
ity, secrecy, and monstrosity; in other words, they are space that, like
books, compels interpretation, which is, however, complicated by the
Housing the Unspeakable 101
H o u s i n g S e c r e t S e lv e s : W i l l i a m
F r i e d k i n ’s T h e E x o r c i s t
a n d R o m a n P o l a n s k i ’s
Repulsion
The focus of my analysis in this chapter and the next are filmic texts
conspicuously associated with the horror genre. Moreover, the four
texts under discussion arguably belong to the haunted house narrative,
if only in the broadest sense when it comes to the two films consid-
ered in this chapter: in The Exorcist (1973, dir. William Friedkin), it is
not so much the house that is haunted but a single bedroom whose
occupant is a possessed child, while in Repulsion (1977, dir. Roman
Polanski), what haunts dwelling is fundamentally the projection of the
protagonist’s unravelling psyche. Although clearly different themati-
cally and stylistically—The Exorcist is an occult horror film set in a large
house, while Repulsion is a psychological thriller filmed in black and
white whose main setting is a small, cramped flat in London—both
works constituted a slew of horror films revolving around the house
released during the seventies and early eighties that were,1 moreover,
also heavily inflected with gender bias that consistently coded women
in extreme, oppositional terms: as victims or threats, and sometimes
even both.2 The main factor underscoring their selection for analysis,
however, is the fact that these two works feature a house that is seem-
ingly sentient and able to elicit and direct its occupant’s unconscious
desires to their most profound ends.3
I demonstrated in the last chapter how the house is capable of
refracting the unconscious of its occupant. Like a mirror, it not only
reflects the looker’s image but also deflects features away from her
104 W o m e n a n d D o m e s t i c S pa c e
also discuss sites that seemingly disavow clear parameters and mark-
ers of spatial distinctions (like “inside” and “outside”). The second is
Lacan’s extimate, a model that eschews the binary logic of self and
other to, instead, reveal their dialectical relationship, which consti-
tutes subjectivity. While the two notions hail from distinct disciplines,
they are nevertheless similar in their insistence on ambiguity and mul-
tiplicity in the construction of subjectivity/subjective position, thus
remarkably linking the unconscious and space when brought together
as a single framework. As my reading of The Exorcist would have estab-
lished, and my analysis of Repulsion would subsequently reinforce,
horror narratives that emphasize space are particularly effective in rep-
resenting sites that seem to “fold” into themselves to reveal another
dimension that resembles and is yet different from the original. In this
capacity, such folding sites—or the pli—invariably encourage the
metamorphosis of their occupants as well, as they also undergo fold-
ing that turns their inside (the repressed) outwards, thus erasing the
psychic boundaries separating self from other.
In terms of space, horror is more widespread in Repulsion, per-
meating by the end of the narrative the entire apartment altogether.
But like The Exorcist, spatial disturbance is also initially registered in
the bedroom. Just as Regan’s transformation is effected by her bed-
room’s capacity to “unfold” her, the awakening of Carol’s secret self
that will eventually dissolve all trace of her already tenuous subjectiv-
ity is also first experienced in this particular room of her lived space.
Unlike in Blatty’s film, however, what constitutes the pli in Repulsion
encompasses Carol’s entire apartment. I begin my discussion of this
film by correlating the pli with other related Deleuzian concepts such
as intensive space and depth in order to further clarify the theoretical
position guiding my reading. Taking a more spatial perspective rather
than a strictly psychological one with regard to Carol’s condition,
I argue that her sensation of repulsion is related to a profound desire
for a monadic existence, whereby proximity to other people would
only prevent and contaminate. But keeping away from people proves
impossible not only because she lives in London, one of the busiest
cities in the world, but because her undeniable beauty (Carol is played
by the exquisite Catherine Deneuve) constantly attracts unwanted
attention especially from men. Nonetheless, when she is left alone
after her sister, who shares the apartment, leaves for a holiday with her
lover, Carol is able to at last confront her secret self. In the film, the
extimity slowly taking over her subjectivity is paralleled by the house’s
worsening condition. This association is often treated metaphorically
by scholars, but I want to posit that the house’s circumstance is not
108 W o m e n a n d D o m e s t i c S pa c e
The Exorcist
The setting of the film abruptly shifts from an archaeological dig
in Iraq after the first few minutes to a suburb in Georgetown,
Washington, DC, before settling, via an establishing shot, on the
Macneils’ residence, thus indicating the evil entity’s possible source
and its subsequent target. With its box-like structure, tall mansard
roof, and large windows, the residence recalls Victorian Second
Empire architecture (which was popular in the mid-eighteenth
century),7 but more palpably, Hollywood’s most common type of
monstrous house, from the famous Bates mansion in Hitchcock’s Psy-
cho (1961) to the haunted farmhouse in The Conjuring (2013), which
has infiltrated the popular imagination.8 The house in The Exorcist, as
such, is an architectural shorthand that effectively identifies the site of
horror for the rest of the narrative. Moreover, despite the film’s open-
ing segment, that it remains unclear how the house became infected,
thus suggesting its singularity throughout the narrative, indirectly
encourages an atmosphere that accords with Gothic scholar Elizabeth
MacAndrew’s view of “a strange and wonderful place, a closed world
within everyday world” (MacAndrew: 110). MacAndrew, however,
also contends that this “closed world is not entirely cut off. Indeed,
its effect often depends on the sense of moving in and out of it”
(MacAndrew: 110). Or, to rephrase it differently, while the Gothic
landscape may appear to be an enchanted place unaffected by the
“everyday world” adjacent to it, its sense of strangeness and wonder is,
in truth, dependent on an interaction with this other world. In most
haunted house stories, this is usually evinced by a backstory reveal-
ing how the building became infected in the first place that usually
identifies the infecting presence as initially belonging outside, but has
since penetrated and defiled, the building. In the case of The Exorcist,
however, such a backstory remains unavailable. It deploys a recogniz-
able motif in horror but refuses to provide any possible explanation
(apart from a rather weak reference to the Ouija board) as to how
the home, in both the sense of the United States and the Macneils’
H o u s i n g S e c r e t S e lv e s 109
When part of the body has had to sacrifice most of its motoricity in
order to become the support for organs of reception, the principal
feature of these will now only be tendencies to movement or micro-
movements which are capable of entering into intensive series, for a
single organ or from one organ to the other. The moving body has lost
its movement of extension, and movement has become movement of
expression.
(Deleuze 1986: 7)
Figure 3.1 The Exorcist: Fathers Merrin and Karras – priests or prisoners?
while the accessibility of the child’s room will only compel her to take
greater care in her pursuance of private pleasures. It is in the latter
that the child learns to “cultivate sense of autonomy through inter-
actions with an environment charged with personalized meanings”
(Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton: 138). As such, watchfulness
is a critical strategy, whose mastery will determine the subject’s status
and degree of freedom within the house, and the bedroom becomes
the most important site at which the gaze is directed. Or recalling,
but slightly modifying, Beatriz Colomina’s notion of the house-as-
stage (see Chapter 1), the bedroom operates like a domestic “theater
box” by paradoxically protecting its occupant’s privacy and inviting
constant scrutiny from others, and consequently plotting every mem-
ber of the household as simultaneously actor and spectator, voyeur
and exhibitionist.
Colomina’s observation, when applied to the bedroom, intimates a
sinister property inherent to it—a point that is not missed by haunted
house narratives. That the protagonist is often afraid of, or experi-
ences assault by, an unseen presence in the bedroom potentially hints
at a profound degree of intimacy between self and this site, which is
particularly conducive to channeling and/or harboring malevolence.9
This body/space correlation is especially significant when supernat-
ural horror is recast as a metaphor for psychodrama, as my reading
of The Exorcist evinces. In this interpretative light, what is otherwise
a virulent, invasive other may actually be the subject’s unconscious
retaliation against the possible loss of a hidden, forbidden desire.
In Friedkin’s adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel published two
years earlier, this retaliation manifests as violent revulsion that physi-
cally transforms the subject. The bedroom, I opine, colludes in turn
with her unconscious in the struggle by further accentuating Regan’s
revulsion, thus becoming not only a site for horror, but of horror as
well. This suggests that more than an architectural uncanny reflecting
its occupant’s psyche, the bedroom is also capable of extending from,
and enhancing, the subject’s psychodrama in order to abet in and
reinforce her retaliation. Arguably excessive, horror narratives nev-
ertheless confirm Merleau-Ponty’s argument that subject and space
are organically related, whereby disturbance to the former’s “deeper
life of consciousness” (the unconscious) can directly affect the con-
stitution, atmosphere, and identity of the latter (Merleu-Ponty: 329).
Indeed, the form and degree of haunting characterized by Regan’s
bedroom are determined to a large extent by its identification with
Regan’s unconscious desire.
H o u s i n g S e c r e t S e lv e s 113
Figure 3.2 Father Merrin’s arrival at the Macneil’s residence in the iconic scene from
The Exorcist
however, the chilly atmosphere could also imply the bedroom’s asser-
tion to undermine and/or dissuade any rescue attempts so as to
ensure that the process of the return of Regan’s repressed remains
unobstructed.
The last scene that purportedly substantiates my interpretation of
the bedroom as an independent agent animating Regan’s unconscious
occurs near the end of the film, during which Father Karras is left to
continue the exorcism by himself after Father Merrin expires from a
heart attack. In a desperate attempt to drive the demon out once and
for all, Father Karras persuades it to possess him instead; the demon
complies, after which Karras apparently charges toward the window,
defenestrates himself, and then tumbles down a long flight of stairs to
his death at the street below. Of the film’s several father figures, Karras
is perhaps the most potent because he is, in Ellis Hanson’s opinion,
a “lover” who “aspires unconsciously to betray his vow of celibacy
and take the place of the absent [father], the absent Mr. Macneil”
(Hanson: 116). Grappling with a loss of faith and with indecision
about remaining in the order, Karras sees the chance of starting afresh,
this time as lover and father, when he meets Chris and learns of
Regan’s plight. The narrative subtly reveals Karras’s unstated wish in
the scene following the priest’s attempt to record the demon’s voice
but was rewarded by its vomit. Chris offers to wash and iron Karras’s
clothes, and subsequently performs these tasks in concurrence with
discussing Regan with him while he waits—a scenario redolent of a
nuclear family moment. Unsurprisingly, then, as Regan’s strongest
competition, Karras must therefore be eliminated if she is to continue
her secret, incestuous enjoyment and homoerotic fixation on Chris.
With regard to Karras’s death, it is indeed curious that many of the
“first people” who saw the film thought it was the demon that pushed
Karras out the window (Hanson: 113).16 With its medium close-up
tracking shot that aligns Karras’s perspective with the audience’s, this
particular scene can equally suggest the priest’s suicide or coercion by
an unseen force to kill himself.17 This ambiguity is further enhanced
by the appearance of his mother’s apparition just before Karras’s body
is taken over by the demon. A profound source of guilt on Karras’s
part because he had abandoned his mother to die alone in a nursing
home, her appearance here could indicate, if metaphorically speaking,
a moment of faithlessness that allowed the demon’s entry into the
priest’s body. However, that this apparition appears hovering against
the window, on the other hand, could also be aligned to a conscious
force that is present in the bedroom to simultaneously induce guilt
in Karras and identify for him his final exit, which the priest duly
takes. In the end, whether it was the physical manifestation of Regan’s
120 W o m e n a n d D o m e s t i c S pa c e
I have thus far used to substitute the extimate, comes to fore when
her desire for her object cause is threatened with erasure. The subject,
prevented “from becoming whole” (Copjec: 59) as a result, instanti-
ates the self’s connection to otherness via the space of her bedroom
to become “a complete body [ . . . ] an almost exact double of [the
self], except for the fact that this double is endowed with the object”
(Copjec: 60). Accordingly, Regan’s self is retained but has merged
with her other to culminate in extimity, a configuration identical to
the self except for the fact that it also implicates the other. In my view,
the physical transformation Regan undergoes metaphorically asserts
her identification with her other that is endowed with her object cause
of desire; that her alteration grows increasingly grotesque is because
this object cause involves a desire that is highly taboo and distinctly
transgressive.
As with subjectivity, architecture too has this remarkable capac-
ity to be both what it is and what it is not. The notion of a
building presupposes measurements and functionality—the “self” of
architecture—and ambiguity inspiring differences in its interpretation
and deployment should altogether be discouraged. In saying this, I am
not suggesting that the architecture’s measurements and utility are
unclear (for there are also safety issues with regard to the former):
take the labyrinth, which features in Deleuze’s formulation of the pli,
for example. While it clearly has parameters, they are unknowable to
someone trapped in it because he will be unable to gauge especially its
depth in order to conjecture how large it may be or how far it goes.
Deleuze relates unambiguous architecture to an ontology of stasis,
whereby the building is transfixed in perpetual sameness and actu-
ally contradicts the ontological position of the subject it is meant to
serve, reflect, and extend. As James Williams explicates, difference as
ontology is not something observed “between individuals, but a con-
dition of the existence of any individual.” Accordingly, while “space
is divided following oppositions between identities and distinctions
between concepts (inside/outside; figure/ground) . . . space is [also]
given by a distribution of movements and intensities (the site is more
limited/dense here, less here)” (Williams: 209).19 Hence, while we
understand any given space, like architecture, as units of measurement
(how far, wide, big, and so forth, it is), this space is also apprehended
in terms of what cannot be quantified, such as its affective qual-
ity and psychological implication (how “much”). Deleuze contends
that although the former does presuppose the latter to some extent
(a cramp office is often less pleasant to work in than a spacious one), it
often also mutes the intensity of the latter (an office space is primarily
H o u s i n g S e c r e t S e lv e s 123
The event, restless inhabitants of this house, is that which neither the
material nor the immaterial, neither the ground nor upper apartment,
can entirely be accounted for. The event wanders about, ghost-like,
ungraspable, in-between floors, surveying the flexible membrane that
has been developed by Deleuze and Leibniz.
(Frichot: 66)20
and far, and so forth, have no clear distinction, but are reconstituted
as movements: “The outside is not a fixed limit but a moving mat-
ter animated by peristaltic movement, fold and folding that together
make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside, but
precisely the inside of the outside” (Deleuze 1988: 96–97). What is
“outside,” in this regard, is a spatial determinant of inside-ness and
is thus already inside, the outside of the inside (and vice versa). This
is what Deleuze terms as “fold,” each of which is the unfolding of
the previous fold, and the folding of the next, thereby establishing an
endless continuum that transforms space into an event. An individual
located within the fold will potentially experience a shift in her sub-
jectivity as well; for instance, her alter-ego would gradually emerge
to “[assume] an independent status . . . . It is as if the relations of the
outside folded back to create a doubling, allow a relation to one-
self to emerge, and constitute an inside which is hollowed out and
develops its own unique dimension” (Deleuze 1988: 100). In other
words, as the result of habitation, the subject becomes “a fold within
a fold” (Deleuze 1991: 231), implying that the pli’s disruption of
spatial (outside/inside) binary will also directly subvert the self/other
binary constituting the subject by turning the self inside out (“hol-
lowed out”) and releasing the other to thereafter develop a unique
expression of subjectivity that engages both self and other. Clearly,
Deleuze’s notion of the pli hints at space’s influence on subject and
not the other way round; the pli has the potential to encourage the
articulation of what has otherwise been disavowed or repressed by the
subject, and in the process, propels the subject’s transformation into a
configuration that remains more or less unchanged from before except
that it now incorporates otherness. The pli, in other words, is able to
compel the subject’s transformation into an extimate.
As a genre known for expressing exaggeration, horror is especially
effective in exposing the spatial event of the pli and its impact on the
subject in clear, arresting (and in film, graphic) terms. In The Exor-
cist, Regan’s bedroom, for example, can be interpreted in this light,
While the bedroom obviously has coordinates that distinguish its space
from the rest of the house, that it also refuses containment by these
coordinates and their determination to affect the stability of the entire
household directly identifies it as a fold (this point also reinforces the
argument I posed earlier with regard to the space of the house as inde-
terminate in function). From the moment Regan becomes possessed,
attention to the house is focused entirely on the bedroom, while the
rest of its space is relegated to mere background bracing itself in ten-
sion of the event occurring there. Such is the intensity of the pli that
H o u s i n g S e c r e t S e lv e s 125
Repulsion
Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, considered a masterpiece of psychologi-
cal horror by many scholars and enthusiasts of the genre, is the story
of a young Belgian immigrant, Carol, who slowly dissolves into mad-
ness when left alone in her apartment, killing two men in the process
and is subsequently reduced to a catatonic state in the end. The film’s
layered narrative has, unsurprisingly, prompted much discussion, and
one constant in almost all of them is the focus on her apartment. This
site is integral to the narrative, as its worsening condition is meant
H o u s i n g S e c r e t S e lv e s 127
a pli) that, when coupled with her own unstable condition, precipitate
the emergence of her extimate.24
A bit more clarification on what Deleuze means by intensity, a char-
acteristic integral to the fold because of its association with depth,
is required in order to demonstrate precisely how the apartment in
Repulsion functions as a pli. Manuel Delanda rightly points out that
Deleuze derives his notions of extensive and intensive space from
thermodynamics, which defines such categories of space in terms of
“magnitude or quantities (which can then be used to define space)”
(Delanda: 80). Accordingly, extensive space is additive because it
can be quantified, (adding more floors will make a building taller,
increase story divisions, etc.), whereas intensive space, Deleuze con-
tends, cannot be measured without changing its nature. As such, to
measure intensive space requires a radical alteration to its state that
will inevitably reduce it, in the process, to merely a semblance of the
original. That we tend to be more familiar with extensive space (con-
sider, for instance, “the diversity of extension and figure” [Flaxman:
182]), in Deleuze’s assessment, is partly due to the extent of alter-
ation performed on intensive space in order to measure it so much
so that this space is no longer clearly determinable. A primary exam-
ple of intensive space Deleuze identifies from his study of artworks is
depth, which according to him, is also the fundamental premise on
which we recognize space. Depth is what gives an object its present
definition while also enshrouding it partly in an enigma that connects
it to “Memory and the past . . . . This synthesis of depth which endows
the object with its shadow, but makes it emerge from the shadow,
bears witness to the furthest past and to the coexistence of the past
with the present” (Deleuze 1997: 230). As a result of “relation to
its own depth” (Deleuze 1997: 229), each object accrues a “unique
dimension” (Deleuze 1988: 101) that enables its transcendence from
temporality.
Despite the pervasiveness of depth, however, it often goes unrec-
ognized because of its subsumption by “the law of figure and ground”
(Deleuze 1997: 229) of extensive space that recasts depth as distance
and size instead. But like the fantasy that attempts to conceal the real
according to Lacan, the law of figure and ground is necessarily unsta-
ble and its attempt to recast intensive space to extensive space only
serves to articulate the former more resonantly.25 As Deleuze posits,
No doubt the high and the low, the right and the left, the figure and
the ground are individuating factors which trace rises and falls, cur-
rents and descents in extensity. However, since they take place within an
H o u s i n g S e c r e t S e lv e s 129
The passage above provides another reason for intensive space’s mis-
recognition; as “pure implex,” intensive space is necessarily intricate
and complex, thus complicating any direct means to apprehend it.
To do this without radically affecting its property would require a dif-
ferent kind of identification with space, one that does not “[capture]
only the real’s conformity with possible experience,” but that “deals
with the reality of the real insofar as it is thought” (Deleuze 1997: 68).
In other words, to experience the “reality of the real” characterizing
intensive space, we must rethink space as perception and sensation
rather than as measurement. Here, what Deleuze repeatedly states
about depth in Difference and Repetition to reinforce the link between
depth and intensive space—that is, the principle that “depth is simul-
taneously the imperceptible and that which can only be perceived”—is
equally applicable to intensity, which “is simultaneously the impercep-
tible and that which can be sensed” (Deleuze 1997: 230–31). The
imprecision of such means of apprehension is, in fact, compatible with
the nature of depth that is partly always hidden, thus directly implicat-
ing this space with a degree of uncertainty. Based on the explication
above, it can be concluded that the fold is a kind of intensive space
capable of generating multiple intensities, and by extension, varying
sensations and perceptions. In this regard, it is not merely how the
pli is perceived or sensed that makes it intriguing, but also the kinds
of perceptions and sensations it generates that consequently affect us.
With this point in mind, I will proceed with my analysis of Repulsion.
Housing Depth
With such an unmistakable antipathy toward the exterior world, it
is only a matter of time before the difficulty of sustaining her interior
H o u s i n g S e c r e t S e lv e s 133
space becomes too overwhelming for Carol, forcing her to retreat into
her apartment, which she then barricades in order to prevent the exte-
rior world from invading her space further. Here, undisturbed except
for the two occasions when her monadic world is breached, Carol’s
psyche will slowly dissolve as her consciousness is replaced by delusions
and hallucinations that transform her otherwise cramped apartment
into a spacious, boundless domain (Figure 3.3). In actual fact, how-
ever, the situation of her apartment is also increasingly deteriorating
in tandem with its occupant’s disintegration. While the common ten-
dency in scholarship is to view the state of the apartment as more or
less the effect of Carol’s condition, and correspondingly, to consider
the significance of lived space only after she has barricaded herself in
it, when the narrative is carefully considered, it will be evident that
even before this episode, the apartment has already been affecting her
at an unconscious level, thus indirectly precipitating her mental col-
lapse, and will continue to affect her after her self-incarceration until
the process of discharging her repressed is complete. It is in this regard
that the apartment, in my view, functions as a pli that unfolds Carol’s
subjectivity inside out, collapsing her self and other into a single con-
tinuum to consolidate her extimate. Unlike Regan, however, whose
extimate is defined by her inadmissible desire for her mother, Carol’s is
without any clear definition, and thus remains unreadable to the end.
Indeed, the first clear indication of Carol’s psychic fracture actu-
ally takes place in the apartment, or more specifically, in her bedroom.
As I have already analyzed this episode elsewhere,28 this chapter will
134 W o m e n a n d D o m e s t i c S pa c e
Figure 3.4 Carried by Michael, a catatonic Carol leaves her apartment for the last
time in Repulsion
hermetically sealed within her psyche (“a reality of the real insofar as
it is thought” [Deleuze 1997: 68]), where it will be safe and impen-
etrable. There is thus no more need for the rest of her body, which
has brought her only anxiety and dread, and thus can be relinquished.
Tellingly, the film’s final scene will show Michael carrying Carol out of
the apartment, possibly for the last time (Figure 3.4). With its oper-
ation of folding completed and arguably successful, the house is no
longer required, and can therefore take its final leave of Carol.
Chapter Conclusion
It is likely because the horror genre trades on realizing the improb-
able that its intense symbology—variously exaggerated, grotesque,
obscene, and fantastical—is capable of bearing meanings associated
with our deepest, often inadmissible, apprehensions, whether at an
individual or a collective level. As critic Brigitte Cherry asserts, hor-
ror can be “easily adaptable at addressing a range of ideological
issues. Horror films invariably reflect the social and political anxi-
eties of the cultural moment” (Cherry 210). Horror narratives, to
rephrase Cherry, function as allegories of the contemporary, and if
we look beyond their monsters and ghosts, gore and violence, and
if we are attentive enough, we will discover there are other concerns
being addressed in them that reflect social and political issues of their
historical and cultural moments. As such, in my conclusion, I want
140 W o m e n a n d D o m e s t i c S pa c e
to briefly consider one such issue that both The Exorcist and Repul-
sion, when viewed allegorically, are potentially addressing. It relates to
modern living and is specifically concerned with private property.
Lewis and Cho’s sociological essay develops the concept of the dirty
home as an alternative to private property. Although they disagree
with Adorno’s postulation that the homeless individual exemplifies
anti-private property most distinctively, their position related to pri-
vate property essentially accords with that of the German philosopher,
who views its logic as a kind of entrapment related to modern liv-
ing. According to Adorno, where once the home denoted intimacy, in
the modern (and I would add, even postmodern) era, it is a “[living-
case] manufactured by experts for philistines, or factory sites that have
strayed into the consumption sphere, devoid of all relation to the
occupant” (Adorno 2005: 38). This circumstance, as Adorno sees it,
represents the dilemma of private property within capitalist systems,
where
this space, she can enjoy the “secrecy” underscoring her “I” (Levinas:
156). Imploded into the monadic world of her thought, she has
become truly nomadic and has cut all ties with the bourgeois world
and its imperative for private property, as symbolized by her exit from
the house for the last time.
In The Exorcist, that Regan and her mother demonstrate little con-
nection to either their house or its objects typifies the lack of value
they hold for the two of them, a thoroughly bourgeois couple. Nev-
ertheless, as property privately owned by Chris, the house is also
an expression of her cultural and economic status, and hence serves
an important purpose for her. Thus, when an intruder attempts to
forcefully take over the house, Chris must retaliate by enlisting the
assistance of one of the most prominent supporters of private prop-
erty, the Catholic Church (who believes that private property is a
natural right), to help drive out the intruder. In the end, although
mother and daughter are shown packing up the house and leaving for
Europe, that Chris’s servants are left to look after it suggests an even-
tual return. Unlike Carol, they are not leaving their house for good,
but leaving for other capitalist pursuits, after which they will return
to their “natural existence” (Levinas: 156) as private owners of their
property to continue the enjoyment of their secret selves.
Chapter 4
Housing Melancholia:
A l e j a n d r o A m e n á b a r ’s
T h e O t h e r s a n d J ua n
A . B ay o n a’s T h e O r p h a n a g e
W hat is, for me, distinctive about the two narratives considered in
this chapter is the fact that both illuminate the profound connec-
tion between haunting, mourning, and architecture in comparable
yet dissimilar ways. While The Others (2001) and The Orphanage
(El Orfanato, 2007) contextualize haunting differently,1 the two
films nevertheless underscore how architecture can embody perpetual
mourning, thus disavowing loss and by extension, historical oblivion.
Like Beloved, both films also complicate the idea of the “haunted”
house by insinuating architecture as haunting and correspond with
Julian Wolfreys’s view that:
The Others
There are clear parallels between The Others and Beloved in terms of
their protagonists’ relationship with lived space. In both, the traumatic
memory unclaimed by the subject is projected onto the house, which
thereafter becomes the repository for her unspeakable that she mis-
recognizes as threat. The apprehension, frustration, and helplessness
she experiences suggest a tensed affinity between subject and space;
instead of a haven, the house has become an enemy and is therefore
unsafe from the subject’s viewpoint. Yet, evacuation is not an alterna-
tive: Sethe, because 124 is her property and, ironically, the only safe
place she knows; and Grace, because she is awaiting her husband’s
return from war. The Others is set against the aftermath of World War
I. As Grace and her children wait while sequestered away in a remote
country house in Jersey, a British Crown Dependency, the combina-
tion of loneliness, isolation, and fear eventually becomes too much
for her already troubled mind, leading to her acts of infanticide and
suicide. But the real reason why Grace cannot leave is because she
is dead, although along with the audience, she and her children will
not know this until near the end of the film.3 The narrative cleverly
disguises this revelation and manipulates the audience into believing
that something in the house is haunting the family in order to sustain
an eerie atmosphere and to build tension. For example, in the only
episode where Grace attempts to leave the house to seek help from
the village priest, her path is overcome by fog and her husband sud-
denly reappears, as if he has finally returned, thus compelling her to
abandon her journey. Such a “natural” narrative development is one
way in which the text prevents Grace and the audience from arriving
too soon at the truth.
Grace’s inability to leave her haunt, in fact, directly relates to my
postulation that the house is her existential double. In Gothic litera-
ture, despite the double’s oppositional stance against its prototype,4
the two are nevertheless profoundly intertwined and completely
dependent on each other for existence. Grace, as such, cannot leave
her house because the very fact of her being is contingent to her spa-
tial occupation since she can have no presence as ghost unless she
identifies with a specific place. Due to trauma, however, Grace will
148 W o m e n a n d D o m e s t i c S pa c e
not only be unable to know this for much of the film, but will also
view her house with antagonism, thus prompting her constant anxiety
over her children’s safety. Certain that unless she polices the house vig-
ilantly, it will somehow harm Anne and Nicholas, either by physically
injuring their bodies (because they both suffer from acute photosen-
sitivity, whereby contact with sunlight can be fatal) or by corrupting
their minds (by allowing alien ideologies to enter and influence them,
a family of devout Catholics). Such a situation is characteristic of
doppelgänger narratives, in which the double’s significance as threat
fundamentally reflects the prototypical subject’s unconscious moti-
vation to externalize what she cannot admit by inscribing it onto
an other. In Grace’s case, the stake placed on this process of exter-
nalization is especially acute because she is her children’s killer and
therefore their ultimate threat. In reading the house as a Gothic dou-
ble with regard to The Others, this study offers yet another perspective
on the symbiotic relationship between subject and domestic space
that extends from my analysis of Beloved and departs from scholar-
ship’s familiar consideration of this motif only when it is configured in
human or human-like terms.
Grace’s presentiment around the house that impels her perpet-
ual patrol is fundamentally reflective of her struggle with impending
insanity, against which she must vigilantly guard lest it overwhelms and
causes her to perform unspeakable acts. This has, of course, already
happened, but in her state of trauma, it remains, as Caruth asserts,
an unclaimed event for Grace, who has instead psychically transferred
the threat she poses to her children to the house in order to reassert
her position as the good, loving mother who will do anything to pro-
tect her children, and to deny the fact that they are all dead. Yet, the
unrelenting surveillance she exacts over the house indicates a degree
of desperation as well, as if there a part of her that “knows” and
must therefore be repressed even more intensely. Notably, that the
film is set in a disproportionately large country house (“fifteen dif-
ferent keys for all of the fifty doors, depending on which part of the
house you are in at the time”) for a family of four is possibly a cal-
culated directorial decision precisely to emphasize her unremitting
but ultimately hopeless endeavor. Recurring long shots that visually
juxtapose the expansiveness of the house against Grace’s smallness
further reinforce this view. As the “haunting” intensifies, the house’s
vastness will increasingly undermine Grace’s assertion of authority by
engaging her in a game of hide-and-seek, whereby her attempts to
locate the source of haunting (actually the new, living occupants of
the house) are consistently thwarted. In one episode, for example,
Housing Melancholia 149
the self and its collapse into trauma” (Ng 2008: 8, emphasis in the
original). Its function, in other words, is to ironically safeguard its
occupant until such time when she learns of her true circumstance,
after which she will integrate herself with it to arrive at transcendence.
It is this quality of protectiveness that also renders the concept
of the uncanny inadequate in analyzing the film’s house. Instead,
I find Freud’s notion of melancholia more appropriate because of
its affiliation with trauma and by extension, its correspondence with
the double. I will here briefly introduce this concept before apply-
ing it to my analysis of The Others. First introduced in the seminal
essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), melancholia, according
to Freud, is the condition of mourning that becomes indefinite and
gradually affects the psychic life of the subject as his ego begins to
experience “inhibition and circumscription” due to “exclusive devo-
tion to its mourning, which leaves nothing over for other purposes or
other interest” (Freud 1917: 153). This occurs because the subject is
unable to relinquish the object-love, or “what [not whom] it is he has
lost” (Freud 1917: 155, emphasis in the original). This condition is
unconscious, and therefore unrecognized by the subject, but as with
all psychic damages, there will be manifest symptoms indicating its
presence. One of the more distinctive is the tendency for self-reproach
exhibited by the subject over matters that reinforce his ties to the
object-love. This is because the subject’s ego has “established an iden-
tification . . . with the abandoned object,” and has transformed “the
loss of the object . . . into a loss in the ego [,] and the conflict between
the ego and the loved person . . . into a cleavage between the criticiz-
ing faculty of the ego and the ego as altered by the identification”
(Freud 1917: 159). In other words, in identifying with the object-
love, the ego has also incorporated the object-love’s identity, which
is then turned against itself and expressed as (self)-criticism. Impor-
tantly, however, as the adjective “abandoned” implies, melancholia
is profoundly narcissistic because it is the ego’s assertion of self-
preservation; by incorporating the object-love into itself, the ego’s
fundamental aim is to prevent a part of itself from becoming lost. But
an inevitable result is the rupturing of the subject’s psyche because
his ego has been “complicated by the conflict of ambivalence” (Freud
1917: 167): the ego is now caught in a tug-of-war between love and
hate as it simultaneously attempts to detach from, while preserving,
his libidinal object-love. In this regard, what is indirectly revealed in
the act of self-reproach is simultaneously an unconscious reaffirma-
tion of longing for, and an inadmissible desire to also separate from,
the object-love that has become firmly lodged within his ego.
Housing Melancholia 151
following scene, which takes place in the kitchen, where a clearly dis-
traught Grace, attended by one of her new servants, Mrs. Mills, tries
to rationalize the incident. With her face framed in medium close-
up/close-up and high-angled shots, the camera respectively conveys
her confusion and diminishment by the house. The formal techniques
throughout may be simple, but they not only effectively maintain
the narrative’s secret, but succeed in reinforcing at the same time
what I see is a melancholy dialectic operating in the text: that is, by
inscribing haunting onto her double, Grace is in fact unconsciously
resignifying absence as presence and as such is ironically encouraging
the revelation of what she is denying.
their situation. Like The Exorcist and Repulsion, The Others also locates
both the origin of and resolution to horror in the bedroom (the
children’s), which functions as pli that folds the subject, this time,
outside-in (as opposed to the other two narratives, whose pli folds the
subject inside-out). Here, the trauma/melancholia that had set within
Grace’s unconscious but subsequently externalized onto architecture
to effect disavowal will be reverted to, or folded back into, her. Or,
as Elisabeth Bronfen puts it, in this scene, “Grace is reborn as the
subject of her traumatic story” (Bronfen: 22). Thereafter, Grace will
reappraise her relationship with the house and finally recognize the
intimate dialectic between them. Vowing that “no one can ever make
us leave this house” in the film’s closing scene, Grace thereby declares
not just solidarity, but identification as well with the house. As the
camera zooms away from the window framing Grace and her chil-
dren, who slowly vanish into the dark surrounding them, we hear the
fading echoes of their voices in unison declaring, “this house is ours”
(Figure 4.2).
With the narrative resolved, however, only the house’s function to
sustain the family’s continuity will remain. Just as Grace has finally
consolidated her traumatic experience and integrated it into her ego,
she has also surmounted her melancholia to achieve transcendence
to an elsewhere. But this transcendence, in my view, is not effected
despite her melancholia, but because of it. In other words, like trauma
is the experience that both locates the subject in stasis and, when
Figure 4.2 The ghostly mother and children in the closing scene of The Others
Housing Melancholia 155
she relates to the house. That Grace and her children remain located
within the house despite their transcendence implies, however, that
transcendence does not mean liberation from melancholia; instead,
melancholia is resignified as the reason for their existence henceforth
so that even though they are now absent, they will continue to sub-
sist as presence, thus opening themselves up to both meaning and
nonmeaning.
In his essay on the ruins of war in Northern Cyprus, anthropologist
Yael Navaro-Yashin notes the extent of melancholia invested in mate-
rial objects by subjects living in/among such conditions and concludes
with the following meditation:
Melancholy is the loss of self to the self, the loss of a sense of a self as
clean and pure. This is a feeling of an abjected self, of the abject inside
the self, of subjectivized or interiorized abject to the point where the
abject is normalized and no longer recognized as such. Melancholia,
then, is both interior and exterior. It refers to subjectivity and the world
of objects at one and the same time.
(Navaro-Yashin: 17)
More precisely, I want to discuss how the film “constructs” and inserts
trauma into its overall narrative structure. By specifically analyzing the
link between the film’s introduction and conclusion, I argue that it
implies either a narrative looping that corresponds with the cyclical
nature of trauma or an originary narrative that locates trauma as its
beginning from which the rest of the narrative then develops and tran-
scends. While these two interpretations lead to different conclusions
with regard to how I interpret the film, they nevertheless demon-
strate that trauma is more than just its theme, but is also a mechanism
incorporated into its narrative structure.
It is possible, on the one hand, to interpret this looping as sta-
sis, which, as trauma studies indicate, reveals the subject’s inability to
organize a narrative around her subjectivity.13 In other words, as a
result of trauma, the subject is now locked in an originary moment
she can neither relinquish nor remember, and is thereby doomed to
keep repeating this moment. Until and unless she is unstuck, not only
will her subjectivity remain undeveloped, but it will also be incoherent
because the corresponding narrative that necessarily gives it definition
has been jeopardized. In The Others, this narrative breakdown can be
inferred from its opening sequence: a voice-over from Grace saying,
“Now children, are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin,”14 is fol-
lowed by the opening credits framed against the backdrop of pages
from what is apparently a children’s book depicting various scenes,
drawn in pencil sketches, resembling those in the film. When relating
these two extra-diegetic elements to the narrative proper, they suggest
a twice-told tale—thus the looping effect that mimics the mechanism
of trauma. Because they are already dead, Grace and her children
not only have forfeited the narrative/subjectivity they possessed in
life, but have no recourse to more narrative or subjective develop-
ment henceforth as well. The only narrative with which they are left is
their traumatic story, which implicates them in a loop, thereby doom-
ing them to a perpetual retelling. The film’s ending, as such, would
directly return us to the beginning, where Grace will once again ask us
if we are sitting comfortably before she begins her story, and ad infini-
tum. On the other hand, the film’s opening sequence could also be
read as indicative of an originary tale. This interpretation finds war-
ranty especially in the first drawing and the voice-over during the
opening credits of Grace relating the story of creation reminiscent
of the Book of Genesis. The drawing shows The Garden of Eden
presided over by two children, who are obviously Anne and Nicholas.
The prominence of the children in the artwork is evident in their
position at the foreground and their size, which constitutes half the
Housing Melancholia 159
sketch. Taken together, both the voice-over and the artwork seem to
function as subtext for the unfolding of another narrative, which is
evidenced by the pencil sketches that follow thereafter, all of which
depicting scenes from the film that involve the children. According
to this second perspective, The Others would then be the originary
story of how Grace and her children became a new creation residing
in an elsewhere that constitutes their Garden of Eden. In this sense,
although it is still a story of how they came to “be,” the narrative is
no longer structured as a loop, but is instead suggestive of a point of
departure for succeeding stories to which we are, however, no longer
privy.
I will return to the elsewhere in The Others in the chapter conclu-
sion, where it will be compared to the elsewhere in The Orphanage.
This will make obvious that while Grace and her children achieve
transcendence, the significance of their elsewhere, from a (Christian)
theological perspective, is decidedly ambiguous, as it could represent
either purgatory or eternal damnation, both of which, by extension,
respectively correspond with the two interpretations (liberation vs.
stasis) of the film’s narrative structure discussed earlier.
The Orphanage
Along with The Others, The Orphanage is considered one of Spain’s
most successful film productions of all time in terms of financial
returns and international recognition. It won seven Goya Awards and
brought immediate fame to its then unknown director, Juan Antonio
Bayona. Although in a sense a more conventional ghost story than
The Others insofar that The Orphanage does not involve a narrative
twist requiring certain information be withheld from the audience
until the end of the film,15 when comparing the two films, several
similarities are noticeable. Like Amenábar’s text, The Orphanage also
relies on atmosphere and identification with the principal character,
rather than gore and shock tactics, for its affective power. Both films
revolve around mothers fearful of losing their children, and in this
regard, indirectly imply the operation of melancholia. Finally, like The
Others, in which melancholia is redirected to, and becomes embodied
by, a house, The Orphanage also features a large house whose haunt-
ing metaphorically reflects a relentless grief linked to a repudiation of
loss. However, while melancholia is primarily concentrated on Grace
and clarified through her relationship with the house in The Others, its
representation is more complex in Bayona’s film because there are at
least two operations of melancholia simultaneously maintained in the
160 W o m e n a n d D o m e s t i c S pa c e
appearing so that she can speak with them. Her plan works, and Laura
is directed to a hidden basement where she will find her son’s corpse.
Simõn had somehow fallen into this place, and unable to escape had
slowly succumbed to death. It is from this point onwards that the nar-
rative grows increasingly surreal, as reality slowly suspends and gives
way to a fantasy of reconciliation whereby Laura, who commits suicide
due to extreme grief, is suddenly reunited with her son and the other
children again, in a place that is at once the orphanage and elsewhere.
The first movement of my reading of The Orphanage concerns
Laura’s initial melancholia; admittedly, this seems to detract from
my focus on space for this study, but as I will demonstrate, Laura’s
originary loss is also related to the house. I argue that despite the
film’s representation of Laura’s palpable experience of loss and ensu-
ing depression as a result of Simõn’s disappearance, it is, in fact, an
earlier loss she experienced when she became adopted that constitutes
her melancholia. In returning almost three decades later to this build-
ing with the hope of reviving its original function, Laura, I argue,
is indirectly articulating a tacit disavowal of loss. For my argument,
I turn to the psychoanalytical work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria
Torok, whose notions of introjection and incorporation (their pre-
ferred terms to mourning and melancholia) address the modulations
of grief in more complex ways than Freud’s binaristic concepts. Fol-
lowing this, I next turn to the house and its function as melancholy
object. By performing a close reading of the film’s formal techniques,
I demonstrate how the house, figuratively via the mechanism of haunt-
ing, effects the work of melancholia to disavow loss, or absence,
of the object-love comprising five murdered children. That this loss
involves unwanted children and was perpetrated by a crime, moreover,
also implicate questions of justice and memorialization, the latter of
which is achieved in one of the film’s closing scenes. More impor-
tantly, however, is the discussion of how Laura must confront the
house’s melancholia in order to overcome her own loss. Framing
Kevin Herrington’s formulation of liminal space, which he develops
from Foucault, against Iris Marion Young’s view of homemaking, to
read the narrative, I demonstrate how Laura’s attempt to commu-
nicate with the children’s ghosts by reorienting the interior of the
house precisely erases the present/past, reality/unreality, us/them
boundaries necessary to overcome grief.
The final part of my treatment of The Orphanage concentrates on
the sequence of events that begins with Laura’s discovery of Simõn’s
body in the basement and concludes with mother and son, along with
the other children, having allegedly transcended to a place that is both
162 W o m e n a n d D o m e s t i c S pa c e
the orphanage and elsewhere (I will briefly consider the closing scene
as well). My discussion will first address the mixed critical responses
with regard to the ethical tenor expressed in the film’s surreal resolu-
tion, before drawing them to a consolidation from which I will then
establish my own position, which necessarily involves the operation of
melancholia. Here, Kristeva’s model of melancholia, which I briefly
mentioned in my discussion of The Orphans, will be especially relevant
to warrant my case.
the wants of the original oral vacancy are remedied by being turned into
verbal relationships with the speaking community at large. Introjecting
a desire, a grief, a situation means channeling them through language
into a communion of empty mouths . . . . Since language acts and makes
up for absence by representing, by giving figurative shape to presence,
it can only be comprehended or shared in a “community of empty
mouths”.
(Abraham and Torok 1972/1994: 128)
Haunting as Melancholia
At the start of this chapter, I argued that the haunted house cannot
be appreciated separately from the specters inhabiting it because the
event of haunting necessarily presupposes architecture and apparition
as a single, symbiotic unit. In the case of The Orphanage, this relation-
ship, according to my interpretation, is further complicated by the
house’s embodiment of melancholia. Hence, for the purpose of facili-
tating clarity in my treatment of the narrative, I will discuss haunting
more or less independently from the house, which I will focus only
in the following section. It is not possible to completely disassoci-
ate the two, of course, and reference to the house when discussing
haunting (and vice versa) will be inevitable. For this section, my main
consideration is to establish a link between haunting and melancholia,
166 W o m e n a n d D o m e s t i c S pa c e
by itself are scant, and when they do occur, they often function as
merely establishing shots that invite no nuanced perspectives of the
building. The atmosphere, vital to any horror story,20 and in which
the film excels, is sustained mainly through (extra)diegetic compo-
nents like lighting and sound. For example, in the scene where Laura
is confronted by a mysterious masked child, she is framed against a
strongly lit background, as opposed to the child’s significantly darker
one, thereby underscoring their contrastive positions and the insidious
implication borne by the latter (Figure 4.3).
Notwithstanding their infrequency, scenes that implicate both
house and haunting together to suggest their intersection are nev-
ertheless forthcoming. The narrative, for example, is occasionally
punctuated by medium shots depicting an unoccupied part of the
house, such as a corridor or the stairway, that are usually combined
with either a slowly panning or tracking point-of-view shot to suggest
an animate, but unseen, entity. There are also two instances in the nar-
rative that deploy a moderately long take to frame an otherwise empty
playground, but whose swing and seesaw manifest volition. An even
more interesting example is the episode where Aurora is psychically
surveying the house in an attempt to locate the source of haunt-
ing. Aided by modern technology, her movements are tracked by
a series of infrared, close-circuit television cameras located through-
out the premise and linked to a central control system monitored
by her team. Indeed, the images registered by these cameras are a
170 W o m e n a n d D o m e s t i c S pa c e
On one end of the debate is, for instance, Paul Julian Smith’s obser-
vation that “El Orfanato is thus skeptical of a nostalgia for childhood
that can leave no legacy to the future and takes care to open a space
for reflection on the moral dangers of confusing fantasy and reality”
(Smith: 75). On the other end is Sage Leslie-McCarthy’s considera-
tion, whereby she argues that “Laura’s choice to ultimately give up her
life to be with these ‘othered’ children can be seen as [a] redemptive
act . . . . Acknowledging what has happened to them, she sacrifices her-
self to provide the children with the love and care they did not receive
in life” (Leslie-McCarthy: 11).
Both views are, of course, equally valid, but I am less inclined
toward Smith’s otherwise persuasive observation as it is likely influ-
enced by bias against the horror genre’s unmitigated promotion of
disillusionment with little promise of redemption (implied by his con-
stant use of the term “impure aesthetics”). In equating the surreal
element of this episode with “moral danger,” Smith clearly disfavors
substituting reality with fantasy as a means of coping with profound
loss. But such a position is essentially incompatible with the genre,
whose propensity for ambiguity would thus also “open a space for
reflecting” on either an alternative reality or an alternative to the reality
that we know. That The Orphanage concludes with an episode sliding
between “fantasy and reality” is precisely to provoke such a reflec-
tion. Hence, I am more sympathetic to Leslie-McCarthy’s assessment,
which ascribes a redemptive closure to the film that ennobles Laura’s
sorrow and underscores its narrative with transcendent meaning. Hav-
ing said this, however, I am also aware of the limitation related to
her perspective as there are considerable clues throughout the film
that potentially vitiate it as well. Herein again is an example of the
genre’s entrenched ambiguity that renders any interpretive position
questionable.
Leslie-McCarthy’s interpretation would be doubtful if we consider
the possibility that Laura has been a victim not only of grief but of
malicious ghosts as well, perhaps due to envy of Simõn’s relation-
ship with his mother. Indeed, there are a number of hints in the
film pointing to such a perspective: for example, why did the chil-
dren lead Simõn to his adoption and medical documents, which Laura
has secretly kept under lock and key, thus precipitating an argument
between them that was never adequately resolved even at the time
of his disappearance? And why did they neither warn Simõn about
the basement nor prevent his accident, since they are supposedly
his friends? Did they, then, indirectly murder him, like they possi-
bly did Tomas, Benigna’s son? Then, there is the question of the
176 W o m e n a n d D o m e s t i c S pa c e
mysterious child who attacked Laura and trapped her in the bath-
room to obstruct her search for Simõn. And why effectuate such an
elaborate scheme months later, as if toying with her (here, the game
analogy takes on a decidedly darker meaning), only to lead her to
Simõn’s corpse? Is it a strategy to exhaust her to breaking point, so
that they can subject her to their selfish desire and finally possess
her? These disquieting insinuations invariably subtract any redemptive
possibility from the film’s climactic episode because it would mean
that the children have succeeded in their nefarious scheme, and
Laura is now forever their victim. Read in this light, Smith’s reser-
vation about the possibility of affirmative ethics in fantasy is doubly
convincing.
Where Leslie-McCarthy’s argument gains credence, in my view,
is when it is framed alongside Kristeva’s postulation concerning
melancholia as a potential catalyst that encourages subjective transcen-
dence. In fact, what Kristeva says about the depressed melancholic
seems to resonate remarkably with Leslie-McCarthy’s reading of
Laura’s situation in the film’s final sequence. As Kristeva notes,
For such narcissistic depressed persons, sadness is really the sole object;
more precisely it is a substitute object they become attached to, and
object they tame and cherish for lack of another. In such a case, suicide
is not a disguised act of war but a merging with sadness and, beyond it,
with that impossible love, never reached, always elsewhere, such as the
promise of nothingness, of death.
(Kristeva 1989: 12–13)
Chapter Conclusion
Both The Others and The Orphanage conclude with the subject and
her child/ren arriving at an elsewhere, which nevertheless remains
ensconced within the house. However, here is where the similarity
of the elsewhere in the films also ends; careful attention to the way
this transcendental place is represented in both narratives will reveal
a fundamental disparity—a disparity, which, moreover, is linked to
the two protagonists, as if the distinctive configuration of the else-
where to which they respectively arrive is somewhat determined by
178 W o m e n a n d D o m e s t i c S pa c e
longer exists for her (as suggested by the presence of new occupants);
but in refusing to accept death as absolute invalidation, she hence
invests the house with the task of mourning, and thus directly sets
it up as a vehicle through which she can perpetuate her permanency.
By recalibrating self-mourning into self-mourned, Grace externalizes
the act of mourning onto a third party so that she can disavow loss
again, the logic being that as long as the object “misses” her, she can
never truly be gone.
Importantly, this mechanism of double incorporation also guaran-
tees the continuity of her “subject” position, for despite her location
beyond the grave, she nevertheless still has “life” resulting from her
“phantasmic identification” with an object that is, tellingly, invulnera-
ble to death. In short, the elsewhere to which Grace arrive is the result
of encryption effected by her ego in order to keep her family “alive.”
Here, the truth of absence—the “reality, forever denied” (Abraham
and Torok 1984: 5, emphasis in the original)—is reconstituted back
as secret and buried deep within its walls to consequently encour-
age the subject’s misrecognition of herself as still existing. Abraham
and Torok assert that what is buried is “equally incapable of rising
or of disintegrating. Nothing can undo its having been consummated
or efface its memory” (Abraham and Torok 1990: 65). Accordingly,
while the act of burying recognizes the reality of loss, it also repudiates
the imposition of closure to it; as such, it is precisely by acknowledg-
ing absence that it becomes sustained, ironically, as presence. In The
Others, Grace relegates the work of mourning to the house (as else-
where) in order to effect her own burial, thus at once demonstrating
her acceptance of death and her refusal to submit to its finality. And
unlike the mechanism of doubling that projects part of the subject’s
ego onto an other, the work of encryption lodges the crypt “in the
midst of the ego” (Abraham and Torok 1990: 65) without affecting
its topography. In this regard, the elsewhere also serves as “a kind
of artificial Unconscious” (Abraham and Torok 1990: 65) extending
from, but not part of, Grace’s ego, which henceforth is “given the task
of a cemetery guard” to ensure that “[n]othing at all . . . filters into the
outside world” (Abraham and Torok 1990: 65). To this I would add
that the ego’s task, at least in Amenábar’s text, is to also ensure that
nothing from the outside world filters into the elsewhere, for this is
potentially what Grace is intimating when she vows that “no one can
ever make us leave this house” in the end.
The preceding paragraphs’ elucidation of the elsewhere’s signif-
icance in The Others is, to an extent, equally applicable to The
Orphanage. After all, it is arguable that the final episode in the latter
Housing Melancholia 181
the place of the limit between reality (the world with its geographic and
historical networks) and utopia. It reveals the work of neutralization in
utopic practice. Utopia is not only a distant country on the edge of the
world; it is also the Other World, the world as “other,” and the “other”
as the world. Utopia is the reverse image of this world, its photographic
negative. Utopia is thus the product of a process by which a specific
system complete with spatial and temporal coordinates is changed into
another system with its own coordinates, structures and grammatical
rules. This limit is thus an index and zero-point: it is also the bridge to
the “other.”
(Marin: 242)
of our subjectivity, for only then can we cross over and identify with
its “otherness.” And what is the elsewhere in The Orphanage—a place
adjacent to reality like a different country that simultaneously lies on
the edge of our world and serves as its photographic negative; is an
other world and also an “ ‘other’ as the world,” which runs on a system
parallel to ours and yet has its distinctive coordinates, structures, and
grammatical rules (consider the nonlanguage of melancholic incorpo-
ration); and, in the final analysis, is a world at the limit, or zero-point,
of our imagination to which we nevertheless persistently turn in order
to dream of the “other”—what is this elsewhere, if not utopia?
Conclusion
for the protagonist, Joy, against her battle with depression. More than
just lived space, her house and its contents acquire, in a sense, a surplus
function of helping Joy remain grounded in reality and staying con-
nected with the world when her damaged psyche is no longer able to
manage such coping strategies. In this regard, I find James Krasner’s
view on the tactility of homes especially relevant to my analysis of
Galloway’s novel, and will duly appropriate some of his insights for
my discussion. The redemptive impression of the house in Fun Home,
on the other hand, is more subtle, and is thus recognizable only in
retrospect. On an immediate level, the architecture’s profound associ-
ation with the author’s father imbues it with metonymic references to
his abusive behavior and aloofness toward his children; however, on
a more unconscious one, whose significance would only be clarified
many years later when the house is rearticulated in the “language”
of drawing, there is intimation that the house had always borne a
providential property indirectly influencing the author. This property,
I opine, would later play a part in motivating her toward reconcil-
ing with her father’s memory (he has since passed on). And just as
the two narratives’ assertion of a redemptive house is unlike each
other, so would be the significance of its redemption: while the house
in Trick enables, up to a point, a sense of subjective anchoring for
Joy, it redeems for Alison in Fun Home an exhortative memory that
subsequently encourages forgiveness and understanding of, as well as
resolution with, the past.
ooo
I watch myself from the corner of the room
sitting in the armchair, at the foot of the stairwell. (7)
like a DIY item, comes in “so many separate pieces” (8) and must be
assembled, and her body seems to extend from her bed and is thus
flat like it (8). The familiarity that Joy shares with her enclosed world
figuratively transforms her into an object, but rather than implying
her diminishment and objectification (such as with the case of Carol
in Repulsion), it instead communicates an intimacy that not only helps
bridge the widening chasm between Joy and her world due to depres-
sion, but protects her from further disintegration as well. In this sense,
the lived space in Trick echoes Wigley’s point with regard to “the
image of occupiable space [that] wraps itself around the subject posi-
tion [like] a kind of clothing” (Wigley: 387). Interestingly, while Joy’s
objectification is primarily expressed as textual strategy to suggest a
coping mechanism, there are moments in the novel when Joy herself
consciously turns to self-objectification, this time as a defense mecha-
nism, when confronted with situations she does not particularly enjoy
but has to endure anyway in order to convince her community that she
is on the mend. For instance, whenever the weekly health visitor comes
to check on her progress—an occasion that Joy particularly detests
because of its ineffectiveness and the visitor’s glaring tactlessness—Joy
would activate a kind of auto-pilot mode whereby activity and things,
not she, take charge of the situation:
Here, “It” of course means routine, but the routine primarily involves
objects, and therefore cannot be viewed separately from them. During
her “ordeal,” Joy assumes detachment (even while pretending other-
wise) by channeling her attention away from, and alighting it onto
things attached to, her intruder, like the biscuit she is eating, “the
dribble of tea” by the side of her mouth that her tongue is trying to
reach, the gingernut she is dunking into her tea, and so forth (22).
What can be surmised from this is that Joy either has learned to recast
her attention from unwelcomed persons to the objects surrounding
and corresponding to them or has recalibrated them, in her mind,
into things. In doing so, she is hoping to annoy them into leaving her
alone. With the health visitor, who unfortunately “keeps coming any-
way” (23), Joy focuses on making tea, fetching biscuits, and watching
her eat—events over which Joy can assert control and manipulate, and
192 W o m e n a n d D o m e s t i c S pa c e
therefore enable her a sense of purpose and usefulness even while she
exercises detachment from this person and the situation themselves.
In fact, the narrative implies that there is a distinct symbiotic link
between Joy and her house. What happens to the latter reflects, to an
extent, Joy’s condition, and her eventual restoration will also mean
its reclamation. Occupied by Joy and Michael shortly after their affair
began, the house’s walls, they soon discover, have become infested
with mushrooms and spores: “The house was being eaten from inside
by this thing. The spores could pass through concrete and plaster
and multiplied by the thousand as we slept. They could take over
the whole structure as we slept” (65). This condition of the house as
being invaded by foreign, destructive forces metaphorically foreshad-
ows Joy’s depression, during which her body will also be infiltrated by
an alien presence that she cannot subjugate or resist. Like the house
made vulnerable by fungal attack, Joy too is rendered helpless by her
unravelling psyche. Both bodies of the architecture and its inhabi-
tant share a metonymic link of being assaulted by an intruder that
threatens to disrupt and destroy from within them. Unsurprisingly,
and perhaps as a symbolic gesture, as Joy begins to recover toward
the end of the novel, the first thing she does is to arm herself with a
screwdriver and forcefully pry the mushrooms from the walls (217).
Having found the strength to finally confront her trauma, she now sets
out to confront the insidious vegetation plaguing her house, thereby
unmistakably reinforcing once again the intimate link between body
and space in Trick; Joy will eventually sell the house (227), but until
then, the house is the sum of her world, and thus must be reclaimed
in correspondence to her recuperation. To a point, this alludes to
Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the organic unity between dweller and
space/objects, as Joy’s restoration is not limited to just her subjective
well-being, but the well-being of her dwelling as well.7
At the end of the narrative, Joy is seen standing in her house,
which is now empty and will soon be sold, as she speaks the words
“I forgive you” (235). To whom she is referring is ambiguous, but
several candidates are highly possible: the first is Joy herself, since self-
blame is a characteristic of trauma victims who believe they have not
done enough to prevent tragedy. Although spoken to the house, she
is fundamentally forgiving herself as part of her process of healing and
reconciliation with the past. This reading, to a point, further rein-
forces my view regarding the intimacy between Joy and the house
so much so that an enunciation of forgiveness to the house is vicar-
iously an expression of self-forgiveness. But “you” could also mean
just the house itself. As a place that holds Michael’s memory, it is
Housing Redemption 193
Because the verbal and the visual do not simply blend together to form
a single, coherent narrative in the comic medium, it is therefore able to
express contradictions, paradoxes, irony, and so forth, in more effec-
tive and apparent ways when compared to other media. Hence, while
the captions in Fun Home may articulate the insidious and ostentatious
characteristics of the house, the images may be articulating something
else together, such as opposite characteristics. As noted, this perspec-
tive can admittedly be an interpretation only, but in this regard is the
house at once aligned to the other houses considered in this study
in terms of its ambiguity. More significantly, that the narrative could
entertain such a possible reading further reifies the author’s ambigu-
ous relationship with her father and his memory that is premised on
both reconciliation and disavowal.
Joëlle Bahloul’s work on uprooted peoples’ memorialization of
dwelling places is especially useful in providing a theoretical compass
for which to navigate the rest of my discussion of the autographic.
Although vastly unrelated to my study, Bahloul’s meditation (which
focuses on a Jewish-Muslim household in colonial Algeria) on the link
Housing Redemption 199
Although its period interiors are obviously not limited to just this part
of the house, in this particular panel, they figuratively reveal the extent
of Bruce’s concealment, so much so that it is no longer clear who he is.
The multiple framing used in this panel further expresses his imprison-
ment within and by his own stratagem, and it is in this regard that the
visual do not complement the verbal; instead, the visual’s implication
is ironic because it suggests a degree of duplicity on the part of the
house in terms of how it complies with its owner’s desire precisely by
making this desire increasingly difficult to manage at the same time.
The stairway’s next two sets of images (the second will also be the
last time it is featured with prominence) will be discussed concurrently
because I want to consider their correlation as a way of reinforcing my
point. Particularly interesting is the first set: placed side by side are two
images, one of a stairway captured almost in full shot in between of
which are three very young (Bechdel) children and their mother pur-
suing various activities, and the other a reproduction from “a book of
Addams cartoon” depicting the Addams family, whose members com-
prise familiar Gothic monsters, congregating at the foot of the stairway
engaged in a conversation with a human visitor (34). The accompa-
nying verbal cues clarify that a comparison is being made, and over
the next couple of pages, the narrator will identify more resemblances
between members of the two families (especially mothers and daugh-
ters). Chronologically, this episode coincides with the Bechdels’ “early
years” (34) in their Gothic revival house, which has yet to undergo the
transformations that Bruce will impose on it “over the next eighteen
years” (18). The second set is spread over three panels in three differ-
ent pages (68, 69, 70), all of them representing a slightly older Alison
and her brothers, dressed in pajamas, huddling at the mid-section of
the stairway to eavesdrop on their parents’ heated argument down-
stairs. While the uniformity of these three panels suggests that they are
referring to a single moment, that they are punctuated in between by
panels portraying an array of unrelated events, mostly featuring their
parents’ relationship over the years, could equally imply that fighting
and eavesdropping constitute a recurrent, unvarying episode for much
of Alison’s childhood.
In Lydenberg’s assessment, these two sets of illustrations carry
implications that are associated: the stairway’s first appearance along-
side an Addams cartoon is meant to lend “the Gothic interior” of the
Bechdel house “a more homey atmosphere” (Lydenberg: 63):
In [the] latter image, however, the eerie quality of the Addams cartoon
invades the narrator’s home as Alison and her brothers huddle at the
Housing Redemption 201
top of those same stairs listening to their parents argue . . . . The narrow
space of the staircase, further accentuated by the verticality of the comic
panel, reinforces a sense of constraint and potential violence.
(Lydenberg: 63–64)
* * *
Throughout this study, I have maintained that a fundamental prop-
erty of lived space is ambiguity. The house cannot be presumed, and
as such, neither can our dialectical relationship with it. The house
in Galloway and Bechdel’s narratives may engender reparation and
redemption according to one reading, but it could equally, accord-
ing to another, arouse fear and confusion. On the contrary, while
the house in Beloved, The Exorcist, and The Others may seem antag-
onistic to the subject, underscoring this appearance is its alignment
with her in, respectively, compelling her to confront her past, instigat-
ing and sustaining her unspoken desire, and protecting her from an
inadmissible, world-destroying knowledge. In this regard, the house
is actually supportive of, and not hostile toward, the subject. The tex-
tual house in Bechdel’s narrative further recalls those of Carter’s, thus
tying my conclusion back to the beginning of this project: Fun Home,
The Magic Toyshop, and Love all showcase houses that are treacher-
ous but whose duplicity is not necessarily offensive because it is also
the quality that will eventually help the protagonists transcend their
Housing Redemption 203
Introduction
1. Although the ghost story, the generic category under which many
haunted house stories are subsumed, is evidently much older than the
Gothic, it has since become part of the latter tradition.
2. See, for example, various essays in Horror Film and Psychoanalysis
(2004), edited by Steven Jay Schneider.
3. Although strangely enough, the house is only indirectly portrayed and
is soon burned to the ground in the story.
4. See, for example, Joe Moran’s essay “Housing, Memory and Everyday
Life in Contemporary Britain” (2004) for an interesting discussion on
how changes to housing laws can affect the meaning of the house
in the cultural imaginary. Although Moran does not use the term
“uncanny,” his discussion concerning how everyday life is sometimes
“othered” at the expense of maintaining and/or pursuing desirable
(read government ordained) housing certainly implies how familiarity
can be undermined in the act of occupying a home. For a discussion
on the various significances Freud’s “uncanny” can bear, see Royle
(2009).
5. Todorov’s structuralist approach, however, is more concerned with
formal ambiguity, whereas my focus is more on theme.
6. Although Showalter’s studies do not focus specifically on the Gothic,
her views on the genre remain influential and are often credited as a
primary instigation behind the innovative, and often redemptive, con-
sideration of female Gothic narratives. The example to which I refer in
my discussion is in relation to Showalter’s reading of Gilman’s “The
Yellow Wallpaper” (1892).
7. In fact, many early criticisms that consider the significance of the
house in Gothic literature are almost always a gendered reading that
explores the status of women. Exceptions, such as Sabine Büssing’s
Aliens in the Home (1987), that focus on the child in horror fiction
are rare.
8. Examples, which I limit to only those that consider Western litera-
ture, include Architecture and Modern Literature (2012) by David
Spurr, although its focus goes beyond the house to also include
public spaces, and several earlier critical treatments of individual
author’s depiction of the house, such as Jean-Christophe Agnew’s
206 N ot e s
Chapter 1
1. See Gamble (2009) for discussion.
2. Lorna Sage’s study (1992) includes a short discussion on space in
Carter’s work.
3. Examples include the abandoned buildings in Shadow Dance (1966);
the zoo in Several Perceptions (1968); the dystopic landscape of Heroes
and Villains (1969); mirrors in “Reflections” (Fireworks 1974); the
enchanted, beguiling, worlds of Passion of New Eve (1977); the cir-
cus, the panoptican, and the Siberian wilderness in Nights at the
Circus (1988); and the apartment in Love (1971). In these novels,
Carter’s rendition of space can be studied in its own right, especially
the way it affects identity, gender formation, sexual awakening, and
relationships.
4. Most obviously in Davidson-Pégon’s essay (1998).
N ot e s 207
5. See Palmer (1987), Sage (1992), and Day (1998), although these
critics do not explicitly relate the novel to the Gothic. The notion
of the house as reflective of imperialism is also suggested in the way
Philip, an Englishman, cruelly mistreats his Irish wife and brothers.
For discussion, see Smith (2006).
6. Viewed as such, The Magic Toyshop reflects, as noted in my Intro-
duction, a long-standing tradition in Gothic literature deploying the
house as a metaphor of female domestication and entrapment.
7. All references to the novel are from the Virago edition (1981).
8. Of the three children, it is only Melanie who demonstrates such a pro-
found, unhealthy attachment to the house. Her two younger siblings,
on the other hand, seem almost impartial to the house. So feeble is
Jonathon and Victoria’s sense of belonging that they are like strangers
in their own home. Their presence merely registers as an awkward
addition to the house: Jonathon, for instance, is described as “a tank
through the side of a house” (4), and is only interested in model
ships—a preoccupation that distinctly symbolizes his detachment and
displacement—while the possibly retarded Victoria is described as “a
dreadful secret in the back bedroom” (7).
9. In this regard, Philip’s house continues to exert a long-standing gen-
der ideology related to architecture that was first expressed by the
architect Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72) in the fifteenth century.
I will consider this ideology in further detail in the conclusion to this
chapter.
10. I will explore Colomina’s analysis of the modern home as a theater
box in greater detail when discussing Love.
11. The narrative hints at the escape of Margaret, Francie, and Victoria,
while Finn and Melanie’s retreat is unmistakable. Jonathon had
already left the family, having been sent by his uncle to apprentice
at a model ship building establishment.
12. For a sustained discussion of the ruin, see Patricia Juliana Smith
(2006).
13. Possibly the replica of a ruin left over from the Great Exhibition of
the Works of Industry of All Nations, held in 1851.
14. All references to Love are from the Viking edition (1988).
15. In an afterword written and added fifteen years later to the novel,
only Lee achieves a kind of salvation in the guise of his wife, Rosie,
“a radical feminist in the early seventies” who “thinks of her life
as a heterosexual is a bad dream from which she is now awake”
(114).
16. This spatial representation, which also ends the narrative, has been
remarked upon by several critics. Lorna Sage reads this space as a sig-
nifier of ambivalence (Sage: 171), which is a stylistic and thematic
feature prominent throughout the story. Patricia Juliana Smith relates
the park’s simultaneous Gothic dimension and the “cool rational-
ity of Augustan neoclassicism” to a metaphor of Romantic hypocrisy
208 N ot e s
Chapter 2
1. In his essay, Kuntze identifies Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial
in Washington, DC, as an example of such architecture.
2. Kari Winters, whose study of female Gothic literature considers slavery
as fundamentally a patriarchal institution, postulates that “Both genres
focus on the sexual politics at the heart of patriarchal culture, and
both represent the terrifying aspects of life for women in a patriarchal
culture” (Winters: 13).
3. All references to Valerie Martin’s Property are from the Abacus edition
(2003).
4. The second is central to Edward P. Jones’s Pulitzer Prize historical
novel, The Known World (2003).
5. Scarry’s thesis is, however, limited to only physical pain. For me,
however, all forms of pain are personal; while pain may be commu-
nicated via language, it is only known by the sufferer and remains
fundamentally an abstraction to others.
6. The Destrehan Plantation House in Louisiana is a prime example.
7. Characteristically, the kitchen was kept separate from the main house
since it was a working area. This spatial arrangement is evident in
Martin’s novel.
8. Kinchin’s discussion focuses primarily on urban English homes, but
it is nevertheless applicable as well to the homes in North America
during that same period, contextual and geographical variations
notwithstanding.
9. Largely disavowing English influence, American architecture wit-
nessed instead Greek and Gothic revivals. However, my focus is not
N ot e s 209
so much on the exterior design of the house, but the ideology operat-
ing within its interior. In addition, because the house in Property is a
relic from an earlier period, its structure would most likely still reflect
a colonial heritage.
10. See Chase (esp. 144–45) on the influence of English architectural
planning on American homes in the nineteenth century.
11. This public aspect of colonial houses will be more circumscribed
toward the middle of the eighteenth century due to the chang-
ing nature in the relationship between slaveholders and their slaves.
For a useful discussion, see Clifton Ellis’s study (2006) of the man-
sion house at Berry Hill Plantation, Virginia. The house became an
increasingly private place that emphasized the family, giving rise to
the cult of domesticity, or more aptly, as Barbara Walter’s classic essay
(1966) asserts, the cult of “True Womanhood.” Henceforth viewed
as possessing special “moral powers,” the house would conceptually
transform into “a ‘home’ ” (Ellis: 43) subsequently.
12. Indeed, the notion of privacy in the interior of a nineteenth century
middle-class home, as Moira Donald (1999) notes in an essay, is itself
highly suspicious and problematic.
13. As an interesting counterpoint to my reading of a slave owner’s
home, I recommend Lynne Walker and Vron Ware’s essay, “Polit-
ical Pincushion: Decorating the Abolitionist Interior, 1787–1865”
(1999).
14. The other two are “to obtain the exercise of power at the lowest
possible cost” and “to bring the effects of this social power to their
maximum intensity and to extend them as far as possible” (Foucault
1984: 207).
15. Vidler also makes a similar point with regard to the uncanny, which
I will revisit in my reading of Beloved.
16. Complicating Said’s discussion, Burgin goes on to assert that paranoia
does not distinguish members from either side of the binary divide,
but equally afflicts both. Racism, he posits, is an example of collec-
tive paranoia engendered when a group makes a decision to view and
treat another group as a dangerous “other.” The ground—palpably
baseless—for such a resolution often amounts to a fear of “penetration
of the body” (Burgin 1996: 134), which is a particularly insidious dis-
course that cleverly aligns women’s bodies and the body-politic, thus
metonymically and effectively linking the two.
17. There is possibly a third reason: as Manon’s remaining slave, Sarah
will serve as the guinea pig in her slaveholding experiment using her
husband’s approach, which she had roundly criticized hitherto, but
with which she now symptomatically identifies in alignment with her
“new” objet a.
18. In their Ten Books on Architecture (1452) and Treatise on Architecture
(1464) , respectively. These texts have since become foundational in
the history of Western architecture.
210 N ot e s
19. All references to Beloved are from the Vintage edition (1988).
20. As elaborated in his seminal work, The Fantastic: A Structural
Approach to a Literary Genre (1973).
21. I prefer the term “irreal” because “unreal” seems to imply that trauma
is, at the end of the day, imagined. Although there are cases in
which a traumatic event is illusory—that is, the patient “believes” he
has encountered trauma when he merely imagined it, but neverthe-
less symptomatically reenacts this original moment repeatedly—this
does not mean that the exertion of an “imagined” trauma’s effect
is therefore “unreal.” Whether the patient has indeed encountered a
traumatic moment or merely imagined it, his trauma is “real,” and
thus must be addressed.
22. The “misery” is Stamp Paid’s euphemism for the tragic event that saw
Sethe attempting to murder her children.
23. A similar dialectic is also evident in The Others and The Orphanage,
both of which will be discussed in Chapter 4.
24. For insightful discussions of this episode, see Corey (1997) and
Rushdy (1992).
25. Such a configuration of space also recalls Heidegger’s fourfold model
of dwelling; accordingly, dwelling includes the earth, the sky, “the
mortals [that] are the human beings” (Heidegger: 148), and “the
divinities” (Heidegger: 147), which roughly correspond with the
sacred.
26. Eliade admits that there are such things as pseudo-religious space, that
is, space invested with private meanings because it constitutes for the
subject a special moment in his life. But Eliade’s examples are limited
to happy moments, and the space he discusses is subsequently con-
fined to figurative originary sites such as “scenes of first love, or certain
places in the first foreign city he visited in his youth” (Eliade: 24).
Chapter 3
1. Among examples of films that explicitly feature a haunted house are
The Legend of Hell House (1972), The Amityville Horror (1979), The
Changeling (1980), and Poltergeist (1982). Other works that fore-
ground the house as a significant, if not central, motif include The
House that Dripped Blood (1971), Don’t Look Now (1973), The Shin-
ing (1980), The House by the Cemetery (1981), and Fright Night
(1985).
2. An exception is The Changeling (1980), in which the victim and
ghost is a male child. However, his age and physical disability also
figuratively feminize him, thus indirectly reifying the gender ideology
operating in horror films during this period once again.
3. It is for this reason that I chose Repulsion, instead of Polanski’s
earlier work, Rosemary’s Baby (1968), for my argument. Although
N ot e s 211
13. In this scene, as Chris’s head is held to Regan’s private parts, the
latter gleefully cries, “Lick me! Lick me”! Creed insists on gendering
the demon possessing Regan as female, which curiously contravenes
her reading of Regan’s incestuous desire for her mother. I am more
partial to Tanya Kryzwinska’s treatment of the demon as male, “as his
snake phallus implies” (Kryzwinska: 256).
14. Teyssot argument, however, involves the more commonplace sce-
nario whereby rooms that were once comfortable and inviting have
now turned squalid and bear a “macabre atmosphere of the detective
novel” (Teyssot: 92).
15. Just as the house’s exterior is manipulated for the scenes of Merrin’s
arrival and Karras’s death later, the bedroom set has to be refriger-
ated so that the icy breath effect in this scene is authentic. Indirectly
implied by these set designs, it seems, is an endeavor on the part of
the film to insinuate the bedroom’s manifest role in contributing to
Regan’s condition.
16. This prompted Blatty to propose reshooting it in order to allay con-
fusion. It is not clear, however, who these “first people” were or if the
scene was actually reshot.
17. Carol Clover claims that Karras is “hurled through the window to his
death on the street below” (Clover: 90), but this is clearly a misread-
ing as the diegetic sound of rapid footsteps just before Karras crashes
through the window suggests that he either ran or was made to run
toward his death.
18. As Deleuze asserts, unfolding is “certainly not the opposite of the
fold, nor its effacement, but the continuation or the extension of its
act, the condition of its manifestation” (Deleuze 1991: 243).
19. Here, Williams summarizes a rather lengthy exposition Deleuze pro-
vides in his Difference and Repetition on intensities in space (Deleuze
1994: 54).
20. The house to which Frichot refers is the diagram of a Baroque house
reproduced in Deleuze’s essay (1991).
21. The pli underlies the aesthetics of Baroque architecture according to
Deleuze, but is arguably also a predominant feature in postmodern
architecture (e.g., the regeneration of the Rebstockpark periphery
of Frankfurt by the American architect Peter Eisenman). Folding
architecture, as Paul A. Harris explains, is interested in
Chapter 4
1. The acclaim of The Orphanage is arguably also influenced by the inter-
national success of Pan’s Labyrinth (2005), directed by Guillermo
del Toro, who incidentally produced Bayona’s film as well. For my
study, however, I have decided not to focus on Pan’s Labyrinth,
despite clearly conducing to my interest in ambiguous space especially
214 N ot e s
Conclusion
1. Although Trick has never been explicitly read as Gothic, that it shares
many thematic and stylistic qualities with Galloway’s other works (par-
ticularly her collection of short stories, Blood [1991]) that have been
distinctly associated with the genre (see Punter 1996, 1998; Ng 2004)
would certainly qualify it as a Gothic text.
2. Coined by the critic Gillian Whitlock (2006), an autographic is an
autobiography in graphic novel (comics specifically concerned with
weightier issues) form.
3. See, for example, Norquay (2000) and McGylnn (2001, 2008).
4. All references to The Trick Is to Keep Breathing are from the Minerva
edition (1991).
5. To an extent, Trick could be regarded as an example of what Susan
Fraiman terms “shelter writing,” in which “characters therein are
marginal in one way or another [and] are all, in a manner of speaking,
survivors [whose] relationship to beautiful, functional, and safe inte-
riors is underwritten by terror and longing” (Fraiman: 349, emphasis
in the original).
6. The one thing in the house that Joy cannot abide is the telephone.
For discussions, see McGlynn (2001) and Ng (2012).
7. On its own, however, the house is unable to provide Joy with suf-
ficient arsenal to fight depression, which eventually lands her in a
psychiatric clinic (38). From this point, her journey toward restora-
tion will increasingly depend on objects, especially language recast as
things. For an analysis, see Ng (2012).
8. Scholarship on this elegant work has steadily been growing since the
renowned journal Modern Fiction Studies featured Hillary Chute’s
interview with the author the same year Fun Home was published.
Chute’s prediction that this autographic is “sure to soon become an
important reference point in academic discourse on graphic narrative”
was undoubtedly prescient (Chute: 1004).
9. All references to Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home are from the Mariner
Books edition (2006).
10. Bruce, an English teacher and the town’s funeral director, often also
effects dissemblance of who he really is by identifying himself with
modernist writers and their novels’ protagonists. His vast number of
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Wo r k s C i t e d 227
close-up, 109–10, 118, 131, 132, 165, 172, 173, 183, 188–90,
153, 177 196, 203
establishing, 108, 169 as performance, 12, 20, 27–8, 32,
long, 116, 118, 134, 136, 148 46, 48, 56–7; see also self
medium, medium close-up, suicide, 45–6, 51, 60, 84, 119, 145,
109–10, 116, 119, 153, 169 147, 149, 161, 174, 176–7,
point-of-view, 117, 169 193
tracking, 119, 169 supernatural, 2–3, 8–9, 92, 104–6,
zoom, 154 112–15, 120, 127, 144, 153
see also camera techniques surreal, 36–7, 39–40, 45, 53, 127,
Showalter, Elaine, 4 135–6, 161–2, 174–5
Sibley, David, 152 surrealism, 52, 127
Simmel Georg, 44 surveillance, 74–5, 86, 111, 148
sixteenth century, 48 swooning, 4
slavery, 20, 63–7, 69, 73, 74–5, Symbolic order (or system), 81,
77–9, 81–2, 84–5, 87–8, 94, 86–7, 113, 131, 149, 167, 168
98, 101 symptom, 32, 68, 80, 82, 104, 150,
see also horror under slavery as 163, 166, 189
Smith, Colin, 98–9 synecdoche, 193
Smith, Patricia Juliana, 33, 43, 46
Smith, Paul Julian, 175–6, 190 taboo, 122
somatic, 190 tactilility, 15, 187, 190
Spain, 159, 187 tattoo, 45, 50
Spanish, 21, 144 teleology, 211
spatiality, 7, 12, 14, 25, 33, 62, 106, terror, 1, 37, 64, 90, 92, 117, 136,
116 217
spatial similitude, 171–3 Teyssot, Georges, 116
spectacle, 56 Thacker, Andrew, 42
specter, see ghost Thanatos, 155, 176
specular, 89 thermodynamics, 128
Spiegelman, Art, 193, 196 “thingification”, 54, 56
Maus, 193 thriller, 3, 103–4
Spiers, Miriam Brown, 195 Todorov, Tzvetan, 3, 68, 89
stairs, stairway, 110, 119, 169, 190, Tolmie, Jane, 196
199–201 tomb, 147, 178, 181–2
statues, see children’s games topography, 4, 5, 29, 164, 174, 180
Steiner, Henriette, 140–1 topophobia, 4
Stewart, Susan, 104–5 Torok, Maria, 22, 145–6, 161,
storytelling, 89, 188, 194, 198 163–4, 170–1, 178–80
subjectivity, 3, 10–12, 14, 16, trace (Benjamin), 8, 9, 59, 62, 72,
19–20, 26–31, 35, 53, 59, 186–7, 197, 199
61–2, 65, 68, 71, 73, 79, 84–5, tragedy, 27, 47, 192
88, 101, 107, 120–2, 124–5, tragicomic, 186, 193
133, 138, 149, 155, 157–8, transsexuality, 85, 87, 101
246 Index