Espaço

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies
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.
Robert T. Tally Jr. is Associate Professor of English at Texas State Univer-

sity, USA. His work explores the relations among narrative, representation,
and social space in American and world literature, criticism, and theory.
Tally has been recognized as a leading figure in the emerging fields of
geocriticism, spatiality studies, and the spatial humanities. Tally’s books
include Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism; Poe and the Sub-
version of American Literature: Satire, Fantasy, Critique; Utopia in the Age of
Globalization: Space, Representation, and the World System; Spatiality; Kurt
Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography; and Melville,
Mapping and Globalization: Literary Cartography in the American Baroque
Writer. The translator of Bertrand Westphal’s Geocriticism: Real and Fictional
Spaces, Tally is the editor of Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Map-
ping in Literary and Cultural Studies; Kurt Vonnegut: Critical Insights; and
Literary Cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative.
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
Andrew Hock Soon Ng

WOMEN AND DOMESTIC SPACE IN CONTEMPORARY GOTHIC
NARRATIVES
Copyright © Andrew Hock Soon Ng, 2015.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-53681-5
All rights reserved.
First published in 2015 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
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.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above

companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United

States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-71086-7 ISBN 978-1-137-53291-6 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/9781137532916
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ng, Andrew Hock-soon, 1972–
Women and domestic space in contemporary gothic narratives :
the house as subject / by Andrew Hock Soon Ng.
pages cm. — (Geocriticism and spatial literary studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Gothic fiction (Literary genre)—History and criticism.
2. Gothic revival (Literature)—History and criticism. 3. Horror
films—History and criticism. 4. Horror comic books, strips,
etc.—History and criticism. 5. Dwellings in literature.
6. Dwellings in motion pictures. 7. Home in literature.
8. Home in motion pictures. 9. Women in literature.
10. Women in motion pictures. I. Title. II. Title: House
as subject.
PN3435.N53 2015
809.3 8729—dc23 2015003190
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Integra Software Services
First edition: July 2015
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
2 Housing the Unspeakable: Valerie Martin’s Property and

Toni Morrison’s Beloved 63
3 Housing Secret Selves: William Friedkin’s The Exorcist
and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion 103
4 Housing Melancholia: Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others
and Juan A. Bayona’s The Orphanage 143
Conclusion: Housing Redemption: Janice Galloway’s The
Trick Is to Keep Breathing and Alison Bechdel’s Fun
Home 185
Notes 205
Works Cited 219
Index 233
L i s t o f I l l u s t r at i o n s
3.1 The Exorcist: Fathers Merrin and Karras – priests or

prisoners? 111
3.2 Father Merrin’s arrival at the Macneil’s residence in
the iconic scene from The Exorcist 118
3.3 The famous “Ames Room” scene in Repulsion 133
3.4 Carried by Michael, a catatonic Carol leaves her
apartment for the last time in Repulsion 139
4.1 Grace attacked by her house in The Others 153
4.2 The ghostly mother and children in the closing scene
of The Others 154
4.3 The mysterious masked child in The Orphanage 169
4.4 Laura and the children in elsewhere 181
S e r i e s E d i t o r ’s P r e f a c e
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.
Robert T. Tally Jr.

A c k n ow l e d g m e n t s
I would like to thank the series editor, Associate Professor Robert

Tally, for his encouragement, feedback, and patience, especially with
my constant requests for more time, as well as his amazing promptness
in responding to my queries.
Some parts of this book have previously been published as essays in
various journals. They are identified and duly acknowledged below:
● The section on Love in Chapter 1 appeared as “Subjecting Spaces:

Angela Carter’s Love,” Contemporary Literature, 49. 3 (2008):
412–37.
● The section on Beloved in Chapter 2 appeared as “Toni Morrison’s
Beloved: Space, Architecture, Trauma,” Symplokē, 19. 1 (2011):
191–205.
● Parts of the analysis of The Exorcist, Repulsion, and The Oth-
ers in Chapters 3 and 4 are based on a single article, “Intimate
Spaces, Extimate Occupants: The Bedroom in Horror Films,” that
is forthcoming in Spaces of the Cinematic Home: Behind Screen
Doors (London: Routledge), edited by Eleanor Andrews, Stella
Hockenhull, and Fran Pheasant-Kelly.
● A version of The Trick Is to Keep Breathing in the conclusion
appeared as “Coping with Reality: The Solace of Objects and Lan-
guage in Janice Galloway’s The Trick Is to Keep Breathing,” Critique,
53. 3 (2012): 1–13.
These essays have all been revised and modified, with additional mate-
rials introduced, in order to facilitate the comparative nature of this
study.
Introduction
The Subject of the House

i n G o t h i c N a r r at i v e s
G othic narratives have long privileged the house as one of their

principal tropes. From its inception as a genre with Horace Walpole’s
The Castle of Otranto (1764) to the latest Hollywood horror parody
like Haunted House 2 (2014), the Gothic has consistently depicted
the house not only as a setting for the unspeakable, but, in less clearer
terms, as a site that actually invigorates it. Arguably, that many of
its narratives identify the house in the title seems to suggest that
the architecture’s prominence exceeds its function as backdrop but
is in fact the very thing that engenders terror. Throughout its tra-
dition, the Gothic has consistently recognized a quality invested in
domestic space that has the power to unnerve, fragment, and even
destroy its inhabitant unless something is done to arrest it and restore
order and normalcy back to the house. The most obvious repre-
sentation of such a circumstance is, of course, the haunted house
tale;1 leaving aside haunted house films for the moment since I will
be specifically discussing them in Chapter 3 (and Chapter 4), it is
evident that within the Gothic canon are numerous works that notice-
ably or obliquely fall within this category of narratives, including
Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Charlotte Perkins
Gilman’s frequently anthologized “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892),
Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), Toni Morrison’s
Beloved (1988), and Sarah Water’s The Little Stranger (2009). A vari-
ant of the haunted house tale are stories involving an occupant or
a family whose state of being cursed—usually implied and/or con-
sidered metaphorical—invariably also affects the condition of the
house within which they occupy, sometimes for generations. Walpole’s
2 W o m e n a n d D o m e s t i c S pa c e
quaint novel is arguably the precursor of this narrative type; other

well-known examples include Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”
(1839) and, in the case of film, The Old, Dark House (1932).
More interestingly are Gothic narratives that feature a house whose
ominousness is not the result of a curse or possession by an unseen,
alien presence, but stems instead from its very own self; that is, the
house is itself the very source of strangeness or anomaly, and who-
ever occupies it will be inevitably engulfed by its power to become
part of its mysterious establishment. Examples are William Hope
Hogdson’s little known The House on the Borderland (1908) and Mark
Danielewski’s dizzying novel, The House of Leaves (2000). Then there
are narratives whereby the articulation of menace by the house is
highly indirect and thus often easily (dis)missed, because of the archi-
tecture’s seeming function as mere passive setting. Of the various
narrative types mentioned thus far, this category of Gothic writing
foregrounds the house most ambiguously in terms of its dialectical
relationship with the subject as it fluctuates between a protective haven
and a hostile space threatening her existence. Indeed, it is this Janus-
faced aspect of the house that underscores Freud’s formulation of “the
uncanny” (1919), the concept most often evoked in psychoanalytical
exegesis of narratives with an aberrant, usually haunted, house,2 that
he derived from reading a Gothic tale, E.T.A Hoffman’s “The Sand-
man” (1817).3 In his essay, Freud identifies a characteristic of this
intimate space that contradicts the traditional view of the house as a
place of refuge, comfort, and rest, for corresponding with the famil-
iar (heimlich, or the homely) that promotes these signifiers of home
is also the unfamiliar (unheimlich, or the unhomely) that directly dis-
perses them. The uncanny, in other words, points fundamentally to a
shift in terms of the relationship between the house and its inhab-
itant, whether this shift is paranormally induced, or the result of
more mundane circumstances such as familial conflict, a crime, or
an unwelcomed intrusion, the contention with private property (see
Chapter 3), or even a change in housing laws.4 This shift, moreover, is
often rarely noticed initially due to the familiarity by which one is con-
ditioned and thus affects the occupant in subtle terms, only becoming
unmistakable (usually) by the time it is too late.
It is therefore unsurprising that many Gothic works linking the
supernatural to the house are susceptible to a psychoanalytical reading:
the protagonist wavering between belief and disbelief as the haunting
intensifies is certainly an effective metaphor for a patient struggling
with irrationality as he becomes increasingly unable to differentiate
between what is real and otherwise. This is especially evident in a
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 3
branch of Gothic narratives Tzvetan Todorov identifies as fantastic

texts; unlike supernatural stories that can be interpreted in psycholog-
ical terms, this subcategory involves texts in which it is impossible to
tell if the fearful account is a supernatural event or a psychodrama,
thereby invoking but also problematizing both premises and resulting
in readerly hesitation (Todorov: 167).5 Interestingly, what Todorov
deems to be the most conspicuous example of the fantastic text and
therefore the centerpiece of his study is Henry James’s “The Turn of
the Screw” (1898), which, perhaps unsurprisingly, is also a story set
within domestic space. But if the house remains limited to its formal
function in James’s fiction, it is decidedly a principal factor behind
the narrative ambiguity characterizing another fantastic text, Toni
Morrison’s Beloved (1988), which will be considered in Chapter 2.
But while the uncanny is most patently expressed in supernatural
tales set against domestic space, its occurrence in the Gothic tradi-
tion is not limited to this category of narratives alone. The house,
Thornfield Hall, that Jane eventually comes to view as a familiar
signifier of her impending husband’s stalwart and sincere nature in
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), for example, will overnight lose
its familiarity when it is revealed that its walls hide a terrible secret
that will transform Rochester into a monster. Several of Poe’s psycho-
logical thrillers, such as “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat”
(both published in1843), depend on for their effect the role of space
as colluder with, and accuser of, the guilty subject in both hiding and
exposing, respectively, his crime. Similarly, the eponymous building in
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables (1851) stands as if it
were a living crypt that hides a dark past while perpetuating the ill-fate
suffered by its family of occupants, but is at the same time the cata-
lyst that sets in motion their redemption as well. In Shirley Jackson’s
final novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), what is to the
reader and all other characters a house marked by condemnation is to
its twisted protagonist and child murderer a paradise that collaborates
with, in order to protect, her from the influences and prohibitions of
adults, but not, however, without a price. Finally, to cite one more
example, in the film The Resident (2011), the house functions as an
accomplice to its owner, Max, who uses its incomplete state to spy
on the new tenant, Dr. Juliet Devereau. Arguably, the house’s unfin-
ished condition is not only a metaphorical reflection of Max’s defective
subjectivity, but a literal extension of it as well, as it actively aids and
abets Max in his voyeuristic pursuits, which eventually turns into sex-
ual abuse. In the end, however, the house that has hitherto enabled
his degeneracy will also turn out to be the instrument of his downfall
and punishment. In this study, works featuring a duplicitous house

that will be considered include Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop
(1967) and Love (1971), Valerie Martin’s Property (2003), and Alison
Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006).
Occupying such a distinctive place in the Gothic, the house would
inevitably be a point of interest in scholarship devoted to the genre.
The revival of academic interest in Gothic literature in the late 1970s
has since spawned a slew of monographs and critical essays that have
provided valuable insights into the variegated meanings accommo-
dated by this particular space. Strongly influenced by psychoanalysis
and feminist theory, works (and I mention only those featuring the
house, or one of its rooms, in the title) such as Sandra Gilbert and
Susan Gubar’s now classic The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Kate
Ferguson Ellis’s The Contested Castle (1989), and Alison Milbank’s
Daughters of the House (1992) have, importantly, compromised the
traditional link between woman and the house by exposing the patriar-
chal structure embedded within the domicile, which, as such, becomes
symbolic of her entrapment and subjugation. What constitutes the pri-
vate space in many traditional Gothic narratives, based on these critical
observations, is tantamount to the limitation of freedom and agency
afforded to the female subject as she is confined to the house appar-
ently in order to protect her innocence but is, in truth, fundamentally
meant to subordinate her to male dominance and control. The pro-
tection and refuge offered by this lived space are, as such, merely a
pretense for its insidious collusion with patriarchy to repress women,
who, as a result, slowly begin to develop topophobic sensations which
are, arguably and figuratively, commonly represented by swooning.
In contradistinction to this position is scholarship that views the house
as a site of female empowerment. According to such a critical perspec-
tive, whose defenders would include Elaine Showalter’s A Literature
of Their Own (1977) and Sister’s Choice (1991), what appears to be
menacing the female subject in stories involving a haunted house, for
example, is in fact a catalyst that will motivate her toward activating
her desires and eventual liberation from patriarchal control.6 Evident
in all these studies mentioned are two related key points that inform
the trajectory of my study: first, the Gothic invariably testifies to an
intimate link between the female subject and the house;7 second, it
demonstrates the link’s complex dimension that indirectly reveals a
degree of ambiguity characterizing the latter. That the house can bear
oppositional connotations (subjugation/entrapment versus empow-
erment/emancipation) in Gothic works clearly evinces this quality,
thus identifying its function as more than just a stage for narrative
unfolding. As the title of this introduction means to intimate, the sub-

ject of many Gothic works is not just their principal character, but is
also frequently the house itself.
While Gothic scholarship that productively reveals the complicated
relationship between the house and the female subject is bifurcated in
its claims, it is nevertheless consolidated by one persistent drawback:
the house is almost never considered for what it basically is—a spatial
presence. Indeed, the house is rarely interpreted from such a perspec-
tive but is understood instead as often implying a metaphor that, in
turn, indirectly reinforces or attacks an ideology. Whether its claim
promotes the house as incarcerating or liberating, such scholarship
manifestly locates the house within the realm of symbols that aligns
this space, respectively, with patriarchy and its subversion. This inter-
pretive direction, however, is not limited to Gothic studies, but is
in fact quite common to literary studies across the board. There is,
admittedly, a growing body of scholarly investigations in the discipline
of literature that emphasizes the house’s qualification as space,8 but it is
apparent that this interpretive tradition remains rather entrenched still.
For example, in a fairly recent article that specifically focuses on the lit-
erary house, its promising start that identifies the rise of the novel as
coinciding with “the emergence of an aspiring bourgeoisie in the eigh-
teenth century or earlier” that correspondingly witnessed “increasing
domesticization, feminization and privation of society” (Mezei and
Briganti: 838), will, however, remain undeveloped as the discussion
subsequently gives way to a focus on the house as an analogue to the
history of literary interpretation (Mezei and Briganti: 838). In this
way, space becomes reconfigured as metaphor once again, as the essay
explores the parallel between the topography of this architecture with
the topography of, variously, the mind, the body, and the nation, as
represented in a range of literary texts, to conclude with the familiar
view of the house’s (and literature’s) paradoxical significance when
related to women: as constraining or liberating the latter’s “ways
of knowing” (Mezei and Briganti: 844). Similarly, Julian Wolfreys’s
essay “Dwelling with Dickens and Heidegger” is largely interested in
the literary house’s capacity to perform “double service rhetorically
and imaginatively, poetically and ideologically” (Wolfreys 2012: 342),
rather than a space whose primary significance is the level of intimacy it
shares with the occupant and the resulting consequences engendered
by this association.
The situation in film scholarship, however, is decidedly better. Per-
haps due to the prominence of the visual that virtually locates the
viewer in filmic space, it is more difficult to reduce architecture to
merely a figurative element in the story. In films, the palpability of

architecture’s spatial presence demands careful interpretive attention
that, at once, also elevates space from backdrop to an active par-
ticipant in the development of the narrative. The critic Katherine
Shonfield (2000, 2012), for example, whose scholarship I will revisit
in Chapter 3, has consistently argued that architecture is essential to
our appreciation of the historical context, and the identities and psy-
chological states of characters, in fictional film.9 According to her,
how lived space is portrayed on screen, whether in terms of struc-
tural weaknesses and building damages, or of architectural grandeur,
conspicuously guides the interpretation of, while remaining distinct
from, these other elements integral to narrative. If architecture makes
a metaphorical point at all, it does so analogously (to either the story
or a character) and in highly subtle terms that often only eyes accus-
tomed to structural anomalies and/or peculiarities will be able to
detect. Unsurprisingly, the level of care taken to ensure, for instance,
the house’s historical verisimilitude and flavor, or its atmospheric qual-
ity consistent with a specific genre or scene, is fundamental to a film’s
affective and aesthetical predications because part of the medium’s
emotional and ideological power is dependent on creative architec-
tural articulations that transform passive, disinterested space into an
active, instrumental force. This is precisely the conviction expressed in
Susanne Cowan’s article “The Gendered Architecture of the House in
Cinematic Space” (2000), where she draws attention to the domicile’s
ability to mirror and, at the same time, motivate its occupants’ relation-
ship with each other in two contemporary films, Ice Storm (1997) and
American Beauty (1999), both of which feature a family that is slowly
unravelling. Cowan’s assessment thus suggests that the house while
operating in figurative terms also exceeds this function in its seem-
ingly active collusion with its occupants’ frustration with each other.
The various household objects that Cowan identifies, such as the din-
ing table and the family car, become in this regard concomitantly a
consolidated platform on which this tensive dynamics is staged, and
weapons that avail themselves to each of the family members for doing
harm to the others.
* * *
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
this book, the spatial anomaly is either clearly or potentially a reflec-

tion/projection of the protagonist’s compromised psyche, and is thus
“not real” in a sense, thereby rendering space already into a metaphor.
Moreover, my reading of haunting as a metaphor in The Orphanage
(Chapter 4) only seems to reinforce this tendency due to the fact that
this activity, as I also argue, cannot be probed discretely from the space
accommodating it. An explanation, as such, is necessary to elucidate
precisely my interpretative position: while I do not deny the mani-
fest or probable metaphoricity of space in several narratives discussed
in this book, my emphasis is always on how a subject encounters lived
space as real space (if only to her) and as such treats this space—the
house—as a material, physical presence. In other words, regardless of
the extent to which spatial representation in the narrative has been
manipulated by the protagonist’s warped perspectives, which in turn
problematizes its apprehension by the reader or audience, my inter-
est is foremost the direct, sensual interaction between subject and
the house that then informs the psychological, often unconscious,
effects of dwelling on the former. In this regard, my study of the fic-
tional house, while focusing on both literary and filmic texts, inclines
more toward the interpretative direction established in film schol-
arship that does not disregard, or take for granted, the spatiality
of architectural presence, or largely consign it to the realm of the
figurative.
I will outline the theoretical framework underpinning my investi-
gation shortly, but before that, it is necessary to first discuss a feature
intrinsic to the house that, on the one hand, sets the domestic space
apart from other kinds of architectural space and, on the other, con-
nects the house to the idea of home: its interiority.10 It is almost
without doubt that the house cannot be read separately from its
interiority, for to do so will result in perspectives that are substantially
limited (although this criteria, admittedly, is also dependent on the
degree with which the narrative represents interiority). Importantly,
the study of domestic interiority contributes to a more sophisticated
understanding and appreciation of, among other things, the cultural,
historical, and psychological importance of lived space. In fact, as
architectural scholarship has increasingly clarified, much that has been
said or written about the house is, in actual fact, really to do with
its interiority. The qualities traditionally associated with the happy
house like comfort, security, and respite are, for example, palpably
related to the atmosphere and condition of the building’s interiority.
Bachelard’s meditation on the poetics of space (1958), to take a well-
known scholarly example, largely concentrates not on the house as
a structural presence, but on its interiority and the objects corre-

sponding to, and contained within, it. Finally, as Charles Rice points
out, Benjamin’s concept of trace—how a subject and lived space
inevitably leave impressions on each other in the process of dwelling—
fundamentally relates to interiority more than it does to the house in
general, for it is through the subject’s negotiation with interior space
that subsequently establishes her imprint on the house and vice versa
(Rice: 283).
In literary studies, it seems evident as well that much of the critical
insights surrounding domestic space is actually derived from reading
the fictional house’s interiority. After all, what gives this building its
centrality are almost always the events occurring within its four walls,
and not beyond them. In Gothic works, to return to my subject mat-
ter, that deploy the haunted house trope, for instance, it is frequently
the case that the unseen does not overwhelm—at least in the ini-
tial stages—the structure per se with supernatural contamination, but
limits its activities to the interior space, or a part of it such as the
living room, the bedroom, or more usually, the basement, the cel-
lar, or the attic. William Friedkin’s film adaptation (1973) of William
Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist (published in 1971), which I con-
sider in Chapter 3, is an example of such works. Here, the paranormal
is limited to one specific room throughout the narrative.
In this sense, what I claim is the house’s propensity for ambi-
guity more accurately describes its interior, whose definition is irre-
ducible to any and all human assertions.11 This coincides with Peter
Eisenman’s observation of interior space in general when he states
that “the interiority of architecture might not be something sta-
ble and already known” (quoted in McCarthy: 122). This is due to
the fact that the uniqueness of each individual house correspond-
ing with its inhabitant’s singularity is fundamentally distinguished by
its interiority; hence, just as there is diversity in subjective config-
urations, likewise will there be multiple compositions of interiority.
In her ludic essay that attempts to define interiority with an explicit
aim to also not arrive at a definition, Christine McCarthy playfully
shows the extent of ambiguity characterizing this space. She argues
that while the word “interiority” itself suggests one part of a binary
logic, and is thus opposed to “exteriority,” what constitutes these
two terms are never clear or certain because “interiority [and like-
wise its antonym] is grounded in circumspection, rather than relative
location” (McCarthy: 112). That is, interiority denotes “an act of
exclusion, as much as one of inclusion. Interiority is [among other
things] elitist and selective . . . the incorporation of mechanism of
control . . . and hence an explicit manipulation of an environment to

achieve and construct a desired space. Desire, space and control coin-
cide in interiority” (McCarthy: 113, my emphasis). As such, while
interiority invariably implies spatial categories like limits, boundaries,
and territories to thereby separate the included from the excluded
(a constituent of exteriority), these categories are also ultimately
unstable and subjected to porosity, shifts, redefinition, and renego-
tiation, all of which suggests that interiority is also “a responsive
phenomenon” (McCarthy: 115). And because interiority is con-
structed, controlled and “displaced environment” that reflects the
occupant’s will-to-power over it, it thus enables “certain possibili-
ties of habitation to occur” (McCarthy: 120), possibilities that would
otherwise remain prohibited and unexpressed if not for interiority.
An extreme example would again be the haunted house: an environ-
ment displaced by the specters whose infiltration and control of the
building is tantamount, figuratively speaking, to its reconstruction,
the haunted house becomes, as a result, a peculiar interiority that con-
duces to the possible habitation of the supernatural. Indeed, such a
scenario seems reflective of films like Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others
(2001) and Juan A. Bayona’s The Orphanage (2007), both of which
will be discussed in Chapter 4.
Because the eccentricity of interiority extends from, and is reflective
of, the individuality of its occupant, this space is therefore also poised
to instigate the stirring of her unconscious regions. As Rice astutely
notes, “In the interior subjects confront themselves in psychologically
charged ways through the medium of objects and furnishing” (Rice:
277). When relating this view to his interpretation of Benjamin’s
“trace,” it suggests that trace also includes impressions that are
unconscious, and therefore unknown to the subject. Although Rice
mentions in his essay Freud’s analogy between the domestic interior
and the structure of the unconscious, his critical position is fundamen-
tally directed by Benjamin and Baudelaire’s observations of what Rice
terms “a space of immaterial, de-realized experience” (Rice: 277).
While not exactly akin to a space influenced by the unconscious, it
nevertheless underscores a quality that is at once related to, but also
transcends, the subject, becoming as a result an independent, tacit fea-
ture capable of inducing the subject with certain kinds of sensations.
In this way is the domestic interior imbued with an indeterminacy that
Lefebvre can only describe as a “property” of occupied space; his qual-
ification that this “property could not be imputed either to the human
mind or to any transcendent spirit, but only to the actual ‘occupation’
of space” (Lefebvre: 171) bears a striking resemblance to Rice’s view.
Possibly because negotiation with the domestic interior engenders

profound psychic consequences, an excessive experience of derealiza-
tion and immateriality within this space can be inimical. As McCarthy
avers, “Desire for closeness [or enclosure] constructs interiority as
a shrinking phenomenon . . . with an actively encroaching border”
(McCarthy: 114). She further delineates what this “closeness” entails
when noting that “Interiority becomes a device of entrapment when
an interior allows an illicit intrusion to come too close” (McCarthy:
117, my emphasis). McCarthy’s terms “desire” and “illicit intrusion”
are almost certainly a psychoanalytically directed one, suggesting a
repressed and unconscious desire often signified as, among other
labels, the forbidden, the perverse, the inadmissible, and the unspeak-
able that has somehow (re)surfaced or returned, and is now “too
close” to the subject. Installed within the interior, this desire inex-
orably finds abetment by this space, which sustains and reinforces it
until it gradually overwhelms the subject and can even potentially dis-
solve her subjectivity altogether unless this process is arrested. Such,
I will demonstrate, is precisely the circumstances surrounding the pro-
tagonists in Beloved, The Exorcist, and, in particular, Roman Polanski’s
Repulsion (1977).
Since this book is concerned with the house, it is unsurprising
that women are also (but not exclusively) the focus of my interpre-
tation of select Gothic narratives not only because of the traditional
link between the female subject and domestic space, but also because
women, in general, tend to spend more time at home than men
do, and are thus more intimately connected, for better or worse, to
its interiority. But this connection, notably, is also a factor that fur-
ther underpins the ambiguity of this space and of femininity as well.
In an article that investigates the position of women figures in paint-
ing by Dutch masters, particularly Pieter de Hooch (1629–1684),
Bart Vershaffel shows that while women are clearly situated within
domestic space in some of these artworks, their postures and focal
points of attention suggest that they are nevertheless also “without”
it. Equally subtle are also works whereby the foregrounded woman
figure(s) inside the house is/are cleverly juxtaposed with an almost
imperceptible female subject located unmistakably outside the house
at a distance. In both cases, the easy assumptions of the association
between house and woman, and the stability of meaning implied by
either category, are problematized. As Vershaffel postulates,
What happens to femininity when it is linked to domesticity? At first,

femininity seems reduced: linking woman and house could be a means
to simplify and control the feminine, out of fear or for whatever reason.
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)
The last sentence in the quote above is crucial as it serves to consoli-

date two salient points that direct the trajectory of my study. First, the
domestic interior is undoubtedly more than “place” and “centre”; it is,
for lack of a better term, an experience that, as a result of dwelling, is
borne of its occupant’s conscious and (especially) unconscious desires,
but also exceeds them, becoming in the process an independent prop-
erty now integral to the architecture capable of implicitly influencing
its occupant’s subjectivity. Second, as my analysis of several narratives
will evince (see chapter outline below), the link between femininity
and domesticity is not always reductive to both, but in some cases
can also be productive and redemptive. Nevertheless, in the final anal-
ysis, while my scholarship presupposes such a link, one of its aims
is actually to also delink femininity and domesticity by demonstrating
how this space fundamentally destabilizes gender and sexual categories
altogether.
* * *
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
theoretical framework underscoring my inquiry is phenomenology as

advanced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but further inflected by psy-
choanalysis. Particularly important for my investigation is his view on
space’s (unconscious) relationship with the occupying subject. Space,
according to Merleau-Ponty, may be independent of the subject, but
it nevertheless also extends from her, and, as such, has the potential
to function as both a platform upon which subjectivity is staged and
a canvas onto which desires are inscribed. But space also determines
the configuration of the subject to a point by either serving as a mir-
ror from which the subject derives her sense of self-image or affecting
her unconscious to subtly recalibrate the coordinates of her subjec-
tivity. Indeed, as noted earlier in my discussion of interiority, space
can and does accommodate an unconscious property that insinuates
itself in ways that are often more “felt” than “known.” As Merleau-
Ponty notes in Phenomenology of Perception, such spatial “disturbance
does not affect the information which may be derived from percep-
tion, but discloses beneath ‘perception’ a deeper life of consciousness”
(Merleau-Ponty: 329). Elsewhere in the same study, he states that
space “. . . by its magic, confer its own spatial particularizations upon
the landscape [and subject, I would add] without ever appearing
itself ” (Merleau-Ponty: 296; emphasis mine). The nonappearance of
spatiality that is nevertheless particularly “present,” as I understand it,
is the spatial unconscious, which the subject registers predominantly in
indirect ways. Encountering such a space exposes the extent to which
subjectivity inadvertently shapes space, and to which such a perfor-
mative in turn resignifies the subject’s position. In this sense, both
space and subject are potentially collapsed into each other to thor-
oughly problematize notions of self and other, male and female, seen
and unseen, reality and refraction. Space becomes, at once, a stage
in and through which the subject moves as she responds and gives
definition to it, and a screen upon which the subject’s (un)conscious
desires and fears become inscribed. It is clear from the preceding dis-
cussion, then, that the subject/space relationship is more dialectical
than hierarchical.
For architectural historian Mark Wigley, the tendency in traditional
discourse on architecture to obscure the relationship between bod-
ies and space has directly impeded investigations into the manner in
which architecture controls and manipulates bodies and sexuality:
[E]ven though the definition of space is ostensibly the subject of archi-

tectural discourse, it cannot simply be interrogated by that discourse.
On the contrary, it is protected from analysis by that very discourse.
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)
Wigley astutely notes that the performance of guarding architecture

from theoretical interrogation is itself an ideological strategy infused
with sexual politics. But as Beatriz Colomina contends, “[t]he politics
of space are always sexual, even if space is central to the mechanisms
of the erasure of sexuality” (Colomina, “Introduction”: iii). Under
the scrutiny of psychoanalytical theory, however, space can no longer
be read as purely a receptacle that passively contains, and is therefore
independent of, its inhabitants and objects (Grosz 1995: 92). In the
case of the house, for example, its space has increasingly been dissected
for ideological and gendered inflections. But if architectural discourse
(at least up until recently) has tended to ignore questions of sexual
politics, in literature, architecture has long been an important trope
analyzed for its multilayered ideological (including sexual) allusions.
The Gothic, for example and according to one reading, has always
exploited the house’s differentiated sexual spaces, thereby revealing
the sinister link between interiority (domestication) and entrapment.
Here, the easy sliding between “house” and “home” is ruptured,
and thus demonstrates that its exterior threat—the “alien spirits”
so sharply contrasted with “the intimate shelter of private comfort”
(Vidler: 17)—is in fact an interior one in the guise, moreover, of some-
one to whom the (usually female) victim is most closely related, such
as a father or a husband. For the Gothic heroine, the house is some-
times not a home but a prison, or worse, a crypt. Of course, Gothic
criticisms’ investigation into unhomely houses is largely informed by
Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny, which describes how a
familiar, intimate space becomes defamiliarized, thereafter precipitat-
ing horror. But as Vidler has rightfully noted, the uncanny should
not be construed as “a property of the space itself nor can it be
provoked by any particular spatial conformation”; instead, “it is . . . a
representation of a mental state of projection that precisely elides the
boundaries of the real and the unreal in order to provoke a disturbing
ambiguity, a slippage between waking and dreaming” (Vidler: 11).
Heeding Vidler’s point for my own reading of the fictional house,
while I do not expressly insinuate that space possesses agency like
an unseen force that directly imposes and influences, I nevertheless

contend that the way in which a subject correspond with space and
the objects (including other subjects) occupying it does result in space
becoming invested with either uncanniness or homeliness implying a
certain degree of volition on its part.
Any competent discussion of space cannot afford to ignore the
importance of its contents, for it is the objects occupying space
that fundamentally allow for spatial determination and meaning.
According to Grosz,
The subject’s relation to space . . . is not passive . . . rather, the ways in

which space is perceived and represented depend on the kinds of objects
positioned “within” it, and more particularly, the kinds of relation the
subject has to those objects. Space makes possible different kinds of
relations but in turn is transformed according to the subject’s affective
and instrumental relations with it. Nothing about the “spatiality” of
space can be theorized without using objects as its indices. A space
empty of objects has no representable or perceivable features, and the
spatiality of a space containing objects reflects the spatial characteristics
of those objects, but not the space of their containment.
(Grosz 1995: 92)
Grosz’s point serves as an important reminder that space is “mean-

ingless” without its contents, and that it is the relationships between
the objects (including people) occupying space that grant space “rep-
resentable or perceivable features.” The words “perceivable” and
“perspectival” further imply that spatial meaning is only possible when
the subjective gaze is turned upon the intersection between space
and objects. It is of course possible for space to be objectless, but
such space will elude “spatial” conceptualization because notions like
dimension, coordinates, depth, and distance would all be meaningless
here (indeed, even “here” would be meaningless). Grosz’s observa-
tion, while insightful, nevertheless seems to assert a binary logic that
positions space and object in opposition to subject, thus insinuating by
extension the former’s reliance on the latter for significance.12 But as
Merleau-Ponty has shown, the perceiving subject and the space per-
ceived via objects are not straightforwardly distinguishable entities,
but are instead dialectically and organically intersected (Merleau-
Ponty: 293). As such, even as the subjective gaze endows space and
its corresponding objects with meaning, space and objects also pro-
vide the subject with the “means” to come into being. In other words,
what gives meaning to subjectivity is largely linked to how the subject
negotiates and identifies space and its contents with her gaze.
Accordingly, rather than a dominant, independent point of view

detached from the space it observes, the subjective gaze is also
paradoxically “objectified” by the act of seeing within space. Space is
not an “object” separate from the subject and for the latter to “unify”
(i.e., to confer “meaning” upon); instead, it is the organic relation-
ship between subject and space that “represent[s], at the core of the
subject, the fact of his birth, the perpetual contribution of his bodily
being, a communication with the world more ancient than thought”
(Merleau-Ponty: 296). This argument is also echoed by Grosz in an
earlier study, Volatile Bodies (1994), when she postulates that:
It is as an embodied subject that the subject occupies a perspective

on objects. Its perspective represents the position within space where
it locates itself. Its perspective dictates that its modes of access to
objects are always partial or fragmentary, interacting with objects but
never grasping or possessing them in their independent or complete
materiality. The object posed before a subject, a subject engaged with
objects, must be a subject situated in space as the (virtual) point of cen-
tral organization of perspective, the point which organizes a manifold
into a field.
(Grosz 1994: 90–91)
What can be surmised from Grosz’s observations is that as much as

space is rendered material, or an object, by the subject and the mecha-
nism of her gaze, so is the subject/gaze given materiality by the space
she occupies and the objects she perceives. Subject and space, in other
words, are symbiotically correlated in and through the gaze: while
the gaze is the mechanism by which space is constituted as object for
the subject, it is also that which situates the subject in, and there-
fore objectifies her, within and for space. Grosz later writes, “It is our
positioning within space, both as the point of perspectival access to
space, and also as an object for others in space, that gives the subject
a coherent identity and an ability to manipulate things, including its
own body parts, in space” (Grosz 1995: 92). But rather than focusing
solely on the gaze as designator and inheritor of materiality, she fur-
ther suggests that the significance of space is also motivated through
tactility:13 “space does not become comprehensible to the subject by
its being the space of movement; rather, it becomes space through
movement, and as such, it acquires specific properties from the sub-
ject’s constitutive functioning in it” (Grosz 1995: 92). Here, Grosz’s
point is that space must (also) be manipulated through “movement”
for it to attain any material reality; this movement, moreover, is often
activated via its content. But the flip side to this circumstance is the
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
to this is also the problem that the representation of space, according

to Griselda Pollock, is inevitably determined by
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)
The argument above, when realigned to a perspective on architecture,

inevitably reinforces the latter’s historical essentialness in asserting that
not only is architecture conditioned by history and its vicissitudes, but
the way it is experienced (i.e., how it is utilized, talked about, investi-
gated, and so forth, what Pollock calls “the point of consumption”) as
well. Therefore, to ensure that these interrelated contentions do not
significantly mar the efficacy of this study, my treatment of the fictional
house will, when necessary, also take into account the complications
pertaining to dwelling that corresponds with the particular histori-
cal moment against which the narrative is set. Admittedly, however,
since my primary objective is to demonstrate the unconscious dynam-
ics between subject and space that is engendered by their dialectical
connection, such an enterprise will remain tangential to this project
and will only be apparent in chapters (especially Chapters 2 and 3) that
directly or indirectly incline to this aspect.
In the final analysis, that which determines what a house is, accord-
ing to Julienne Hanson, has less to do with “a list of activities or
rooms” and more with
a pattern of space, governed by intricate conventions about what space

there are, how they are connected together and sequenced, which activ-
ities go together and which are separated out, how the interior is
decorated, and even what kinds of household objects should be dis-
played in the different parts of the home. If there are principles to be
learned from studying the design of dwelling, they do not yield eas-
ily to a superficial analysis of ‘basic human needs . . . ’. [T]he house is
perhaps the most complex building of all.
(Hanson: 2)
Implied in Hanson’s observation is the house’s functions as a locus

of power; its design, for example, communicates less about its inhabi-
tants’ “basic needs” than it does the unspoken hierarchy they occupy
and, by extension, the kinds of relationship—whether gendered,

raced, or others—they exercise, within its interior. More than just “a
machine for living in,” according to Le Corbusier’s famous definition
(Le Corbusier: 151), the house is also a complex network of power
that governs inclusivity and exclusivity through constant policing of
its boundaries. It is largely, if not altogether, because of this net-
work that the house transcends its function as space for habitation,
to become home. For Mary Douglas, home is “a tangle of conven-
tions and totally incommensurable rights and duties” (Douglas: 302),
whose “strongest index of solidarity would not be stoutness of the
enclosing walls but the complexity of coordination” (Douglas: 306)
between its occupants. Ironically, however, as an instrument effected
to regulate authority and hierarchy, it is also a fragile system that is easy
to subvert (Douglas: 301). Even the slightest transgressions in terms
of communal relations and organization can undo the familiar and,14
as a result, invest space with an unhomely quality that subsequently
vexes the pursuit of dwelling.
But transgressions are not only limited to deliberate and clearly
noticeable expressions, but involve subtle and imperceptible ones as
well. A case in point is the subject’s psychologically charged con-
frontation with herself that, as Charles Rice observes, occurs in the
domestic interior. In the Gothic, a figurative equivalent to an intensify-
ing psychodrama is frequently the experience of haunting. A standard
narrative pattern in many haunted house narratives is the protagonist’s
dismissal, with rational explanations, of the slight changes around the
house that eventually gives way to mounting fear and anxiety when
these adjustments, in both their frequency and objects affected, esca-
late. By then, however, the protagonist would likely be unable to
redress the situation because she is rarely capable of tracing (due,
perhaps, to possession or intense distress) its source, which like in
The Others and Beloved may even be herself. Indeed, what partly
constitutes the Gothic house’s ambiguity is arguably this tendency
toward activating such transgressions, or shifts—whether observable
or otherwise—which render, as a result, what is allegedly a network of
stable, complex, coordinates suddenly incoherent.
* * *
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
readily to my analytical trajectory that seeks to clarify some of its

modulations. This, in turn, will help me isolate a sample of possible
unconscious constituents that the house can accommodate. In this
study, five such constituents will be identified, each of which will be
announced in the headings of the chapters following from this Intro-
duction. And as eclectic as my choice of narratives may seem, every
text is actually selected and paired carefully—as will be evident in the
chapter-by-chapter outline below—to enable a comparative study of
the various unconscious operations of the house resulting from its
dialectical relationship with the subject and their corresponding influ-
ences on the latter. An important clarification needs to be addressed
at this point, however, before I introduce the chapters. Throughout
this study, I privilege the term “Gothic,” rather than, say, “horror,” to
describe the narratives under discussion because of the type and range
of texts that the former can encompass. While horror stories certainly
preoccupy a substantial portion of my analysis (five out of the ten
texts), they are not the only type of stories in which I am interested.
In Gothic scholarship moreover, it is commonly acknowledged that
the horror story is a component of the Gothic while a Gothic narrative
is not necessarily a horror story. Hence, although I will use the terms
“horror” and “Gothic” interchangeably in chapters that explicitly deal
with horror narratives, I want to stress again at this juncture that this
study is concerned not with horror but with the Gothic, under which
horror is subsumed.
The focus of Chapter 1, which considers a pair of early novels by
the late British master of postfeminist Gothic fiction, Angela Carter,
is the treacherous house. Both The Magic Toyshop and Love revolve
around a house, whose initial subscription to its occupant’s authority
that reinforces its dependability to advance his or her will-to-power
subsequently culminates in betrayal when the house swiftly changes
loyalty and reveals its duplicity. As a receptacle that also accommodates
the desires and subjective positions of others, the house is necessarily
ambiguous in its allegiance, and thus ascribing it with trust is always
risky. I draw on two related spatial concepts that effectively clarify my
interpretative direction for The Magic Toyshop: Lefebvre’s notion of
space as mirror and Foucault’s heterotopia. While the first delineates
how space functions to simultaneously motivate subjective formation
and reflect its position, the latter shows that such subjectivity is funda-
mentally insubstantial and easily dissolved—like the image reflected in
a mirror—when it depends on the house for consolidation. As such,
structuring one’s self-image by symbolically aligning it to the house
is always precarious, for the ambiguity underscoring the architecture’s
property potentially threatens to sabotage such an exertion and, in the

process, rupture subjectivity. My reading of Love takes its cue from
Mark Wigley’s insights into the gendering of the conventional white
walls of houses, and Beatriz Colomina’s perspective on the theatrical
dimension of the modern domicile. Wigley’s observation helps clarify
why Annabel’s effacement of the flat’s white walls indirectly reflects
her husband’s emasculation, while Colomina’s guides my interpreta-
tion of the performative motivations informing the three occupants’
mutual manipulation of each other that, to an extent, is also subtly
directed by the house.
Historically, the chronology of the narratives discussed in Chapter 2
bookend the American Civil War. Valerie Martin’s Property, which
takes place before the war, is a chilling meditation on moral dissi-
pation and controlled violence that ably demonstrates the extent to
which a monstrous system perpetuating racism can divest not only
the victims of their humanity, but their victimizers—such as the pro-
tagonist, Manon Gaudet—as well. Toni Morrison’s Beloved, on the
other hand, is set immediately after the conflict, and concerns a fugi-
tive slave, Sethe, who had earlier committed infanticide to deliver
her child from slavery. But unable to accept what she had done, she
repressed this memory, and thus installed trauma into her uncon-
scious. Although different in their treatments of the slave narrative,
both novels focus as their motif on a house that bears traces of
the unconscious. In the case of Martin’s novel, I contend that its
unconscious is the indirect result of the gender ideology prevalent
in the nineteenth century that divides the key rooms of a middle-
class house into either masculine or feminine (or, more rarely, neutral)
domains. This gendering of rooms would also implicate racial rela-
tionship, thereby transforming the house into what Victor Burgin
terms as paranoiac space—a concept that also informs my interpre-
tive framework—where its occupants exercise their contempt for each
other. For Morrison’s novel, whose depiction of trauma via the trope
of haunting will be the focus of my analysis, I intersect Anthony
Vidler’s reworking of Freud’s uncanny with trauma theory in order to
distil how the trope of haunting operates as an expression of Sethe’s
unspeakable, and more importantly, how haunting and trauma are
consolidated through the house, 124 Bluestone.
The first two chapters are devoted to literary works, but the
following two will focus on films. Chapter 3 considers two of hor-
ror genre’s most iconic films: William Friedkin’s The Exorcist and
Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. In terms of a reading framework, how-
ever, this chapter decidedly attempts an unconventional approach of
introducing it in retrospect to my analysis of the first narrative (The

Exorcist) in order to establish the interpretive direction of the second.
Deleuze’s architectural concept of the pli, or fold, framed against the
Lacanian notion of the extimate, underscores my discussion of both
films. Following Barbara Creed’s interpretation of The Exorcist, I read
Regan’s possession as metaphorizing her resentment against poten-
tially losing the object of her unspeakable desire—her mother. Her
transformation, as a result, into an abject embodiment, however, is
in part encouraged by the space of her bedroom, which I see is a pli
unfolding her unconscious inside out to thereby unleash her repressed.
Similarly, in Repulsion, Carol’s (the protagonist) otherwise impossible
desire for a monadic existence becomes likely when, after her sister
departs for a holiday, she is left alone in her apartment where she
will gradually implode into herself. Her dissolving psyche is visually
reflected by her apartment’s increasingly deteriorating condition, but
instead of reading the latter as merely analogous to the former, I argue
that her interior space’s transformation, which clarifies its operation as
pli, directly helps to reinforce Carol’s absorption (or, to evoke the
notion of depth, her slide deeper) into her own subjective interiority.
Fundamentally, my discussion of the two narratives implies a secret
self, or extimate other, encrypted within the subject’s psyche that
will, however, be elicited by her lived space. To warrant my interpre-
tation, careful consideration will be given to both the films’ various
mise-en-scènes, and formal and stylistic features, in order to identify
representations of domestic space in its function as pli. I conclude this
chapter by performing a comparative reading of the two films as alle-
gories of the crisis of modern living implicating the problem of private
property.
Both the narratives discussed in Chapter 4 are Spanish horror films
set in a haunted house and concern a mother struggling with the pos-
sible loss of her child(ren). Because she refuses to accept this, her
ego is invariably invested with what Freud terms melancholia as she
sinks into grief. More significantly to my study, however, is the role
of the house in embodying the subject’s grief. While Freud’s con-
cept guides my analysis of The Others and The Orphanage, it is to
melancholia’s subsequent modulations by various theorists to which
my chapter is more inclined because of my interest in how a house
is injected with an unconscious property. My treatment of The Oth-
ers proffers a curious proposal that identifies the house’s function as
Grace’s (the protagonist) double. Grace, along with her two children,
are dead but cannot acknowledge it, projects the disavowal of her own
absence onto the house in order to maintain an illusion of presence.
In light of Max Pensky’s notion of melancholy object, what the film

suggests is the possibility of transferring melancholia to an object—a
process he calls “melancholy dialectic”—which thereafter sustains the
subject’s unconscious grief, while helping, ironically, the subject to
live with more vitality. In my treatment of The Orphanage, I consult
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s notions of introjection and incor-
poration, which they revised from Freud’s mourning and melancholia,
and link them to Kristeva’s meditation on melancholia and depression,
to help me establish an interpretation that synthesizes haunting and
the house into a single continuum that is also figuratively aligned with
melancholia. As both films end with the protagonist and her child(ren)
transcending their circumstance to arrive at an ambiguous elsewhere
within the house, I will hence conclude this chapter with a compara-
tive reading of elsewhere in terms of how differently the two narratives
configure it.
My conclusion performs a close reading of two more narratives,
Janice Galloway’s debut novel The Trick Is to Keep Breathing (1991)
and Alison Bechdel’s autographic, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomedy
(2006), to consolidate the various properties discussed in the pre-
ceding chapter and thereby foreground a more positive attribute of
the house: its capacity for encouraging redemption. Although unusual
in the way they depict the house’s affirmative property, both novels,
I argue, demonstrate that the house is able to deliver, up to a point,
the subject from a traumatic past either directly, such as serving as
lifeline connecting her to both herself and her world when her psyche
and body are increasingly disintegrating (Trick), or indirectly, such
as subtly protecting and comforting the subject without her aware-
ness and even though she has consciously ascribed it with reductive
connotations (Fun Home). Importantly, I aim to demonstrate that
the subject’s dialectical relationship with space and its contents is not
merely limited to an instrumental relationship, but implicates a psy-
chological and emotional one as well. In this way, more than just lived
space, the house (and its objects) can sometimes become the means
by which the subject achieves restoration after an agonizing ordeal,
either by helping her cope (Trick) or in subtly impelling her to make
peace with the past and move forward (Fun Home).
There is one final point I wish to establish regarding my inter-
pretive position before I close this Introduction. Throughout this
study, the predominantly psychoanalytical framework I use to analyze
the various narratives presupposes a psychological dimension to the
characters, and thus would attribute their desires, motivations, behav-
iors, and emotions to the unconscious. I am aware that while this
is accepted practice in psychoanalytical criticism, it is equally viewed

by many scholars as problematic because it essentially treats fictional
characters (except those in Bechdel’s autographic) like they were real
people. I want to therefore stress at this point that my intention is
purely heuristic; in other words, I use these fictional characters as case
studies that can be psychoanalyzed in order to show the effects of
dwelling in a house that are often unobvious and indirect. For this
reason, it is inevitable that I would approach characters in fictional
narratives as if they were real people endowed with consciousness,
or it would be otherwise impossible to identify and understand the
manifold dynamics engendered by body/space dialectics.
Chapter 1
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
This study begins with a discussion of the late Angela Carter’s

narratives. Carter was one of the most distinctive postmodern femi-
nist writers of her generation, and certainly one of the most researched
contemporary British authors today.1 Her superlative novels and short
stories, whose exploration of perversion and transgression in highly
ludic ways, and whose portrayals of unusual and subversive hero-
ines, decidedly situate them within the Gothic genre. But while much
scholarly work has been devoted to her narratives’ unconventional
treatment of gender and sexual politics, little attention has been given
to a feature that crucially intersects with this concern: the role of
space.2 In several of Carter’s stories, it is obvious that space—or
more precisely, place—is not merely staged as setting or backdrop,
but bears an uncanny, sentient-like quality whose history and exis-
tence are profoundly interrelated with its inhabitants, often subtly
shaping their lives even as its significance is dependent on them.3
In this chapter, while issues familiar to Carter scholarship are evident,
largely because they are also integral to appreciating her work, they
will nevertheless be discussed primarily in relation to my focus on
space and spatiality, especially the space of domestic interiority. Focus-
ing on two of her earlier novels, The Magic Toyshop (1967) and Love
(1971), I explicitly foreground their depictions of the family home as
a place harboring ambiguous inclinations, which in turn affect them
at the level of the unconscious and in therefore unpredictable ways.
Subjected to Carter’s Gothic sentiments, the traditional references
associated with the house—as implied by the notion of the “hearth”—

are often compromised, and as a result, the house become invested
with ambiguity that threatens to dislodge its inhabitants from their
stable positions with regard to their authority and subjectivity.
Additionally, in Carter’s works, categories related to gender and
sexuality that operate according to normative family ideals are often
also transgressed because of this spatial ambiguity, which in turn
reflects the architecture’s reorientation of allegiances with the various
household members. As a site accommodating and upholding one of
capitalism and patriarchy’s most cherished institutions—the nuclear
family—the house, in Carter’s fierce imagination, becomes a pow-
erful instrument aimed at subverting these very ideologies, thereby
revealing the destabilizing predisposition it can potentially and secretly
accommodate. In the final analysis, the houses populating Carter’s
work often cannot be fixed with an absolute signified by its dweller(s),
but is ultimately unpredictable and duplicitous. In this regard, it pro-
foundly subscribes to the notion of property that Lefebvre identifies
(see Introduction) in architecture as an inevitable consequence of
human occupation. By focusing on the way the house is lived in
Carter’s novels, I demonstrate not only how this spatial property is
clarified, but how it works as well to subtly complicate relationship
patterns between members of the household and individual subjective
positions.
Familiarly read as a Gothic text,4 The Magic Toyshop clearly estab-
lishes domestic space as a patriarchal institution writ in miniature.5
The house owner, Philip, who is a toymaker, literally subjugates and
controls the lives of his dependents, particularly the women, to ensure
that they comply with his hegemonic, masculine whim. He is espe-
cially vigilant in policing their bodies and sexualities, so much so that
their expressions must accord to his desires and determination, or
be unpermitted. Any deviation, however slight, will be swiftly met
with punishment, usually with basic material denial, for Philip also
controls the family finances. However, as an unmistakable symbol of
female entrapment, the house as a literal presence is often disregarded
in scholarship, which tends to view it in purely metaphorical terms.
As a result, inadequate attention is paid to how the house precisely
supports its proprietor’s, and hence patriarchy’s, cruel and forbidding
machinations. For me, the house’s material significance is crucial to
helping us understand the body/space dynamics that correspond with
male and female subjectivities installed within a social system that is
underscored by gender and class discrimination. Another limitation
with an emphasis on the metaphorical link between the house and
H o u s i n g Tre ac h e ry 27
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
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”
(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.
The Magic Toyshop

When The Magic Toyshop opens, we find Melanie, aged fifteen,
ensconced in a “pastel, innocent bedroom” (2) of her parents’ osten-
tatious mansion (which, the narrative tantalizingly suggests, is as frail
and risible as Melanie’s imagination),7 standing before a mirror and
admiring the reflection of her naked body. She is delighted with
the topography of her developing physique, which she equates with
“America, my new found land,” as she goes through a series of play-
ful calisthenics, “exhilarating at the supple surprise of herself now she
was no longer a little girl” (1). She toys with various ideas on how
best to offer herself to a future husband, her “phantom bridegroom,”
on their wedding night, including assuming a “gift-wrapped” present,
and other images borrowed from novels she had read, specifically
Lady’s Chatterley Lover and Lorna Doone (2). Arguably, there is a

sense that Melanie is performing self-objectification, which serves as a
foreshadowing to what will later befall her when she is forced to relo-
cate to her uncle’s house where she will be treated as more or less an
object. It is possible that Melanie’s obsession with mirrors is the result
and an extension of her insularity. In this home where she is free to
pursue whatever activities she wants and is only concerned for herself
(since her siblings are under the constant care of Mrs. Rundle, their
housekeeper), it is unsurprising that she would develop a narcissistic
complex. In this sense, the narrative already indirectly intimates that a
subject’s relationship with her home—in this case, the living choices
she is afforded with by the house—can, to an extent, determine her
sense of self.
The first chapter of The Magic Toyshop distinctly provides an inkling
of the literal and metaphorical functions mirrors and mirroring will
play in relation to the dialectics between subjectivity and space for
the rest of the novel. The mansion, as Melanie’s relationship with it
will increasingly evince, is more than just interiority for occupation
and manipulation, but has also an inherent property that can direct
and determine its inhabitant’s self-definition and image. That Melanie
can pursue an indolent, romanticized, and self-serving existence is the
result of not only narcissistic desire that is indirectly motivated by the
signifiers of affluence and showiness, but also vapidity and frivolity,
characterizing the mansion, which is filled with an assortment of more
or less useless things from all over the world that reflect her parents’
idle lifestyle (13). A description of her parents’ bedroom, for example,
tells us that:
Her parents’ wedding photograph hung over the mantelpiece, where

the familiar things seemed exotic and curious in the light of the moon.
The French gilt clock, for instance, which told her parents’ time and had
stopped at five minutes to three on the day after they left for America.
Nobody bothered to wind it up again. Next to the clock was a Mexican
pottery duck, bright, gay and daft, its blue black splotched with yellow
flowers . . . . (10)
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
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:
Inasmuch as its symmetry is projected therein, the Ego is liable to

“recognize itself in the other,” but it does not in fact coincide with
it: “other” merely represents “Ego” as an inverted image in which the
left appears at the right, as a reflection which yet generates an extreme
difference, as a repetition which transforms the Ego’s body into an
obsessing will-o’-the wisp. Here, what is identical is at the same time
radically other, radically different—and transparency is equivalent to
opacity.
(Lefebvre: 185, emphasis in the original)
In Lefebvre’s assessment, a mirror image may correspond, but can

never achieve similitude, with the object it reflects because an image is
fundamentally an inverted representation of the original and is ulti-
mately unreal (like the “will-o’-the wisp,” which is false, harmful
light). Implied is that the image’s apparent identicalness to the pro-
totype is already compromised by difference. An ego that derives a
sense of subjectivity from a mirror is therefore liable of losing itself in
that “other space,” that is, the realm of representation, and become
replaced by an image of self instead. As a result, obsession with the
mirror becomes inevitable as the ego struggles to ground its subjec-
tivity by constantly turning to its reflected image in order to reassure
itself of presence. For Lefebvre then, what constitutes narcissism is
the failure of the ego “to reassert hegemony over itself by defying its
own image . . . . It will then be in danger of never rediscovering itself,
space qua figment will have swallowed it up, and the glacial surface of
the mirror will hold it forever captive in its emptiness . . . ” (Lefebvre:
185). Lefebvre’s observation aptly illustrates Melanie’s condition: her
narcissistic propensity is, I opine, the result of her ego’s inability to
assert presence due to its excessive, if largely unconscious, identifi-
cation with the mansion. Indeed, a particularly quaint behavior of
hers distinctly intimates such an association. It involves a set of pho-
tographs of her younger self that she curiously reimagines as depicting
her “children in Brownie uniforms and Red Indian outfits, and pet
dogs, and summer-snapped future holidays” (6); even odder, when-
ever she views it, she would also be compelled to “[look] at herself in
the mirror as if she were a photograph in her grown-up photo album”

(6). Extraordinary as it may be, this scenario nevertheless denotes
the extent to which Melanie’s self-image has become derealized and
ensnared by the house—a scenario that, to a point, echoes Charles
Rice’s observation of derealized experience unconsciously encoun-
tered by the subject in the domestic interior (see Introduction).
On the one hand, the photos reveal a childhood spent impersonat-
ing a variety of identities, but all taking place at home because none
of them seems to correspond with an actual holiday, as implied by the
phrase “future holidays”; on the other, it is possible that by recast-
ing the images in the photos as her imaginary offspring, Melanie is
vicariously projecting herself into the future when she will assume the
role of a mother, thus suggesting more than an emulation of, but the
desire to be, her mother, whose frequent absence defines her in equally
fantastical terms for her daughter. In a sense, Melanie’s profound iden-
tification with a timeless funhouse has paradoxically positioned her as
both child and adult.
But her constant need for mirrors to affirm presence already sug-
gests, at the same time, the phantasmal construction with which
she identifies, and more insidiously, the fact that her self-image has
become trapped in the mirror par excellence—the very mansion itself.
In other words, her perpetual self-inspection is also symptomatic of an
unconscious anxiety over the fact that who she is may ultimately be
deceptive and unreal. More than an expression of childish vanity, her
need for constant affirmation of, for example, her beauty via mirrors
(16) is possibly tantamount to what theorist Jenijoy La Belle terms a
“catoptric confrontation” effected to transform “an ocular reflection”
into a signified (La Belle: 11). Accordingly, for Melanie to establish
the facticity of her material presence and reality, she needs to depend
on the image that is reflected in the mirror. “Visual presence” con-
firms and consolidates her “self-conception” (La Belle: 36)—which
is undoubtedly ironic indeed. Melanie’s pursuit of an illusory self-
image that is reinforced by her dependence on a place of illusions—her
house—for definition will, in the end, come to an abrupt halt when
news of her parents’ fatal automobile accident decides the children’s
subsequent fate. However, before they (and the reader) learn about
this tragic event, a curious episode will transpire that possibly serves,
among other things, to foreshadow the children’s impending ejection
from the mansion.
The sequence of this episode begins with Melanie donning her
mother’s wedding dress, after which she sneaks out “into the garden,
into the night” (16). For Alison Lee, this performance symbolizes
Melanie’s sexual awakening and figurative re/displacement of her

mother (Lee: 46), thus reinforcing the earlier episode involving the
set of photographs that underscores her desire to be her mother—at
least, the mother according to her fantasy. But as she steps across the
threshold of the building, whatever fantasy of self she is entertaining
at that moment is unexpectedly “snuffed out” (17), as she suddenly
finds herself unmoored and alone on a dark, moonless night. Unfazed,
however, she wanders around the garden where:
The flowers cupped . . . with a midnight, unguessable sweetness, and

the grass rippled and murmured in a small voice that was an inten-
sification of silence. The stillness was like the end of the world. She
was alone. In her carapace of white satin, she was the last, the only
woman. She trembled with exaltation under the deep, blue, high arc of
the sky [ . . . ]. The dewy grass licked her feet, like the wet tongues of
small, friendly beasts; the grass seemed longer and more clinging than
during the day . . . . She walked on slow, silent feet through the subaque-
ous night. She breathed tremulously through her mouth, tasting black
wine. (17)
In Patricia Juliana Smith’s assessment, the garden in this episode pur-

portedly represents “the precarious liminal space between childish
innocence and womanly experience, leaning to the former more than
to the latter” (Smith 2006: 348). Notwithstanding my agreement
with Smith’s reading, I am of the view that the liminality motivat-
ing Melanie’s transition from childhood to womanhood has less to do
with the garden and more with the night. The warranty of my read-
ing is largely informed by the philosopher Richard Etlin’s meditation
on how the relationship between spatiality and the night can assert
a profound effect on self. Etlin points out that “night threatens (or
promises) to abolish the separation between the self and the world,”
and further adds that “The psychological effectiveness of this spatial
analogy depends, I believe, upon the spatial sense of self whereby we
have the impression of having a bounded spatial being which extends
outside the body but nonetheless is contained within some actual
physical boundary within view, beyond which lies a spatial realm that
becomes the locus of the unknown or the unfathomable” (Etlin: 11).
Accordingly, because of night’s inducement of darkness, which cancels
out our visual capacity to distinguish self from world, it can potentially
instigate the mind to entertain the belief that the boundary separating
our body and its beyond does not exist while simultaneously reas-
sure us that the body nevertheless sustains a delineation that does not
collapse into space, which serves here as “the locus of the unknown
or the unfathomable.” When this perspective is framed against the

episode in novel under discussion, it is arguable that Melanie’s experi-
ence is a kind of figurative return to a presymbolic state, during which
the ego has yet to recognize its separateness from its environment.
It is an ego, in other words, that is without definition and thus has no
self-image yet.
Fundamentally, I interpret the scenario above as a series of sensa-
tions implying the dissolution of a self-image that Melanie has hitherto
been constructing through identification with her house. Indeed, the
complete lack of visual sensation evident throughout the quoted
passage possibly implies the absence of self-recognition, which is a
developmental stage of the ego heavily dependent on the technol-
ogy of seeing (what Lacan calls the mirror stage). In the darkness of
this garden, Melanie has metaphorically regressed to a figurative stage
where she is yet to be born again, a stage that thus fulfils the condition
of being simultaneously defined by her physicality and undefined due
to its link to the “locus of the unknown or the unfathomable,” which
by extension implies the evaporation of her self-image that has only
ever been tenuous in the first place. That she will thereafter reenter
the house completely unclothed—purportedly to avoid damaging her
mother’s dress (20)—serves, in fact, to further consolidate my inter-
pretation, for her nakedness could represent her yet unborn status. But
as a subject whose ego no longer bears the house’s reflection, Melanie
has also symbolically forfeited her welcome there. Indeed, almost as if
the mansion is impatient to evict her, Melanie will learn of her parents’
fate the following day.
The House that Uncle Philip Built

With their affluent parents dead, the newly orphaned siblings have no
alternative but to go live with their estranged working-class uncle, a
toymaker, and his family comprising his dumb wife, Margaret, and her
brothers, Finn (Philip’s assistant) and Francie (who lives with them
but works independently, and is apparently rarely at home). Melanie
quickly learns that in this house (which is also a toyshop), everyone
has a specific function that must be diligently observed in order to
keep the premise running like clockwork. Philip’s dwelling, in a sense,
corresponds with, but also exceeds, what the modernist architect Le
Corbusier’s proposes is the house’s primary role—a “machine for liv-
ing in” (Le Corbusier: 151)—for while it runs like a machine whose
grooves are oiled by the family’s day-to-day activities, it also operates
as an extension of its owner’s power to subjugate his subordinates,
transforming them into automatons and thus homogenizing every-

one who lives there. Melanie will also quickly learn that Philip values
his self-made puppets (132) above his family precisely because the
former has no agency and hence, submit totally to his perverse and
draconian will (76, 144). Philip’s home, in this sense, seems like a
parody of the notion of home itself: for instance, while home is tra-
ditionally associated with privacy, such a quality is mostly impossible
in the toymaker’s house. Not only is the house’s design reminiscent
of a panoptican that places its inhabitants under Philip’s control, its
walls are often also unreliable as boundaries because of the family’s
predisposition toward spying. For example, within a few days of her
arrival, Melanie accidentally discover two peepholes cleverly masked
by a painting hanging on the bedroom wall through which Finn,
especially, has been voyeuristically looking (109). But the house’s par-
odic dimension is also due to the small acts of resistance performed
by Philip’s dependents, thereby already indicating the house’s unclear
loyalties. Here, what are often considered normal domestic behavior
or activities become either relinquished, such as Finn’s preference for
walking on hands, or, in Margaret’s case, pursued to excess (sewing
and cooking) so as to deceive her husband into a false assurance of
his authority in order to enjoy the illicit. This latter point, more-
over, underscores what is perhaps the most strikingly parodic about
the house: the ambiguous reference that confuses its function as an
abode in which to live and a theater box through which to perform.
This feature of the house will be discussed in more detail later.
Having just arrived at a home that is diametrically unlike her previ-
ous one, Melanie would, unsurprisingly, be disorientated at first. Her
uncle’s house is altogether an inversion of her original dwelling in
more sense than one. Doubling up as toyshop, Philip’s house should
exemplify the signifier “fun” more obviously than the mansion, but
such is evidently not the case. It is, instead, a reversed wonderland, the
foil to Melanie’s first dwelling, and the consolidation of the self-image
that Melanie has been developing up until now—an image that is dis-
torted and ultimately illusory—that will, ironically, leave her bereft
of any image whatsoever, at least for a while. For in Philip’s house,
Melanie’s ego will have no recourse to establishing a definition not
only because it is devoid of mirrors, but also because her subjectivity
will be reduced to a thing whose function is to satisfy her uncle’s per-
verse and sometimes violent desires. Nevertheless, there is one quality
both houses share, and that is the sensation of pervasive derealiza-
tion they engender. But if the mansion’s derealizing capacity is due
to its ostentation and artificiality, Philip’s house’s is the result of, first,
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)
What was once familiar to Melanie has, as a consequence of sojourning

at her uncle’s place, begun to slowly melt away and assume a surreal
quality instead. And while the passage above concerns Melanie’s grad-
ual inability to recall who her siblings really were before their parents’
death, implied is also her struggle to remember who she was. Impor-
tantly, the fundamental point inferred from this observation is the fact
that the dissolution of Melanie’s previous self-image is not merely the
result of being unwillingly subjected to her uncle’s control but has
also to do with inhabiting a house engineered according to Philip’s
desire for policing, to borrow a quote from Mark Wigley, “sexual-
ity, or, more precisely, women’s sexuality, the chastity of the girl, the
fidelity of the wife” (Wigley: 336).9 It is, I opine, likely due to the
extreme measures Philip takes toward this end that, in part, render
his house—and by extension, the process of dwelling—anomalous,
thereby inciting Melanie’s derealizing sensation. These include dis-
allowing the women to wear cosmetics and trousers, and condemning
them to total silence unless when spoken to (62–63). Margaret’s
inability to speak, in this sense, is symbolically telling. Such regula-
tions apply even in Philip’s absence, for the house continues to assert
his ruthlessness in clear, unmistakable ways. A case in point is the bath-
tub and its unpredictable heating system that respond only to Philip,
as if he “exercise[d] some occult authority over it, for it never erupted
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.
Heterotopic Duplicity and the Advent of Utopia

Theoretically, the analogical association between the two houses and
the mirror in The Magic Toyshop also directs my interpretation to a
spatial concept developed by Michel Foucault. First introduced in

his essay “Of Other Spaces” (1986), heterotopia describes a place
that is simultaneously not a place, or a placeless place. Although it
is implausible that Carter’s novel is inspired by Foucault’s concept
(the translation of Foucault’s essay appeared nineteen years after the
novel’s publication, and Carter only became familiar with Foucault’s
writings in the seventies), The Magic Toyshop nevertheless seems to
anticipate the French theorist’s meditation on a kind of space that
serves as a “counter-site” to contest and invert what are, in fact, “real
sites” (Foucault 1986: 24). But what is for me the primary connec-
tion between Carter and Foucault’s delineations of volatile space is its
mirroring propensity. For Foucault, the most prominent example of a
heterotopic site is the mirror, with its spatial quality that asserts both
the “absolutely real” and “absolutely unreal” while fundamentally
“exist[ing] in reality” (Foucault 1986: 24). In this regard, what consti-
tutes a heterotopic space is always deceptive: it may display “the scene
desired by an autoerotic imagination” (Melchor-Bonnet: 243), but
the security it affords to this imagination is dangerously fragile since,
like a mirror, the heterotopic space “will always remain haunted by
what is not found within it” (Melchor-Bonnet: 273) and thus accom-
modate the potential to expose the fleeting, fantastical property of
such an imagination (Melchor-Bonnet: 260). For Foucault, however,
it is precisely its capacity to maintain the unreal while actively implicat-
ing reality that fundamentally identifies heterotopia as utopic as well
(Foucault 1986: 24), the importance of which for my discussion will
be clarified later.
It is striking that Carter’s novel also identifies sites that are similar
to the ones Foucault sees as heterotopic space, including the theater
stage and the garden, thereby revealing a surprising similarity between
these two thinkers’ perspectives on space that is abstruse and ambigu-
ous. But while Foucault distinguishes usually non-normative sites like
the cemetery and the asylum as the clearest representations of the
heterotopia, Carter (at least as intimated in The Magic Toyshop) also
includes normative sites like the family home in her list of locations
that reflect spatial ambivalence. In this regard, Carter demonstrates
that heterotopias can encompass any site. Whenever a particular site’s
normative quality is disturbed or destabilized, resulting in its assump-
tion of an ambiguous dimension, it is potentially already heterotopic.
This is because despite the infiltration of semblance, the site continues
to appear real nevertheless, thus accommodating as a result the con-
stituencies both reality and its other. Unlike the Freudian uncanny,
whose presence, while undetected at first, is usually undeniable when
it intensifies, the property of the unreal inherent in heterotopia is

arguably more insidious precisely because it is consistently difficult
to distinguish from the site’s real dimensions. But as noted, a site’s
heterotopic determination is invariably accompanied by its utopic
potential as well, thus suggesting that the derealization experience
effected by such a site is not necessarily always deleterious to the
inhabiting subject. To give a gendered example, while a heterotopic
site in the form of the house may appear to symbolize patriarchy and
female entrapment, it can also undermine these references and play a
decisive role in empowering women. To a degree, The Magic Toyshop
reflects such a circumstance by establishing the house as initially sinis-
ter but ultimately imprecise when it is revealed toward the end that it
has all along been invalidating, even while it is apparently reinforcing,
its owner’s authority.
As a point of interest, I want to propose that when applied to The
Magic Toyshop, Melchor-Bennet’s argument concerning the hetero-
topia as a place capable of conjuring a “scene desired by an autoerotic
imagination” (Melchor-Bonnet: 243) aptly sums up both Melanie and
Philip’s attempts and subsequent failures at constructing a self-image
modeled after, respectively, the mansion and the toyshop. In the fol-
lowing paragraphs, however, my discussion will concentrate on only
the heterotopic propensity of the toymaker’s house. Admittedly, since
I have already discussed some of them earlier—namely, in the house’s
functions as an architectural double to Melanie’s first home, as the
mirror reflecting Melanie’s ultimately distorted self-image, and as par-
ody of home—I focus for my present argument on what I see is
perhaps the house’s principal assertion of a placeless place, an asser-
tion that moreover evokes another of the house’s parodic property
that nevertheless underscores a utopic potential: its overt dimension of
theatricality. Unlike the modern home, which, according to architec-
tural theorist Beatriz Colomina, tends to masquerade this feature by
having it cleverly embedded into its interior design so that it can then
clandestinely regulate the “private universe” constitutive of its inhabi-
tants’ desires and subjective positions (Colomina, “Split Walls”: 79) by
directing their gaze (see also Introduction),10 Philip’s house explicitly
foregrounds its theatricality to the extent that habitation there seems
surreal and staged, thereby inducing confusion among its inhabitants
with regard to what is real and otherwise. With an interior that looks
like its owner (and vice versa) and reinforces his presence even when
he is absent, an owner who appears more fictional than factual, daily
and routine activities that are characterized by bizarre and/or exces-
sive behaviors, occupants who act like puppets and puppets that seem
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
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.
In Philip’s mind—if following from my line of interpretation—the

house has exhibited treachery and must thus be punished with total
annihilation. Philip perishes in the blaze,11 and in this sense, expresses
a final identification with his house: as his ego is irrevocably bound
to the house, its destruction will invariably signal his complete loss of
self-definition. His house is literally himself, and as such, its extinction
must invariably also mean his.
Philip’s disappointment with the house is valid, of course, but the
fault primarily lies with him. His resolute certainty that the house
subscribes to and maintains his authority only serves to demonstrate
the extent of his incredulity with regard to the ambiguous property
that characterizes all space occupied by humans, and “the ambivalent
strategies of power informing [. . .] spatial practices” (Thacker: 29).
Such qualities become even more pronounced in a volatile space like
the heterotopia, where power is fundamentally apparent, and is as such
always under erasure already. In the case of Carter’s novel, the house’s
assertion of Philip’s dominance and its lack of privacy that are effected
from his strategy are, in the end, no more than an illusion reinforced
by his dependents’ equally illusive submission and the house’s capacity
for dissimulation. Allowing competing desires to exist side by side is
not, however, what distinctively determines the house’s heterotopic
nature, but its ability to maintain as real what is, in truth, unreal.
Heterotopias, as such, would always place reality under suspicion, but
it in this regard that heterotopias are also utopic because the subver-
sive opportunities they provide can also be harnessed to counter and
undo oppressive regimes.
Ruins, Gardens, and Reversals

I want to conclude my analysis of The Magic Toyshop by briefly dis-
cussing another spatial trope that appears in the novel, one that recalls
the garden I discussed earlier. Although this space is, admittedly,
tangential to my study’s focus on the domestic interior, its sym-
bolic functions as, among others, juxtaposition against the toymaker’s
house and as maternal space are directly important in, respectively,
reinforcing my reading of the mirror(ing) motif in the novel and con-
solidating my analysis of the garden episode. The site I am referring
to is a ruin located not far from Philip’s home.12 Melanie was intro-
duced to it by Finn, who affectionately calls this place his “garden of
pleasure” (in actual fact, it constitutes what “is left of the National
Exposition of 1852” [99]),13 thus obliquely signaling its role as the
previous garden’s double. Indeed, what subsequently occurs here will
concomitantly reinforce and bring to fruition the experience Melanie

encountered earlier in the mansion’s garden. Installed in this ruin
is a life-sized, albeit damaged, chessboard. During her initial visits,
Melanie would tread “on the white squares only,” as a way of pre-
tending that what is currently happening to her “could never be real”
(102). But if she were to accidentally step on a black square, it would,
she believes, indicate that “this bleak nightmare” would continue “for
the rest of her life, sixty or even seventy years” (103). For Patricia
Juliana Smith, Melanie’s logic reflects a passive acceptance of “her
role as a pawn in a game she only partly comprehends; indeed her
diagonal movement across the squares suggests that she is ready not
for a game of chess but for its simpler variant, checkers” (Smith 2006:
343). Despite being cruelly thrust into a hostile world, she has, at this
point in the narrative, clearly not arrived at womanhood but remains
entrenched in her childish ways.
But awaiting Melanie at the ruins later in the novel is her first kiss,
which Finn administers (105). The quote below depicts her reaction:
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)
Of interest is the similarity between the prose in this episode and

the previous one in the mansion’s garden. The repetition of certain
nouns describing sensations (stillness, warmth, softness, subaqueous) is
almost deliberate, as if to ensure that the reader does not miss the
parallelism between them. Additionally, the predominating sensation
Melanie feels at this juncture is a growing “blankness” (107), which
approximates being enveloped in darkness that characterized her ear-
lier experience. After this episode, Melanie and Finn will establish a
relationship, signifying an end to Melanie’s childhood as she finally
confronts “womanly experiences” (Smith 2006: 348). This directly
marks, at the same time, the complete annulment of whatever illu-
sory self-image to which she may still be unconsciously clinging,
as evident by her act of ripping off “most of the mourning band
away from her sleeve” before finally pulling “it off entirely” (108) to
suggest a break from her past, her parents, and the values they repre-
sent. Henceforth, she will construct her self-image by relating to and
identifying with people, especially Finn, not space or objects. These
subsequent developments emphatically implicate the second garden

as a rebirth motif more or less like the previous one. An obvious dif-
ference between them, however, is the preponderance of references to
sight here and their complete absence from the earlier one. Based on
the various clues outlined earlier, it is my view that the two garden
episodes constitute a continuum, whereby the first initiates Melanie’s
process of figurative rebirth and the second establishes its culmina-
tion. In this regard, it is unsurprising that the children’s eviction
from the mansion and relocation to Philip’s house must occur dur-
ing the interim in order to textually facilitate Melanie’s (re)birth, for
her passivity and lack of volition throughout this duration that may
be attributed to shock and grief initially, and confusion and fear later,
could also be suggestive of inertia (in terms of mobility) that typifies
the gestating stage.
But while both gardens are figuratively associated with the mater-
nal, it is the second that demonstrates a singular feminine dimension,
thereby contrasting it with the toymaker’s house in palpable ways. For
example, the novel draws a resemblance between this place and “fat
women” to suggest its natural abundance, which also doubles up as
“mantraps” (100) to trip and even injure intruders. Then there is the
damaged statue of “Queen Victoria in young middle-age” (104) that
constitutes the centerpiece of this location, thus establishing her as
its de facto ruler. But perhaps the strongest, if also the least obvious,
indication of the site’s feminine bias is the fact that it is a ruin. With-
out alleging a familiarity with Georg Simmel’s work, it is nevertheless
curious that Carter’s evocation of a ruin in maternal terms demon-
strates a striking affinity with the German philosopher’s meditation
on the site as symbolizing “a return to the good mother.” Simmel
also notes that “the [primary] mood of which encompasses the ruin
[is] freedom” (Simmel, in Lang: 423), and he qualifies this with the
postulation that the ruin testifies to nature’s triumph and “legitimate
claim” over culture (Simmel, in Lang 423). The implication here, if
I read Simmel correctly, is that in invariably overcoming culture in
the end, nature is also expressing the freedom to once again flourish
unimpeded. Simmel’s assertion, despite somewhat romanticized and
even simplistic, aptly describes the ruin featured in The Magic Toyshop.
Undoubtedly, the transformative and liberating capacity of the ruin in
Carter’s narrative reveals unmistakable qualities akin to Simmel’s ruin,
and in this regard, clarifies its feminine dimension most distinctively.
This is where Finn, and later Melanie, escapes to whenever they need
some breathing space away from Philip, and it is here to which they
both head in the end upon leaving the burning house. The novel’s
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
a kind of perverse ménage à trois (Buzz, we are told in the afterword,

bears a homoerotic desire for his brother) that veers between sadism
and masochism, each unable to let the others go despite the emotional
and physical abuses they persistently exchange. In the end, Annabel
seeks out Buzz and has intercourse with him, perhaps as a way of tak-
ing revenge on her husband; a jealous Lee then attempts to violate
her, culminating in a “mutual rape” (97) that leaves him deperson-
alized and his wife dead. Indeed, Love is a cruel story without any
redemption.15 As Patricia Juliana Smith puts it, the novel “takes stock
of our cherished and reviled conventional gender roles and to what
extent they have, while changing drastically, nonetheless stubbornly
remained the same” (Smith 1994: 24). Emotionality, physicality, and
sensibility are pushed to the extreme to unveil their sinister propensi-
ties, as each one, in Lorna Sage’s assessment, “plays itself out with cold
brilliance, like the last act in a firework display” in the end (Sage: 171).
There is a certain degree of artificiality about all three characters
in Love; none of them has “depths” to lodge himself or herself firmly
in the universe he or she inhabits. While Annabel constantly “trans-
forms” to suit immediate contexts and Lee has a set of ready-made
demeanors on which to draw depending on the occasion, Buzz, like
a static method actor, stubbornly performs his singular role, what-
ever the mise-en-scène may be. That they are always already actors is
a point that the narrative accentuates in two important ways. First,
the characters sometimes function as if they are acting, reading their
own behavior objectively like an interested audience studying a per-
formance. Immediately after Annabel’s (actor) attempted suicide, for
example, her audience (including herself) retrospectively analyzes this
episode as if it is a clichéd scene from a horror movie unfolding in slow
motion:
Afterwards, the events of the night seemed, to all who participated in

them, like disparate sets of images shuffled together anyhow. A draped
form on a stretcher; candles blown out by a strong wind; a knife; an
operating theatre; blood; and bandages. In time, the principal actors
(the wife, the brothers, the mistress) assembled a coherent narrative
from these images but each interpreted them differently and drew their
own conclusions which were all quite dissimilar for each told himself
the story as if he were the hero except for Lee who, by common choice,
found himself the villain. (43)
Later, following Annabel’s discharge from the hospital, Lee assumes

a different role, this time as “the fool” in a new “sequence of
events” reminiscent of an “Elizabethan drama” (but more absurdist),
in which “the remorseless logic of unreason [operates] where all

vision is deranged, all action uncoordinated and all responses beyond
pre-diction” (101). Second, and strongly reminiscent of The Magic
Toyshop, the narrative strategically invokes the theater stage motif, with
the two most important sets being a nearby disused park and the flat
itself. Echoes of the Gothic novel resound in the opening “scene,”
which the narrative explicitly announces as “a premeditated theatre”
(2): we see a hapless female victim, Annabel, walking in solitude
through a ruined park at an ambiguous time of day (for both moon
and sun are in the sky).16 Like a stage door, the park’s gates are never
really “open or closed” (2), thus allowing a quiet slippage into the next
scene/stage, which is set against a little flat shared by two brothers,
and where the tragedy of their lives will be henceforth rehearsed. The
flat’s main door that is tellingly always ajar after Annabel’s arrival fur-
ther reflects the domicile’s ambiguous status. Like its inhabitants, this
space is also transient; its definition, like an actor’s roles, is constantly
changing. And as each player manipulates it to mirror and assert his
or her desire(s), a process that inevitably leads them to transgress or
become thrust into one another’s territory, so will the flat’s apparent
allegiances repeatedly shift, while never deciding on any. In this sense,
spatial irruption, I will demonstrate, often discloses relational difficul-
ties between the occupants and the unspoken perversions housed (pun
intended) within themselves.
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
hide anything, so little did it reveal. In this way, Lee expressed a desire
for freedom . . . . (14)
The expansive whiteness of Lee’s house has nothing to do with fru-

gality; its emptiness is a metonymic extension of its owner’s sense
of apathy and noninhibition. But the characteristic white walls of
domestic spaces have a deeper, longer history, one that I find is also
implicit in Lee’s spatial preference. It has to do with substantiating
and protecting Lee’s sense of his own masculinity with a feminine
surface. In his careful and fascinating reading of the sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century history of Western houses, Wigley reveals that the
“dominant figure for the body remained that of the house. But with
the plague, the very walls of that house are seen as porous” (Wigley:
359). To augment this porous surface, or more precisely, to hide it, an
addition of a smooth, supplementary layer of clothing [was deployed].

White linen took over the role of the porous surface it protected. It lit-
erally became the body. Its cleanliness stood for the purification of the
body . . . . The white surface was a critical device with which a detach-
ment from the body, understood as a feminine surface, a discontinuous
surface vulnerable to penetration, could be effected.
(Wigley: 359)
Through a symbolic sleight of hand, the body of the male subject

that can be ravaged by disease is now displaced onto a feminine sur-
face, making the latter the receptacle of weakness while simultaneously
safeguarding the former in its impenetrability. It is now the house that
is plagued, not the (male) subject that inhabits it. Eventually, white
surfaces became inseparable from the concept of interior space, cul-
minating in the walls characteristic of modern homes. The ideology
that goes with this architectural feature has also remained intact—to
situate the male subject as solid and impervious to externalities.
Wigley’s theory illuminates an interesting dimension to Lee’s
unconscious performance of masculinity. For Lee, being free is akin
to being able to perform masculinity without distraction. In calling
his room a “desert,” Lee is akin to Crusoe, the self-sufficient alpha
male (27). Indeed, his masculinity has always been a compromise with
conscious performance, almost as if he is aware of how “porous” this
construction is. Like his house, he too wears a “female” face to protect
his frail manhood. Donning charm and a sensibility somewhat remi-
niscent of Romantic heroes (prone to photophobia, Lee’s eyes water
easily, a condition he sometimes affects as tears, a weapon he deploys
to accentuate his boyish attractiveness), Lee epitomizes the sensitive
male at the wake of the sixties feminist movement. He has various

manipulative smiles that he “learned to utilize . . . in order to smooth
his passage through life for he liked to have an easy time of it” (19).
At the same time, however, he also sees himself as a “Spartan boy”
(15, 61) who takes pride in being able to conquer women and still
remain uninhibited. It is therefore not surprising that he maintains the
whiteness of the walls in his room, “like a fresh sheet of paper” (28),
because it is an unconscious testimony to his masculine freedom, how-
ever paradoxical and fragile it may be. To appropriate Wigley’s theory
further, the flat’s
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)
Lee sees Annabel’s symbolic action as a sexual invitation, but their

copulation becomes the first of a series of events that will unravel Lee’s
masculinity. After lovemaking, Annabel asks, “Why should you want

to do this to me?” (16), a question to which Lee has no reply, for his
ability to do whatever he wants with women has always been a given
of his masculinity, a signifier needing no qualification or justification.
If, as I am arguing, the freedom that expresses Lee’s masculinity is
metonymically refracted by the whiteness of his room, then the fis-
suring of this freedom would necessarily be mirrored on the walls’
seamless surface. The tree, an emblem that splits the white space
in two, marks the beginning of Lee’s fracturing. In time, the room
will be inundated by “a very dark green and from this background
emerged all the dreary paraphernalia of romanticism, landscapes of
forests, jungles and ruins inhabited by gorillas, trees with breasts,
winged men with pig faces and women whose heads were skulls” (7).
In the novel’s afterword, Carter reveals that the inspiration for Love
was an obscure early nineteenth-century novel of sensibility entitled
Adolphe, by Benjamin Constant. Love sets out to parody the notion
of Romantic sensibility by stretching it to a sinister extreme to reveal
apathy and emotional blackmail disguised as sensitivity.17 The painted
jungle that eventually overwhelms Lee’s white space not only attests to
his certain emasculation (culminating, perhaps, in his being “marked”
by Annabel as property and object when he has to wear her name as
a tattoo on his breast [70]) but also serves to parody the Roman-
tic sensibility Lee embodies. The dreary, fantastical representations
of Romanticism are the mirror image of Lee’s “true colour,” most
notably the winged men with pig faces. For beneath his angelic, boy-
ish good looks is an indifferent, selfish man adept at masquerading
emotions. Interestingly, Annabel paints her trees as feminine, reiter-
ating my point that it is with this image that she first fissures Lee’s
masculine prerogative.
Lee both desires and fears Annabel. The narrative suggests an
unconscious codependence between them that manifests itself in a
sadomasochistic relationship. Annabel, whom Sue Roe reads as devoid
of interiority (64), also reflects the lack of interiority in others. Lee is
drawn to Annabel because he sees in her a helpless, loveless woman
upon whom he can impose “care” (“He was used to having some-
body to care for and, because his brother was away, he cared for her”
[17])—another unconscious exemplification of his masculine will-to-
power. But he is also drawn to her because she is his mirror, or double:
“he suspected that her visionary eyes pierced his disarming crust of
charm to find beneath it some other person who was, perhaps, him-
self” (17). In her gaze, Lee catches a profound glimpse of who he is
beneath the mask he wears—the self which he dares not admit. Lee
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)
Although he is still installed at the center of his home’s universe, the

authority that goes with this center has been undermined. The most
essential member of the household (because he pays the bills), Lee’s
centrality now functions as familial adhesive and for pragmatic pur-
poses, thereby placing him in an ambiguous position alongside his
wife and brother. Despite occupying the center, he cannot be sure if
he is still the uninhibited, superior male. More importantly, the three-
chapter novel formally locates this revelation in the middle, which is
also the shortest, as if suggesting the “plus” with which Lee identi-
fies. After the incident of Annabel’s suicide, the positions of all three
will be less clear with regard to who dominates and is dominated.

If up to this point Lee can rest assured in his working-class mascu-
line prerogative and sexuality, henceforth, it will be Annabel who will
take center stage, relegating him to a bit part in her masochistic fan-
tasies that is “as silent and decorative as the statue with which she
had always compared him while their home rotted around them, suf-
fused with purgatorial gloom” (71). His house, once so white and
uncluttered, is now covered with symbols and useless things. His free-
dom of movement, so crucial in defining his sense of identity, is now
impeded; his gaze meets grotesque drawings of himself all around
him. Everywhere he looks, he is constantly reminded of defeat and
emasculation. Buzz, who so far has remained a vague presence in the
house, becomes significantly more defined after this fateful juncture
as well, growing more substantial than his brother. Even Lee admits,
“Until this time . . . Buzz was a necessary attribute, an inevitable con-
dition of life. But now the circumstances were altered. Annabel freshly
defined Lee as having no life beyond that of a necessary attribute of
herself alone, and, in this new arrangement, Lee knew his brother for
an interloper” (64).
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
a special significance in Love, for Annabel’s claustrophobic world, in

Roe’s reading, is “a world where nothing is discarded . . . a world of
nothing-adds-up, and no questions asked” (64). Annabel suffers from
an “anorexia of the real” (Roe: 64), not that nothing is real enough,
but that no reality is ever enough—not even herself. As such, her tree-
drawing takes on another layer of meaning. It not only symbolizes
the rupturing of her husband’s fragile masculinity but also serves as a
metaphor for her liminality. She embodies an intermediary state where
the worlds of the “real” and the “imaginary” converge but are never
sufficient for her “reality.” She desires things not because she is, unlike
Melanie before her parents’ death, materialistic, but because she is a
void that pulls everything around her into herself. Her performance
recalls Walter Benjamin’s notion of the book collector,
who must negotiate a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder

and order . . . . The most profound enchantment for the collector is the
locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed
as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them . . . . In this
circumscribed area . . . collectors . . . turn into interpreters of fate.
(Benjamin 1973: 62)
Like Benjamin’s collector, Annabel’s objects have no “usefulness”

beyond the fact that they draw around her a “magic circle” that guards
her position as the master of (her objects’) fate.
Annabel is the fetishist par excellence, deriving a sense of presence
(space/subjectivity) through scopophilia.19 For Annabel, visual per-
formance serves as the mechanism of spatial manipulation. As Lee
comes to notice, his wife is indifferent “to the world outside her
own immediate perception”—including himself.20 In fact, she does
not register “herself as a body but more as a pair of disembodied
eyes—when she thought about herself at all, that is” (30–31). Lacking
in self-definition, Annabel finds definition by conferring meaning o
things, or more precisely, by rendering things “perceptible,” although
only to a point. As Slavoj Žižek observes, fetishism reveals more about
the gazer than the gazed-at. What is fascinating about the fetish is
not the object but the gaze, thus turning the disembodied eyes into
fetishes themselves (Žižek 1996: 201–02). Annabel’s cluttered, sur-
real, heterogeneous space is, on one level, emblematic of her anorexia
of the real, but it is more fundamentally an insinuation all over again
of her lack of interiority and the slow dissolution of her subjectiv-
ity. To reiterate Roe’s point, Annabel is a world where nothing is
discarded and where nothing adds up. Her fetishistic impulses trans-
form her into the very space she seeks to manipulate. As the narrative
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,
because the ballroom, like her flat, functions as a stage, Annabel is

able to “model” variegated personalities that she can pass off as gen-
uine (she has, after all, “the capacity for changing the appearance of
the real world”—including herself [3]) to serve her waitressing pur-
pose. In this sense and interestingly, Annabel’s relationship with space
seems to concurrently parallel and deviate from Melanie’s. While both
establish a sense of self by incorporating the images signified by their
homes, they have very distinct incentives for doing so. For Melanie,
space serves as a means to correspond her ego with a self-image; in
Annabel’s case, however, it is her lack of an ego altogether that moti-
vates her desire to incorporate space into her identity; in other words,
it is she, not space, who is the mirror. Thus, although both women
share a metaphorical link with reflection, Melanie is the effect of reflec-
tion while Annabel is its cause. Arguably, Annabel is what Melanie
would potentially become if not for the latter’s enforced expulsion
from her parents’ house.
I have already noted the stage-like configuration that the narrative
grants Lee’s house; here I want to briefly develop this motif, with par-
ticular emphasis on its relation to Annabel. Beatriz Colomina, whose
work I mentioned earlier in my discussion of The Magic Toyshop, con-
tends that houses, read from a gendered perspective, can function as
a stage upon which sexuality is performed: “Architecture is not sim-
ply a platform that accommodates the viewing subject. It is a viewing
mechanism that produces the subject. It precedes and frames its occu-
pant” (Colomina, “Split Walls”: 83). Studying the Moller and Müller
houses by the influential modernist architect Adolf Loos (1870–
1933), Colomina views the social spaces of such houses as theatrical
platforms. In these spaces, the “voyeur” and the object trade places:
[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)
Based on Colomina’s observation, it is arguable that Annabel’s act-

ing, affected through her lived space, also directly entraps (“frames”)
her within this “theater box” through the mechanism of the other’s
gaze (both Lee’s gaze and Buzz’s camera eye). A stage, after all, like
Benjamin’s magic circle, is a place of enchantment where reality and
fantasy converge, and where the self can be remolded into endless
surfaces. But a stage also spectacularizes the actor—turning the subject

into spectacle, and therefore, an object. Colomina’s enigmatic com-
ment, “Object and subject exchange places,” suggests that inhabiting
the theater box of the house (flats are especially boxlike) inadvertently
casts its inhabitant as simultaneously voyeur/subject and specta-
cle/object. Clearly a paradox, it nevertheless reinforces the point that
architecture frames its contents/subjects, even as they, in turn, give it
meaning. That the flat is a stage where the subject is also an object
testifies to such dialectic, with Annabel the model epitomizing this
dialectic most profoundly.
When Annabel’s parents come to take her away from the two broth-
ers until Lee decides to marry her, the house suddenly “seemed so
under-furnished without her . . . . They [the brothers] felt incomplete
without her presence; without any conscious volition of her own, by
a species of osmosis, perhaps, since she was so insubstantial, some-
how she had entered the circle of their self-containment” (29). At this
point, Annabel’s objectification is notable: engendering a magic circle
from which she can gaze and interpret the fate of other things and
people, she has herself become objectified by that circle, which is also
the stage upon which she models (as performance and performative,
the latter suggested by her lack of “conscious volition”) for others to
see. For Buzz and Lee, Annabel registers as another, if necessary, thing
in the house. The last time Lee sees her, just before her death, he is
struck by her complete “thingification”:
[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)
Transforming, and later absorbing, the world around her (“osmosis”),

she no longer merely occupies space: she has become that very space
she had initially sought to establish: the creator, as such, has truly
become the created.
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
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)
masculine façade. But as philosopher Gaston Bachelard has shown, a

corner is a “physical contraction into oneself [which] already bears
the mark of a certain negativism.” He goes on to argue that a cor-
ner that is “ ‘lived in’ tends to reject and restrain, even to hide, life.
The corner becomes a negation of the Universe” (Bachelard: 136).
Bachelard’s observation certainly confirms Buzz’s simultaneous hid-
ing from and rejection of the world he inhabits, for Buzz has a taste
for “dark corners” (93) where he can simulate a formless shadow.
Another of his methods of hiding and rejecting his world is photog-
raphy. Constantly taking pictures, he never appears in any of them,
almost as if he realizes that he does not belong to the space he occu-
pies and consequently refuses to participate in whatever is happening
around him. Notably, however, his hiding and rejection underscore
a more fundamental aspect to his self, one that aligns him with Lee
and Annabel—his will to control. For example, Buzz, as the narrative
informs us, “liked organizing parties for he always hoped something
terrible would happen when so many people intersected upon one
another” (6–7), which he would then, of course, capture in photos for
posterity. The implication here is that Buzz disavows space in order
to be in total control of, and everything within, it: “surrounded by
frozen memories,” Buzz can “hold them in his hand [with] a sense
of security” (25). More importantly, this strategy of controlling space
is also without the corresponding experience of being framed by that
space. Photographing everything, Buzz is constantly framing space
but escapes being framed by remaining outside his pictures. He sets
the stage rather than allows space to become a platform that com-
pels his reluctant participation as an actor. Finally, there is another
possible reason behind Buzz’s disavowal of space related to his exer-
cise of power, one that also metonymically aligns his bias for corners
and photography. Both interests, I argue, reflect his tendency toward
immobility. As Bachelard notes, “the corner is a haven that ensures
us . . . immobility” (Bachelard: 137), while photography is a method
of immobilizing space and time. Buzz’s desire to control the world
around him through technologies of framing is, in a sense, a kind of
retaliation against it for rejecting him (according to his view), thus
compelling him to reduce everything to his logic of stasis. It is not
surprising therefore that Lee and Annabel are his favorite subjects,
because he feels most strongly rejected by them.
But just as Annabel’s attempt at detachment fails, so does Buzz’s.
As an obvious irony, his photographing already directly installs him as
dependent on the space and objects he captures. And despite denying
the space within which he dwells, he becomes increasingly framed and
defined by it, so much so that, as Lee notices, “he is more a fitting
inhabitant of the room than [Lee]” (66). And struggle as he may to

remain aloof from everything, Buzz cannot help but feel miserable
during the night, listening to Lee and Annabel’s whispers and love-
making. It is as if the house is “conspiring” with them to reinforce
Buzz’s feelings of rejection: its “wall was very thin and Buzz, in his
narrow cot, could hear each word and movement the lovers made.
Every night he lay sweating at the unmistakable creakings and groans,
writhing as he imagined their unimaginable privacy” (24). If the flat
initially belonged to Lee and Buzz, Annabel’s arrival shifts the balance
to make the house increasingly and explicitly the couples’, thus exacer-
bating not only Buzz’s dismissal but his homoerotic desire (revealed in
the afterword [117]) for his half-brother as well. This point emphat-
ically recalls Merleau-Ponty and Grosz’s argument that subjectivity
cannot ultimately be detached from the space. For all his endeavor to
look askance at space, when Buzz is evicted from the house, he can-
not stay away; one day, when Lee was out, Buzz “edged slyly [back]
into the flat” and, seeing that it was more or less as messy as he left
it, “was quite satisfied” (83). Clearly, rather than being indifferent to
space, Buzz is actually particular about leaving his impression on the
flat. There is, however, a possibility that his satisfaction stems from
a further reason. According to Saulo B. Cwerner and Alan Metcalfe,
messiness, or clutter, in the domestic space is not necessarily opposed
to order, but can function as an “ordering strategy” (Cwerner and
Metcalfe: 234) for some:
Clutter, we argue, is not just an almost inevitable outcome of living with

things. It constitutes alternative modes of ordering the home based on
practices, habits and routines that are complex, contingent, sometimes
unconscious and often unexpected, and that cannot be subsumed under
that rationalist gaze that conceives of time, space and objects as fully
measurable and manageable entities.
(Cwerner and Metcalfe: 236)
Accordingly, Buzz’s clutter may, in fact, be his way of ordering his

lived environment; he is happy to see it in tact because it is tantamount
to the maintenance of familiar coordinates for him and his sense of
belonging.
Curiously, if Lee desires and fears Annabel, she in turn desires and
fears Buzz. These feelings stem from her inability to know Buzz, who
remains an enigmatic presence for her. Once, she “sneaked into the
forbidden territory of Buzz’s room”:
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,
selected a ragged vest dyed purple and a pair of orange crushed-velvet

trousers, took off Lee’s shirt and donned these garments to find out
what Buzz felt like or what it might feel like to be Buzz. But his old
clothes felt like any other greasy and unwashed old clothes and she was
disappointed. She already felt a vague interest in him . . . . (31)
While Lee is gradually subscribed to Annabel’s mythology, Buzz

remains stubbornly obscure to her (although she tries to write him
into her world). He is the only presence that she cannot completely
appropriate, and in this sense, functions as the space that she can-
not occupy. The failure to overpower this one last perspectival point
becomes her doom. With Buzz, she cannot reverse the process of her
lack because he belongs outside her magic circle. In the later part of
the novel, Annabel endeavors to copulate with him (I interpret this
as a last attempt to “absorb” him): “they had undertaken the experi-
ment rashly and had failed but Annabel suffered the worst for she had
been trying to convince herself she was alive” (95). It is this failure
that subsequently leads to Annabel’s violent retaliation on Lee, end-
ing in a mutual rape and her suicide. When Annabel proves incapable
of appropriating Buzz, her own gaping interiority becomes undeni-
able and no amount of plugging will henceforth be sufficient. Her
only recourse is death.
Grosz tells us that space is meaningless without its content. But
once inscribed with meaning, it begins to function as the gazing sub-
ject’s metonymical extension whose symbology has to be persistently
reiterated and reinforced lest the subject lose his or her sense of pres-
ence and identity. In Love, the destruction of Annabel’s mythological
edifice (starting with Lee’s adultery, reinforced by Buzz’s impenetra-
ble enigma, and concluding with the failed copulation with Buzz and
her rape by her husband) is reflected in the walls, which “were already
beginning to fade so faces yellowed, flowers withered and leaves
turned brown in a parody of autumn” (83). Annabel, who draws as a
means of creating and defining her world (and indirectly herself),
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).
Once again, the creator metamorphoses into the created, but in a

sinister twist, the narrative suggests that this final transformation
exemplifies the inevitable failure of Annabel’s project because her

model is fundamentally nothing.
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
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
Housing the Unspeakable:

Va l e r i e M a r t i n ’s P r o p e r t y a n d
To n i M o r r i s o n ’s B e l o v e d
In his meditation on architecture as an untranslatable moment,

Donald Kuntze argues that there is architecture whose power lies in
its seeming reification of an “alien and prohibitive order alongside
the normative” (Kuntze: 28).1 Such architecture compels “reading”
rather than just habitation (Kuntze: 32) because its incongruence
invites opposing meanings that, in turn, can potentially complicate
dwelling. Kuntze identifies three distinct and related qualities inher-
ent in such architecture: virtuality, secrecy, and monstrosity. Virtuality
is a spatial aspect that encourages tension and collision in terms of
what it signifies. Architecture that exhibits this quality often carries
contradictory meanings, and thus invites constant interpretations. But
because interpretation is already vexed by ambiguity, the architec-
ture will nevertheless always maintain its secret, or unknowability.
The preservation of this quality inevitably leads to nonclosure, which
Kuntze sees as a monstrosity installed within architecture. Kuntze’s
perspective provides a useful point of entry into my reading of this
chapter’s two narratives, which are contemporary slave narratives that
feature a house as the central motif. In both Beloved (1988), win-
ner of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, and Valerie Martin’s Property
(2003), which won the Orange Prize, the house becomes space that at
once extends from, and exceeds, its occupant’s unconscious, thereby
operating along an “alien and prohibitive order” even as it func-
tions according to the normativity of a dwelling place. The tensed
relationship between architecture and occupant, and the divergent
interpretation it provokes, that result directly underscore the ambi-

guity signified by the former, and in this regard reflect precisely the
virtuality of which Kuntze speaks. In the end, the ambiguity signified
by architecture in both novels directly implicates it in a secret, thus
transforming it into a monstrous presence on simultaneously a meta-
narrative level (i.e., in the form of nonclosure) and narrative one, as
suggested by the house’s capacity to transfigure the (un)conscious of
its inhabitant.
Kuntze’s reflection frames the architectural aspects of my discus-
sion for the rest of this chapter, although it will only be revisited in
my conclusion to specifically address the novels. But to appreciate the
“function” of the house in both novels requires that the building be
also contextualized according to the genre within which it appears,
one that hybridizes the American slave narrative and the Gothic.
A defining feature of American Gothic is its connection to slavery. For
critic Teresa Goddu (2008, 2014), this inhuman institution provides
American Gothic with one of its most crucial historical frameworks, as
both abolitionists and proponents of slavery deployed Gothic conven-
tions in their writings to, respectively, “unveil slavery’s horrors making
them strikingly visible” and “to departicularize [the story of former
slaves]—turning it into a generic tale—and to support the pro-slavery
storyline—that slavery’s horror were a fiction, trumped up by fanat-
ical abolitionists, and that slaves were liars” (Goddu 2014: 72–73).
Evidently, while the Gothic and slave narratives share similar thematic
preoccupations and motifs (as Goddu elegantly puts it, “Represented
as a house of bondage replete with evil villains and helpless villains,
vexed bloodlines and stolen birthrights, brutal punishments and spec-
tacular suffering, cruel tyranny and horrifying terror, slavery reads
as a Gothic romance [Goddu 2014: 72]),2 they are fundamentally
uneasy bedfellows. Although a vocabulary was readily available to for-
mer slaves and abolitionists for recounting their harrowing tales of
slavery, that the Gothic is a “white” discourse heavily informed by the
literary heritage of the “master race” would inevitably compromise
the efficacy of its narratives to delineate a conspicuously black expe-
rience. As Laura Doyle informs us, this limitation in expressing the
evils of slavery meant that the slaves’ stories were already determined
and “possessed by whites,” “already-framed” on delivery (quoted in
Goddu 2014: 73; Doyle: 255) and were necessarily “overwritten” as
Gothic texts (quoted in Goddu 2014: 73; Doyle: 256), and thus lost
their distinctiveness as slave narratives.
Despite this complication, however, slave narratives continued to
draw inspiration from the Gothic, especially appropriating many of its
Housing the Unspeakable 65
metaphors to articulate both the visible and, more importantly, the

invisible wounds seared into an entire race’s psyche by the institution
of slavery. This intertextual exchange persists until today; American
writers of the postmodern era who revived the slave narrative remain
partial to the technologies of the Gothic in articulating the extremity
and grotesquery of slavery. As Nobel laureate Toni Morrison admits,
the Gothic is a fundamental signifier gesturing toward the specter
of race (Morrison 1992: 36) that continues to haunt American his-
tory and to question the nation’s democratic principles of liberty and
equality. The Gothic, for Morrison, is not just aesthetics through
which slave narratives discover a means to express the unspeakable,
but also an “experience” through which slavery can be memorialized.
The Gothic, if I read Morrison correctly, is what lies at the heart of
slavery—a position she clearly evinces in her highly acclaimed Beloved,
which many scholars consider is equally a slave narrative and a Gothic
novel.
Although very different in their treatment of slavery, both Beloved
and Property deploy the familiar Gothic motif of the big house to
demonstrate how unconscious and unacknowledgeable dimensions
of subjectivity can be transcribed onto an architecture, which there-
after accommodates insidious propensities that are at once related
to, and transcend, its occupants. The title of Martin’s novel coinci-
dentally recalls Lefebvre’s notion of property in its reference to both
the house itself and the indefinable element that permeates it. Set in
Louisiana (and partly in New Orleans) during the first part of the
nineteenth century, Property is a deeply unsettling morality tale about
the way slavery exacts a terrible toll on both slaves and slave owners.3
A first-person narrative recounted from the viewpoint of its protag-
onist, Manon Gaudet, Property chronicles her unhappy marriage to
a sugar planter, who remains unnamed throughout the novel, that
ended on the night of a slave rebellion when he was murdered. Central
to the story is the plantation house, which serves as a locus of power
from where the sugar planter exercises his rights of ownership, and a
gender conflict zone where Manon, her husband, and the house slave,
Sarah, are locked in an antagonistic relationship. It is only inevitable
that these two functions will certainly converge to culminate in catas-
trophe. Throughout the narrative, glimpses of Manon’s past humanity
is constantly juxtaposed against what she has become, having mar-
ried to a man she deeply despises and living in constant suspicion and
disappointment. But while she is disgusted by her husband’s cruel
methods of slave management, she is also clearly complicit, despite
her denial, with his depravity. Indeed, slavery’s gradual corruption of
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,
Madame Manon herself exists in the innermost cell of a set of concentric

prison walls, confined only by her legal and customary disabilities as a
nineteenth-century American woman but encircled, like the rest of her
race, by the stirring of rebellion and violence of the enslaved peoples
closing around her like a noose.
(Foster: 317–18)
Property is often hailed as a new breed of slave narrative because it

tells the forgotten stories of slavery (such as the effect of the system
on its practitioners and the issue of slaveholders who were once slaves
themselves)4 and enlists, like Morrison’s Beloved, postmodern liter-
ary conventions such as the unreliable narrator, self-reflexivity, and
fragmented narration to not only cast doubt to its own textual perfor-
mances, but also articulate a profound moment in history that words
alone cannot adequately express because of its extreme horror. The
excessive experiences of loss, suffering, self-dissolution, hatred—all of
which are “world-destroying” because they leave the subject isolated
and disconnected from her environment—show up the limits, or even
the failure, of language (Scarry 1985), and thus must be articulated
via other textual performances.5
My reading of Property begins with the way it reimagines the
gender ideology that corresponds with the interiority of nineteenth-
century middle-class homes. It is an ideology that lasted “throughout
the nineteenth century despite the increasing plethora of styles and
goods from which consumers could choose, and slight shifts in the
planning and specificity of room use” (Kinchin: 24). While in no way
representative, it is nevertheless a “surprisingly consistent” feature of
domestic space during that era on both sides of the Atlantic (Kinchin:
24). Fundamentally, this ideology ascribes either a masculine or fem-
inine inflection to the different rooms throughout the house, leaving
only a few neutral. As such, requisite for this part of my argument will
be a discussion of some key rooms explicitly featured in the novel and
the significance they communicate. Related is also an analysis of the

house as a locus of power within the institution of slavery, and how
this function inevitably crisscrosses with the sexual tension between
the sugar planter, his embittered wife, and the house slave that is
played out through their negotiation with and manipulation of the
key rooms. Invariably, this tension is also the effect of, and will fur-
ther aggravate, the distressed relationship between the slaveholder and
slaves, and together, they will strain the household to breaking point.
As with any structures of power, hierarchies are inherently unsta-
ble; to undercut them, attack must be focused on the locus from
which these hierarchies derive their significance. In Property, the house
is clearly the plantation’s center of power and as such, heavy stress
is placed on this site to subvert both gender and racial inequalities.
Indeed, the novel carefully aligns subverting one with the other to
show the intricate nature characterizing the network of power rela-
tions and the possibility of undoing it. Additionally, by relating the
operations of this network to the house, the narrative reveals not only
a profound correlation between architecture and power, but also the
forms of resistance that can be mounted via spatial manipulation. This
is because the dialectical relationship between body and space con-
currently implies that inflicting the latter with stress can adversely
affect the former as well. But while Manon, her husband, and Sarah
are pitting their wits and loathing against each other in a drama of
racial and sexual tension, another effect of the house’s gender ide-
ology is also in operation, albeit on an unconscious, and therefore
more insidious, level. In the final part of my discussion of Martin’s
novel, I will demonstrate how dwelling that is heavily gendered is
capable of subtly coercing its occupant’s identification with a sex-
ual position apparently unknown and unnatural to her—apparently,
because, in truth, it is a position she secretly desires, but due to its
forbidden nature has been repressed and lodged in her unconscious
instead, thereby ascribing it with an unspeakable and inadmissible
nature. In the case of Manon, it is what I term a transsexual desire
that has all along structured her unconscious, and while she cannot,
of course, know this, it nevertheless influences her relationship pat-
terns with her husband and Sarah, and will gradually intensify after
her husband’s death. To assert this interpretation, I will draw on Vic-
tor Burgin’s psychoanalytically inspired notion of paranoiac space and
Diane Agrest’s identification of a transsexual operation inherent in
architectural practice to respectively warrant my point that space can
inherit its occupant’s unconscious by assimilating the unconscious into
itself and transforming it into a facet of spatial property, and show that
the gender determinations imposed on lived space are incompatible

with the transsexual nature of houses and would thus be necessarily
unstable.
Following from my discussion of Property, my focus on Beloved
will also be directed at the house’s function as a repository for its
occupant’s unconscious. But while the unconscious in 124 Bluestone
(Road), which is both the address and the name of Sethe’s home
in Morrison’s novel, extends from its occupant, it also exceeds it to
become a property that is both reflective of its dweller’s psyche and
unique to its interior. Arguably, 124 Bluestone is a more insidious
house because it not only appropriates what its inhabitant refuses to
acknowledge, but also realizes it to confront her. The latter, more-
over, implies that Sethe’s unconscious, while originating with her, has
now taken an independent existence whose source is the architecture
itself. Principally, my interest is in Beloved’s representation of trau-
matic space. It is important to consider 124 Bluestone not only a
metaphor for a stubborn, destructive history, but as a literal place as
well, whose haunting figuratively represents Sethe’s negotiation with
both her past and her lived space. For me, the house’s apparent “alive-
ness” is an important clue pointing to the operation of trauma and its
effect on subjectivity. Drawing again on Anthony Vidler’s architec-
tural uncanny and correlating it with the critical insights developed
by trauma studies, I argue that the quality of dread permeating 124
Bluestone is fundamentally Sethe’s projection of trauma onto the inte-
rior of her home. Trauma, in this sense, is not merely a condition
encrypted within the psyche, but can become inscribed onto the walls
of a lived environment. As a result, this space also acquires the quality
of a symptom that hints at trauma, but so indirectly that its presence
remains unclear.
As trauma is a psychic condition, it is invariably linked to memory,
or, as re-conceptualized in Morrison’s novel, to “rememory.” Unlike
memory, which is primarily a function of consciousness, rememory
involves memory that is embodied as well. Rememory, in other words,
exceeds the contours of the psyche as it invests other structures, such
as our bodies and architecture, with a distinctive presence that is never-
theless often only intuited and never really directly experienced. In this
sense, buildings embodying rememory is dissimilar to memorial build-
ings, whose specific function is to ensure the persistence of memories
that are certain and recognizable. Tellingly as well, the way in which
rememory operates, as I will show in the last section of my discussion,
also manifestly resembles the work of haunting, thereby reinforcing
the fantastic (in Todorov’s sense) quality of Beloved further. To help
me make an interpretive inroad to rememory, I turn to Mircea Eliade’s

notion of sacred space as a conceptual framework for which to under-
stand the constitutions of rememory’s spatial embodiment. Finally,
I conclude my analysis of both novels by briefly returning to Donald
Kuntze’s reading of architecture’s tripartite qualities, and linking it
not only to 124 Bluestone and Manon Gaudet’s estate mansion, but
to the history of slavery as well.
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,
within the domestic arena . . . the key rooms tended to be further

grouped to either side of the male-female divide . . . . Each room-type
was minutely codified in terms of its function, contents and décor.
Within these formulae some variety was allowed but the keynote of
the masculine rooms was serious, substantial, dignified (but not osten-
tatious) and dark-toned. By contrast, the more feminine spaces were
characterized as lighter or colourful, refined, delicate and decorative.
(Kinchin: 13)8
More importantly, this phenomenon implied that although the ide-

ology of separate sphere, which emerged in the nineteenth century,
aligned women with the private, and therefore domestic, space, this
was not truly reflected by the interior arrangement of the house.
Nevertheless, the house in the nineteenth century continued to be
perceived increasingly as feminine space (Kinchin: 12), whose satisfac-

tory upkeep reflected the worth of its mistress that in turn signified the
worth of her husband. Manon’s mother, for example, would criticize
her daughter’s unhappy marriage by drawing links between Manon’s
obligations as wife and the chaotic circumstance of her home: “You
neglect your duties so you have no control in your own house” (74).
Indeed, as Beverly Gordon surmises, “the connection between women
and their houses in Western middle-class culture was so strong that it
helped shape the perception of both” (Gordon: 282). Gordon iden-
tifies the Industrial Age as the period during which this reciprocal
relationship was at its most intense, but it is evident that the phe-
nomenon was already in practice since the beginning of the nineteenth
century (if not earlier), as my consideration of the house in Martin’s
novel will show. Despite America’s endeavor to distance itself from its
colonial heritage, including its architecture,9 communal interactions
within the walls of the home remained entrenched in the twinned
Victorian ideology of class and gender (and even race). Here, we can
observe “how dominant middle-class beliefs about ‘proper’ social rela-
tionships and the different roles and capacities of men and women in
culture and society were coded (architecturally and linguistically) and
built into the fabric of the house . . . ” (Walker: 624).10
One masculine area mentioned in Martin’s novel that both Gordon
and Kinchin’s essays identify is the dining room. Arguably the most
important room in any large middle-class home, it is not only the
family’s congregational point, but also the primary social space for the
master and his (male) visitors to engage in “masculine conventions”
(Kinchin: 15) like drinking and planning a hunt. Unsurprisingly, the
landscape of this room is often adorned with “the iconography of the
hunt elaborated in carving, wall decorations or pictures, all insisted
on the importance of a well-provided table, and by implication, a
competent (male) provider” (Kinchin: 16). Furniture, especially the
dining table, must be durable and imposing, a necessary paradox to
the otherwise restraint disposition of a room (basic fixtures, white or
tempered wall tones) emphasizing “economy of means and function-
ality” (Kinchin: 19). Moreover, as the house’s most public space, the
dining room also metonymically declares the owner’s social and eco-
nomic circumstances. How frequently it receives visitors, whether for
business or entertainment, measures the social and economic standing
of the master of the house. In the novel, for instance, it is unsurpris-
ing that when one of Manon’s friend, the handsome but hedonistic
and somewhat indigent Joel Borden, finally marries into money, the
first thing he plans to do is buy a large house and give “a series of
dinners and dances . . . . We will have to bring in the wine in flatboats”

(194)—an itinerary that manifestly emphasizes the central role of the
dining room.11
The business room is another masculine-oriented part of the house
prominently featured in Property. Called simply “the office” in the
novel, this room is the master’s workplace away from work; here, he
would conduct more business, but also household business. Manon,
for example, would be summoned here whenever her husband has
issues to discuss with her regarding, for example, their nuptials (since
he views their partnership as a kind of business dealing) and the
management of the house slaves. For Manon, however, the office is
another example representing his crassness:
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
entity, so much so that she is emotionally remote from both. It is

apparent that Manon’s bitterness with her marriage has led to indif-
ference toward the house, and hence its neglect by her. Throughout
the narrative up to the time of her departure from the house, Manon
rarely speaks of the house beyond identifying its various rooms; mas-
culine rooms are passingly described, usually with contempt (see
above), and she says almost nothing about the feminine ones. Espe-
cially noteworthy is the absence of a drawing room, which is the
quintessential “woman’s space” because it most “reflects her charac-
ter” (Chase: 144) and is thus where feminine activities, like sewing
and painting, are pursued. Instead, it is only to her bedroom (she
and her husband have separate sleeping arrangements) that she is
most attached; here, she spends most of her time and pursues most
of her domestic activities (especially sewing [58]), sometimes even
taking her meals in it to avoid her husband. Implied in her action,
undoubtedly, is her repudiation of the house to reflect her rejection
of its owner. So intense is her disgust that she refuses to leave any
impression of her occupancy there (hence, the absence of a drawing
room) but collapses her entire world at home into the single space of
her bedroom. Interestingly, while Manon is decidedly silent about her
husband’s home, she is lavishly expressive of the cottage belonging to
her mother that is first introduced when Manon visits to take care of
her in her last days. In both size (Manon calls it “little” [176]) and
atmosphere, the cottage is palpably distinct from her husband’s home;
more importantly, Manon’s occasional thoughts about it provide a
valuable portrait of what constitutes feminine space in antebellum
middle-class homes. In her descriptions and memories of the house
are, moreover, often strong, positive connotations (especially tranquil-
ity and comfort). Clearly, this is a striking contrast from the way she
views and relates to her other home. That she seems especially partial
to the kitchen in the cottage (72), I opine, is less to do with her sym-
pathies for the working class (this is, of course, possible since she grew
up in relatively difficult circumstances, having lost her father when she
was still young), and more with the fact that here is one area in her
husband’s house that she particularly despises and avoids because it is
where Sarah mostly resides.
The strict demarcation of key rooms according to gender in the
plantation house will be increasingly compromised as Martin’s nar-
rative develops, thus uncovering the tensed, complex relationship
between bodies and space, and between private and public.12 The
house’s dependence on atmosphere and appearance for signification
will also prove to be its weakness because their structuring properties
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
her husband’s spyglass installed in the house to monitor the slaves

working on the plantation, Manon witnesses him pursuing a favorite
homoerotic game with a group of young male slaves. Its objective:
to trick them into sexual arousal and then punishing them for it.
As she continues her observation, she tells the reader: “Often, as
I look through the glass, I hear in my head an incredulous refrain:
This is my husband, this is my husband” (5, emphasis in the original).
Why she nevertheless continues to look is an irony in itself, but I am
more interested in the irony related to the house as a locus of power.
To a point, the building, on the one hand, reminds us of the panopti-
can that performs the important function of “[linking the] economic
growth of power with the output of the apparatuses . . . within which
it is exercised: in short, to increase both the docility and the utility of
all the elements of the system” (Foucault 1984: 207).14 Like Philip’s
house in The Magic Toyshop, the one in Property is not just “an appa-
ratus” for accommodation, but the center of power where the “gaze
is alert everywhere” (Foucault 1977: 195), to monitor the “docility
and utility” of its source of output, the slaves. But Foucault also tells
us, on the other hand, that in all dominant and repressive systems
are covert movements of resistance that inevitably exists (Foucault
1980: 142). In the novel, as the house stands watch over its mas-
ter’s human resource, it paradoxically also gradually imprisons him as
whispers of slave rebellion grow louder. In this regard, although it is
like a “citadel” (113) that exercises control over its master’s domin-
ion, the house is nevertheless still part of that dominion, and is thus
subjected to (counter)surveillance as well. The plantation owner and
his wife cannot comprehend that in effecting their gaze from within
the house to police the slaves, they are also being subjected to their
gaze from without. In the end, this prejudiced disregard will prove
their downfall.
To better contextualize my analysis of the slave mutiny that destroys
the plantation and its owner, some further insights into the manner in
which master and slave relate to each other in the novel is necessary.
It is not unreasonable to state that both the sugar planter and his
wife view their slaves as more or less objects. Their relationship, for
instance, with Sarah, the slave given to Manon by her aunt as a wed-
ding present, is an obvious case in point. Manon and her husband
privately regard her, respectively, as rival and solace; while this may
ascribe her with a subjective position to a degree, it is, however, con-
stantly undermined by their treatment of her as if she were an object.
For the sugar planter, Sarah is primarily a place to release his sex-
ual frustration resulting from his wife’s frigidity. This has produced,
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
one more interpretation, that Sarah is taking note of Manon’s dis-

covery, and is irritated (what Manon describes as “nerveless”) by the
fact that another location must now be identified since this one has
been exposed. The latter two views, when considered against Sarah’s
role during the night of mutiny, would further reinforce my point that
Sarah’s objectification by her mistress and master actually empowers
her while hiding this fact from them.
From what has been discussed in the preceding paragraphs, it is
therefore noteworthy that on the night of the mutiny, the authority
of the house will be inverted when it explicitly becomes the target, or
object and not the source, of the gaze. Ironically, the sequence of this
episode will begin with a single eye peering into the house to parody
the sugar planter’s spyglass and its purpose. Despite the earlier inci-
dent recounted in the paragraph above, Manon has clearly dismissed
it to her peril, for her nightmare will begin with this eye probing her
private interior and “watching” (114) her when she is most vulnerable:
while she is resting. As this single eye transmutes into an entire per-
son and then more persons struggling to enter her chambers, Manon
realizes with mounting dread that something terribly wrong is afoot.
Together with Sarah, she is taken downstairs to the dining room by her
interloper, where she is confronted by a group of rebel slaves already
gathered there. Manon’s husband, having been captured, soon joins
them. Shortly after that, however, in an altercation during which he
tries to escape again, he is killed. There is much that can be critically
observed from this episode, but in line with this study, my interest
is particularly in its architectural significance, for which two exposi-
tions will be advanced. First, it is interesting to note the area breached
by the insurgent slaves that the narrative clearly identifies as a femi-
nine space, the bedroom, thus reinforcing not only the gendered logic
of nineteenth-century architecture, but the association between sub-
ject and space. For just as the female subject is traditionally viewed as
weak, therefore would her room be the feeble link of the house and
would thus be more accessible. Indeed, it is curious that what Manon
notices initially about her assailants as they penetrate her room are not
their human features but a succession of phallic symbols—an eye and
some sharp weapons (115)—as if the narrator is determined to drive
the point regarding the body/space dialectic unmistakably home by
implicitly linking the act of breaching the house to rape. Second, that
the rebel slaves choose to congregate in the dining room, the most
important masculine room, is telling from an architectural point of
view because it potentially symbolizes the dislodgement of the master
from his center of power and therefore his emasculation. Moreover, in
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.
Paranoia and Space

Throughout the narrative, Manon provides ample justification for
despising her husband that ranges from his infidelity and perversion
to his lack of finesse and vapidity. Indeed, her embitterment is fur-
ther fueled by her fatherless status (hence, she has no other male
figure to turn for protection) and the fact that she had failed, dur-
ing their courtship, to read him accurately—such as, among others,
mistaking his brooding and uncommunicative nature as seriousness
and dignity when they indicated his impoverished social skills and
narrow-mindedness—resulting in her decision to marry him. But
while her assessment may be valid, it is not without prejudice. Typ-
ical of postmodern fiction’s self-reflexive nature, Property deploys a
first-person narrative that is highly unreliable to underscore the moral

ambiguity of its protagonist. So blinkered is Manon’s perspective of
her husband that even when he shows his concern and affection
for her (and the narrative recounts several such instances, including
one episode where he awkwardly proposes intimacy and indirectly
pleads for her forgiveness [110]), she cannot see them as other than
more of his melodramatic turns and expressions of an ungovernable
libido. Added to this are her frigidity (beyond the consummation
of their marriage, Manon has since refused to respond to her hus-
band’s needs) and emotional retreat from him (thus driving him
to seek solace in Sarah), her constant, if veiled, verbal barbs at his
alleged entrepreneurial incompetence, and her condescension over his
attempts to emulate the gentry—all of which clearly demonstrates
Manon’s complicity in damaging her marriage, but which Manon
refuses to admit, solely blaming her husband for her fate.
Underlying the above reason for Manon’s contempt, however, is
a deeper, and likely unconscious motivation that, while negatively
impacting her husband, is in actual fact completely unrelated to him.
Her snobbery toward him, especially in repeatedly pointing out his
poor etiquette and his simplistic ideas about business matters, is a
clue, as his failings are then measured, whether or not explicitly in
the narrative, against her father’s success, which indirectly also makes
her feel superior to him. For Manon, her late father embodies the
planter and slave owner par excellence; although this is a perspective
more romanticized than grounded on fact, as she was still relatively
young when he died under mysterious circumstances, Manon never
doubts her view, but upholds her version of his memory as accurate
(unsurprisingly, the object that Manon values most in her mother’s
cottage is a framed picture of her father). Because of this, everything
her husband does becomes subjected to comparison with her father,
and thus, criticized, from his choice of planting cane instead of the
“less finicky” cotton (22) to his heavy-handed treatment of his slaves
instead of her father’s “strict and fair” (23), and therefore more effec-
tive approach. Based on this interpretation, it is arguable that a more
compelling reason underscoring Manon’s despise for her husband is
simply the fact that he is not her father. To her, the sugar planter must
necessarily always occupy an inferior position to her father’s supe-
rior one, for the latter must remain unrivalled in Manon’s esteem.
Her devotion to her father’s memory constitutes a “blindness” that
results in an inability to love her husband because neither he nor any-
one else can ever measure up to an ideal, which is essentially what
her father is to Manon. This symbolic blindness, as Eve Sedgwick
explains in her study of the Romantic writer Thomas de Quincy, is

fundamentally associated with loss, and complicates the “perceptual
circumference to the self” (Sedgwick: 43). What this amounts to is
confusion between the object and what the subject wants it to be, or
in Manon’s case, between her father and her ideal. In privileging the
latter, the subject will inevitably “shrink [her] self to the tiny inter-
nal dimensions of, say, [her] dream” (Sedgwick: 43), a circumstance
demonstrably revealing Manon’s unreasonable view of her father that,
curiously, only ever focuses on his identity as planter—“the tiny, inter-
nal dimension of . . . [her] dream,” and never as anything else, not even
a father.
From the perspective of my study, what is more crucial about
Manon’s memory of her father is how it indirectly also affects the way
she relates to domestic space. It is arguable that her idolization of him
periphrastically informs her relationship with her husband’s house;
that is, her reason for remaining detached from it may be metonymic
of her emotional distance from her husband, but it could also stem
from the fact that it is not her father’s estate. Just as Manon has revised
his memory into an ideal, she will also do likewise with her childhood
home, thus situating any rival home, such as her husband’s house,
as already inferior and unworthy of her. Significantly, however, in
describing her memory of this first home, Manon almost never men-
tions the house, but focuses her attention instead on the surrounding
cotton plantation. This again recalls the “tiny, internal dimension”
mentioned above that structures Manon’s view of her father, as it is her
memory of the plantation corresponding with the image of her father
with which she most identifies. In fact, so fused are her father and the
plantation’s images in her consciousness that Manon’s recollections
would always involve both of them simultaneously, especially those
foregrounding her father as an excellent manager of his estate that,
as a result, engendered good relations with, and happiness among,
his slave (22–23). Clearly, there is a strong correlation between space
and memory here that, in effect, structures subjectivity. How a subject
relates to present space is very much determined by her relationship
with the various places in her past, the most significant one often serv-
ing as benchmark. Such a process, however, occurs at the level of the
unconscious; in Property, it is quite obvious that Manon never once
suspect that her contempt for her husband and her indifference to
his house may stem from her devotion to her father’s memory, even
though she is constantly comparing them.
There may be an additional reason underlying Manon’s uncon-
scious motivation for belittling her husband, one that is related to
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).
But Manon’s paranoia potentially entails a further, more compli-

cated dimension that the narrative will only intimate with a sole clue:
the homoerotic moment when Manon drinks from Sarah’s breast.
This episode occurs during the New Orleans visit, during which
Manon, who has recently lost her mother, is fearfully contemplat-
ing her utter abandonment when she notices Sarah “in the shadow,
watching me. Her bodice was open, her breast exposed” (80). Evi-
dently, Sarah is about to nurse her child but just as “a white drop
formed at her nipple and clung there” (80), Manon abruptly goes to
her and proceeds to:
[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)
Manon is immediately overcome by “[a] sensation of utter

strangeness” resulting momentarily in a disembodied experience that
also expands her consciousness in space, enabling her to see, for exam-
ple, her “husband in his office [with an] uncomfortable suspicion” on
his face—a “vision [that] made me smile”—as she continues to drink
“greedily,” feeling “wonderful” and “entirely free” (82). One way
of appreciating this episode is to contextualize Manon’s act within
the frame of her bereavement. In attendance at the point of her
mother’s death, Manon was unfortunate to witness the final ravish-
ment of cholera on the patient’s body when dark liquid began to
surge from her mouth, nose, eyes, and ears (74). The shock Manon
suffered was extreme, and days later, the strange, sudden behavior of
lapping milk from her slave’s breast may indicate a (temporary) con-
dition of developmental regression resulting from that shock she is
clearly still experiencing and the grief over her loss, since milk and
the maternal share a metonymic link. Indeed, the remarkable sen-
sations Manon experiences while drinking are strikingly reminiscent
of the pre-Symbolic, or in Kristeva’s term the imaginary, stage—
the stage prior our entry into the Symbolic order—where resides
the “phallic Mother who gathers us all into orality . . . into the plea-
sure of fusion . . . ” (Kristeva, 1980: 191). However, Manon’s overt
gesturing toward her husband in this episode also points to another
possible interpretation, one that directly links her homoerotic act with
a homoerotic desire. Between her private musing about his thoughts
and her transcendental vision of him, Manon clarifies her homoerotic
propensity by identifying with him and then positioning him as rival

(implied by his incredulous look) for the privilege of Sarah’s body.
But while Sarah’s breast, based on Kleinian psychoanalysis, accom-
modates concomitantly positive and negative significances, what it
ultimately represents for Manon, also in Kleinian fashion, is irre-
vocable loss. However “wonderful” her experience at that moment
may be, it inevitably reminds Manon that with her mother’s death,
the world she associates with her parents and her childhood is also
invariably gone. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Manon’s reac-
tion once the moment has dissolved is to give Sarah a resounding
“slap” on her face (82), as if the slave had tricked her into false
pleasure.
But a closer link between Manon’s paranoid attributions to the
space of her husband’s home and her unconscious homoeroticism lies
in another dimension inherent in the latter that, importantly, relates
to her father. The effect of this link, moreover, implicates Said’s model
of paranoia that has so far informed my reading with Freud’s as well.
Filial devotion notwithstanding, Manon’s excessive clinging to his
memory could imply that her love for him is possibly also underscored
by paranoia over her homoerotic desire. This reading, however, will
only be clarified when she discovers a “truth” about her father and
thereafter rejects his memory completely. In placing truth in quota-
tion marks, however, I am also highlighting the fact that what Menon
discerns is never quite clear, and thus her shift in loyalty, like her
devotion, may also be the result of her interpretation. Perusing his
journal one day, she learns of an undisclosed offense on his part for
which his wife never forgave him. Later, an indirect hint from her
aunt would encourage Manon to fill this gap in the journal herself,
concluding that:
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)
Although Manon’s assessment of her father is highly questionable and

baseless, it is nevertheless conviction enough for her to henceforth
reject his memory. Underlying this change in her esteem for him is, in
fact, paranoia, but one based on Freud’s formulation that correspond
this condition with a defense mechanism that protects the self from
becoming aware of forbidden desires. Accordingly,
internal percepts—feelings—shall be replaced by external perceptions.

Consequently, the proposition “I hate him” becomes transformed by
projection into another one—He hates (persecutes) me, which will jus-
tify me in hating him. And thus the impelling unconscious feeling
makes its appearance as though it were the consequence of an external
perception.
(Freud 1911: 63, emphasis in the original)
To restate Freud, an inadmissible desire that originally belongs to the

subject-ego is unconsciously projected onto the object-love instead,
making it the bearer of desire and thus reversing their positions. In this
way, the subject-ego is not only able to safeguard its desire, but redi-
rect it in such a way that this desire no longer relates to it. This scenario
is evidently observable in Manon’s treatment of her father’s mem-
ory, as how she feels, whether affection or later dismissal, toward him
depends entirely on what he signifies for her. In this way, Manon can
continue to deny the rather excessive and obscene dimension to her
devotion (which possibly explains why she cannot see that she loves
not a man but an ideal) by making her father the locus, or source, of
desire instead that subsequently hails corresponding feelings from her.
Interestingly, Freud states that the prime desire instigating paranoia
is homosexuality; although a clearly problematic view, it nevertheless
provides further qualifications underscoring Manon’s complex uncon-
scious that intertwines her homoerotic propensity and a degree of
incest as well, for there is an indirect trace of the latter involved in
her paranoia. This is further reinforced by the fact that in all her recol-
lection of her father except of the day he died, Manon rarely includes
her mother in them; in fact Manon almost seems envious of her for
having married such a “remarkable” man (24), and against whom she
initially felt resentment when learning that her mother never forgave
him for his single transgression (95). However, I contend that her
“incestuous” feeling is less to do with a sexual desire than with a
desire for identification; that is, it is not that Manon sexually wants
her father, but that she wants to be (like) him. By this, I am not sug-
gesting that Manon unconsciously wishes to be a man (although her
frigidity, which she justifies with her repugnance for her husband, may
be indicative) but to embody the signifiers associated with one such

like her father: authority and power that are admired by others. This
is what aligns Manon’s desire with what I term a transsexual one.
Establishing the transsexual element of Manon’s paranoia imme-
diately explains two related factors: what compelled her change in
attitude toward her father, and why her regard for him, whether admi-
ration or rejection, is necessarily excessive. It seems quite incredible
that Manon would altogether relinquish her esteem for him when she
had practically worshipped his memory all this time, and based on
such uncertain clues like her aunt’s evasive response to her question
about her parents’ quarrel and the enigma surrounding his death—
was it suicide or murder? But when understood in the context of her
present situation, this dramatic shift is not only inevitable but essential
for Manon’s sanity and survival. Within the logic of Manon’s para-
noia, it is the conviction of his pronounced love (“he loves me”) that
enjoins her affection. It cannot be “I love him” because that would
expose the phantasmal quality of her father who does not exist except
as an ideal she constructs. In this way, her transsexual motivation is
safeguarded as there is a signified to which her desire can attach, thus
providing her a stable subjective position. Or, in psychoanalytical par-
lance, her father signifies as the objet (petit) a upon which Manon’s
desire and subjectivity are premised. This subjectivity, ironically, is
further sustained by her husband, for what she perceives as his lack
actually reinforces her sense of worth and strengthens the significance
of the objet a in her unconscious. However, the night of the slave
rebellion will change all this. Thereafter widowed, horribly mutilated,
and with only a small monthly income from her mother’s inheritance
and a future bereft of prospect, the subjective position and directly
her objet a have become completely derailed. To reconstitute the for-
mer, Manon’s unconscious must seek a replacement objet a because
her father’s memory can no longer be sustained by her current sta-
tion. For if Manon’s former bitterness when she was married secretly
hides a sense of superiority encouraged by her objet a, her bitter-
ness now has no such inkling. As such, her father’s image must be
reoriented and transformed into an inversion of itself in order to
mitigate the loss of her objet a, thereby easing her unconscious’ tran-
sition to a new one. And Manon’s substitute objet a, I contend, is
also the narrative’s most disquieting irony. Because her unconscious
is underscored by transsexual desire, and since her husband is the
only other man she knows, who, moreover, functions like her father’s
double, it is inevitable that his image will become Manon’s substi-
tute objet a. This argument finds its strongest warranty in Manon’s
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
The Transsexual Operation of Architecture

How does my discussion above relate to the focus on space? Or rather,
in this case, how does space influence subjectivity at the level of the
unconscious? I want to posit that Manon’s transsexual desire is indi-
rectly the result of inhabiting an interiority that is intrinsically coded
by gender; her desire may be a product of oedipalization, but is only
consolidated when it becomes intertwined with her fantastical image
that symbiotically yokes her father and her childhood home, thus iden-
tifying the latter as invariably a masculine space. As such, it is arguable
that nineteenth-century architecture’s demarcation of interior space
according to gender indirectly integrates her objet a with transsexual
desire, which shapes her unconscious. The distinctively hierarchical
logic that positions the masculine rooms as overall more important
than the feminine ones directly also defines, to quote Walker out of
context again, “what people feel about who they are and how they feel
about each other” (Walker: 829); accordingly, it is palpable that most,
if not all, middle-class women during this era would unconsciously
identify with the lesser position within the domestic interior. Manon’s
case, however, is different; although a woman, her desire informed by
transsexuality would necessarily plot her on both sides of interiority’s
gender divide. Arguably, along with and related to her fantasy of a
superlative father is also this desire that engenders paranoia, which she
manifests as antagonism against her husband. Or to restate it more
directly, part of the motivation behind her antipathy toward the sugar
planter is possibly rivalry due to the fact that Manon unconsciously
refuses to subscribe to an architectural logic that locates and defines
her according to her gender because, paradoxically operating on the

same logic, she has all this while, albeit indirectly, identified more with
the allegedly superior sex.
Perhaps more interestingly is how the spatial manipulation of
Manon’s unconscious directly reflects a view with regard to the
gendering of the house that underscores architectural history up until
the advent of the ideology of separate spheres. The view that the house
“is an impersonation of woman and the woman as an embodiment of
the house” (Gordon: 301) that emerged during the Industrial Revo-
lution hereafter replaced a prior one, which can be traced back to the
Renaissance, that posited a more balanced gendering of space. During
the fifteenth century, renowned architects like Leon Battista Alberti
(1404–1472) and Filarete (a.k.a. Antonio di Pietro Averlino [1400–
1469]), who both drew ideas from the first-century Roman author
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (80–70 BC, died possibly after 15 BC),18
initiated “the operation of symbolic transference from the body to
architecture,” which Diane Agrest observes is “paradigmatic of the
operations of repression and exclusion of woman by means of replac-
ing her body” (Agrest: 30). As ambivalent bodies in the Symbolic
order, women must therefore be fitted, via architecture, “between”
and “in the interstices” of the order (Agrest: 30). Here, they would
remain under surveillance, and allowed to pursue certain “feminine”
pleasures that would earn them accolades (for accomplishment) and
criticisms (for tastelessness and frivolity) in equal measures for the
next few hundred years. However, although Renaissance architecture
established homes to domesticate the “other,” its underlying philos-
ophy had always identified this building as “an analogue of man’s
body” (Agrest: 34). This gender ambiguity, according to Agrest, was
distinctively intuited by Renaissance architects, as evinced by their sub-
scription to a “transsexual operation” when erecting a house: that is,
although the architects are men, they must nevertheless identify with
a feminine position in order to conceive and nurture an architectural
image that figuratively corresponds with male physicality; they must,
in other words, be like a mother giving birth to a male child (Agrest:
34). For example, Filarete advises that:
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)
Thus, in a paradoxical twist, the building meant to exclude (repress)

women from the Symbolic would end up recodifying masculinity in
feminine terms through architectural operations.
Agrest does not discuss the experience of dwelling in her essay, but
her notion of transsexual operation can, in my view, be broadened
to include it as well. Despite the ideological determination to col-
lapse women and home into a single figurative component throughout
much of architectural history, the fact remains that a house has always
been transsexual by virtue of its function to accommodate both men
and women. In my opinion, the fact that the interiority of nineteenth-
century middle-class homes was coded with a further layer of gender
division was possibly an attempt by the social unconscious to deny
the transsexual quality of the house. But just as the deployment of
the house to domesticate women during the Renaissance period only
served to inadvertently reinforce its transsexuality, the endeavor to par-
tition interior space according to gender in the nineteenth century
would further foreground the house’s gender ambiguity. In fact, as
Property seems to imply, such a concerted design to split the house
along a gender divide can adversely affect its inhabitants in both
direct and, as in the case of Manon, surreptitious, and thus more
insidious ways. Hence, while her desire may correspond with a his-
torically more flexible (and, in my view, also more accurate) reading
of the gender/house interface, it is, however, ultimately structured by
the divisive ideology of nineteenth-century architecture, and is hence
biased toward the masculine because of its association with power and
domination.
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
“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
effect of misrecognition that occurs when “one speaks for another”

(Handley: 685). What Handley means is that “representing” through
storytelling is a deeply ethical enterprise, but one which is fraught with
the problem of misreading. To speak on behalf of another requires
interpreting its otherness, which inevitably renders it “fictional.” The
receiver of that “fiction” (the reader, us), twice removed from the
other of which is being spoken, thus doubly misrecognizes it because
two layers of interpretation are involved. This complication, Handley
surmises, is reflected in the way Sethe’s home address is announced:
The double misrecognition or misreading between Sethe and Beloved

occurs in a structure—Sethe’s home—that houses the allegory of our
own reading: “124” addresses this double specularity, or this doubling
relationship, in that the numbers each double the one preceding. The
pictographically specular address is addressed to the reader, an allegory
of whose activity is mirrored in the processes of Sethe’s mourning, in
her attempts to account for Beloved.
(Handley: 685)
Sethe’s attribution of the haunting to a “baby ghost” (96) reveals an

inability to perceive it as relating to herself. This directly results in her
failure to recognize who/what Beloved is. Sethe, in other words, is
unable to read Beloved properly because the story she furtively allows
herself effectively denies this daughter any existence. As such, Beloved
becomes an interstitial entity, hovering between “thereness” and tex-
tual void. As a reading experience, the novel is unsettling because
the reader no longer “feels at home” in the text, for the anchoring
normally established by clear characterization is lost. In this regard is
precisely Beloved’s fantastic (in Todorov’s sense) structure.20
Handley’s reading, innovative as it may be, rehearses, however,
the problem of allegorizing place, which tells us nothing about the
house itself. Also, Handley’s theory elides altogether a consideration
of the missing number in the sequence. Number three is notewor-
thy because, like Beloved, Sethe’s third child, its absence is what
announces its presence most indubitably. The number three is rep-
resented by virtue of its invisibility, in the way Beloved lingers as an
unseen, unspoken presence that saturates the house. Sethe, Denver,
and Beloved constitute three beings who live in 124, but their com-
munity cannot, however, be quantified by the number three. Three,
in this sense, reflects the ambiguity that Beloved embodies—an empty
space that nevertheless resounds as an undeniable trace.
The house is intimately connected with its inhabitants, especially
Sethe. Somehow, despite its oppressive nature, it seems to modulate
its moods according to Sethe’s. For example, when Sethe is about to
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)
Through a series of metonyms, this passage carefully links the house,

the haunting, and Sethe. Denver never registers the house as merely a
structure, but intuitively realizes its “humanness” as interrelated to
her mother. More importantly, the house is characterized by deep
sadness and overwhelming terror—again signifying its connection to
Sethe. When Denver witnesses the “ghost” caressing her mother, its
posture and action seem to mimic Sethe’s, as if they were a sin-
gle being. This implies that the ghost is not only connected to, but
is also engendered by, Sethe. That is, the ghost is the energy and
memory of Sethe’s pain concentrated, at this moment, in a single

spectral presence, but which at other times, is writ large through-
out the house, permeating the entire architecture to culminate in a
haunting.
Trauma and the Architectural Uncanny

The haunting of 124, in a sense, warrants a discussion of the uncanny
because it is related to trauma. Both are the persistent recurrence of
something that should, but cannot, remain repressed. Anthony Vidler,
in The Architectural Uncanny (1992), proposes that:
the “uncanny” is not a property of space itself nor can it be provided

by any particular spatial conformation; it is, in its aesthetic dimension,
a representation of a mental state of projection that precisely elides
the boundaries of the real and the unreal in order to provoke a dis-
turbing ambiguity, a slippage between waking and dreaming . . . . [I]f
actual buildings or spaces are interpreted through this lens [that is, as
uncanny], it is not because they themselves possess uncanny properties,
but rather because they act, historically or culturally, as representations
of estrangement . . . . [T]here is no such thing as an uncanny architec-
ture, but simply architecture that, from time to time and for different
purposes, is invested with uncanny qualities.
(Vidler: 11–12)
Vidler’s argument reminds us that Freud’s theory of the uncanny

is foremost an architectural one. As noted in Introduction, Freud
derives this idea from a careful consideration of the German term
for homeliness, heimlich, which he claims is “identical” to its oppo-
site as well, unheimlich (unhomely) (Freud 1919: 225–26). From
this, it is implied that inherent within the home is its own threat:
home, in other words, is itself a danger to its inhabitant. But, as
Vidler remarks, this sense of the unhomely is actually derived from
the inhabitant herself. The inhabitant projects her own uncanny onto
lived space, which in turn, harbors it as a constant property that dis-
comfits her. It is a cyclical process: both lived space and inhabitant feed
on each other’s anxiety. The fracturing of this allegedly safe space and
its transformation into a menace directly plots such a space as inter-
stitial. And because the uncanny is a “mental state” transcribed onto
dwelling space by its occupant, it collapses the signifier of security
and its antithesis into a single experience, and relegates the occupant
to a threshold existence—one that straddles the real and the irreal—
such as in the case of trauma.21 In other words, the home has now
become uninhabitable precisely because it houses that which should

have been excluded but has ironically been invited in instead by the
occupant herself. Because the uncanny resides in the unconscious, its
threat remains shadowy and shapeless, always experienced as felt, but
ultimately unknowable and unspeakable. The architectural uncanny, in
this sense, is at once the unconscious spatial extension of the owner,
and an eerie instance of a house taking over, or possessing, its owner.
Vidler’s view that uncanny space is also historically and cultur-
ally determined ascribes space with a certain persistent energy that
haunts it. Space, in other words, can be invested with particular (cul-
tural) signifiers or qualities at a given (historical) moment, after which
these qualities will remain as spectral presences that persist indefinitely.
Such a view of space certainly contravenes rational perspectives, but
this does not suggest something “supernatural” about it. Space, as
this study has so far maintained, is not merely a neutral container
of objects; it accrues specific meanings based on how an inhabitant
negotiates with it and what objects occupy it. According to Kathleen
Kirby,
Space forms a medium for reconnecting us with the material, but it

also maintains a certain fluidity, a mobility: If we are speaking of space
in the abstract, it is a certain fluidity, division, and reshaping. A space
persists only as long as the coordinates holding it open are deliberately
maintained, and the shapes and boundaries modeling space are, at least
ideally, open to continual negotiation.
(Kirby: 175)
Whether space remains static or is transformed depends on how it

is “thought,” or “abstracted.” The coordinates of space are fore-
most plotted in the dweller’s psyche, and when these coordinates are
shifted, so will the significance of space. In the case of a haunted envi-
ronment, it is arguable that the energy enervating it has settled into
a kind of a dynamic containment, and as has thus made it a locat-
able, if disturbing, “place.” Place, unlike space, involves boundaries
(Kirby: 176), and the parameters inscribing its limits can potentially
transform it into a trap. It is unsurprising that stories of haunting are
almost always about architecture, usually a house. It is also unsur-
prising that Freud’s treatment of the uncanny is metaphorized as the
home—a bounded space (place) where comfort effortlessly slides into
terror. Within such a place, it is never certain that the specter is “real”
or ultimately a projection of its dweller’s trauma.
Trauma, according to Cathy Caruth, is “an overwhelming experi-
ence of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the
event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled appearance of hallu-

cinations and other intrusive phenomena” (Caruth: 11). Trauma, in
this sense, can also be reconceived as haunting because of a similar
sensation involved in both. From a psychological point of view, it is
arguable that Sethe’s experience of haunting is actually the intrusion
of trauma into her everyday life. Caruth further states that trauma is an
“overwhelming experience” that must remain unclaimed in order for
the patient to survive; it is, in other words, “an experience that imme-
diate understanding cannot permit” (Caruth: 11). The same could
be said of the uncanny. Both are encounters that, once experienced,
can no longer be denied even though their repression is vital in order
for the subject to carry on living. Such an impossibility affects the
existential condition of the subject. She becomes constrained within a
perpetual loop that compels a reexperience of the traumatic/uncanny
moment even though she refuses it. In Beloved, Sethe cannot rest in
her unclaimed experience because the house itself is constantly com-
pelling her to confront her past. Despite her valiant and relatively
successful endeavor to never “go inside” her memory (46), the story
she refuses to acknowledge takes on an energy that permeates the
house and subsequently threatens her life.
It is possible that Sethe’s trauma may be less to do with her refusal
to bear witness (again) to the distressing event than it is an incapacity
to be a witness altogether. As Dori Laub observes,
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)
Accordingly, trauma is the victim’s inability to properly see the “con-

taminating” event, thus compromising her objectivity. When her
witnessing is placed under erasure and results in her experience “no
longer communicable even to” herself, the traumatic event becomes
potentially a nonevent—it “never took place. This loss of the capac-
ity to be a witness to oneself and thus to witness from the inside is
perhaps the true meaning of annihilation, for when one’s history is
abolished, one’s identity ceases to exist as well” (Laub: 66–67). If, as
Laub observes, both victim and executioner are implicated in trauma,
how much more delirious would be the event if both victim and execu-
tioner are a single individual, as with Sethe’s case. Indeed, mother and
daughter (Denver) in the novel exist on the brink of disappearance:

abandoned by the black community after the “misery” (171),22 both
women are in danger of gradually fading from history and commu-
nal memory because Sethe has done more than just kill her daughter:
she has failed as a witness. Her refusal to face her past renders that
traumatic moment a nonevent, and by extension, Sethe’s eventual
nonexistence as well. That she is trapped in trauma and cannot escape
is due, ironically, to her repudiation of that trauma by avoiding any
discussion of it. As Nancy Jesser observes, “Sethe’s resistance to re-
living the past has cast her into a kind of limbo, with no judgment and
no forgiveness” (Jesser: 334). Her life has ceased continuing, but is
perpetually looped in the traumatic moment that has become spatially
embodied as her house. As she tells Paul D, “Whatever is going on
outside my door ain’t for me. The world is in this room. This here’s
all there is and all there needs to be” (183).
The novel establishes the house as a spatial location for trauma
in two important ways. First, although the house is a double-storied
architecture, narrative focus largely remains on two areas: the kitchen
and Sethe’s bedroom (formerly occupied by Baby Suggs). Both areas
are significantly affiliated with Sethe’s “misery.” Arguably, the kitchen
was the space that initiated her traumatic experience. In her desire
to celebrate Sethe and her children’s escape from Sweet Home and
safe arrival at 124, Baby Suggs held a grand cookout (156) to which
the entire black community is invited. However, instead of gratitude,
the community reciprocated with resentment at Baby Suggs’s alleged
“special,” “blessed” status (157). This unspoken “meanness” (157)
led to complacence and failure to warn, on that fateful day, either
Sethe or Baby Suggs of Schoolteacher’s (Sethe’s owner) imminent
arrival to reclaim mother and children, thus precipitating the “mis-
ery” thereafter. After the traumatic incident, Baby Suggs retreated to
her bedroom and would spend the rest of her life in bed. Despite her
communal standing as a quasi-preacher who is able to rouse the com-
munity into love its sullied flesh, Baby Suggs will end her days defeated
by slavery’s cruelty. When Sethe moves into Baby Suggs room after the
latter’s death, this insinuates the former’s identification with defeat as
well. Time now stands still in 124, whose walls are etched with the ter-
rible memory of what Sethe had done. The house has become a spatial
monument testifying to Sethe’s trauma and stasis, for although she is
alive, she has nevertheless ceased to exist. And that Sethe occupies the
kitchen and her bedroom most of the time when at home (at least
during the course of the narrative) suggests, eerily, an unconscious
attachment to her trauma.
Second, it is noteworthy that Beloved, when she becomes flesh,

nevertheless identifies herself as a place (the house). She tells Denver,
for example, that “This the place I am” (123; my emphasis).
Of course, this could be Beloved’s clumsy way of saying that 124 is
where she belongs—that is, with her mother. But it is equally possi-
ble to construe this strange statement as Beloved establishing not so
much her possession of the house but her embodiment by it (and vice
versa). In this sense, the notion of haunting in Beloved provides an
alternative approach to the haunted house narrative; instead of dis-
tinguishing the haunting entity from the haunted space, Morrison’s
tale suggests that the two are merged and inseparable.23 Hence, when
Beloved appears as a young woman, it is not only specter becoming
flesh, but a house personified. This interpretation also provides an
explanation as to why Beloved’s appearance as a young girl coincides
with Paul D’s reentry into Sethe’s life. A familiar view in scholarship
is that Paul D’s arrival “disturbs the unhealthy equilibrium at 124.
In evicting the ghost and touching Sethe, he initiates the process of
articulating ‘word-shapes’ [99] for the past that still imprisons them”
(Lawrence: 237). If, as mentioned earlier, the ghost of 124 resents
Paul D’s presence, this view, accordingly, posits that Paul D reawak-
ens Sethe’s hope and desire for a future—a possibility that the ghost
cannot allow. He is Sethe’s savior, and the ghost an evil presence that
incarcerates the women. But such a consideration suffers two limita-
tions: it fails to account for Beloved’s reappearance, and summarily
paints Beloved as menace. This, I argue, is actually far from accu-
rate: that Beloved returns in the guise of a girl will eventually lead to
Sethe’s salvation. Paul D’s arrival may signify promise for Sethe, but it
does not guarantee her escape from trauma as long as she is unwilling
to confront her past. As she solemnly declares to Paul D, her future
lies “in keeping the past at bay” (42). Beloved’s recurrence, this time
as flesh, provides the needed catalyst to compel Sethe into admitting
her repressed memory, something that 124 has failed to accomplish
in the last eighteen years because Sethe has persistently misrecog-
nized the significance of its haunting. The house wants Sethe (and by
extension, even Paul D and Denver) to face her trauma, but she con-
scientiously refuses despite her unconscious attachment to sections of
the house that reiterate her pain most; in the process, she gradually
contributes to the annihilation of her history, and inevitably herself
and Denver. Paul D’s arrival, however, sets the house in concentrated
motion: it will henceforth focus all its energy into an embodiment of
trauma—the figure of a young woman—that Sethe, Denver, and Paul
D can no longer ignore.
The proposed interpretation insinuates that underlying the story

of these individuals is the problem of seeing. The inhabitants of 124,
each entertaining a private trauma, fail to notice that suffering will not
be surmounted unless it is communicated and confronted. Paul D has
locked his pain away in “a tobacco tin lodged in his chest” (113), and
Sethe is too busy “keeping the past at bay,” while Denver is only inter-
ested in the present. For them, the house is just haunted—daunting,
but manageable—nothing more. It merely functions as background,
albeit an unsettling one, and “insofar as it is experienced as a back-
ground, [it] is visually present to a subject even though it makes no
determinate contribution to [their] experience” (Kelly: 82). In refus-
ing to admit the past, the three of them encourage a self-reflexive
blindness that the haunting alone cannot reverse. If the house is to
help them find liberation and peace, it must transcend its normative
role to play a more determinative one in: it must, in other words, turn
from background into something more palpable so that its inhabi-
tants can “get a better, fuller, or more complete experience of the
focal thing” (Kelly: 97). The house must compel them to “see a point
of view on the figure, a point of view that solicits [them] to take it up”
(Kelly: 97). It achieves this when it transposes hauntedness to a child-
woman figure. In shifting trauma from building to body, the ghost is
soliciting a focal point so as to induce its inhabitants into confronting
trauma (“a better, fuller and more complete experience”) so that a
necessary “change” can finally be achieved.
But success is, unfortunately, unforthcoming. So immobilized are
Sethe and Paul D by trauma that they are unable to recognize
Beloved’s significance. To them, she is just another young, black, and
troubled woman to whom Sethe has taken a liking. Sethe initially
even fails to notice that this girl shares her dead daughter’s name.
In the way that she is drawn to the kitchen and the bedroom of 124,
Sethe is attracted to Beloved because the latter intimates her trauma,
despite her inability to “see” this. Sethe registers Beloved as possi-
bly a good companion for Denver, which is justification enough for
this mysterious young woman to stay with them (56). Even when
Sethe eventually realizes Beloved’s identity, her misrecognition con-
tinues. In fact, Beloved is divested further of the trauma she embodies
because she has, in Sethe’s perspective, now become the daughter who
has miraculously returned from the dead, thus canceling out the past
altogether. In failing to revalidate the past, however, Sethe becomes
even more entrapped in her unspeakable trauma. Paul D, on the other
hand, increasingly perceives Beloved as a threat as he finds himself
sexually drawn to her. Her “shining” (65), which could arguably be a
reference to her allure, is viewed as an attempt at arousing him. This is

again misrecognition because Beloved’s desire for intimacy is meant to
effect his release; as the narrative later reveals, when Paul D eventually
has intercourse with Beloved, what he experiences is healing:
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”
(259). This wordless sound is the utterance of the unspeakable, a

sound that cannot be symbolized by words. It recalls pain and vio-
lence, and is shared by all the women in their intense intimacy with
slavery and loss. When the sound finally finds “the right combination,
the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words . . . it broke
over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its wash” (261). For
Sethe, “it was as though the Clearing had come to her” again (261),
thus connecting the present and the past to explode in a confrontation
with her trauma once and for all.24
“Rememory” and the Spatial Fantastic

Space can function as a repository for memories, including repressed
ones. But to argue that the uncanny in Beloved is solely Sethe’s tran-
scription of trauma into spatial terms is to deny the fantastic element
of the narrative. The novel, in the end, cannot be reduced to a
psychological case study because Beloved’s earthiness vexes such an
absolution. Indeed, part of the narrative’s power is Beloved’s pro-
found ambiguity as a presence. As much as Vidler’s model is useful to
understand Sethe’s trauma, that Beloved is also a ghost story neces-
sarily compels the reader into acknowledging that 124’s “aliveness”
is also ultimately separable from, although related to, Sethe. The
merging of trauma with architecture sets the house off as an entity
energized by an invisible agency which, in time, consolidates into a
singular focal point that perpetuates, and transforms the nature of,
haunting. But the house is not the only site of haunting and trauma
in the novel, as Sethe’s musing on “rememory”—an important theme
in the novel—reveals.
Beloved’s fantastic nature must be broadened to include its rep-
resentation of space as well. On the one hand, the narrative clearly
demonstrates that it is humans who give space meaning. Space is sig-
nificant as long as humans dwell in, and negotiate with, it. Space and
the objects occupying it may have a “pre-objective” reality (i.e., a kind
of a priori status), but the value and significance of their objectivity
can only be established by a perceiving individual. As Colin Smith
avers, “This field [of space] is real, because it is resistant, but pre-
objective, and it is precisely the aim of perception to bring objects into
it. Perception will do so in accordance with the dictates of another
‘field,’ which is myself, a historical being with a situation and cer-
tain exigencies” (Smith: 111). To a point, 124’s relationship with
Sethe affirms such a perspective. Although the house has a shad-
owy history—its pre-objective reality—long before Baby Suggs and
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)
For Kristin Boudreau, this passage reflects Sethe’s attempt at realiz-

ing her pain in spatial terms so as to give it meaning and substance.
“If,” as Boudreau argues, “language cannot render the experience
of suffering, at least, Sethe believes, that experience can continue to
occupy physical space in the world, so that a stranger may ‘bump into
a rememory that belongs to somebody else’ ” (Boudreau: 462). But
why should this be? Does Boudreau’s reading not tacitly imply that
it is Sethe who desires remembrance for her experience of trauma,

and not be written off by history as another statistic? Although
Boudreau remarks that such a desire is “an alternative to roman-
ticism” (Boudreau: 462), I am not sure how her reading can be
anything but romantic. Furthermore, Sethe’s opinion of such a space
is blatantly pessimistic, unlike Boudreau’s seemingly affirmative inter-
pretation. Sethe realizes that such places are dangerous but inevitable,
and duly warns Denver to avoid them. A more plausible interpre-
tation of this passage is Sethe’s acknowledgment of places in the
world harboring powerful, unseen forces that can adversely influence
those who unwittingly encounter them. Unlike the phenomenologi-
cal model deployed thus far in this study to consider the relationship
between trauma and space, Sethe’s formulation of rememory seems
to evoke a sense of the numinous in space, one intertwined with evil.
There are, in other words, places that register a “break in plane which
opens a communication between cosmic levels” and preserve “recol-
lections of ‘other’ human worlds” (Shiner: 432) that are no longer
available to contemporary dwellers but which somehow continue to
influence them.25 Sacred places conform to such a category, but there
are others as well. In fact, the type of place that constitutes Sethe’s
rememory, despite similar qualities it shares with what Mircea Eliade
views as sacred space, is diametrically opposed to the latter in terms
of functionality. For Eliade, sacred space “is equivalent to the cre-
ation of the world” (Eliade: 22), but a place haunted by rememory is
annihilative.26 Nevertheless, one common denominator of both spaces
is the interpenetration of temporalities. Here, the past invades, and
interfaces with, the present to reawaken the inhabitant’s unspoken
fears and desires. The inhabitant, in turn, must learn to confront and
manage them, or risk dissolution. What she experiences in such a space
may seem unfamiliar and otherworldly (“cosmic”), but they are, in
truth, merely originary memories that have been repressed by time
but can be reignited again by space.
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
silence and “untranslatability” (or unknowability/unpredictability)

underpinning their ambiguity (Kuntze: 28). It is unclear if the house
in Beloved is haunted or uncanny. The impossibility of establishing
this, coupled with the house’s already suspicious history (259), trans-
forms 124 into a virtual monument whose secret remains unknowable
and therefore monstrous. Even after Beloved is exorcised by the thirty
women, her presence remains unmistakably imprinted onto the house,
which thereafter stands “Like a child’s house; the house of a very
tall child” (270). The enigmatic line that concludes the novel—“This
was not a story to pass on” (274)—only serves to reify the non-
closure embodied by this architecture. Likewise, despite the realist
premise of Property, the attributions ascribed to the sugar planter’s
mansion, and even Manon’s original home, are at best questionable
because of her unreliability as a narrator. As discussed, it is possi-
ble that paranoia suffused with latent transsexuality, of which Manon
is unaware, directs and relates her hatred and nostalgia, respectively,
for the two houses, thus compromising her judgment and rendering
both buildings monstrous. This, however, should not lead the reader
to abandon attempts at interpreting these buildings. Instead, as this
chapter seeks to demonstrate, interpretation should be especially pur-
sued to establish a more dynamic perspective of the dialectics between
space, subjectivity, and the specific history against which the narra-
tive is set. Admittedly, although reading 124 Bluestone and Manon’s
homes is, as Kuntze would have it, a “melancholic” enterprise, it is
nevertheless necessary because architecture is what ultimately bridges
“this moment [to] other spaces, other times, and other meanings,
completely here and now” (Kuntze: 35). To understand these “other
meanings”—such as rememory, or the gender ideology crisscross-
ing racism in antebellum South—is to better understand the often
unrecorded, and therefore unknowable, history of slavery—that of its
effect on slaveholders and the trauma encountered by its millions of
victims. Like these fictional houses, the history of slavery will always
be shrouded in secrecy in order to maintain the profundity of its mon-
strosity that, as (re)memory, continues to haunt the American psyche
until this day.
Chapter 3
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
that ironically compels their misrecognition and realization. It could

be said that the house designates a “structure” to the unconscious in
order to help the subject express trauma (Beloved) or desire (Prop-
erty). But whatever “agency” the house effects is dependent on what
the subject unconsciously projects. Thus, while crucial in its role,
the house as unconscious space is fundamentally influenced by its
inhabitant’s psychodrama; the unconscious property it develops, while
subsequently taking an independent existence of the dweller, is still,
in the end, originated in the latter. In this chapter, however, this
property will take on an altogether different quality when domestic
space itself becomes the source of the subject’s identification with her
repressed. In both The Exorcist and Repulsion, it is possible to read the
house as directly instigating the emergence of an unspeakable that has
been repressed within the subject’s unconscious. No longer a figura-
tive symptom, the disturbance in space palpably expresses the house’s
provocation of the subject’s secret self to surface, and in a guise that
is most virulent.
Arguably, such active agency expressible by the house is only possi-
ble in fantasy narratives,4 of which horror is a prime example. As Susan
Stewart notes, the horror story, “whether oral or written . . . depicts
scenes of those ambiguous suburb between nature and culture, or
between categories of the natural” (Stewart: 41). For Stewart, the
haunted house is perhaps the most manifest illustration of such a sub-
urb because it powerfully exemplifies “the domestic ceded to nature”
(Stewart: 41). It is, however, important, when discussing horror, to
treat the terms “haunted” and “nature” as broad categories: nature,
which according to Raymond Williams is one of the most complex
words in the English language (Williams: 68), can range in horror
narratives from the Kantian noumenon (the supernatural horror),5
and the ecological (monster and environment horror films), to the
Freudian id, the primal level of human consciousness subsequently
repressed by the ego but can sometimes resurface and render the
subject highly volatile (the psychological thriller, the slasher film).
Similarly, while haunting is generally associated with ghosts, it could
equally relate, as Martin and Morrison’s novels respectively imply,
to an ideology and the past (Beloved, in fact, makes apparent the
link between haunting and history). Haunting, moreover, can also
be linked to a forbidden desire buried deep within the psyche that
inevitably returns to (re)claim the subject. Such a scenario is already
implied in my reading of Property, but will be the main focus of this
chapter. In light of the multiple meanings of “nature” and “haunt-
ing,” what constitutes a house infested by the unnameable should
therefore not be considered as simply meaning an abode plagued by
H o u s i n g S e c r e t S e lv e s 105
a supernatural presence but, to reiterate Stewart’s point, as domes-

tic space (a space marked by culture) that has yielded to the force
of nature, and can thus no longer maintain the rigid demarcation
between culture and nature, and between categories of the natural.
Indeed, the ease with which the house can slide from refuge to a
site of anxiety in horror narratives not only foregrounds the fiction
of sanctuary normally associated with the home, but also reveals that
oppositional qualities are mutually related and possibly integral to the
architecture itself. While intrusion usually suggests an external pres-
ence that has penetrated the house, it could, less commonly but more
closely associated with Freud’s “uncanny,” also imply a presence that
has always been part of the house, quietly biding its time before finally
revealing itself.
But what signifies as unhomely in Freud’s formulation is, in the
end, still dependent on the subject. The house becomes disquiet-
ing because it has unwittingly reacquainted the subject with a past,
which now somehow frightens her. Beyond its function as catalyst, the
house thereafter has little involvement in the subject’s psychodrama
except as environment against which to frame her psychological con-
flict. This, as I noted in an earlier chapter, is partly the reason why
the house in Gothic narratives is often viewed largely in metaphori-
cal terms alone. But such a limited treatment is incompatible with a
large number of haunted house stories (e.g., Beloved), in which the
house plays a direct, active role in inciting and intensifying the intru-
sive, alien presence, almost as if the house is an entity with sentience
independent of its inhabitant, thus blurring the distinction between
the house and what haunts it. Such stories contradict Vidler’s postula-
tion in their implication that the uncanny is very possibly “a property
of the space itself” (Vidler: 11), and not merely a quality inscribed
onto it by its dweller. In this chapter, two iconic horror films will
be discussed to substantiate my perspective of the house as operating
independently of, while nevertheless implicating, the subject to engen-
der horror. Admittedly, Repulsion is rarely considered a haunted house
narrative, and more commonly classified as psychological horror. But
if we return to my earlier injunction to treat “haunted” and “ghosts”
as broad terms, it is possible to argue that Polanski’s film is a variant of
the haunted house tale, whose ghost remains indeterminable because
the narrative stubbornly refuses the audience any clue or explanation
with regard to the protagonist’s (Carol) mental breakdown, which is
literally reflected by the house’s deteriorating condition. The super-
natural in The Exorcist, on the other hand, is largely confined to
a single domain of the house—the bedroom of Regan, the target
of possession.6 Nevertheless, despite this spatial concentration, the
supernatural sickness clearly affects the entire domestic space as the

household grows increasingly apprehensive at Regan’s transformation
into a grotesque embodiment.
While my treatment of The Exorcist primarily focuses on Regan’s
bedroom, the first part of my analysis will nevertheless draw atten-
tion to the house on the whole in order to demonstrate that amidst
its apparent normalcy is already inscribed an unhomely presence,
which will eventually concentrate on Regan’s bedroom. Discussing
the house’s interiority, in both its intrinsic quality and the way it
is framed by the camera, I propose that its prominent characteris-
tic is ambiguity, which, as a result, engenders confusion about spatial
boundaries and functions, and a sense of entrapment. Following from
this, the second part of my argument will directly focus on the bed-
room; building on Barbara Creed’s hypothesis that Regan’s possession
is the metaphorization of an incestuous, homoerotic desire for her
mother, Chris, I relate this perspective to my treatment of spatiality by
demonstrating how the bedroom colludes with Regan’s unconscious
to encourage the return of her repressed, thereafter sustaining it in a
terrific battle with father figures enlisted to coerce the repressed back
to the nether regions of her psyche once again. In The Exorcist, the
room literally comes alive and actively abets Regan’s articulation of
her unspeakable desire, as evinced by its steady drop in temperature, its
predatory-like observation of Regan and the others to monitor their
actions, which, if threatening, will be met with violent retaliation, and
its physical ejection of Father Karras that results in his death at the
end of the film. By carefully investigating the camera techniques used
to frame the various mise-en-scènes of the bedroom, I show that the
paranormal activity is not entirely effected by the demon possessing
Regan, but is also motivated, in part, by the bedroom itself.
Unlike my previous chapters, which more or less interrelate theory
and text in a complementary manner to generate interpretive insights,
here, I introduce the framework underscoring my reading as a way to
consolidate the analysis of one text (The Exorcist) and to identify the
interpretive parameters for the next (Repulsion). My approach for this
chapter is meant to express in clearer terms the importance of sub-
scribing theory to text, but more importantly to demonstrate how a
perspective potentially implied in one narrative can become evident
in another. Accordingly, my reading of The Exorcist will culminate in
the establishment of a reading framework that draws on and integrates
two concepts, one from architecture and the other from psychoanaly-
sis. The first is Deleuze’s notion of the pli (or fold), which he develops
in order to link ontology and difference, and has since been used to
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
merely a figurative reflection of Carol’s psychic dissolution, but is an

active, direct agent aiding in the emergence of her repressed. This per-
spective, as with my reading of The Exorcist, will be substantiated by
careful analysis of qualities intrinsic to the apartment and in terms of
how it is framed by the camera. I conclude this chapter by mount-
ing a comparative reading of the two films as allegories of the crisis of
modern living related to the dilemma of private property.
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’
residence, became polluted by an alien, malevolent entity, or why

Regan is targeted.
Notwithstanding the lack of clarification, the film does, however,
provide vague clues that already conduce to the house’s significance
as an ambiguous, insidious site early in the narrative. While these
clues do not amount to an explanation for why it is possessed, they
do point, albeit figuratively, to a quality that simultaneously renders
the house susceptible to an alien infection and aligns it metonymi-
cally with Regan’s extimity that will soon be folded outwards. The
first clue is the lack of clear demarcations between the various sections
of the house, and along with them, the functions these sections are
meant to perform. The most pronounced example is the basement,
which simultaneously serves as Regan’s activity room and the laundry
room, thus collapsing the domains respectively associated with clutter
(basement) and cleanliness (laundry room), with work (laundry room)
and play (activity room), into a single site. The second clue is the
sense of discomfit when occupying the house; indeed, this impression
is established concurrently with the house’s introduction when Chris
interrupted in her sleep by a strange noise goes to investigate the attic
in an attempt to identify its source, but to no avail. This motif is later
repeated, but again before Regan’s possession, thus suggesting that
an uncomfortable presence is already lodged within the house prior to
the main event, and is perhaps even inherent to the house.
The final, and the most subtle, clue of all is a quality inscribed onto
interior space itself. On one level, the interior design of the house
unmistakably connotes modern, upper-middle-class affluence, which
corresponds with Chris’s status as a financially independent woman
(she is an actor). But on another, there is also a sense of claustrophobia
pervading the interior, due to a surplus of possessions. Here, walls are
more or less completely inundated with pictures, and the floor space
is largely taken up by an endless suite of furniture, which is in turn
decked with a wide assortment of paraphernalia. The recurrence and
proliferation of similar objects obfuscate the specific parameters (and
function) defining each distinct part of the house. While not untidy,
the house is nevertheless “cluttered,” thereby restricting movements
to set flows of direction. This third point, however, is only indirectly
represented, as it is conveyed less by any overt gesturing toward its
crowdedness than by how the camera frames the various parts of the
house throughout the narrative. Interestingly, quite a few scenes frame
the house in either medium or extreme close-up shot. These types of
angles are traditionally used to capture details (such as emotions), but
as Deleuze insightfully notes,
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)
Accordingly, while close-up shots may encourage attention to specific

details of the body—what Deleuze terms the “organs of reception”—
they do this by relegating the rest of the body to a state of apparent
immobility. The body may be in movement, but this fact will not
be registered by the close-up and (to a lesser extent) medium shots,
which focus instead on the “tendencies to movement or micro-
movements” effected by a “single organ” or by several corresponding
organs. Consequently, most of the body’s motoricity and “movement
of extension” are sacrificed and rendered as mere support for the
body’s “movement of expression.” Applying Deleuze’s perspective to
my point about spatial constraint in the film, it is possible to view the
consistent use of such shots as implying a sensation of confinement
that is nevertheless unconsciously experienced by the occupants of this
excessively furnished and decorated house. The sensation is nowhere
more explicitly represented than in the scene near the end of the film
where Fathers Merrin and Karras are taking a brief respite between
exorcisms: in a telling mise-en-scène, the two men sitting quietly and
dejectedly against the railing of the stairway seem to symbolize a pair
of prisoners behind bars (Figure 3.1).
With an interiority that is porous but engenders sensations of dis-
quiet and confinement, the house, even before Regan’s possession,
already asserts itself as an unhomely site that affects its occupants at
the level of the unconscious. As the narrative develops, however, these
qualities will increasingly be directed to one single area in the house,
Regan’s bedroom, where they will function in a consolidated man-
ner to align the pli with Regan’s interiority so that it may encourage
the unfolding of her repressed inside outwards, and thus unleash the
secret self, which is also her other, encrypted within her psyche.
Situating the Object-Cause of Desire

Very likely, that the bedroom serves as an intensification of the
house’s ambiguous property in The Exorcist is, in part, related to its
implication and conflation of intimacy and transgression. A domain
Figure 3.1 The Exorcist: Fathers Merrin and Karras – priests or prisoners?
associated with sexuality, where forbidden desires are potentially real-

ized, the bedroom is also the most private site of the house. Notably,
The Exorcist (and Repulsion as well) also locates horror directly at
the site of the woman’s body to arguably push the view linking the
bedroom and femininity (see previous chapter) to its most extreme
expression. Since the bedroom, as the narrative provocatively suggests,
is the architectural extension of the woman, it is only logical that it
would also enhance her unconscious by drawing out her repressed into
the open to finally expose her other. Finally, that The Exorcist revolves
around the family is another important factor related to the bedroom
as the site of horror. This is because the bedroom in family homes
bears the added signifiers of segregation and hierarchy, and therefore
harbors, by implication, a greater potential for transgression. While
children are often barred from entering their parents’ room, theirs
are placed under constant surveillance. The bedroom, in other words,
is the platform that concomitantly enacts the contestation and fusion
between power and pleasure in the bourgeois family unit (Foucault
1990: 47). This spatial distinction ensures the maintenance of the
parents’ conjugal rights and authority; whether in crossing the thresh-
old of the parents’ room without permission, or pursuing activities
deemed inappropriate in her own room, the child inevitably becomes
disciplined. Ironically, however, and as with any exercise of power, this
spatial arrangement also already threatens the various bedrooms’ hier-
archical significance with erasure. The forbidden nature of the parents’
room merely serves to accentuate the child’s desire to penetrate it,
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.
My discussion of The Exorcist builds on the interpretation first

proffered by Barbara Creed in her now classic work The Monstrous
Feminine (1993) and further developed by Ellis Hanson (2004).
Accordingly, Regan’s inadmissible desire for her mother is what con-
stitutes her secret self, which will remain dormant as long as it is
unthreatened. Unsurprisingly, as both Creed and Hanson note, ini-
tial signs of Regan becoming possessed occur at the same time when
intimations of her mother’s potential marriage to a director, Burke
Dennings, begin to surface. Possession, reconsidered psychoanalyti-
cally, is Regan’s secret self, or other, emerging to confront the possible
loss of her object-love. Her increasingly grotesque transformation over
the course of her ordeal metaphorically reflects the excessive and for-
bidden nature of her desire. A problem with such an interpretation,
however, is that it ignores the evident supernatural premise of the nar-
rative in order to foreground a psychological and rational one.10 In its
defense, however, this critical correlation between numinous horror
and aberrant psychological states is an acknowledged interpretative
direction in Gothic scholarship, and whose history can be traced back
to Freud’s essay on the uncanny. Ellis Hanson indirectly advances a
similar argument in his response to complaints against the lack of con-
sistency and explanation in the film (why the family is targeted by
evil, if Regan remembers her ordeal after the exorcism, etc.). Accord-
ing to him, these aspects are actually the text’s performance of “the
classic gothic ruse of sexual ambiguity by embodying perfect inno-
cence and outrageous licentiousness in the [ . . . ] character” of a child,
and suggests that “the film itself, like the body of the child, seems
to be possessed, to play games with us, to put things where they
do not belong” (Hanson: 113). Unstated, what underlies Hanson’s
discussion of textual performance is obviously his subscription to the
established interpretative premise in Gothic and horror studies that
symbolically conflates the supernatural and the psychological.
Importantly, the signifying chain that joins the supernatural and
the psychological also extends to space: just as places can be disturbed
by supernatural evil, it can also be destabilized by the return of the
repressed. That horror can simultaneously affect both the sites of
consciousness and space implies a profound link between all three.
Or, to quote Dani Cavallaro: “Symbolic analogies between psyches
and buildings as contexts for unresolved hauntings are sometimes
reinforced by the meandering and uncharitable character of both”
(Cavallaro: 89). In fact, this analogy is acknowledged by Blatty him-
self; his horror short story “Elsewhere” (1999), for example, explores
the intimate connection between spatial and psychological confusion

that results “from a disquieting sense of directionless” (Cavallaro: 89).
In The Exorcist, this “sense of directionless” is implied by the absence
of an explanation as to why Regan is targeted, because this absence fig-
uratively hints at the unspeakability of her unconscious desire whose
libidinal direction has suddenly become impeded with potential derail-
ment and loss, and as a result, manifests itself as horror that engenders
the transformation of both her body and her bedroom.
A more significant problem with Creed and Hanson’s interpreta-
tions, however, is their disregard for the technical aspects of the film.
As Cynthia Freeland (2000) notes, Creed’s primary focus is the appli-
cation of theory (in particular, Kristeva’s formulation of the abject) to
narrative content—a task she performs with distinction, but whose
result somewhat compromises the persuasiveness of her argument.
Nevertheless, Creed’s position, in my view, remains a convincing one,
which I hope to reinforce precisely by taking into account formal
and stylistic qualities in my discussion. Moreover, my claim for a sen-
tience that endorses Regan’s bedroom with apparent independence
and agency also restores the supernatural dimension to the film that
has been consistently muted in psychoanalytically informed scholar-
ship. In doing so, I demonstrate how The Exorcist directly literalizes
the analogy between warped psyche and haunted space that is often
only symbolically represented in horror narratives. While my discus-
sion admittedly considers Regan’s possession as figuratively both the
acknowledgment of Regan’s homoerotic desire for her mother and
her resentment against its potential loss, my treatment of the bedroom
seeks to retain the text’s supernatural edge. As such, I argue that the
spatial violence engendered by the bedroom testifies to its collusion
with Regan to retaliate against the exposure of a secret that ultimately
belongs to both Regan and bedroom, the latter because it is where
the secret is fundamentally contained and hidden.
Horror and/in the Bedroom

In The Exorcist, all the scenes involving Regan’s possession and exor-
cism are confined to her bedroom. Several of them, moreover, poten-
tially suggest the bedroom’s apparent participation in reinforcing its
occupant’s state of possession. Consider, for instance, the crucifix that
mysteriously keeps appearing despite being removed from it several
times (this object first emerged directly after Regan begins to show
signs of change), thus indicating the bedroom as a site where things
that do not belong are nevertheless found. As no one knows how the
crucifix continuously reemerges, or admits to putting it there,11 the

only explanation, however improbable, is that the crucifix is “some-
thing” belonging to the bedroom that potentially points to its capacity
for volition. Moreover, the presence of the crucifix also implies that
things mysteriously appearing in the bedroom are nevertheless not
random, but appear to be deliberately nominated to signal or signify
the otherness gradually emerging from within Regan’s self. In a later,
and controversial, scene, the crucifix will become an especially potent
phallic instrument used by Regan to exemplify both “mother-loving”
(desire to be husband-lover) and “mother-hating” (fear of being sup-
planted by competing father figures, such as Burke Dennings and
Father Karras) (Hanson: 117). Additionally, her act also mocks, while
identifying with, a religion heavily inflected by a masculine logic; in
this way, the film succeeds in implicating both a psychological and
a supernatural dimension to Regan’s possession. Regan’s incestuous
desire is merely apparent and never clearly defined; in this regard, it
too, like the crucifix, is something that should not belong to the bed-
room but is nevertheless located there. But as the narrative unfolds,
her “homosexual-fixation on her mother” gradually gains momen-
tum mutating from “subtle tension and eroticism between mother
and daughter” in the first half-hour of the film to the violent out-
bursts characterized by the possession scenes throughout the rest
(Hanson: 117).
Interestingly, this shift is also corresponded spatially by the house:
in the scenes before Regan’s forbidden desire is threatened with era-
sure, her loving and often physical relationship with her mother is
rehearsed everywhere in the house to figuratively imply her desire’s
unboundedness. However, after rumors of her mother’s possible mar-
riage finally reach her/after Regan begins to show signs of change,
their relationship decidedly deteriorates, and Regan’s world is sub-
sequently limited to her bedroom, suggesting that her desire has
come under siege.12 Regan’s confinement, I argue, will drive her
increasingly violent, not because she is retaliating against her incar-
ceration, but because her bedroom is capable of drawing forth her
repressed to manifest itself in its most extreme, virulent form. Here,
both the space of the subject’s body and the bedroom are bound
by a consolidated desire and collapsed into a single embodiment.
Indeed, the episode involving Regan’s masturbation with the cru-
cifix provocatively suggests this symbiotic relationship: tellingly, the
episode begins immediately after the departure of one of the film’s sev-
eral father figures, Detective Kinderman, who suspects Regan is Burke
Dennings’s killer. It is also the first time Regan’s entire bedroom is
shown through a succession of medium and medium long shots. Hear-

ing a scream, Chris runs upstairs into the bedroom to witness objects
being flung against the wall by an unseen force and Regan stabbing
her crotch with a crucifix. Chris attempts to stop Regan from her
masturbatory violence but is forced by Regan to “lick” her bloodied
crotch instead.13 When the servants try to enter the bedroom to assist
Chris, an armchair mysteriously moves toward the door and slams it
shut against them, after which the armchair reinforces obstruction by
leaning against the door. Chris is then seen flung across the room, and
as she lies injured in one corner, a heavyset wardrobe begins to creep
toward, before collapsing on, her. If not for the narrowness of the
corner, Chris would have surely been crushed. To a point, this partic-
ular episode in The Exorcist testifies to Elizabeth Grosz’s view, noted
in the Introduction, that “Nothing about the ‘spatiality’ of space can
be theorized without using objects as its indices” (Grosz 1995: 92).
Indeed, the repressed desire directing both Regan’s unconscious and
the bedroom’s volition will not be able to find articulation without
the objects contained on site.
From the mise-en-scène, it is clear that everything in the bedroom,
from Regan’s personal belongings (records, books) to door and furni-
ture, conspires to express its occupant’s unspeakable desire; what are
otherwise harmless contents are transformed into weapons capable of
volition and harm. They seem, in fact, to aptly reinforce, albeit in exag-
geration, Georges Teyssot’s argument that “Furniture—the agents of
comfort and signs of well-being, interior equipment, upholders of
status, symbolic configurations of the tight fabric of affection in the
scheme of things, instruments of domestic comportment—can also
dislocate and render inhospitable the space par excellence of intimacy,
the [bed]room” (Teyssot: 92).14 These objects serve as concurrent
indices of Regan’s inadmissible incestuous homoeroticism and rage,
and each item symbolically represents a specific meaning that cor-
responds with and reinforces the girl’s unconscious. For example,
possibly foreshadowing the scene of Karras recording Regan’s voice
to verify possession, the destruction of books and LPs insinuates
the impossibility of communication not only between the good and
evil, but between the perverse and the acceptable. Another exam-
ple is the wardrobe, a metonymy for items associated with Regan’s
body that, at the moment, has turned into an embodiment of its
owner’s revulsion whose function is to target the source of this feel-
ing: Chris. That it almost crushed Chris, but does not, serves to
further reflect Regan’s ambivalent emotions for her mother at this
point.
Stylistically, how this episode is shot further insinuates the bed-

room’s active participation in Chris’s punishment. The way in which
the camera initially frames the door, armchair, and wardrobe, for
example, suggests that all three are standing in attention, ready to
respond to the direction of Regan’s unconscious. Using a low-angle
point-of-view shot to capture the armchair moving toward the door
to slam it shut and block it aligns the audience’s perspective with
Chris’s in order to identify with her terror, but also, conversely, places
this perspective along the height of the armchair itself, thereby subtly
encouraging a rapport with it. A similar angle is also used to frame
the moving wardrobe; here, however, point of view clearly remains
with Chris as she watches helplessly while a massive piece of furniture
single-mindedly moves toward and momentarily looms over, before
falling on, her. Possibly implied in a single shot to show the wardrobe’s
advance is that objects in this bedroom are not moved by an indepen-
dent force but have volition instead, thereby investing them with an
ability to intuit necessary actions, and the freedom and ease with which
to move.
If the interpretation I proposed earlier can be countered with the
claim that the objects were telekinetically moved by the demon pos-
sessing Regan, thus invalidating my view about the room’s sentience
and agency, subsequent scenes in the film will prove less conducive
to such a reading. In the following paragraphs, I will analyze, with
emphasis on formal qualities, four such instances, which I hope will
be sufficient to further establish the validity of my argument. The first
occurs on the night of Burke Dennings’s murder. Having just returned
from the doctor after a discussion of Regan’s worsening condition and
yet to learn of her lover’s violent demise, Chris finds her unattended
daughter asleep in a bedroom that has turned icy as a result of its win-
dows being flung wide open. The entire sequence, which consistently
cuts between a moving, agitated Chris and Regan lying completely still
in bed, is framed in near darkness except for the lit area just beyond
the bedroom, where Chris temporarily lingers before the sequence
concludes. But what is curious throughout is how the mise-en-scène
implies a point of view as well, as if someone in the bedroom is intently
watching both women while remaining unseen in the dark. Clearly not
belonging to Regan, and by extension, the demon possessing her, this
point of view, I opine, can therefore only be attributed to another sen-
tient presence that is equally interested in Regan’s transformation, and
would thus monitor her situation in order to ensure that this process is
not impeded—the bedroom itself. Its seemingly unflinching attention
during the entire time almost hints at profound wariness, as if it were
Figure 3.2 Father Merrin’s arrival at the Macneil’s residence in the iconic scene from
The Exorcist
positioning itself to attack whoever or whatever that threatens Regan’s

unconscious (like Dennings) or attempts to jeopardize its emergence.
The second scene corresponds with Father Merrin’s arrival at the
Macneils’ residence during the night (Figure 3.2). Its sequence begins
with the iconic long shot, one of the few in the film, of the priest
standing before the house that abruptly cross-cuts to an extreme
close-up shot of Regan’s horrendously altered face with only her
eyes in clear focus, before cross-cutting again to the priest as he
enters the house. Noteworthy in the initial shot is the clever use of
lighting and manipulation of perspective to align the bedroom win-
dow alongside Regan’s eyes, thus not only creating a metonymic
link with the second shot, but also implying the room’s sentience
that extends from its occupant’s desire. That it unmistakably sug-
gests the bedroom’s intense focus on the priest is immediately clarified
by the second shot of Regan’s penetrating eyes. Notwithstanding
their link, the two shots can also be read as independent of each
other; that is, although bound by a common interest, the bedroom
and Regan are nevertheless watching the priest in wariness separately.
The third example is the sequence of scenes that depicts the bed-
room’s escalating iciness. Again, if viewed figuratively, the bedroom’s
growing coldness would denote the increasing domination of Regan’s
body and consciousness by the repressed/the demon that will soon
culminate in their utter erasure unless she is saved.15 Alternatively,
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
unconscious or the demon that killed Karras, it is evident that the

bedroom served as both their weapon and collaborator in the bid to
remove the threat embodied by the priest. In a perverse way, the film
demonstrates that a subject’s relationship with space is capable of pro-
viding an otherwise undefined longing with a “coherent identity and
an ability to manipulate things, including [the subject’s] body parts,
in space” (Grosz 1995: 92).
Theoretical Intermission: Extimity and the Site

of (Un)Folding18
The arguments I professed earlier for The Exorcist imply a mutual
affinity between Regan’s unconscious and the bedroom as they work
together to elicit a desire she has repressed. This affinity, on the one
hand, may be analogous; that is, what the room expresses metaphor-
ically reflects and reinforces Regan’s psychological conditions. It is a
view most commonly adopted by scholars, but which also deliberately
eschews the film’s obvious supernatural premise in favor of an alleged
psychological one. My reading, which proposes an intrinsic feature
belonging to both Regan’s subjectivity and her bedroom, restores the
film’s supernatural premise without disregarding its psychological one.
This feature, while shared by both subject and space, is nevertheless
specific to either and thus independent of each other. In this respect,
the feature would also go by different terms, which for my argument,
will be conceptualized as the extimate for subjectivity and the pli for
space. Both operate on the principle of transformation by drawing
to surface, or unfolding, what is hidden or repressed, and it is this
mutuality that, in my view, draws Regan and her room into such a
profound and reciprocal intimacy. That her repressed can manifest so
steadily and intensely is precisely because its return is encouraged and
safeguarded by the bedroom, which in turn is granted with increasing
power of volition.
In the next few paragraphs, the two concepts that have tacitly
informed my reading of The Exorcist will be detailed and consoli-
dated into a framework to specifically guide my reading of Repulsion
hereafter. While the pli and the extimate are ideas related to theories
from disparate disciplines (architecture and psychology, respectively),
they nevertheless share a quality of ambiguity that is intrinsic to
the structures of, respectively, certain types of buildings and every
individual’s subjectivity. I will discuss the extimate first because it is
arguably the more accessible concept when compared to the pli. Psy-
choanalysis tells us that a stable, coherent, and self-aware subjective
position is fundamentally a fantasy. Split between the conscious and

the unconscious, the ego must effect repression of the latter to forge a
semblance of ontological confidence. What structures the unconscious,
as a result, becomes designated as other (while the constitutions
of the conscious become self) that must remain unspeakable and
unacknowledged—a secret—to allow this fantasy of subjectivity to
continue unperturbed. In the event that the repressed does return,
however, it must be quickly but effectively dealt with and returned
to whence it came, lest it overwhelms and destroys the subject.
In Friedkin’s film, the Catholic rite of exorcism becomes the figu-
rative means to reverse the process of a forbidden desire emerging
from Regan’s unconscious, after which she is restored to normalcy
again, and with apparently no memory of her ordeal to suggest the
thoroughness of (re-)repressing this desire.
However, a neat polarization between self and other is not always
possible, as in the cases of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and mul-
tiple personality disorder (or disassociative identity disorder). In all
three, an otherwise inadmissible dimension of the psyche suddenly
surmounts the conscious and confuses its contents so much so that it
becomes impossible thereafter to tell where the self ends and the other
begins. This psychological condition would prompt Jacques Lacan
to formulate a concept that explains the phenomenon in which self
and other have become indistinguishable. The extimate, or extimity
(extimite), as he calls it, is not the opposite of intimate and is adverse
to binary logic; instead, it is a continuum that links self and other in
intimacy while retaining their particularity. Extimity is fundamentally
related to another of Lacan’s concept, the object petit a (or objet a),
which was briefly introduced in the last chapter: the objet a (at the
risk of simplification) functions like a psychic trace that has become
separated from, but continues to influence, the subject-ego, which
as a consequence continues to unconsciously long after this trace.
The extimate, in this regard, represents “the otherside of the subject,
foreign and removed yet encapsulated within the psyche’s most funda-
mental recesses” (Arnold and Iversen: 151). Lacan intimates this point
in Écrits (1977) when he explains the extimate as an “other to whom
I am more attached than to myself, since, at the heart of my assent
to my own identity it is still he who agitates me” (Lacan 1977: 190).
It is this curious intimacy that instigates the subject to both repress
and actively seek out this other, which Joan Copjec describes as “the
object-cause of our desire” (Copjec: 59). Horror narratives are espe-
cially expedient in symbolically illustrating this psychological curiosity.
In The Exorcist, for example, Regan’s secret self (her other), a term
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
thought of in terms of size, not comfort), which is the quality that

asserts positive and creative difference in space. For Deleuze, space
should be understood as an “event”; as such, while it accommodates
the real, it is also gesturing toward the virtual, or ideal. Architecture
construed in this way becomes, in a sense, atemporal, as its present
would manifestly bear the trace of its past but is also already imply-
ing its future. In my view, 124 Bluestone as rememory in Morrison’s
Beloved would subscribe to such a configuration of space. Space as
event, to continue Deleuze’s rumination, is “what can be conveyed by
all expressions, or what can be realised by all realisations, the Eventum
tantum to which the body and soul attempt to be equal, but that
never stops happening and that never ceases to await us . . . ” (Deleuze
1993: 105–06). In other words, it is a space opened to unending pos-
sibilities, and whose meanings it accommodates, however, can never
transfix it. Speaking specifically of the event, Hélène Frichot asserts
that:
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
Defining event as “restless inhabitants of this house” suggests that it

is a property inherent to the house but subsists like ghosts, unseen
and forever active. Hence, it cannot be apprehended by “the realm
of [our] five senses” (Frichot: 65), but is nevertheless experienced
usually by, for lack of a better word, intuition. On the other hand,
Frichot’s definition could also imply the human occupants, whose
habitation invests the house with movements and intensities. In this
regard, Frichot’s reading of event parallels closely Lefebvre’s notion of
a surplus feature that is only noticeable in occupied buildings; while the
event exists independent of the occupant, the event is also only possi-
ble because of the occupant, who both contributes to, and is affected
by, it in return. And why the event is integral to (some) architecture is
the result of the fold.
The pli is not specifically an architectural concept, but a spatial one
Deleuze developed from his meditation on the Leibnizian monad,
which he then applies to his reading of buildings like the labyrinth and
Baroque architecture.21 The pli, accordingly, is a peculiar architectural
feature that concurrently conforms to, and departs from, the norms
of spatial signification. Here, categories like outside and inside, near
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
it is able to reduce the house to unmeaning even as it works to unfold

the subject residing in the bedroom. To reinforce this point with the
text, I will revisit the scene where Chris checks in on Regan prior
to the revelation of Dennings’s murder after some further explication
from Deleuze that is necessary to properly contextualize my reading.
In discussing the Leibnizian monad, Deleuze notes that:
Chiaroscuro fills the monad according to a series which can be followed

in both directions: at one end the dark background, at the other sealed
light; the latter, when it lights up, produces white in the sextion set
aside for it, but the white grows dimmer and dimmer, yields to darkness
and deepening shadow as it spreads out toward the dark background
throughout the monad.
(Deleuze 1991: 239)
The monad is a self-enclosed space, contends Deleuze, insofar that

it abjures the difference between interior and exterior, not because
it presupposes them as completely independent of each other. And
chiaroscuro, or light’s varying intensities, is an expression of the
monad as/in the fold. Discussing the indivisibility between light and
dark in the monad, Deleuze proposes that the intensities engendered
via folding incline light to darkness rather than the other way round.
In other words, while light and dark cannot be considered in separa-
tion, light nevertheless increasingly yields to darkness in the process
of folding throughout the monad. It is possible to apply Deleuze’s
observation here to the proposed scene in The Exorcist, although with
some modification, since it is not a gradation of light that the scene
depicts, but the intensity of darkness. With only a third of the frame
lit, in which Chris is further framed by the door, the alignment of
audience and bedroom as they watch her together in darkness care-
fully locates the viewer’s vision within a monad that extends from the
space of the cinema to cinematic space, thereby folding the viewer into
the space of the screen, and then again into the house, and then again
into the point of view the house is effecting, and so on. Read within
this framework, this scene clarifies the power of the pli not only in
encouraging the emergence of Regan’s extimate, but also in affecting
spatial intensity as it gradually folds the house and the audience into
the monadic space of the bedroom.
In folding Regan’s subjectivity, the bedroom disqualifies the psy-
chic border separating conscious from unconscious, self and other,
to unleash her extimate double. It functions, to quote a line out of
context from Victor Burgin’s study of cinematic space, “as a mise-
en-scène, a staging, of the fundamental incoherence of sexuality: its
heterogeneity, its lack of singularity, its lack of focus” (Burgin 1992:

238); it is, in other words, the site where the ambiguity inherent in
sexuality is not only permitted but also liberated and resoundingly
expressed. As Deleuze contends, the fold may be “scission,” but it is
also a “setting-off” (Deleuze 1991: 241): it brings the subject to the
limits of the self so that the self can experience collapsing into, and
integration with, the other to become a configuration that henceforth
transcends both categories. As such, just as Regan’s unspeakable desire
is not separate from, but integral to, her sexuality, her monstrous
becoming is not other to, but a continuum of, her human.
Fundamentally, ambiguity is, of course, a prime characteristic of
Gothic and horror narratives. While The Exorcist portrays Regan’s
experience as a terrifying ordeal, when read as psychic retaliation
against a possible loss, what her possession expresses could also be
construed in more positive terms as self-transcendence that allows
her true nature to finally surface. That the process she undergoes
is extreme and life-threatening, when considered from this perspec-
tive, suggests a transition that is necessarily painful because it is
meant to destroy the binary logic structuring the self to instate in
its place the logic of duality. Even more obvious is the case of Sethe
in Beloved, to take another example, whereby her folding by the 124
Bluestone is meant to unleash the trauma she has repressed so that she
can transcend it and finally become her “own best thing” (Beloved:
273), which in Deleuzian term, would be equivalent to her “unique
dimension” (Deleuze 1988: 101). With Repulsion, however, it will be
difficult to derive anything redemptive about Carol’s yielding to the
pli; the desire for a monadic existence that triggers her psychologi-
cal decline will, in the end, erase every trace of self with no sight of
what her other might be. Hence, while the pli abhors stasis in space, it
could potentially cause stasis in a subject, especially when the extimate
unfolded from within her is essentially structured by unknowability.
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
to reflect a similar situation with Carol’s psyche; as noted by Ivan

Butler, who wrote one of the first critical essays on the film, the apart-
ment is “a central character, and by the end, we feel we have lived
in it ourselves” (Butler: 80). Indeed, the film remains one of the few
pronounced examples of the genre that demands critical attention to
space not only because of its analogous relationship with its occupant,
but also because, as Butler notes, of its effect on how we experience
the film.22 Tarja Laine is even more explicit when she argues that “the
apartment is a lived body in the Merleau-Ponty sense: it is both a phys-
ical (architectural) and a mental (conscious) structure with an agency
and intentionality of its own, aiming to drive Carol insane” (Laine:
41). What Laine means by “agency” remains unqualified in the rest
of her essay, but her point echoes the position I have been asserting
throughout this study. Indeed, appreciating space from the perspec-
tive of Deleuze’s pli would further elucidate what assertion of agency
by space in Repulsion may entail.
It is, however, difficult to fully attest to Laine’s argument, primar-
ily because Repulsion, unlike The Exorcist, is not a supernatural horror
in which buildings can come alive and strike out at their occupants.
Moreover, the film discretely represents the surreality of the apart-
ment (such as subaqueous walls, the elongation of the main corridor,
hands emerging from the walls, cracks appearing at touch) as mani-
festly Carol’s deranged vision.23 Hence, while I read the apartment as
representative of the pli and thereby accord it with agency, my argu-
ment of what it does to Carol (which seems to be Laine’s position) is
also complimented by how living in it affects her; that is, what I claim
are the modalities of the fold in Repulsion is derived from observing
the effects of dwelling in a specific kind of space. In this sense, my
interpretation, while mindful of the realist element of the film, never-
theless departs from the standard view that considers the apartment’s
deterioration as a reflection of Carol’s mental state, thereby imply-
ing that the apartment’s decline is a projection of Carol’s. While I do
not contest this perspective, I am of the view that her decline is also
precipitated by the habitation itself. As such, although my argument
inevitably concentrates on the apartment’s effect on Carol, my aim is
to also establish a reciprocal, rather than a one-directional, relationship
between subject and space, in which each mutually affects the other.
Recalling, as an example, the film’s depictions of the apartment in
highly surrealist fashion, while these scenes suggest Carol’s hallucina-
tions, they could, based on my framework, also hint at the apartment’s
capacity to induce such hallucinations. Simply put, the apartment is
able to evoke certain sensations in Carol (thus establishing this site as
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
already developed extensity, their value is only relative. They therefore

flow from a “deeper” instance—depth itself, which is not an extension
but a pure implex.
(Deleuze 1997: 229, emphasis in the original)
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.
The Monadic Subject

In order to appreciate how the apartment in Repulsion functions as a
pli, it is necessary that we first consider its occupant and the condition
from which she suffers. This will help to establish an important link
between Carol and her house that would later explain why it is she
conduces to the effect of inhabiting the latter. The narrative remains
stubbornly unforthcoming about Carol’s psychological breakdown
despite the tantalizing hints it drops. Scholars have proposed various
perspectives,26 but most agree that Carol manifests a pathological aver-
sion toward men. While she tries to maintain distance from them as
much as possible, it is made impossible by her beauty. An early scene
in which a construction worker makes a pass at her during her walk

home from work suggests that this is a common experience, which she
must constantly endure. There is also her would-be suitor Colin who,
despite her obvious and complete disinterest in him, remains unre-
lenting in his pursuit. He seems unable to detect, or perhaps refuses to
acknowledge, Carol’s discomfort whenever he imposes himself on her,
as evident in their awkward conversation during the scene when they
are lunching at a diner. Indeed, so extreme is her aversion that even
the presence of a man’s belonging is enough to upset her, like when
she discovers Michael’s (her sister Hélène’s married boyfriend) razor
and toothbrush callously placed in her glass. But what repels her most
of all is physical contact with one. When Colin steals a kiss from Carol
after dropping her home, her reaction is visible distress, compelling
her to dash up to her apartment to purify her mouth immediately
with brushing and rinsing. She would later kill him and her landlord
in her delusion, but in both cases, as I will demonstrate, she is clearly
retaliating against their desire for physical contact with her.
That Carol seems more at ease among women is intimated by
her job as a beautician in an exclusive spa for women only. Even
so, she seems to merely tolerate her customers and assumes detach-
ment whenever she attends to them in order to discourage rapport,
largely because their topic of conversation often revolves around men.
But while she can bear physical proximity with other women, she is
less willing to let them—save her colleague, Bridget—get emotionally
close. In the end, that Carol is less anxious around women is only
when in comparison with the way she responds to men and the fact
that she interacts with (only) three women (her sister, Bridget, and
her employer) throughout the narrative. In the latter, moreover, it is
arguable that Carol is less apprehensive around these women because
they either treat her or make her feel like a child. Hélène, for exam-
ple, often appears more like a mother rather than a sister to Carol,
while Carol’s employer deliberately assumes a maternal approach in
her management style. In the scene depicting Carol and Bridget alone
in their workplace locker room, they appear more like little girls
sequestered in their hideout, playful and giggling as they share secrets
and tell funny stories. The only episode in the film where Carol is
demonstrably happy and relaxed concludes, however, on an ironic and
chilling note when Bridget discovers the head of an uncooked rab-
bit left over from a previous night’s dinner in Carol’s purse. Implied
is that even before her self-incarceration in the apartment, Carol’s
mind has already been compromised. Nina Marten, after pointing out
that the “rabbit can be seen as a child’s pet,” proceeds to argue that
Carol’s act of severing “the head from the rabbit’s body . . . definitively
indicates her complete disengagement from normative femininity and

her forceful retreat into a childish interior world” (Marten: 143). Evi-
dently, if based on these various examples and Marten’s postulation,
Carol’s response to these three women is due to the fact that they
foster her secret wish for a child’s existence in which she can then
abandon the normative femininity imposed on her and just be (by)
herself. Here, Fredric Jameson’s view that submission to the Sym-
bolic order “designates, not repression, but something quite different,
namely alienation” (Jameson 1977: 373) aptly describes Carol’s situ-
ation. Forced by the Symbolic order to assume normative femininity,
Carol retreats into herself and becomes increasingly alienated from her
surroundings instead of repressing her desire.
Importantly, Marten’s point directly implies a spatial dimension to
Carol’s condition. What Marten terms “interior world,” when recast
to according to my interpretive framework, would be tantamount to
what I call a “monadic existence.” The clearest evidence that Carol
desires a hermetic world is, of course, her avoidance of contact with
the exterior world. Even before she ceases going to work and barri-
cades herself in her apartment, Carol’s detachment from her exterior
environment already suggests a sense of self-enclosure she is attempt-
ing to sustain: during her daily walk home from work—a sequence
that occurs several times in the narrative—Carol makes no eye contact,
engages no one in conversation, and in one scene, is even oblivious to
a motor accident that occurred right before her. Carol’s repulsion,
moreover, is also inferred from the frequent close-up shots of her
face during these scenes. Most critics argue that the consistency of
this shot implies her objectification by the (male) gaze and an inva-
sion of her personal space. Marten, however, by carefully studying
the camera angle as well, postulates a different perspective: in framing
Carol’s face, Marten notes, “the camera gradually catches [Carol’s]
waxen visage with increasingly canted angles, repeatedly crossing the
180-degree axis of action that maintains spatial orientation in narrative
cinema, [thus] adding to the film’s confusing sense of space” (Marten:
42). Based on Marten’s reading, with which I agree, the close-up and
gradually canted angle shots are less to do with Carol’s objectifica-
tion and more with her increasing inability to cope with the exterior
world. To this point, I want to further add that these shots imply
Carol’s progressive self-implosion as well: by repeatedly violating the
180-degree axis rule to express Carol’s disorientation while maintain-
ing the close-up shot, the camera is indirectly also underscoring the
profundity of her detachment, whereby so completely incompatible
is the exterior world with her interior, private space that no amount
of crossing and recrossing between the two plains will ever succeed
in aligning them. Carol’s repugnance toward the exterior world is

another reason driving her to murder two men. In breaching her
hermetic space,27 they have brought into it the contamination of the
exterior world, for which their deaths are now inevitable in order to
arrest the contamination.
Carol’s aversion of both the exterior world and its people is not
the only clue that points to her unspoken desire for self-enclosure.
Another clue, which relates to the first, is her preoccupation with
bathing and washing during the first half of the film. One scene even
shows her aggressively peeling off her gloves upon returning home,
as if to symbolize her disgust with the exterior world with which she
has so much contact despite her unwillingness. Then, there is also the
pleasure she derives from observing things at a distance. For example,
one scene shows her standing by her window observing some children
playing on the grounds of a convent that her apartment overlooks; her
face clearly registers a sense of calm and being at ease. Moreover, as
the convent is a kind of monadic space as well, and since Carol asso-
ciates her hermetic world with childhood, her enjoyment here may
also partly be due to a sense of solidarity with both this place and the
children playing there. Polanski admits that the monastery is meant to
function as a motif that “give[s] the feeling of isolation later on in the
picture” (quoted in Meikle: 86)—that is, when an increasingly volatile
Carol barricades herself in the apartment. A last clue can be found in
the extreme close-up at the end of the film that focuses on a family por-
trait with a younger Carol standing slightly aloof into the background
from the rest of the family and looking away as if she is disinterested.
It is possible to infer from Carol’s posture that her disengagement
from the exterior world can be traced back to her childhood. As she
grows older, however, the pressures of life will make it increasingly
difficult to sustain this detachment, and madness seems the only way
to reclaim that monadic space of her childhood for which she longs.
All these clues, however, are but glimmers of light cast against an oth-
erwise darkened interior. Despite the various hints provided in the
film, Carol’s world is as shadowy in the end as it was when the viewer
first meets her. Or, if restated in Deleuzian terms, Carol’s world is
located in intensive space where, as a constituent of this space, she is
like depth, unpredictable and can only be partially, if at all, known.
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
Figure 3.3 The famous “Ames Room” scene in Repulsion
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
instead focus on other features of the apartment that implicate it in

a folding operation. In a sense, the apartment is particularly suited as
a pli that subtly encourages and complements Carol’s metamorpho-
sis. For example, its overall design—a narrow corridor leading from
the front door to the bathroom, with two small rooms on each side
(Carol’s bedroom and the sitting room on the left; Hélène’s cham-
ber and the kitchen on the right)—is suggestive of depth rather than
distance. This interpretation is further reinforced in several scenes
that use long shots to frame the entire apartment but from differ-
ent angles to repudiate calibration of the apartment’s size. Based on
its crowded condition, we would assume that the apartment is rela-
tively small, but its crowdedness is also due to a surplus of things (the
kitchen and Hélène’s room are obvious examples) that may, in truth,
disguise its actual size. Later, after Carol has killed Colin and placed
his body in the bathtub submerged in water, and as her perceptual
judgment grows more awry due to delusion, the apartment will visu-
ally transform, becoming forelenghtened via wide-angle lens; it is as
if the house’s depth is augmented, making everything seem further
away; the stretch to the bathroom is longer, the sitting room looks
cavernous. The scene with Carol in the bathroom uses a fisheye lens
to intensify its depth, thereby pushing back the image of the bathtub
with Colin’s body deeper into the frame’s vanishing point. To achieve
all the visual distortion of the apartment, Polanski uses the technique
developed for the famous “Ames Room.”29
Undoubtedly, the “Ames Room” sequence is meant to reflect
Carol’s precarious state of mind; however, the depth of focus that
enlists a play of chiaroscuro to achieve its effect is also reminiscent
of Deleuze’s monad, which, if we recall, is a site of folding that dis-
avows spatial logic predicated on binarism. As such, another way of
understanding the house’s distortion in this sequence is to read it as
a folding operation that is visually represented. Implied here is that
the pli has been active all the while, as inferred from the shots of the
apartment that camouflage its size, but is only now visibly displayed
in concurrence with Carol’s delusion. In this regard, the apartment,
to quote Deleuze’s description of intensive space again, is “the real-
ity of the real insofar as it is thought” (Deleuze 1997: 68), which
in this case is Carol’s. Hence, my reading does not detract from the
view of the sequence as representing Carol’s delusion, but reinforces
it by demonstrating how her mental instability is reflected by both the
visual cues of the apartment and also the effect of living there. Take
the bathroom scene again, for example: while the distance between
Carol and the bathtub engendered by the fisheye lens underscores
Carol’s emotional and psychological distance from Colin, or a refusal

to acknowledge his presence, it could also suggest—when analyzed
alongside the rest of the sequence—an instance of folding that trans-
forms the calibration of the house for Carol so that her world appears
more sprawling and is thus conducing to her extimate’s emergence.
In this regard, I am unconvinced by Joanna Rydzewska’s postula-
tion that the apartment is “confined and claustrophobic” (Rydzewska:
343); viewed from Carol’s perspective, the reverse seems more evi-
dent. In her warped reality, whose visual representation also makes
explicit the pli’s operation, the enhancement of spatial depth would
correspond with a more expansive house.
The walls of the apartment are another feature that further evinces,
in my opinion, its folding capacity. Of all its structures, the walls are
the clearest expression of the pli at work. They seem almost alive,
and, in several scenes, have a palpable effect on Carol that suggests a
subtle provocation to further drive the process of her transformation.
In fact, it is possible to view (some of) the walls’ “activities” as unre-
lated to Carol’s hallucination despite their enactment only when she
is present. Three particular manifestations of the walls will be consid-
ered. I will discuss each in terms of their representation in the narrative
before drawing them to a consolidation of the walls’ overall contri-
bution to the pli. The first is construction damage in the form of
cracks. Cracks are a consistent motif in the film, and its initial appear-
ance on a pavement that attracted intense attention from Carol, so
much so that she missed her appointment with Colin, is the film’s
preliminary indication that she is not quite what she seems. The motif
appears the second time in the apartment prior to Hélène’s depar-
ture. Carol mentions a crack on the kitchen wall that needs sealing,
to which her sister does not respond, thus begging the question if
it was there at all. Shortly after her sister leaves, another gash sud-
denly appears and startles Carol, whose retreat into her bedroom will
culminate in an imaginary rape that marks the first palpable sign of
her mental breakdown. Later in the narrative, as Carol’s condition
worsens, the walls of her home will correspond with larger and more
fundamental damages.
The next manifestation, occurring shortly before Colin’s death, is
decidedly more surreal: in this scene, one particular wall has strangely
“transformed into a viscous substance, wet and soft, as if it were made
of [Carol’s] own flesh” (Marten: 147). As Carol is shown touching the
surface in this scene, Marten’s point, apart from drawing an analogy
between Carol’s psyche and the porous wall, may also be referring to
the dialectical relationship between body and space that has collapsed
them into a single continuum. The last manifestation, also surreal, is

what Marten terms “grabbing walls” (Marten: 148): this scene occurs
twice, once as part of the “Ames Room” sequence and the other
after Carol kills her landlord. In both episodes, hands emerge from
the numerous wall cracks and attempt to seize Carol. In the “Ames
Room” scene, what is particularly striking is Carol’s ambiguous reac-
tion: while her face initially registers terror as she tries to evade the
hands, its shift to an expression that is decidedly more ambiguous—
resignation or ecstasy (or perhaps both)—when she is finally caught
and embraced may suggest a degree of desire as well. In the later scene,
significant variations from the first are introduced, possibly to under-
score the extreme desperation of Carol’s situation. If in the previous
scene the grabbing hands appear as part of the walls’ structure, in this
one, countless hands penetrate the walls, causing damage as they reach
for Carol, who, instead of resisting, walks directly to and through the
narrowest part of the house in order to be touched and groped by
them. The only significant similarity between these two episodes is
Carol’s ambiguous expression that could equally mean submission or
jouissance, or both.
While analogous to Carol’s mental state, these manifestations of the
wall—I emphasize again at the risk of repetition—are also representa-
tions that vividly display the operation of folding exerted by the house.
Take the cracks, for example: their profound effect on Carol, coupled
with the difficulty of ascertaining if some of them are real because
they only seem to appear whenever she is present, potentially hints at
a quality of the apartment that is independent of its occupant but able
to nevertheless influence her in apparent ways. All three manifestations
discussed, moreover, are configured in images that implicate depth,
whether it is a hole in the wall whose extent is unknown, an aque-
ous surface that can be deeply penetrated, or walls from which hands
apparently located even deeper into their structure appear. These man-
ifestations further reinforce the allusions to depth represented in the
“Ames Room” sequence and the various long shots of the apartment
to establish an alignment between the apartment and intensive space
conduced to the pli. In her discussion of the apartment in Repulsion,
Katherine Shonfield’s observation that it is as if interiority is expressing
vengeance by “aggressively [reasserting] itself” (Shonfield 2000b: 96)
clearly echoes my view, although I would slightly modify her phrase to
read “aggressively [reasserting] itself as depth” to also reflect my inter-
pretive framework premised on a Deleuzian concept. As expressions
of folding, these structural aberrations inscribed onto the walls more-
over complement Carol’s transformation by creating an environment
conducive to the extimate’s gestation, and thus abets in the process of

its emergence.
Disorderliness and Folding

Carol, who was so particular about her hygiene in the early part of
the narrative, will abandon washing altogether especially after bar-
ricading herself in the apartment, which responds with increasing
disorderliness. The subsequent messy and dirty environment of the
house, as I see it, is yet another implication of its folding operation.
This is indeed a curious point, and to pursue it, I frame my treatment
of the pli against the concept of “the dirty home,” developed by Tyson
Lewis and Daniel Cho, who adapted it from Fredric Jameson’s notion
of “dirty realism” (Jameson 1994: 55). The dirty home, according to
Lewis and Cho, is
a configuration [that] is not predicated on private property and thus

does not contain alienation in its concept. As such, the impossibil-
ity of being at home is properly historicized as a particular fear of
the bourgeois subject. The dirty is a home that is ironically cleansed
of the anxieties toward the past, permeability, the present, and the
uncanny.
(Lewis and Cho: 87)
The concept is moreover linked to the idea of nomadology concep-

tualized by Deleuze and Guattari in their monumental two-volume
“Capitalism and Schizophrenia” series, especially in the second book,
A Thousand Plateaus (1987). Unlike Theodor Adorno’s view of the
homeless individual,30 whose very status actually sustains a desire for
home, the nomad has relinquished all traces of this desire because he
“does not build structures of permanence—and thus [embodies] pure
movement, pure velocity, and pure becoming [which] are its ethical
demands” (Lewis and Cho: 84). Additionally, the nomad is “truly
feral” because he has not only disavowed “home, but more impor-
tantly, the desire for a home” (Lewis and Cho: 86). For this reason,
the nomad’s dwelling is best epitomized by the dirty home, which—as
implied by the word “home”—does not necessarily involve a build-
ing. I will return to the above quote’s inference to private property
and relate it to Repulsion (and The Exorcist) in the chapter conclusion
below. Here, I am primarily interested in the dirty home as, ironi-
cally, a site “cleansed of the anxieties toward the past, permeability,
the present, and the uncanny”—an idea that will admittedly be modi-
fied and read more narrowly than Cho and Lewis intend—and its link
to the nomad,31 to make my point about Carol’s disorderly apartment

as reflective of the pli in process.
It is certainly plausible to apply Lewis and Cho’s argument to
Carol’s situation if we reconsider it from a nomadological perspective
and view her apartment as a dirty home. In the narrative, the disin-
tegration of her psyche is corresponded by erasure of the boundary
distinguishing her self from the space of the apartment. As the two
increasingly collapse into each other, this process also transforms, as
evinced most clearly in the “Ames Room” sequence, Carol’s world
into an expansive, boundless environment, whose subaqueous walls
are further suggestive of a return either to the womb (Rydzewska:
347) or nature. In Carol’s delusion, the apartment has been turned
into a dirty home, and Carol its nomadic inhabitant. Like a feral crea-
ture, she is “pure movement, pure velocity,” roaming her land freely
and protecting her territory from intruders to maintain its cleansed
state. As this space is now “her ‘right,’ ” the only rules that oper-
ate here are those she prescribes, such as rules “about who can and
cannot enter” (Caputo: 109) her domain. Her murder of Colin and
the landlord, arguably, exemplifies her protective instinct, after which
their bodies are incorporated—Colin’s is submerged underwater in
the bathtub, while the landlord’s is stuffed into the sofa—into the
landscape of her world and no longer bear any reminders. In this sense,
while the apartment’s disorderly state is an analogy to Carol’s warped
psyche, it could also be an instance of folding, when read against Lewis
and Cho’s argument, meant to both complement and encourage the
emergence of her new being. Its state thus possibly symbolizes Carol’s
freedom at last from her past (history), her permeability (which could
be interpreted as the ease with which, especially, men access her body),
and her present (subscription to normative femininity).
When Hélène and Michael return home toward the end of the
film, they find a catatonic Carol lying under her bed, numb and com-
pletely immobilized. Her extimate’s return, as it were, is complete,
but because there is no clear definition of her interiority, just as there
is none for depth, the integration of self and other has turned her into
a configuration with ambiguous significance. On the one hand, her
final condition could suggest a total annihilation of any subjectivity.
So profound is the void characterizing her other that it completely
overwhelmed Carol’s self during the process of transformation to cul-
minate in an extimate that is decidedly vacant. On the other hand,
however, her condition, if recast in spatial terms, could suggest her
metamorphosis into a monad. As an extimate that is self-contained, yet
boundless, borderless, and liberated from binarism, her world is now
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
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
consumer goods [including the house] have become potentially so

abundant that no individual has the right to cling to the principle of
their limitation; but that one must nevertheless have possessions, if one
is not to sink into that dependence and need which serves the blind
perpetuation of property relations.
(Adorno 2005: 39)
In other words, what characterizes the relationship between private

property and ownership in the (post)modern century is a paradox: on
the one hand, private property, which safeguards ownership of limited
goods, is no longer tenable in an environment that has a potentially
endless supply of goods. On the other, however, possessions must nev-
ertheless be made private in order to articulate ownership and protect
their possessor’s claim to them as well as his economic independence.
As a result of this paradox, the value of things has been reduced to
their pure functionality. A house may be private property but it is also
just another consumer good that serves a function, nothing more.
In this regard, its significance, for example, as a sphere separating pri-
vate from public is no longer tenable, for as part of the circulation of
consumer goods, its function as private space already implicates, and
is an extension from, public space, whose motivation is exclusively
economic.
Adorno’s view is echoed by Henriette Steiner in an essay on
nineteenth-century bourgeois interior.32 In a passage that bears
hints of Deleuze and evident traces of Freud, she argues that
“the substantial cultural significance that has been attached to the

[bourgeois] home and the house since the beginning of the nineteenth
century” would, as a result of modernity (and the advent of private
property), paradoxically become the catalyst that will cause the home
to “fold in upon itself and revert into the uncanny, a home deprived
of space. The bourgeois interior leaves no space for movement, for
change, for porosity; if anything, it arouses feelings of strangulation
rather than those agreeable restfulness and security as given in the
Freudian definition” (Steiner: 140). Like Adorno, Steiner also notes a
paradox in modern living. The cultural significance of home that was
so highly prized since the beginning of the nineteenth century had, in
the modern era, become another commodity subsumed under private
property. That is, in a circular logic, a bourgeois home must subscribe
to the ideology of separate spheres by serving its role as private space
in order to protect and uphold its ideological and economical values
as a bourgeois home. Yet, in subscribing to this ideology, the bour-
geois home has already yielded to the determinations of the public
sphere, and by extension, has allowed it to infiltrate its space. Deter-
mined and homogenized thus (because there can only be one idea of
the bourgeois home), the bourgeois home is no longer home, but an
uncanny site where signifiers like comfort, refuge, and noninhibition
have given way to stasis, dread, and entrapment.
Drawing together the various perspectives discussed earlier, a work-
ing framework can be established to guide my allegorical treatment of
the two films. I focus mainly on the conclusions of the two films, sub-
scribing them to a comparative reading in order to demonstrate the
disparate views at which they arrive with regard to the issue of mod-
ern living and private property. In Repulsion, Carol, whom I ascribed
with a nomadic propensity earlier, would represent the anti-bourgeois
and by extension, anti-private property. By disavowing the need for
a dwelling place, the working-class Carol declares her rejection of
bourgeois ideology, which is predominantly determined by the twin
imperatives of heteronormativity and capitalism (there is a further cor-
relation here with the two men she murdered), and hence no longer
experience alienation. Freed from determination by bourgeois ideol-
ogy, her ego can finally liberate its desire from attachment to private
property, and redirect it elsewhere without fear of its mobility being
impeded thereafter (Lewis and Cho: 83). In this regard, Carol, in her
final condition, has arguably reclaimed what Levinas’s sees is “home’s
primordial function” (Levinas: 156), which is not to establish location
for the subject and provide her with familiar surroundings, but to sep-
arate the subject from “natural existence,” so that in the intimacy of
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:
haunting is irreducible to the apparition. The haunting process [effects]

a “gap,” a disruption that is other to the familiarity of particular struc-
tures wherein the disruption is itself structural and irreducible to a
simple, stabilized representation . . . . The efficacy of haunting is in its
resistance to being represented whole or undifferentiated, or being
“seen” as itself rather than being uncannily intimated.
(Wolfreys 2002: 6)
Accordingly, haunting is as much a property of space as of ghosts

since the latter can have no presence without the former. Ghosts
may be incorporeal and “both [exceed] and [serve] in the determina-
tion of the identity of place,” but they are also nevertheless a feature
“incorporated into the very economy of dwelling” itself (Wolfreys

2002: 7). For this reason, as haunted house narratives consistently
assert, once dwelling has been supernaturally contaminated, it will
always be marked by this history whether or not the haunting endures.
As the uncanny is often evoked when analyzing a wide variety of
Gothic and horror narratives, Wolfreys’s gesturing toward the concept
to signify haunting in the Victorian ghost story is therefore unsurpris-
ing. Its suggestion of the homely turned disconcerting that is merely
sensed in the initial stages certainly conduces to understanding the
dynamics of haunting as a metaphor for subjective dislocation from the
familiar that may be psychically related. Or, put simply, the uncanny
is frequently used to explain the psychoanalysis of haunting, thereby
recalibrating a supernatural tale into a psychological one.
The Others and The Orphanage would certainly accommodate
interpretations that frame haunting against the uncanny in order to
figuratively link haunting to psychopathology. Nevertheless, I find
the uncanny inadequate in addressing the films’ narrative concerns.
In Freud’s formulation, the uncanny is fundamentally the failure to
sustain an avowal of loss. An object or event has triggered the sub-
ject’s memory of an originary moment, resulting in her experience of
defamiliarization that debilitates until (if at all) that memory is muted
again by the mechanism of repression. In haunted house texts, this
defamiliarization would be expressed as haunting the protagonist must
either surmount or become claimed by it. In the two Spanish films,
however, it is not the avowal of loss, but its disavowal, that is pur-
sued by the respective protagonists, both of whom are mothers who
have lost children, but refuse to acknowledge this fact. Thus is the
trajectory that precipitates haunting, which the protagonists initially
resist, but eventually embrace to reinforce disavowal. In pursuing dis-
avowal to its logical extreme, both women consent to death (indeed,
in The Others, the protagonist is actually already dead but does not
realize it) in the end and thereby transcend their suffering. This broad
comparison between the narratives palpably indicates their incompat-
ibility with the uncanny’s conceptual determinations; instead, for this
chapter, I turn to another Freudian concept that directly addresses
the theme of grief. Less evoked in Gothic and horror scholarship than
the uncanny, Freud’s melancholia, which demonstrates the power and
effect of relentless mourning on a patient’s psychic contours that can
allegedly transform her subjective position to that of someone else, is
especially pertinent as a metaphor for possession, and, when inscribed
onto the walls of a home, for haunting, hence becoming a permanent,
if invisible, feature of architecture.
Housing Melancholia 145
However, Freud’s model of melancholia is less relevant to my anal-

ysis of the two films, as it insinuates, in my view, two significant
limitations. First, his model largely revolves around the human uncon-
scious as a repository that incorporates the object-love in order to
prevent the subject from experiencing loss. In my view, disavowal
against loss can also be transferred from the subject’s unconscious
to an object, such as a house, thereby transforming the object into
a kind of memento mori that keeps the subject in focus of an object-
love that is otherwise lost to her, and as a result, enable her to go on
living meaningfully. Related to this is the second limitation to Freud’s
model that attributes melancholia with mental damage and subjective
disintegration. Although profound depression is invariably a result of
melancholia, depression, as Kristeva tells us, is not necessarily debil-
itating, but can sometimes be strangely empowering in encouraging
the subject toward transcendence. As such, while Freud’s melancholia
directs the interpretative framework for this chapter, it will be the con-
cept’s further revisions and developments by theorists such as Max
Pensky, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, and Julia Kristeva from
which I will draw to address the specificity of melancholia as intimated
in The Others and The Orphanage.
My reading of The Others identifies a link between melancholia,
architecture, and the familiar Gothic motif of the double. A motif
usually associated with the uncanny and configured in human or
humanoid terms,2 I argue that it is also relatable to melancholia,
staking an unusual claim that in the film, it is the architecture that
functions as the protagonist’s double. Somewhat like Sethe in Beloved,
Grace, who in a moment of insanity killed her children and committed
suicide, nevertheless cannot admit this event, but projects her trauma
onto the house instead. As a result, the house becomes invested with
the unspeakable, which is represented as haunting in the film, against
which she struggles, unable to realize that it is actually they who are
the ghosts. Functioning as her alter-ego, the house would then pro-
tect the family from the revelation of Grace’s acts and ensuing deaths.
Moreover, as Grace’s traumatic memory is profoundly linked to a loss
she cannot admit, what constitutes her trauma also installs melancholia
within her ego. In this regard, Grace’s transference of her alter-ego to
the house also reflects the mechanism of incorporating loss into her
ego in order to repudiate it. Here, Max Pensky’s notion of melancholy
object, which stems from a melancholic dialectic between self and the
material world, is of particular significance to my discussion; Pensky’s
view of the disavowing ego’s absorption into objects, thereby invest-
ing them with melancholia that in turn intensifies the ego’s desire
for its own perpetuity, corresponds to an extent my observation of

Grace’s relationship with her house. Initially antagonistic against the
house because she believes it is trying to harm her children, Grace
and her children’s eventual confrontation with their collective trau-
matic memory and realization of the truth at the end of the narrative
will concurrently imply their transcendence to an “elsewhere” as well.
Henceforth, the house is an ally with which they identify, and from
which they will never leave, as evinced by Grace’s chilling declaration
just before the film closes.
If melancholia in The Others is primarily centered on Grace, it is
more diffused in The Orphanage. Two distinct operations of loss are
asserted in the film. The first is related to Laura (the protagonist),
whose integration of an originary loss into her psyche is what brought
her back to the orphanage many years later in order to revive it. But
this primary loss will experience a second, more terrific blow—her
son’s disappearance—from which her ego will be unable to recuper-
ate as she sinks increasingly into depression. The second loss, which
is directly embodied by the house, is, in my assessment, metaphori-
cally portrayed as haunting. The house once served as an orphanage
where a group of children were murdered, but whose deaths have
gone unnoticed for decades. With no one to mourn for them, the
building becomes a monument whose haunting expresses their artic-
ulation for justice and their repudiation against historical erasure, and
thus, like the building in The Others, is transformed into a melan-
choly object. Informed by the psychoanalytical models of melancholia
developed by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, who substitutes the
terms mourning and melancholia with introjection and incorpora-
tion, respectively, instead, and especially Julia Kristeva, who associates
melancholia with depression and transcendence, I demonstrate how
the film’s twin mechanisms of repudiating loss eventually bring Laura
and the ghosts into a collaboration that collapses the binary logic sep-
arating their worlds and helps reunite Laura with her lost son. The
narrative’s enigmatic ending that establishes her death due to grief
also signals her transcendence to an elsewhere, where she will always
be mother not only to Simõn, but to the other children whose wait for
parents to love them that could not transpire because of their untimely
deaths is finally over.
This chapter concludes with a comparative reading of the else-
wheres represented in The Others and The Orphanage. To help with
my interpretation, I frame my analysis of each elsewhere respectively
against Abraham and Torok’s notion of cryptophore (or encryption)
and Louis Marin’s conceptualization of utopia in order to demonstrate
that the apparent similarity between the two versions of elsewhere

belies an important difference: while the elsewhere in The Others is
reflective of a tomb, the one in The Orphanage displays strong utopic
tendency and is therefore clearly redemptive.
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
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,
Grace’s repeated failure in her efforts to apprehend an elusive entity

despite Anne’s (who can see the living) instruction is attributed by the
mise-en-scène to the expansive space she has to cover to get from one
point to another so much so that she is always one step behind “there,
and there, and there.”
Only near the end of the film, when Grace and her children’s true
circumstance is revealed will her inordinate obsession over the threat
of her domestic space be explicated. In her confession to Anne and
Nicholas about the force of madness that drove her to murder and
suicide, Grace recounts how hearing her children’s laughter “after
the end” had somehow convinced her of a miracle, and that she had
been given a second chance by God. Although unsaid, her confes-
sion obliquely hints at admittance that she had known all along but
was unable to accept what had happened, thus triggering her ego to
implement a radical operation that will separate it from the part of the
psyche that stores this memory. To complete the process of disavowal,
this part of the psyche, resignified as alter-ego, is then transferred onto
someone, or in Grace’s case, something else that thereafter serves as
her double against which she must constantly do battle in order to
maintain that process.
Melancholia and the Double

Admittedly, the critical frameworks on which the literary double is
usually premised are inadequate when it comes to The Others because
the double is not exactly a symbol of the divided self, whether in terms
of the ego/id binary (Otto Rank and Freud himself),5 or the spiri-
tual/carnal dichotomy.6 Instead, the film’s doppelgänger motif is the
result of trauma, leading to a subjective split that locates the inadmissi-
ble part of the protagonist’s psyche onto a site physically disassociated
from her in order to ensure its complete misrecognition so that she
can then maintain her connection to the Symbolic order. As Žižek
explains, trauma is the “absent cause of the symbolic” (Žižek 1994:
101), the cause inducing the breakdown of the Symbolic and disrupt-
ing the signifying chain that holds subjectivity together. Trauma, in
other words, is what makes the Symbolic “fall into” the void known as
the “real” (Žižek 1994: 101), which, unlike reality, prevents the sub-
ject from achieving coherence by rendering it increasingly fragmented.
In traditional narratives of the double, unless the double is subsumed
again under the prototype’s authority, both will culminate in mutual
destruction. In The Others, however, the double is not a threat that will
potentially destroy the prototype, but “the intermediary figure between
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.
In The Others, Grace’s refusal to claim her trauma corresponds with

her disavowal of loss. This effectively installs melancholia in her ego,
which is then split into an alter-ego and transferred to the house. This
way, Grace is able to contrive an illusion of historical continuum that is
unaffected by trauma and death, and by extension, upholds the con-
viction that she is a good mother. Additionally, that her ego must
externalize loss onto an object disassociated from her is due to the
fact that an integral part of that loss is also herself. Or, to phrase it
slightly differently, her ego’s repudiation of loss must be facilitated in
such a way that it does not also betray her own absence at the same
time. While the architecture may be external to the occupant, as her
double, it also extends from, and hence is part of, her embodiment.
In this regard, her externalization of loss is actually an incorporation
of loss, thereby correlating, albeit indirectly, Grace’s melancholia with
Freud’s formulation. By unconsciously resignifying the house as her
alter-ego, Grace will henceforth see it as a hostile force; yet, there are
moments in the narrative when Grace also expresses solidarity with it.
Her obsession with the house’s various points of ingress, both literal
(doors, windows) and metaphorical (the radio, the telephone, books),
is an example. To ensure that negative influences from beyond do
not penetrate the house and compromise her children’s well-being—
such as sunlight that will endanger their health and un-Catholic views
that will upset their faith—the house is respectively kept in perpetual
near-darkness and its reading contents carefully scrutinized by Grace
herself.7 In the case of the latter, it is unsurprising that the book most
frequently read in the house is the Bible.8 Moreover, in her decision
not to reconnect the electricity after it was cut from the house as a
consequence of the war, Grace is merely reinforcing her authority of
the house’s points of ingress by denying her family the use of the radio
or the telephone, both of which would allow the outside world into
the house. When Nicholas laments at one point in the film over the
fact that he will never get to leave the house, Grace responds with the
reassurance that he is really not missing anything, and is in fact “much
better off at home with your mummy and daddy who love you very,
very much.” There is a sense here that her tacit agenda is to occupy
the center of her children’s universe. But implied in her words is also a
reliance on the house for her agenda to be effective, thus revealing an
ambiguity with regard to how she feels about the house that, at once,
also palpably reflects the split in her ego.
Grace’s Herculean efforts to safeguard her children from the house
will grow futile when it becomes apparent that the house has allowed
entry to an “outside” presence, which the children and later Grace
believe are ghosts. In consistently failing to identify the source of

haunting and in her inability to provide rational explanations for the
strange incidents occurring around the house to her children (who,
moreover, can actually see and communicate with these “ghosts”),
Grace not only expresses loss of control over the house, but is viewed
with increasing suspicion by them, especially Anne, who at one point
casually tells her brother that their mother is going mad. But long
before Grace’s unravelling, there are clues intimated by the interior of
the house that already inform us of her impending failure. Its spacious-
ness, as noted earlier, constitutes one such clue; another is its scarcely
furnished state. Of course, the real reason is that the house is awaiting
new deco and furniture, but until this circumstance is unveiled toward
the end of the narrative, its sparseness for nearly the entire film can
be understood as symbolic of its owner’s impotence. According to the
sociolinguist Basil Bernstein, it is “the strength of the rules of exclu-
sion which control the array of objects in space. Thus, the stronger the
rules of exclusion, the more distinctive the array of objects in space;
that is, the greater the difference between object arrays in different
space” (quoted in Sibley: 113–14). Such is, however, not the case
with Grace’s house, thereby underscoring the ineffectualness of both
her exclusionary rules and her efforts to govern lived space.
Ironically, Grace’s excessive vigilance is arguably what renders
her endeavor counterproductive in the end. As David Sibley notes,
“Efforts to purify the space of the home . . . will increase anxieties
about the unheimlich because the purification process heightens
the visibility of the threatening other, however this other may be
embodied” (Sibley: 119). Despite her best efforts, the house never-
theless succeeds in allowing intrusion, thereby indirectly implying that
Grace’s resolve is precisely what made the house unsafe. Her redou-
bled tenacity, it seems, only managed to encourage stronger resistance
from it, slowly diminishing her determination and fragile confidence
in the process. In one particular episode, the strategic use of cam-
era angles carefully depicts a moment of conflict between subject and
space that culminates in the former’s humiliation and confusion. Here,
we see Grace, who is alerted to the sound of the piano playing late at
night, immediately rushing with a rifle to the music room to investi-
gate. She finds no one there, but when attempting to test the door’s
steadfastness, she is violently slammed against by it (Figure 4.1).9
In this entire sequence, the camera rarely leaves Grace, but consis-
tently frames her in full shot to directly juxtapose her smallness against
the vast interior of her house, thereby figuratively signaling her reduc-
tion by her “adversary.” An abrupt cut then shifts the episode to its
Figure 4.1 Grace attacked by her house in The Others
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.
The Melancholy Dialectic of Dwelling

Confronted with the inexplicable, Grace’s compromised resolve will
gradually give way to panic and hysteria—signs that, moreover, point
to the recurrence of a threat that Grace fears, and thus represses,
most profoundly: her insanity. Refusing to admit the supernatural,
she begins to suspect that her recently acquired servants may possi-
bly be responsible, only to discover, while rummaging through their
belongings for clues, a postmortem photograph of them lying dead
side by side, all three victims of tuberculosis.10 The succession of
events following this episode will finally bring Grace and her chil-
dren into direct confrontation with the “others”—the new occupants,
assisted by a medium—from whom they will learn the truth about
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
finally claimed, liberates her, melancholia’s reduction of the subject

to a living-dead existence can also serve as a means, in Julia Kristeva’s
assessment, to help her “live with death” (Kristeva 1989: 83) by
[marking] off a psychic territory that becomes able to integrate loss as

signifiable as well as erogenetic. The separation henceforth appears no
longer as a threat of disintegration but as a stepping stone toward some
other—conflictive, bearing Eros and Thanatos, open to both meaning
and nonmeaning.
(Kristeva 1989: 83, emphasis in the original)
Kristeva’s modulation of Freud’s concept certainly corresponds with

Grace’s condition at the end of the film, as reflected in her affirmative
negotiation with the house.11 But in order to clarify how the house
can accommodate both “meaning and nonmeaning,” I must first dis-
cuss how melancholia can be transferred to, and become embodied by,
things. In an innovative proposition that interweaves psychoanalysis
with Walter Benjamin’s philosophy, Max Pensky further develops the
concept of melancholia to implicate material objects as well. According
to him, objects can also be invested with melancholia, thereby result-
ing in an ambivalent relationship, or what Pensky calls a “melancholy
dialectic,” with the affected subject that vacillates between “immanent
and transcendent moments in the human experience” (Pensky: 21).
Or, to use Gareth Millington’s words, melancholy dialectic instigates
a “simultaneous intensification of subjectivity and [its] absorption into
the world of objects” (Millington: 545). In other words, the sad-
ness following the subject’s recognition of the ephemeral status of
the objective world (the experience of immanence) directly intensi-
fies her desire for, and underscores her absorption into, this world.
This, in turn, intensifies the desire for her own perpetuity (the expe-
rience of transcendence) so that in continuing to live, she can enjoy
a while longer what she will inevitably lose eventually. Based on this
qualification, it is clear that unlike Freud’s melancholia, which is a
psychic apparatus triggered in the unconscious as a result of impend-
ing loss, Pensky’s model implies a condition that is attributed: that
is, an object becomes melancholic because a subject has projected
part of her unconscious onto it. Notwithstanding this difference, the
psychical relationship established between subject and object remains
fundamentally dialectical because the latter thereafter structures and
informs, despite its condition being invested by, the former:
If the melancholy subject “produces” melancholy objects, then those

objects themselves also constitute a world, a realm of objects of
contemplation that in turn constitute the melancholy way of seeing.

Between melancholy subject and melancholy objects, this way of see-
ing subsists in the dialectical interval between these two constituted
moments. The form of vision that draws the speculative subject ever
deeper into the interrogation of the creaturely also establishes the realm
of the objective as a complex puzzle awaiting its decipherment.
(Pensky: 16)
Through this melancholy “way of seeing,” the speculative subject’s

experience of “the objective world is made sense through intense
feelings of loss, sadness and shame” (Millington: 545). Absorbed
in contemplation over her creaturely fate, the subject unconsciously
ascribes melancholy to objects that directly enchant them (“a puzzle
awaiting decipherment”) to a degree, thereby inspiring her, in turn, to
perceive the world anew and with more vitality as she henceforth acti-
vates transcendence.12 However, whether melancholia is expressed as
the ego’s introjection of loss into itself (Freud, Kristeva) or the inscrip-
tion of subjective loss onto an object (Pensky), its function remains
fundamentally unchanged: to disavow loss. In the case of a melancholy
dialectic, the object’s investment with melancholy does not return
what is lost to the subject, but helps the subject live as if loss did not, or
will not, occur: that is, to live despite loss’s inevitability. By establishing
this dialectic with an object, the subject indirectly redefines loss into
something “signifiable” (to borrow Kristeva’s word), thus compelling
her to thereafter live more intensely. This intense experience is what
I mean by transcendence, whose pursuance will relocate the subject
in an “elsewhere” (Pensky) that configures her as both meaning and
nonmeaning, as absence and presence, as having lost and also never
experiencing it.
Having clarified how objects are unconsciously invested with
melancholia and what they then signify for the subject, I now return to
my analysis of The Others to demonstrate this formulation’s applicabil-
ity to the narrative. Arguably, by transferring part of her unconscious
to the house to disavow loss, Grace is activating a dialectic with an
object that infuses the latter with her melancholy. Her subsequent
animosity toward the house that compels obsessive and untiring vig-
ilance on her part can accordingly be interpreted as absorption into
her objective world (the house) and correspondingly, the intensifica-
tion of her desire for life, a desire that is further underscored by pathos
because it is fueled by the fact that she has, in truth, already forfeited
life. In a curious sense, melancholia actually enables her to initially live
with her own death, and after the revelation of her true circumstance,
to transcend to an elsewhere—a shift that corresponds with the way
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)
Navaro-Yashin’s observation, in my view, aptly describes as well

Grace’s reformed affinity with her lived space at the end of The Oth-
ers, for it is precisely her concomitant “loss of self” and “feeling of an
abjected self” that propel her toward a melancholy dialectic with her
home. Sutured into trauma, Grace’s “sense of self as clean and pure”
invariably gives way to abjection, which, as Kristeva informs us, is nei-
ther object nor subject; it is that which disrespects borders and thus
stakes its territory along thresholds and interstices to constantly worry
the lines demarcating self from other, subject from object, prototype
from double (Kristeva 1982: 3–4). Grace, as such, is an abject in both
senses of being a murderous mother and a ghost, the former of which
is, moreover, a contradiction in terms, thus intensifying her abjec-
tion. As her children’s slayer, Grace is a non-mother, a mother who is
also not-mother. But in achieving transcendence that collapses subjec-
tive melancholia (Grace’s ego) and spatial melancholia (her alter-ego,
which is the house) into a single elsewhere, she and her children are
able to arrive, in the end, at a place that conduces to their abjection.
Narrative Form and the Architecture of Trauma

I want to conclude my analysis of The Others by briefly considering
a different architectural operation related to the film, one that has
nothing to do with buildings, but focuses on the narrative instead.
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
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
text that are initially unrelated, but become increasingly intertwined

over the course of the narrative. The first, more direct, melancholia
is reflected in Laura’s return to the orphanage where she spent her
childhood, while the second, more figurative, expression is symbol-
ized by haunting. In the end, both expressions will converge in the
film’s enigmatic climax that suggests Laura’s transcendence to an else-
where, where she will henceforth always reprise her role as the good
mother to both her son and the children who were murdered thirty
years ago.
In my analysis of the film later, I will identify and describe cer-
tain key moments in detail to carefully substantiate the validity of my
interpretation that identifies the psychic apparatus of melancholia in
the text; however, a summary of The Orphanage is necessary to pro-
vide some overall context, especially since the film involves a densely
packed narrative with multiple, rapidly paced episodes that can be con-
fusing at times. The Orphanage centers on Laura, who returns with
her husband, Carlos, and their son, Simõn (who is adopted and HIV-
positive, but is unaware of these facts), to the orphanage where she
had spent part of her childhood. The orphanage had apparently ceased
operation years ago, leaving only an abandoned building, and Laura
has taken it over with an intention of turning it into a home for dis-
abled children. Soon after, however, Simõn begins telling his parents
about his “new friends,” whom Carlos, a doctor, basically dismisses
as imaginary and harmless—considering it as part of a child’s grow-
ing phase. But when Simõn somehow learns of his true origin and
his medical condition with, he claims, the help of his “friends,” Laura
begins to sense a foreboding. On the day Laura throws a welcom-
ing party to advertise her home to interested patrons and sponsors,
she is attacked by an unknown, masked child, who then proceeds
to lock her in the bathroom. That same afternoon, Simõn will dis-
appear from her life. Months pass without any breakthrough by the
authorities, and in desperation, a depressed Laura seeks the help of a
powerful medium, Aurora, who tells her that ghosts of murdered chil-
dren haunt her house, and they can potentially assist her, but that she
must first “believe in order to see.” Submitting to Aurora’s instruc-
tion, Laura is led by a series of clues that the ghosts carefully place
to the coal shed, where she discovers the gruesome remains of five
children. Meanwhile, Carlos, who is increasingly unable to cope with
the situation, gives Laura an ultimatum to leave the house, to which
she agrees in exchange for three days alone in the house. Upon his
departure, Laura begins to refurbish the interior back to its original
state. She hopes that through this, she can tempt the children into
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
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.
Introjection and the Language of Loss

In The Orphanage, while Laura’s experience of loss, which develops
into depression after Simõn goes missing, is palpably represented,
she has actually underwent an earlier loss at which the narrative only
obliquely hints. This first and originary loss is implied in the film’s
opening sequence depicting a group of children playing a game of
statues at an orphanage. The phone rings, and a caretaker is informed
that one of the children, Laura, has been adopted. While the caretaker
is, of course, delighted for the girl, her voice also expresses a sense
of sadness because she knows how much the other children will miss
Laura. As if corroborating the caretaker’s concern, the camera’s con-
sistent focus on Laura throughout this brief sequence further suggests
her importance to the group. The film then cuts to its opening cred-
its, and when the narrative resumes, Laura is now in her mid-thirties,
married, a mother, and has just recently returned to her childhood
home with the hope of reviving something of its former function.
Notably, while the caretaker voices how much Laura will be missed,
her return to the orphanage decades later arguably suggests that she
too has missed, not so much her friends, but the place. But in her
desire to also restore the building, which, based on its disheveled con-
dition, has apparently been uninhabited for some time, to its original
purpose, Laura arguably exhibits not just nostalgia but also a disavowal
of loss. Arguably, Laura has all these years been unconsciously mourn-
ing for an object-love from which she has been separated; now, given
the opportunity, she finally returns to and reunites with it. Apart from
her return, there are additional clues to further warrant my claim:
the first is provided in the scene when Laura is asked by a visiting
social worker named Benigna (it will later be revealed that Benigna
had only pretended to be a social worker to intimidate Laura into
possibly leaving the house) how many children she intends to accom-
modate in such a large house. Laura’s response of no more than five or
six tellingly corresponds with the number of childhood friends she had
while growing up at the orphanage. What can be inferred from this
otherwise casual reply is an unconscious longing for something lost,

which now indirectly structures her consciousness. The second, and
even less direct clue, is her decision to adopt Simõn; admittedly, this
may be suggestive of Laura and Carlos’s inability to bear children, but
since the narrative provides no intimations about this circumstance,
Simõn’s adoption could also be suggestive of another conscious action
driven by Laura’s unconscious desire to reverse the process of, and
therefore disavow, loss.
I am aware that the reading proposed in the preceding paragraph
seems to pathologize Laura by implicating her otherwise altruistic acts
and decisions with unconscious, narcissistic motivations. While this
is a valid accusation, it is also unavoidable since my intention here
is to demonstrate that many of our conscious actions and decisions
we take for granted often belie an influence of, recalling Merleau-
Ponty’s phrase, a “deeper life of consciousness” (Merleau-Ponty:
329). In Laura’s case, what appear to be altruistic acts, according to
my analysis, are likely engendered by her disavowal of an originary
loss, which she attempts to retrieve by reviving in the present a con-
dition that replicates the past so that she can vicariously return to
it and reunite with her object-love. This would then beg the funda-
mental question why Laura does not demonstrate any symptoms of
melancholia, for surely this is her condition after disavowing loss for
thirty years, which is too protracted for mourning. It is arguable that
her decision to adopt a child with a serious illness and who has little
chance of growing up “normal” can be construed as a kind of self-
reproach (or more aptly in this case, self-punishment), which would
then satisfy the condition of melancholia according to Freud’s model.
But instead of pursuing this possible line of argument, which is tenu-
ous at best (the reader will notice that I have thus far avoided the term
“melancholia” in my discussion of The Orphanage), I refer to Abraham
and Torok’s formulation as a means to explain Laura’s circumstance.
Freud’s model of melancholia is primarily limited by its rather sim-
plistic but unclear distinction between mourning and melancholia.
After all, at what point does the former transmute into the latter?
Moreover, is self-reproach a symptom decisive of only melancholia?
Could someone in mourning not express self-reproach as well? As a
corrective, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s revision of Freud’s
concepts in their essay, “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection ver-
sus Incorporation” (1972/1994), not only clarifies what constitutes
their negotiations with loss, but shows that the integration of loss is
a continuous process that never completes, and can be significantly
frustrated if further loss is experienced. An important development
to the work of mourning proffered by the two psychoanalysts is the
significance of language in the process of managing loss. As Esther

Rashkin avers, both psychoanalysts “proposed that the conversion of a
loss into language is a critical sign of its introjection and of the psyche’s
accommodation of that loss” (Rashkin: 30).16 That is, the transfor-
mation of loss into an articulation of loss indicates that the ego has
successfully integrated the “libidinally charged object” into itself. This
process necessarily alters the ego’s topography as well, but in a way
that “enlarge[s] and enrich[es],” rather than diminish(es), the ego
(Rashkin: 30). For Abraham and Torok, a paradigm of introjection
can in fact be traced back to the infant’s experience of “empty mouth,”
whereby the loss of the maternal object/object-love (i.e., the breast)
leads to its first cries, and subsequently, to speech. In this way,
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)
Introjection, then, is the management of loss that transforms loss into

language in order to disavow it. Through language, loss, or absence,
is made present by being given “figurative shape” that is then shared
with others (“empty mouths”), thereby further reinforcing and invig-
orating this presence further until loss is no longer recognizable.
Returning to Laura in light of Abraham and Torok’s insight, I pos-
tulate that her charitable acts and decisions are the “language” into
which her “vacancy” has been transformed, thus implying successful
introjection of her originary loss. Her altruistic propensity certainly
demonstrates an “enlarged” and “enriched” ego, thus implying its
topographical alteration by introjection. Moreover, that her noble
undertakings necessarily involve others in very direct terms curiously
parallels the language that must be channeled to a community of
which Abraham and Torok speaks. Clearly, while it is undeniable that
Laura is a generous woman devoted to helping less fortunate children,
it is also likely that this same desire is driven by an unconscious, orig-
inary loss that she has successfully integrated into her ego. Through
the process of introjection, her ego is able to refashion loss into the
language of altruism, which she articulates through acts like adopting
a boy with serious health issues, and decisions such as converting an
abandoned building into a home for disadvantaged children.
More important in the foregoing discussion, however, is the cen-

trality of the house as the site of Laura’s originary loss. While her loss
encompasses the entirety of her childhood experience, the most tan-
gible feature of that experience—and one to which she can return—is
the house. In this regard, it is arguable that the influence asserted by
the house on her ego is considerable; after all, Laura can always express
the language of altruism anywhere else; instead, she chooses to do it
here. In the process of integrating loss into her ego by converting
loss into language, it seems that this single feature of that loss has
remained unconvertible, and hence testifies to the incomplete process
of her introjection. In the end, managing loss “by establishing a sym-
bolic system (particularly language)” is never foolproof because “[a]
symbolic construct acquired in such a fashion, a subjectivity erected on
that basis can easily collapse when the experience of new separation, or
new losses, revives the object of primary denial and upsets the [ego’s]
omnipotence that had been preserved at the cost of denial” (Kristeva
1989: 64). Such is precisely what happens to Laura when her adopted
son vanishes. Dealt with another, more severe, loss this time, Laura’s
sense of “omnipotence” motivated by her altruism will gradually disin-
tegrate; unable to convert this second loss into a “symbolic construct”
like she did her originary loss, Laura becomes increasingly depressed.
That her ego has failed to introject loss is clearly implied in her refusal
to admit that Simõn’s is likely dead. Despite attending group therapy
sessions for grieving parents six months after the event, Laura refuses
to speak of his death but remains adamant in her conviction that not
only is her son still alive, but that he is somewhere in the house, hidden
from her.
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,
as this link underscores my view of the house as an embodiment of

melancholia. What haunts the orphanage are the ghosts of five chil-
dren, who, thirty years ago, were poisoned to death by their caretaker.
These children, as the film will later reveal, were all Laura’s childhood
friends, and hence, the murder must have occurred not long after she
was adopted. Their bodies were then stuffed into sacks and carefully
placed into the unused furnace in the coal shed, where they stayed
until they were discovered by Laura. Very likely because of their par-
entless status, their disappearance had either gone unnoticed or was
quickly dismissed and forgotten. As more clues are gathered over the
course of the narrative, the viewer will learn that their murderer was
Benigna, thus explaining the reason for her intimidation of Laura dur-
ing her visit, and her reappearance later that same night at the coal
shed, where she was caught by Laura. Benigna, who worked as the
orphanage’s caretaker at one point in time (Laura believes Benigna
arrived after she was adopted, hence her unfamiliarity with the once
caretaker), had apparently killed them to revenge the death of her
deformed son, whom she believed was drowned by the children while
playing. Implicit is also the likelihood that the orphanage was closed
soon after the children’s “disappearance.” Benigna’s intention was not
just to kill the children, but to obliterate their memories altogether
from history, but the children, despite being dead, refuse to be forgot-
ten. As ghosts, they patiently wait for the living to finally take notice
of them and reclaim them from historical oblivion. In asserting their
presence as haunting, they also inscribe melancholia onto the house,
which henceforth stands as an embodiment disavowing their absence.
According to Gillian Beer, ghosts are not the resurrection, but
rather the insurrection, of the dead (Beer: 260), a view relevant to
both The Others and The Orphanage, in which the dead return because
they refuse to conform to the Symbolic system’s determination that
is, moreover, based on a binary logic. In Bayona’s text, haunting
becomes the children’s way of denying the Symbolic system’s pre-
scription of absence to them, and in this regard is also their expression
of rejection against historical erasure. Disembodied, they neverthe-
less effect an embodiment by inscribing their presence onto the space
of the house. Like melancholia, which lodges unknown in the sub-
ject but nevertheless manifests as symptoms, these ghosts inhabit
the house unseen but announce their presence through haunting.
Indeed, this reading of haunting corresponds to a point with what
Julia Kristeva sees as the work of melancholia. In an accurate sum-
mary of the difference between Freud and Kristeva’s model, Martha
Reineke states that:
Freud sees in melancholia a violent cannibalism: a hidden, hostile attack

on the other. By contrast, Kristeva emphasizes that, acutely aware of
loss, those who are melancholic do not challenge loss by attacking its
signs. Indeed . . . . Kristeva is extraordinarily precise in her analysis of the
gesture of melancholic refusal: melancholics do not so much refuse loss
as they refuse to accept that the Symbolic system compensates adequately
for their loss.17 Consequently, their atheism before the Symbolic order
and its sacred Law does not hinge on sheer refusal of its tenets; rather,
they disbelieve that the other can be appropriately mourned through
processes of representation touted by the Symbolic.
(Reineke: 92, emphasis in the original)
In a curious way, Reineke’s deliberation clarifies the important con-

nection that metaphorically aligns haunting and melancholia. Implicit
in Kristeva’s revision of melancholia is a quality of defiance that trans-
forms the subject from mere victim to a somewhat tragic hero. Against
insurmountable odds, the melancholic nevertheless persists in her
“atheism before the Symbolic order” because she would rather cling
to loss than accept the substitution offered to her by that “order
and its sacred Law.”18 In the case of the children in The Orphanage
(and also Grace and the children in The Others), they are at once the
melancholics and the object of loss; hence, in order to disavow loss,
they must establish a melancholy dialectic with the house. Haunting,
accordingly, asserts their refusal to accept the Symbolic system’s com-
pensation, which in their case is actually no compensation at all for
their disregarded passing brought them neither justice nor memorial-
ization. In this way, the semiotics of haunting in the film attests to a
melancholic defiance that repudiates the Symbolic system’s reduction
of marginalized children. It is in fact notable that the film foregrounds
poisoning as their cause of death, almost as if it is further reinforcing
the metaphorical link between haunting and melancholia. Both Freud
and Kristeva liken the condition of melancholia to self-consuming,
and the terms they use to characterize this are specifically related to
eating, such as “cannibalistic” (Freud 1919: 249; Kristeva 1989: 12)
and “self-devouring” (Kristeva 1989: 7). It is into the children’s meal
that Benigna introduces the poison, thus turning their act of eating
into figurative self-devouring to thereby lodge melancholia implicitly
within both the house and the narrative.
The Fort/Da House19

Let me quickly recapitulate some of the main arguments established
thus far before discussing the house in The Orphanage to clarify the
intersection between haunting, melancholia, and the house. Despite

her more or less successful assimilation of originary loss into her ego,
Laura is nevertheless unable to integrate one feature of that loss: the
house. As such, the house endures in her unconscious as a loss, thereby
leading her back to it three decades later. At the same time, the house
is also the repository of another melancholic operation, which in this
case is expressed as haunting. Five children who were murdered there
defy historical erasure by persisting as specters and investing the house
with the disavowal of their own absence in order to assert their pres-
ence. Undoubtedly, the house, whether as unassimilated image or
embodiment of loss, is clearly a melancholy object. Here, one final
experience of loss will occur that in the end translates into transcen-
dence for Laura, her son, and the forgotten children to thereafter
locate them in an elsewhere.
By haunting the house, the children arguably exemplify Kristeva’s
view of melancholia as “a stepping stone” (Kristeva 1989: 83, empha-
sis in the original) toward ambiguity that locates the subject in both
meaning and nonmeaning. Ghosts are, after all, liminal entities whose
existence (meaning) paradoxically asserts their nonexistence (death,
nonmeaning) as well. Moreover, as noted in the preceding section,
by inscribing their melancholic presence onto the house in the form
of haunting, the children are purportedly mounting an attack against
the Symbolic system’s attempt to silence and erase them. Haunting,
as such, becomes their means to overcome the loss of themselves. As a
result of the psychic Aurora’s advice, Laura begins to realize that the
haunting can also help toward her disavowal of loss if she can tap into
the source of its power: the children. And since their ghosts are inter-
twined with the house, it must therefore be through the house that
Laura can contact with them. Before I consider the episode where
Laura attempts this, however, the dialectical relationship between the
ghosts and the house requires further investigation. So far in my dis-
cussion of The Orphanage, this point has remained largely theoretical
(see reference to Wolfreys earlier), which is insufficient to establish the
validity of my interpretation. Hence, it is necessary to reference the
narrative itself to demonstrate precisely how the two are symbiotically
interrelated. To this end, an obvious problem is the lack of scenes
that can be used to exemplify this relationship. Unlike the other films
considered in this study, The Orphanage generates few subtleties in
its formal representation of the architecture. This is likely because the
narrative is driven by its main protagonist, thereby resulting in min-
imal attention given to other aspects of the film, including the rest
of the characters and, of course, setting. Shots that frame the house
Figure 4.3 The mysterious masked child in The Orphanage
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
conundrum: while they are undoubtedly the result of camera place-

ments and angles, these images, like optical illusion, nevertheless
reflect an interior that is strangely discordant with the actual inte-
rior of the house. Instead of the vast, spacious environment that
characterizes the house, reflected is instead a cramped and confin-
ing interior, as if space has suddenly shrunk. But from its previous
occupants’ point of view, this would be the interior according to their
perspective, a place that is, despite its size, constricting and impris-
oning. In this regard, what these cameras fundamentally reveal is a
parallel world lodged within the house that is adjacent but unknown
to the world of the living. But unlike the living, whose existence is
independent of the house, this other world can only exist because of
the house.
The configuration of another world hidden within the house and
unseen by the living reads curiously like melancholia, or, in Abraham
and Torok’s term, incorporation. According to them, introjection
shifts to incorporation when “words fail to fill the subject’s void and
hence an imaginary thing is inserted into the mouth in their place”
(Abraham and Torok 1972/1994: 128–29, emphasis in the original).
This “imaginary thing,” moreover, is “equipped to deny the very
existence of the entire problem” (Abraham and Torok 1972/1994:
129). When considering the phrasing of this last clause carefully, what
becomes apparent is that incorporation is not the consequence of
rejecting loss (despite the word “deny”), but of an inability to admit
loss in the first place. That is, incorporation occurs when “for some
reason, [loss] cannot be acknowledged as such” (Abraham and Torok
1972/1994: 130). In “denying the very existence of the entire prob-
lem,” the experience of loss is rendered altogether moot because it
never happened at all. What Abraham and Torok say about incor-
poration bears interesting parallels with the work of haunting in The
Orphanage. That haunting intimates a separate world existing along-
side the living suggests that while haunting is a component of the
house, it is nevertheless a different place in the latter’s viewpoint.
Unable to assimilate it into its rationalizing ego, the living then
inserts this world into its consciousness as an “imaginary thing” that
ironically reinforces its rejection of haunting. In the film, even after
Aurora and her team were able to prove that the house is haunted,
Carlos and Pilar, the police chief assigned to Simõn’s case, remain
skeptical, dismissing the psychic’s evidence and even questioning her
about her “real” motive. Such is the intensity of their “mouth-work”
that even when faced with undeniable proof, they remain unable to
acknowledge what is obvious.
Laura, however, is at last convinced that ghosts live among her,

and more importantly, that they are the friends Simõn used to speak
of and would thus likely know his whereabouts. But if she wants the
house to yield its mystery up to her, she must first believe in order
to see; that is, she must yield herself to its mystery and learn to com-
municate with it, to speak its language, or, aligning this reading to
Abraham and Torok’s concept, to find the words that will help her
introject loss. She accomplishes this in two ways: the first involves
participating in children’s games, which will enable Laura’s vicarious
regression (which, interestingly, is the term Aurora uses to describe
her state of trance) into a child again in order to figuratively remove
the hierarchy of age, and thereby gain the ghostly children’s trust. The
first game, objects association (which Simõn also used to play with the
ghosts), is effected prior to Carlos’s departure. For participation, she
is rewarded with a doorknob by the ghosts that will prove to be a vital
clue when searching for Simõn later. More importantly, this game will
also lead her to the discovery of the children’s remains in the coal
shed. Clearly, Laura has been able to establish not only contact with
the children, but a measure of acceptance as well, as evinced by their
willingness to respond to her invitation to play. The second game, pur-
sued during Laura’s three-day grace, is statues, thus recalling the film’s
opening sequence. Before discussing its significance, however, I must
first address the second approach Laura takes to draw the children out
because the outcome of the game of statues, to a large extent, is linked
to this approach.
Immediately after Carlos leaves, Laura begins restoration work on
the house, paying special attention to the kitchen and where the chil-
dren’s dormitory used to be. Relying on her memory, she gradually
transforms these rooms back to (approximately) their original states.
Her intention is to blur both temporal and spatial boundaries separat-
ing, respectively, past and present, living and dead. While a variety
of tasks is inevitably involved in Laura’s endeavor, what is striking
throughout the sequence of this episode is its focus on primarily
domestic chores like washing, bed making, clothes drying, collecting
berries in the nearby woods, and preparing dinner—possibly to accen-
tuate Laura’s maternal identity.21 To understand the significance of
this episode in terms of both the restoration work and its emphasis on
domestic chores, I refer to, and interrelate, the insights proffered by
two theorists whose view of space, while distinct, nevertheless suggest
interesting confluences. The first is Kevin Herrington’s view on spatial
similitude, which he develops from Foucault’s analogy of the mythi-
cal “Ship of Fools.”22 According to Herrington, Foucault’s similitude
is meant to encourage a differentiated perspective of space (more

accurately, of place) that de-emphasizes the importance of human sub-
jectivity. Herrington asserts that “places are not what lies on either
side of the boundary, they are constituted through boundary work”
(Herrington: 186), and further adds,
if we stop thinking about places just in terms of human subjectivity and

the way it narrates identities such as the identities of spaces, then we no
longer have to look at place as fixed by subjectivity. Place is the effect
of similitude, a non-representation that is mobilized through the place
of things in complex relations to one another and the agency/power
effects that are performed by those arrangements. Places circulate
through material placings, through the folding together of spaces and
things and the relations of difference established by those folds. They
are brought into being through the significations that emanate from
those material arrangements and foldings.
(Herrington: 187)
When Herrington’s argument is taken point-by-point and applied to

The Orphanage, it is then possible to see Laura’s restorative work as
effecting spatial similitude in order to encourage “the folding of” the
house’s two worlds into each other. Throughout this process, Laura
increasingly displaces her subjective importance from the environ-
ment in order to emphasize the children’s in the hope of encouraging
their appearance. The emphasis on domestic work affirmatively clar-
ifies her maternal position for the children, who, as orphans, will
certainly be partial to it. That Laura does become their surrogate
mother in the end also implies a foreshadowing in this episode. I want
to offer, however, a slightly different interpretation to this empha-
sis on domestic chores by drawing on the views of Iris Marion Young,
whose meditation on homemaking as an act of preservation somewhat
corresponds with Laura’s objective. Criticizing Simone de Beauvoir’s
sweeping reduction of all domestic work to immanence (read dein-
dividualized, repetitive, and uncreative), Young makes a distinction
between housework, which complies with de Beauvoir’s sentiment,
and homemaking, which, according to Young, is inseparable from the
task of preservation:
Homemaking consists in preserving the things and their meaning as

anchors to shifting personal and group identity. But the narratives of the
history of what brought us here are not fixed, and part of the creative
and moral task of preservation is to reconstruct the connection of the
past to the present in light of new events, relationships, and political
understandings.
(Young: 154)
Like Herrington with regard to spatial similitude, Young also stresses

the importance of things, rather than human subjectivities, in relation
to homemaking; as she asserts,
The activities of homemaking thus give material support to the identity

of those whose home it is . . . . Homemaking consists in the activities of
endowing things with living meaning, arranging them in space in order
to facilitate life activities of those to whom they belong, and preserving
them, along with their meaning.
(Young: 151)
When considering Laura’s restorative effort in light of Young’s insight,

it is evident that the protagonist’s task entails a substantial degree of
preservation as she attempts to “reconstruct” a connection that will
bring together disparate narratives of history (hers and the children’s)
“in light of new events [and] relationships,” both of which, in this
case, involve Simõn. Throughout her endeavor, it is undoubtable that
Laura is trying to enact belief in order to see: through preservation
activities, she directly negotiates with space (and time) in an attempt
to collapse the two differentiated worlds of the house into a single
continuum.
Despite her efforts, however, the children remain unforthcom-
ing; Laura, it seems, is still struggling with unbelief. In her futile
wait for them to appear at the dinner table, which she has lavishly
inundated with sweets and cakes, she slowly realizes that she has all
this while been attempting to yield the children to her, when she
should be the one yielding to them. To help with her objective, she
turns once again to play. Significantly, it is the game of statues that
Laura initiates this time: on the one hand, it helps identify Laura
to the children as someone familiar whom they hold in their affec-
tion, even if they have yet to fully recognize her at this point. While
the game may not exactly rekindle their friendship, it is nevertheless
another step toward dismantling the various ontological boundaries
(age, temporal, existential, etc.) separating them. On the other, the
game analogously expresses Laura’s desire to go to them, and in this
sense, demonstrates absolute belief. In playing, and more specifically,
in taking on the role of “it,” Laura is indirectly telling the children
that she will henceforth comply with their terms. As she begins to
count, one by one, the ghosts of the children appear and slowly
moves toward her until one of them is close enough to touch her.
Giving chase, Laura is led to the broom closet and alerted to its
hidden door, which is missing a doorknob—the item given to her
as reward in the earlier game. Behind the door, she will find Simõn
at last.
As a physical topography embodying a psychological condition, the

house invariably accommodates a fort/da dimension, capable of con-
cealment and exposure as its ambiguous environment shifts between
secrecy and disclosure; it is, in other words, a site of absence and pres-
ence. Here, what is supposedly absent can be made present, while
presence can be disguised and transformed into absence. In her effort
to refurbish its interior, Laura is arguably subscribing to its fort/da
logic by trying to disguise presence in order to entice what is otherwise
absent to appear. In a way, although Laura is not quite melancholic
(in the strictly Freudian sense),23 her endeavor nevertheless points to
its condition if we read melancholia as itself a kind of preservation
work whose objective is to provide an anchor for the ego when loss
threatens to unmoor it. Also, the children’s games she plays bear an
element of fort/da as well, thereby linking them in a metonymic chain
to haunting, melancholia, and, of course, the house itself. Objects
association and statues are premised on the principle of presence that,
unless identified/apprehended, will turn absent again. On the other
hand, if presence is correctly identified (in statues, it will be the pres-
ence of “movement”), more of its constituents will follow, each one
bringing the player closer to her goal. Fundamentally, both games
necessitate the player’s ability to recognize, or make present, what
is allegedly not there, and in this way, they metaphorically not only
allude to melancholia, but also function to synthesize haunting and
the disavowal of loss, as the film reaches its end, into a fantasy of
redemption.
The Ethics of Redemptive Fantasy

Laura’s reunion with her son in the house’s surreptitious basement will
initiate a chain of enigmatic events that constitutes the final episode
of The Orphanage. In its surreal sequence, Simõn oscillates between
a sprightly little boy one minute to a decaying corpse the next and
then back to a boy again; Laura ingests a large quantity of sleeping
pills and slowly loses consciousness, only to suddenly revive, refreshed
and invigorated; and the children are no longer ghosts, but are appar-
ently “alive” again as they recognize their old friend and gather round
to welcome her, this time, as their surrogate mother. Surreal as this
part of the film may be, the logic is that Laura, unable to cope with
her son’s death, has possibly slipped into madness to culminate in
suicide.24 Her resurrection thereafter is meant to suggest an afterlife,
where she is again reunited with Simõn and the children. Decidedly
more ambiguous about this episode, however, is its ethical persuasion.
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
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)
Indeed, as Laura’s melancholia escalates, she will gradually grow apart

from her husband and attach herself to the house as a substitute for
Simõn’s absence. When Carlos demands that they leave, he threatens
the loss of even this substitution; Laura realizes the only way she can
remain and attain “that impossible love” is through death. Her request
for a three-day respite alone, accordingly, is merely a ruse to dismiss
him so that, in the event she cannot restore Simõn back to herself,
she will be free to go to him. Based on Kristeva’s assessment, Laura’s
suicide is therefore no longer a display of melancholic defiance, but
an announcement to relinquish defiance altogether as it is no longer
necessary. Her death, in this regard, is the “stepping stone” that will
relieve her from the “threat of disintegration” and help her transcend
to “some other—conflictive, bearing Eros and Thanatos, open to both
meaning and nonmeaning” (Kristeva 1989: 83), that is, a place of
“impossible love, never reached, always elsewhere.” Here, Thanatos
is indeed also Eros, and, as the film draws to its (non) closure, it is
no longer possible to distinguish between meaning and nonmeaning.

As “a promise of nothingness,” it is only insofar that we are no longer
privy to what occurs in that elsewhere—a void we desire to fill with our
imagination, but will necessarily fail because imagination is ultimately
an inadequate resource.
While equating suicide/death with transcendence/redemption
may seem outlandish, Kristeva’s postulation nevertheless aptly reflects
the redemptive ethics of grief that The Orphanage, according to one
interpretation, potentially conveys. And as if to reinforce its ethical
persuasion further, the film’s final scene before the end credits role
will show Carlos returning to the house for a visit at a time very much
later after the events of the narrative; standing outside the building
is a commemoration plaque dedicated to the memory of his wife,
adopted son, and all the children by name to suggest that the ghosts
have succeeded in their endeavor to reject historical oblivion since the
plaque directly overturns Benigna’s intention of erasing their memory
altogether. In the course of the film that potentially leads to such
an ethical promotion, however, the narrative is careful not to glorify
Laura’s circumstance; here, Belén Rueda must certainly be credited for
her deeply moving, but also distressing, performance of a woman sink-
ing into depression to the extent she no longer wishes to live. In the
entire time she is searching for Simõn’s disappearance, not once is
there a trace of happiness etched on Laura’s countenance; instead,
medium close-up and close-up shots persistently expose the worry
lines and wrinkles riddled all over it to signify the scars inflicted on her
by extreme sorrow. And despite what I see in the film’s redemptive
conclusion, Laura’s suicide implies nothing celebratory or inspiring,
but is instead portrayed in undeniably tragic terms: a woman sit-
ting alone by a window embracing the corpse of her son while she
imbibes copious amount of sleeping pills and waits for her life to slowly
ebb away.
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
them. When considering Grace’s act, in The Others, of projecting

part of her (refused) ego onto the house in order to disavow loss
from Abraham and Torok’s conceptual perspective, it is clear that
her “intense desire for incorporation corresponds to a painful sense
of emptiness” (Abraham and Rand: 13), which in her case is profound
indeed, for it is an emptiness tantamount to her (and her children’s)
absence. Incorporation, in fact, operates like trauma in that they both
involve the ego’s refusal to admit to, or claim, an excruciating expe-
rience, which is then rendered unrelated to the ego. By disavowing
her family’s eradication, Grace thus enforces the fantasy of their his-
torical continuity and the conviction of her maternal qualification,
including—and perhaps especially—her role as Catholic shepherd fos-
tering the children’s religious upbringing. Unsurprisingly, after the
narrative twist that discloses their actual circumstances, Nicholas will
ask his mother if they are now in purgatory. Grace, likely for the first
time, is unable to answer a theological question posed by her children,
and frankly confesses that she does not know. Hinted in this brief, but
significant, exchange are the possible ways to interpret the elsewhere
to which they have come since the beginning of the film but only now
recognize. On the one hand, while not the purgatory according to
Catholic iconography,25 the elsewhere may possibly be that intermedi-
ary stage during which the soul is purified until it is ready for ascension
to heaven. In this sense, their elsewhere is merely a point of transit,
not arrival. However, this reading, on the other hand, is problematic
not only because of Grace’s response, which undercuts this otherwise
encouraging presentiment with equivocation, but also because of their
collective determination to never leave the house at the close of the
film. While Grace’s admittance arguably opens the elsewhere up to
“both meaning and nonmeaning,” it also inflects the redemptive pos-
sibility of this elsewhere with suspicion. Considering that Grace and
her children have actually been here throughout the narrative, it is dif-
ficult to see anything promissory about their tenancy apart from the
fact that they are henceforth inseparable. Their elsewhere seems static
and changeless, with no inkling of a further transcendence to a bet-
ter place. If where they are is purgatory, then purgatory is also their
final destination. In this regard, the elsewhere in The Others, as I have
passingly noted earlier, is not unlike a tomb (or more aptly, a crypt),
within whose walls walk the family’s ghosts forever. Indeed, the clos-
ing mise-en-scène of Grace and the children framed within a window
as they slowly vanish from view and sink into the surrounding dark-
ness seems to corroborate this interpretation: implied is not only the
collapse of subject and space into a single entity, but the absorption
of the former by the latter to henceforth establish the subject’s eternal

imprisonment.
It is, however, possible that the family’s final entombment, when
recast psychoanalytically, is yet another unconscious operation effected
through architecture by the subject’s ego. This position gains signifi-
cant warranty when framed against the notion of the cryptophore, also
formulated by Abraham and Torok, which postulates a mechanism of
disavowal associated with incorporation. Like the latter, cryptophore
also involves the inadmissibility of loss; however, it is a form of double
incorporation in that encryption is denial that occurs after the real-
ization of loss in order to recalibrate loss into disavowal again. This
curious scenario is provoked, according to Abraham and Torok, “in
order to overcome a double impossibility: to make the scene into
an admissible ideal or to reveal it, and thereby destroy the libidinal
ideal” (Abraham and Torok 1984: 10). Such a dilemma accurately
describes Grace’s position after the truth is exposed, since she can
neither interpret death to commensurate with an ideal, nor accept
the finality death represents, thereby acquiescing to her family’s com-
plete erasure from existence (the latter of which is, in fact, already
indirectly expressed through their persistence as ghosts). Caught in
such an impossible bind, her ego must exact another psychic opera-
tion to reconstitute her awareness of loss into an awareness of a loss
that nevertheless endures, and as such, is not entirely lost after all.
To this end, her ego will again enlist the house’s assistance. Where
earlier she transposes part of her ego to the house, thereby identifying
it as an antagonistic double, in order to disavow loss, now she will
deploy the house as “disguise” in order to misrecognize herself and
refute the totality of her absence. This strategy—what Abraham and
Torok terms “cryptofantasy” (Abraham and Torok 1984: 5)—entails
the ego’s “covert identification” with
not so much an object, which no longer exists, but essentially the

“mourning” that this “object” allegedly carries out as a result of los-
ing the subject; the subject, consequently, now appears to be painfully
missed by the “object” . . . . This mechanism consists of exchanging
one’s own identity for a phantasmic identification with the “life”—
beyond the grave—of an object lost as a result of some metapsycho-
logical traumatism.
(Abraham and Torok 1984: 5)
Although Abraham and Torok’s language is metaphorical, it is almost

incredible that what they say literally applies to Grace’s situation.
Because she is already dead, the house (the object) technically no
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
film is the result of Laura’s act of encryption to repudiate the finality

of loss because that would mean she can never reunite with Simõn
or see him again. Moreover, that this elsewhere, like the one in The
Others, is also a site confined to the house suggests that the latter
would henceforth serve as mourner and tomb, at once sustaining their
“lives” but also immuring them forever. However, the film’s mise-en-
scène strictly disallows any conviction to such an interpretation, for in
contrast to the elsewhere’s state of constant darkness, with which the
family subsequently blends, that partly insinuates its tomb-like qual-
ity in The Others, the elsewhere in The Orphanage is a place of light,
thereby unmistakably denoting its redemptive configuration.26 This
binary logic attributed to both elsewhere, I propose, is relatable to
the two protagonists, whose positions as, respectively, bad/dangerous
and good mothers indirectly determine the quality of the elsewhere
to which they arrive.27 In The Orphanage, Laura assumes, when she
agrees to be the orphans’ mother, the duty of Kristeva’s “impossible
love” because it is an interminable responsibility she will henceforth
exercise in her relationship with them, who, on the other hand, will
eternally be children reminiscent of the Lost Boys in J. M. Barrie’s
Peter Pan (to which the film directly alludes) (Figure 4.4). With such
positive connotations attributed to the elsewhere in The Orphanage, it
is difficult to identify an affinity between this site and the elsewhere in
The Others apart from the fact that they are both liminal places.
Figure 4.4 Laura and the children in elsewhere

Far from being a tomb or crypt, the elsewhere in The Orphanage

seems more like a model adapted from Louis Marin’s vision of utopia,
which he describes as a “space outside of place” (Marin: 57) that
“excludes the notion of limits” (Marin: 58) even as it represents
the figure of limits (and distance). Utopia, intriguingly, functions as
a “gap” that neutralizes difference, and thus would necessarily ren-
der indistinguishable binary concepts like here and there, this and
that. In this regard is Marin’s utopia distinct from the utopia that
Foucault links to heterotopia. For Foucault, utopia is one culmination
of heterotopia; it is the result of compromising apparent reality with
uncertainty to expose its fault lines, whereby the outcome is liberation
and regeneration. For Marin, however, utopia is aligned to the gap,
which “is very strictly the place of the neutral” (Marin: 233) and
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)
Accordingly, reality and its other are impossible categories in Marin’s

utopia because they would constitute a continuum here, not occupy
opposing positions and thus be equally real. Marin’s utopia, in other
words, excludes the possibility of binary logic (either/or) in favor of a
both/and logic. In such a place, neither Philip nor Lee’s house (and by
extension, their occupants) from Carter’s The Magic Toyshop and Love,
respectively, would have existed because they would have been recon-
figured into a site allowing and enabling divergent desires without
impediment. Duplicity, as such, is unrecognizable in Marin’s utopia
due to its all-encompassing capacity. Any attempt to erect hierarchies
is immediately neutralized so that no single reality can ever claim dom-
inance. In the final analysis, however, the utopia Marin describes can
only be a place of imagination, unlike Foucault’s model, which in cer-
tain circumstances can actually be realized. It is an ideal world we
recognize but can only be reached if we align ourselves to its specific
“coordinates, structures and grammatical rules.” This would require a
process of radical transformation that reduces us to the “zero-point”
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
Housing Redemption: Janice

G a l l oway ’s T h e T r i c k I s t o
Keep Breathing and Alison
B e c h d e l’s F u n H o m e
Lefebvre’s notion of that undefinable property inherent in space

is both motioned by and manifests in the event of inhabiting space.
However, while this property is neither the imputation of the human
mind nor the presence of a “transcendent spirit” (Lefebvre: 171, see
introduction), which could variously imply a Hegelian view of history
or the Kantian noumenon, it is nevertheless engendered by either (or
both) category’s dialectical connection with lived space. It is, in other
words, produced by an intersection between space and subject that
necessarily involves existential and (un)conscious preoccupations; yet,
at the same time, this property also exceeds this intersection to become
a quality inherent in space independent of the subject. Subsisting at
the level of the intuited, this property—as if bearing a sentience of its
own—is curiously able to affect subjective positions, often indirectly,
for good or ill. And certainly, of the many lived space available to the
subject, which would be more intimately and profoundly connected
to, and would thus be able to distinctly if subtly redraw the psychic
contours of, the subject if not the house? As mentioned in Introduc-
tion, this study focuses on the Gothic because its narratives palpably
illustrate the presence of this otherwise elusive dimension of the house
and the delicate influence it wields on the occupant. Whether it is a
haunted house story or a tale about a house with character, these nar-
ratives demonstrate how the house accommodates and directs both
known and unknown/unknowable desires encrypted within the sub-

ject’s psyche to then, among other things, subvert (Chapter 1) or
unveil (Chapter 2) them, encourage their return (Chapter 3), and
sustain them against loss (Chapter 4). In this sense as well, does the
house (more precisely, its interior) articulate an ambiguous dialectical
relationship with the subject?
Admittedly, there is a tendency thus far in this study to focus
on narratives with subject/space dialectics that synthesize into hos-
tility, antagonism, and even ruin and destruction. In the case of
the two films analyzed in the preceding chapter, despite the house’s
redemptive turn at the end based on my interpretation, this can only
be achieved through the subject’s death, thus implying, ironically, that
the living and lived space are fundamentally at odds. To an extent,
my investigative bias is informed by the genre around which this
study revolves, a genre whose narratives primarily involve the illicit
or the obscene (in its broadest sense) that escalates into horror and
culminating, usually, in punishment and devastation. Yet, Gothic nar-
ratives are not always about subjective fragmentation and dissolution,
nor do they always feature homes whose function is merely to be
plagued, to stage the dysfunctional family drama, or to harbor terrible
secrets, and are then finally destroyed or abandoned. While architec-
ture is undoubtedly tasked to undertake such roles in the Gothic, it
is sometimes also a source of salvation, regeneration, and reparation.
Hence, in order to appreciate the redemptive nature that houses in the
Gothic can accommodate, I consider narratives that are unambigu-
ously affirmative in this concluding chapter as a way of consolidating
and bringing this study to a close. Both The Trick Is to Keep Breath-
ing (1989),1 the debut novel by Scottish writer Janice Galloway, and
Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking autographic Fun Home: A Family
Tragicomic (2006)2 involve a house as their main narrative feature,
but unlike the other Gothic works discussed thus far, they constitute
rare instances of the genre that promote a subject/space dialectical
relationship that progressively witnesses the protagonist’s restoration.
In this regard, Trick and Fun Home remind us that while the Gothic
house can inherit a dimension of malevolence and impact the subject
in reductive ways, it is equally capable of assuming a benevolent qual-
ity and leave constructive impressions on her. In both Trick and Fun
Home, that the protagonist is able to reconcile with a difficult past
to finally arrive at a reparative closure, I will demonstrate, is partly
facilitated by her relationship with the home.
Notably, the two narratives represent the house’s redemptive inflec-
tion very differently. In Trick, the house directly provides “support”
Housing Redemption 187
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.
The Trick Is to Keep Breathing

After witnessing her lover, Michael, drown while together on a holiday
in Spain, Joy Stone, a teacher in her late twenties, begins to show signs
of depression upon returning to Scotland. Her intensifying struggle is
further compounded by both her working-class status and the fact that
Michael is a married man. Throughout her ordeal, Joy finds limited
consolation from family, colleagues, and professionals (male doctors,
counsellors) whose alleged attempts to help her only aggravate her
condition further due to their insouciance and condescension. Her
position as “mistress,” furthermore, denies her the opportunity to
mourn and to properly confront sorrow, thereby precipitating her
depression. Overwhelmed by grief, rejection, and belittlement, Joy
eventually develops anorexia and bulimia and is admitted into a psy-
chiatric ward. But through sheer willpower, aided in part by her house,
Joy manages to overcome her situation and achieve healing as well as
regain a level of self-confidence at the end of the narrative.
Scholarship on Trick is especially interested in its experimental

form that communicates and “embodies” Joy’s mental unraveling.
Eschewing a linear plot and other familiar conventions of storytelling,
the novel deploys, in bricolage playfulness, a mixture of texts ranging
from plays and magazine articles to lists and signs in order to construct
its narrative. The typescript constantly interchanges between normal
and italicized fonts to suggest Joy’s sudden slippage into a disorien-
tated state; and when recounting disturbing memories (usually trig-
gered by a particular sight or sound) that threaten Joy’s already fragile
psyche, the text actually “bleeds off” the pages to signify her fragmen-
tation. As Pat Kane notes, the very “materiality” of the narrative is not
“an arid experiment” but “a necessary emotional device” (Kane: 105).
This is further reinforced by Mary McGlynn’s observation that “The
body of the text here becomes a materialist resistance to abstraction,
deploying highly literary techniques, paradoxically, to ground itself in
the tangible” (McGlynn 2008: 229). Trick, as such, is not just text but
the very materiality of Joy’s distressed body—a remarkable assertion of
how “body-as-text” can be signified. The words trailing off the page,
for example, imply Joy’s displaced text/body from reality and nor-
malcy, and thus directly mirror her emotional confusion. The novel’s
textual aberrations, which McGlynn aptly describes as paradoxical,
undoubtedly foreground Joy’s materiality in highly emphatic ways to
compel the reader’s acknowledgment of her profound pain. Through
objectifying Joy as a textual “thing,” the narrative succeeds in empha-
sizing her subjective position directly and convincingly. In this sense,
its textual “tricks” underscore Joy’s subjectivity with a “presence” that
elegantly and sympathetically reflects her attenuated circumstances.
This palpable textual rendition of the distressed female body has
frequently been read as an example of écriture feminine,3 which
Hélène Cixous characterizes as writing that demands that the “body
[ . . . ] be heard” (Cixous 1976: 880), and hence, celebrated. For me,
however, Trick’s concerted narrative strategy to embody Joy’s pain
that paradoxically objectifies her could also suggest the erasure of
the line separating her subjectivity from the objective world around
her, thus aligning both alongside each other in a mutual, rather than
hierarchical, relationship. In this way, the text actually, if ironically,
implies the realization of unboundedness for a self that is otherwise
becoming more and more diminished every day. As a result of depres-
sion, Joy’s subjectivity can no longer rely on her body and mind
to help her function because the former has been contracted into
immobility and the latter reduced to stasis. In textually implying Joy’s
objectified status, however, the narrative is metonymically extending
her subjectivity beyond the confines of the body/mind dyad to also

include her lived space, so that in experiencing subjectivity via the
house, she can then activate coping strategies that will help her main-
tain sanity and emotional rectitude. In this regard, the narrative’s
performance of body-as-text is meant to implicate redemption rather
than reduction for the protagonist, and thus adds another layer of pos-
sible meanings to Wigley’s phrase, “She is the space rather than is in
the space” (Wigley: 385), which I have quoted in a previous chapter.
The sensation of being detached from her body is symptomatic of
Joy’s depression. The numbness from registering the shock of trauma
has left her mind disengaged from her physicality. Because her body
would not obey her thoughts, Joy often finds herself in awkward
and embarrassing situations, such as when she goes into convulsion,
despite her mind telling her not to and articulating mortification, dur-
ing Michael’s funeral service (79):4 here, although she is fully aware of
what is happening to her, she is unable to submit it to her will. Indeed,
the novel begins precisely with this sense of disassociation:
ooo
I watch myself from the corner of the room
sitting in the armchair, at the foot of the stairwell. (7)
Like a run-on verse, the splitting of this opening sentence positions

Joy as both gazer and gazed-at; yet, the precise description of her
position and the subsequent revelation of a heightened sensitivity to
things around her inform the reader that Joy is desperately trying to
hold on to reality by ascribing meanings to her home on which she
can then rely to give herself definition. Hence, underlying the descrip-
tion of what she is doing is an attempt at assurance that it is herself
she is watching because this self is framed against familiar surround-
ings. What this implies, in turn, is Joy’s dependence on objects to
connect with both herself and her world—a dialectical relationship
between body and space that synthesizes into a single configuration.
This view, in fact, is further reinforced a few lines later when Joy is
sitting in the dark because “Brightness disagrees with me: it hurts my
eyes, wastes electricity and encourages moths, all sorts of things” (7);
here, her concern is not just for herself, but, curiously, for the house
as well (“wastes electricity”). Arguably, Joy’s action here can also be
construed as self-erasure because darkness occludes the possibility of
seeing, thereby denying her the ability to locate herself in relation to
her surrounding and effectively dissolving her presence; but in both
identifying “myself” as an expression of presence and being sensitive
to objects around her despite the darkness, Joy is clearly battling

subjective collapse. Instead, she is turning to her home and its con-
tents, and establishing an affective association with them, in order to
convince herself of her own physical certainty, or to use Colin Smith’s
term, her “body image” (Smith: 112). Here, James Krasner’s insight
into the tactile experience of domestic space is particularly useful to my
discussion as they illuminate in palpable terms Joy’s actions. Accord-
ing to Krasner, “While the home is both a cultural formulation and
a building, it is, more than either of these, a cluster of tactile sensa-
tions and bodily positions that form the somatic groundwork through
which we experience its emotional sustenance” (Krasner: 5). Hence,
what Joy is doing in this episode is “[to] feel the world” by moving, a
little at a time, parts “of her body against it” (Krasner: 4, my empha-
sis). In this way, she is “[forced] to negotiate memory and identity
somatically” and thus ground her subjectivity through “tactile sen-
sation” of her home life (Krasner: 7), or, in Krasner’s phrase, her
“experience of embodied domesticity” (Krasner: 7).
Even when confronted with psychical attenuation, Joy is still
able to remain grounded in her subjectivity, at least for the time
being, because of, and through, her relationship with space/objects.5
As critic Margery Metzstein argues, “objects and their base material
use . . . act as an anchor for her sense of displacement and provide a
gloss of normality” (Metzstein: 139). Where her subjectivity is unable,
her house and its objects, which serve as an extension of her subjec-
tivity, become the lifeline that sustains her connection to herself and
her world. This is possible because of how “The home comes to rep-
resent the self through the establishment of habitual bodily behaviors,
such as smooth routines, by which we acclimate our bodily practice
to the architectural forms, objects, and other bodies with which we
live” (Krasner: 192). As such, in Trick, the chair is not just a furniture
on which she sits but an instrument that helps her tilt, adjust, and
slowly redistribute pieces of herself (8) to culminate in proper stand-
ing position so that she can then respond to a corner of the room
that is soliciting her to do some housecleaning. The carpet, to take
another example, is not only a decorative piece of floor covering, but
also a mischievous troublemaker she must be careful to “ignore” (8)
or it would try to trip her. Likewise, the stairs do not only connect
the upper and lower floors of her house, but play hide-and-seek with
their inconsistency—some steps present, and others not—of which Joy
must be mindful (8).6
Even as the novel anthropomorphosizes objects, it in turn also ren-
ders Joy into somewhat a thing: her knuckles “rust” (7), her hand,
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:
Friday, Morning 10:23.

There’s a lot to do before she comes but it’s a set routine so I don’t
need to think. It just uses my body and runs itself, hands picking
up the cloth and wiping taps after I rinse the emptied cup. I begin
cleaning the house. (17–18, my emphasis)
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
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
inevitably the cause of her sustained depression as well. However, it

has also at the same time “helped” her toward self-sufficiency and
eventual restoration, and as such has redeemed itself in Joy’s eyes.
As a result, she is therefore able to “forgive” it. The third and final
candidate “you” potentially represents is the Symbolic order that has
continuously depreciated Joy throughout her ordeal. In this case, the
house as a structure functions as a synecdoche for the larger, more
complex structure of the Symbolic order, whose inadequacy—not
hers—she now realizes is the reason and provocateur of her depres-
sion. But rather than responding with anger or frustration, she accepts
the fact that this structure will always fail her, and that she must be
self-reliant (“to keep breathing”) in order to rebuild her life. In for-
giving the structure, she is not reasserting conformity to, but is instead
transcending, even as she paradoxically continues to inhabit, it. In a
letter to her friend, she writes, “I don’t know if I am making good
decisions or right decisions. I am just making decisions. That is one
step further forward. I am trying not to mind about making mistakes”
(227). Implied in these words is neither conformity to, nor transgres-
sion against, the structure, but negotiating with it, just as she did with
her lived space, in order to move forward the best she can. It is this
approach that, in the end, will determine her ultimate recovery and
triumph.
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Published as recently as 2006, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by
Alison Bechdel is already considered a modern classic in autobiograph-
ical writing by scholars and readers alike for its frank and unsparing
revelation of her father’s (Bruce Bechdel) struggle with homosexual-
ity and subsequent death (possibly suicide), which corresponded with
the author’s own coming out as a lesbian.8 A trauma text about a
child witness (the young Alison) to a disturbing family secret, Fun
Home, like other prominent autographics such as Art Spiegelman’s
Maus (1986) and Marjani Satrapi’s Persepolis (2000), expertly sus-
tains the balance between humor often associated with the comic book
medium and seriousness befitting the narrative’s moving family drama
of a daughter’s coming to terms with her father’s parental failure,
which was driven by his sexual repression, resulting in deep unhappi-
ness for much of his life. Indeed, Gothic sentiments are unmistakable
in Fun Home, but since scholarship, at least to my knowledge, has
yet to associate the narrative with the genre, some explanation must
necessarily be proffered in order to reinforce my claim. Fun Home
demonstrates palpable thematic (and to a lesser extent, stylistic) fea-

tures that parallel those found in Gothic literature, the most distinctive
of which would be trauma linked to a secret encrypted within the
Bechdel household that, although unknown (at least to the protag-
onist and her brothers), is nevertheless adversely affecting the family.
Related to this theme is the Gothic family romance, an inversion of
Freud’s family romance. If the latter “is an idealized image of the fam-
ily that confers on parents the status and consequences of more highly
ranked outsiders” (Backus: 18), the former, in contrast, is a “converse
demonic” image of the family that, while ostensibly associated with “a
world emphatically external to the family,” is in truth “made up of the
family’s own disassociated experiences and conditions” (Backus: 18).
In Fun Home, despite the semblance of a “highly-ranked” atmosphere
the house exudes, its patriarch is, to an extent, decidedly apprehended
as “demonic” by his children. Alison, at one point in the novel, even
refers to her father as a “minotaur” (21), thus associating him with
a world clearly “external” to the family even though this appella-
tion arises from his frequent “dark tantrums” (21), whose source lies
in a personal condition unrelated to the family. As a Gothic fam-
ily romance, Fun Home would inevitably be furnished with tensed
episodes of, among others, child abuse, parental and generational con-
flicts, and discovery that begs more questions—all of which are staple
to the Gothic.
Stylistically, Fun Home also indirectly engages features familiarly
found in Gothic works. For example, there are the framed/framing
narratives to concurrently interrelate and complicate Alison’s story
and her father’s (although noteworthy in this case is the difficulty in
identifying whose is the framed and framing narratives, respectively).
Then, there is the nonlinear storytelling, which is a strategy often
found in trauma texts (Beloved, The Others) whereby her father’s death
could be read either as the point of narrative departure for Alison to
explore one strand of her (their) history or of narrative return in order
to attempt a consolidation of this history in light of the revelations
now afforded to her. Finally, it is arguable that Fun Home mirrors a
plot structure common to many traditional Gothic novels and uses
many of the genre’s standard tropes to recount Alison/Bruce’s story.
After all, what can be more unmistakably Gothic than a story about
a woman trapped in a large mansion, which hides a terrible secret,
that belongs to a monstrous being to whom she is related—which is
exactly the outline of Bechdel’s narrative? Based on these various lit-
erary elements of Fun Home, I am inclined to view it as an example of
a postmillennial Gothic narrative. Admittedly, however, Fun Home, as
various scholars have asserted, fundamentally defies classification, and

in this regard aligns it ironically to the Gothic as well, whose trademark
is ambiguity.
The autographic intimates that in order to allay, and more impor-
tantly, hide his struggle, Bruce undertakes restoration work on
his home; using his “remarkable legerdemain,” he will eventually
transform the run-down Gothic revival architecture into a glorious
“mansion” (5), but at the cost of his relationship with his wife and
children.9 At some point in her childhood, Alison began to realize that
just as her father used “his skillful artifice not to make things, but to
make things appear to be what they are not” (16), he was also not who
he appeared to be; this intimation, moreover, corresponded with her
increasing distrust of words, resulting in linguistic collapse on her part
that indicated a psychological breakdown. It was during this period of
mental distress that Alison would turn to drawing for self-expression.
Unlike words, whose relationship between signifier and signified is
often tenuous and unstable, and whose ability to dissemble Alison
unconsciously associates with her father,10 drawing relates image to
reference unambiguously, and thus communicates in a more authentic
and concrete manner. Although Alison does not altogether abandon
words (her love for literature is evident)—which will, in fact, be instru-
mental in eventually reestablishing a connection with her father just
before his death—she will increasingly, after this traumatic episode,
rely on drawing as both an alternative and a supplement to words,
whereby what the latter cannot or would not articulate is instead con-
veyed in the former. In Fun Home, art is also the author’s way of
negotiating with potentially unsettling materials such as documents
and photographs that reveal details about her father’s clandestine life.
These materials are instead lovingly and meticulously reproduced as
drawings to help her assert an affective distance so that she can relate
to them more objectively in her quest to understand a man she both
knew and did not know. In this way, as critic Ann Cvetkovich postu-
lates, “The act of drawing itself” in Fun Home “thus becomes an act
of witness, while also giving rise to a collection of emotionally charged
documents and objects” (Cvetkovich: 120).
Since its publication, Fun Home has attracted considerable criti-
cal attention that has focused on, among other things, the efficacy
of the comic medium to recount personal trauma (Watson 2008;
Warhol 2011), the unique relationship between Alison and her father,
and the emotional and psychological effects of social prejudices on
gay individuals and their families (Cvetkovich 2008; Spiers 2011),
the narrative’s intertextual connection to modernist literature and its
evocation of modernist sentiments (Freedman 2009; Tolmie 2009),

and, of course, the house and its significance to the story. In rela-
tion to the last category, of particular interest are essays by Annette
Fantasia (2011) and Robin Lydenberg (2012).11 Both critics iden-
tify as the starting point of their discussions Spiegelman’s famous
comparison between the comic form and architecture.12 Central to
Lydenberg’s thesis is how the architecture in Fun Home consistently
fails in its function as a family house because it distances, isolates, and
conceals each member from the others, and threatens to destroy the
family with a secret it is barely able to suppress. Rather than consol-
idate subjectivity, the house instigates a sense of uncertainty instead,
as figuratively implied by the preponderance of mirrors in the house
(Lydenberg: 63).
Fantasia’s article, on the other hand, discusses Bruce’s aesthetical
tyranny that led Alison to view the house and her father as a sin-
gle entity she must thereafter repudiate. Exploited somewhat as child
labor by their father in his aggressive endeavor to restore the house
“to its original condition, and then some” (9), Alison and her broth-
ers’ childhood would involve “an aesthetic indoctrination that is often
figured as frustrated apprenticeship” (Fantasia: 87). This is not only
because they live in constant fear of making mistakes that would attract
Bruce’s anger and hence, harsh punishment, but also because of the
realization that the house and its objects take precedence over them
in his esteem. Bechdel notes at one point, “I grew to resent the way
my father treated his furniture like children and his children like furni-
ture” (14), which underscores a further realization that they can never
succeed in competing with the house for his attention and affection.
Indeed, Bruce’s restoration work will constitute one of the primary
factors that increasingly locate him at an impossible distance from his
family. Even long before his death, he was already absent from his
children’s lives; or as Fantasia puts it, “From Bechdel’s perspective,
her father’s obsession with maintaining the physical appearances of
their home causes him to become, in effect, absorbed (in every sense
of the word) into the material and physical surroundings of the home,
to the extent that she feels ‘as if he were already gone.’ ” (Fantasia: 91;
inset quote from Fun Home: 23).
Obvious in both the articles is the view that the house bears a
negative connotation for the author because of its association with
her father and his secret. Fantasia, however, provides a more nuanced
reading by demonstrating how the house, while resented by Bechdel,
is fundamentally what later enabled her own aesthetical development
as well. Accordingly,
While Bechdel criticizes her father’s obsession with constructing mate-

rial surfaces and rejects his decadent tastes, such gestures do not amount
to an absolute resistance to her father’s aestheticism, considering that
the material surfaces of the home are prominently inscribed in, if
not central to, her book. That is, his creations are, quite literally, the
foundation of her creation.
(Fantasia: 96)
I agree with Fantasia’s view that the author’s aestheticism is premised

on her father’s, although her explanation leading to this point is
slightly unclear. The assertion that Bechdel’s rejection does not tanta-
mount to an “absolute resistance” should be understood, I believe, in
ironic terms to mean the disavowal of Bruce’s aesthetic that Bechdel
the daughter will effect in order to develop her own. Ironically, this
would also suggest by implication her coming to terms with his mem-
ory. An example of such a complex negotiation between affective
and aesthetical sentiments evident in Fun Home is Bechdel’s attitude
toward colors; precisely because her father was such “a crazy color
freak” who infused the house with an explosion of hues (Bechdel in
Chute: 1011), Bechdel initially chose to renounce colors when draw-
ing Fun Home, privileging instead artwork that is black and white.
In the end, however, Bechdel made the decision to illustrate her book
in monochromatically consistent shades of cesious (blue-gray). Under-
lying this strategy is simultaneously resistance to her father/house’s
aesthetic and an expression of her liberation from it: in deciding to
use color after all, Bechdel is declaring that she no longer allows her
father to control her “by making me not use color. So I’m using color
in spite of him” (Bechdel in Chute: 1012). But in deciding to use
color, she is also, in a sense, expressing forgiveness and coming to
terms with her past.
The positive aesthetical impression exerted by the house on
Bechdel that Fantasia proposes, however, can only be an interpreta-
tion, since it is also possible that Bechdel arrived at her own aesthetic
vision independently of the house altogether. Because of its profound
association with her father, it is difficult to see how the house can
afford Bechdel with any exhortation. Yet, it cannot be denied that
the house is also central to her subjective development and history:
as the site of her formative years when she was “closest” to her
father, the house is therefore the strongest expression of his mem-
ory, and as such would have influenced, and continue to influence,
her on both conscious and unconscious levels. Accordingly, while the
house seems to have asserted more depreciative influences on Alison,
it could possibly have also left compensatory marks on her. Written

in retrospect, and unfolding like a version of Nachträglichkeit, or
afterwardness, in which the past is revisited via storytelling to iden-
tify clues otherwise missed earlier about what will be subsequently
revealed, Fun Home, I will show, does provide subtle clues pointing
to the house’s redemptive property that has largely been buried under
Bruce’s aesthetical excessiveness.
But while I am in agreement with Fantasia, my position differs
from hers in that I see the house’s assertion of positive influence on
young Alison and her brothers as being clarified only in retrospect via a
different language. This influence, arguably, remains largely unrecog-
nized by Alison, but is apprehended at the level of her unconscious, as
implied by the benign quality attributed to the house in her artwork.
Whether unconsciously or consciously introduced, that this influence
can be registered in the narrative is possibly the effect of a strategy
unique to the comic book medium whereby
its verbal and visual narratives . . . do not merely synthesize. In comics,

the images are not illustrative of the text, but comprise a separate nar-
rative thread that moves forward in time . . . . The medium of comics is
cross-discursive because it is comprised of verbal and visual narratives
that do not simply blend together, creating a unified whole, but rather
remain distinct.
(Chute and DeKoven: 769)
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
between lived space and memory is nevertheless decidedly relevant to

my treatment of the house in Fun Home. According to him,
[The] remembered past is lodged in the monotonous repetition of

the necessary acts of concrete experience. The memory that “invents”
it, and rewrites it, is the product of this relentless repetitiveness. Yet
this remembrance of concrete experience is structured in terms of two
main fusing dimensions: domestic space and family time. Events are
not remembered simply as they were experienced by the family and
the domestic community. Memory draws the boundaries of the family
and domesticity by shaping within them local, regional, and inter-
national events. The domestic and family world makes up the woof
of remembrance, or memory. The house is “inhabited” by memory.
Remembrance is moulded into the material and physical structures of
the domestic space.
(Bahloul: 29)
For Bahloul, memories of home do not operate independently of the

space (the other constituent is family time) to which they are attached
and from which they are produced. Just as events and people are con-
nected to the house, so are their memories profoundly inscribed onto
its structure, without which they would have no definition. As such,
not only is the house “inhabited” by memory, it is arguably what
enables the formation and continuity—the “woof”—of memory as
well. My reading of the house as redemptive in Fun Home draws
inspiration from Bahloul’s insight into the way architecture impli-
cates memory. As I will demonstrate, how Bechdel negotiates with
the memory of her father is also, to a point, motivated by what she
remembers about the house. While much of her memory is negatively
inflected due to the house’s intricate affinity with her father, there is
precious few that, notwithstanding, bear affirmative impressions, but
which will only and tacitly be clarified many years later via a work of
memorialization.
Due to lack of space and the fact that this chapter is meant to con-
clude my study, I will consider just two examples of illustrations from
Fun Home that, in my opinion, communicate the house’s redemptive
propensity. The first involves the main stairway of the house. Its initial
appearance (20), partial (the last three steps at the top end) and viewed
from a high-angle shot, is reminiscent of a display house photograph
common in home magazines. Just beyond the last step is a room with
the door wide opened, framing a barely visible Bruce reading in bed.
The accompanying caption reads: “In fact, the meticulous period inte-
riors were expressly designed to conceal it,” it being his father’s secret.
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
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)
Lydenberg’s reading is certainly convincing, but I want to proffer

an altogether different perspective that plots the house in a more
redemptive light. In my view, it is by comparing her home with
the Addams’ that initially intimates for Alison a benign property
potentially installed within the house. That the “eerie quality of the
Addams cartoon” and the supposed “homey atmosphere” of her
house can be easily inverted into each other, thus establishing each
house as the other’s imaginary double, would therefore suggest that
her house is, like her father, potentially not always what it appears
to be. As “a sham” (17), it is capable of accommodating varying,
even opposing qualities; while it may reflect its owner’s volatility
and shame, it is equally capable of inverting them to exude stability
and redemption. Indeed, the representation of the Addams’ cartoon,
which compromises what is otherwise fearful with humor and nor-
malcy, is further warranty of this interpretive possibility. In this regard,
what Lydenberg sees as a sense of constraint denoted by the panel’s
verticality can also be viewed as suggesting solidarity between the
house and the children, such as with the second panel in the second
set of images (69); here, the figure of Alison serves more or less the
panel’s vanishing point to imply a visual representation of the sub-
ject/space dialectic whereby the house is bracing together with the
children as they witness a terrible row between adults (this is again
repeated in the final illustration [70], although here, the children are
situated in a row with their eye levels symmetrically aligned). More-
over, in both its portrayal of the children (sitting on the steps and
directly facing the reader) and its placement alongside other panels
recounting a college play during which Bruce first met his wife, this
particular panel is arguably highlighting the house’s theatrical quality
and the resulting irreality this lends to the atmosphere that possibly
enabled Alison to assert a certain detachment from what is transpiring.
The second example is not specific to any part of the house, but has
to do with a feature fundamental to domestic space. Interestingly, this
feature is also found in Galloway’s novel, thus clarifying an object of
redemption common to both narratives. In the autographic, water is
present in at least two instances of memory involving Alison and her
father.13 The first is a series of illustrations depicting Bruce bathing
his daughter; in one panel, Bechdel tells the reader: “my mother must
have bathed me hundreds of times, but it’s my father rinsing me off

with the purple metal cup that I remember most clearly” (22). The
second is the book’s final illustration, which portrays a young Alison
launching off the diving board of the backyard pool into the waiting
arms of her father. Accompanying this visual is a poignant caption that
reads, “but in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined
stories, he was there to catch me when I leapt” (232).14 Without going
into detailed analysis, suffice to say, paraphrasing Bahloul, that mem-
ories of objects invariably connect these objects to space, and in the
case of Fun Home, those implicating water also inscribe the house
with affective connotations that are not always painful and unsettling,
but can sometimes be pleasant and comforting as well. Happy mem-
ories of the house are undoubtedly few in Bechdel’s narrative, but
they do form an important part of her history and whose influence
are thus integral to her formation, even if they are only registered in
the unconscious. The bathroom and the swimming pool, as I see it,
constitute two areas of the house that will always be associated, in
her memory, with a father who is involved, welcoming, and respon-
sive. Whether or not the redemptive references borne by the house
played a role in Bechdel’s later reconciliation with her father’s memory
is something that perhaps not even the author herself can ascertain,
but as implied especially in the final illustration, this possibility is not
altogether improbable, and I would like to think they did.
* * *
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
circumscriptions. Yet, it nevertheless remains a question whether the

house’s abetment of the protagonist’s pursuits is tantamount to an
affirmative quality. As witnessed in The Exorcist and Repulsion, is the
house’s motivation of the subject’s unconscious to resurface meant
to free her desires, or condemn her to destruction? Likewise, is the
haunting perpetrated by 124 Bluestone inclined toward Sethe’s heal-
ing or her ultimate breakdown? And although the subjects in The
Others and, to a lesser extent, The Orphanage finally transcend to an
elsewhere that signals their liberation, that this elsewhere is located
within the house could also suggest their entrapment, henceforth
binding them to a place of limited parameters. According to the latter
interpretation, transcendence has, then, not only led to their eternal
imprisonment, but has significantly shrunk their world as well.
In the final analysis, however, although the house’s interior may
be tainted by dark secrets, and capitalism may have devalued its sta-
tus as private property in the modern era, none of these phenomena
has resulted in the abatement of humankind’s desire for what it con-
tinues to singularly represent: the idea of home. Here is where we
inscribe our presence in most intimate ways, infusing into it “our activ-
ities and physical possessions, but also . . . our aspirations and dreams”:
this, according to Witold Rybczynksi, is what signifies “inhabiting”
(Rybczynksi: 171), or its derivation, “to habit,” which also means “to
dress” and “to accustom” (Rybczynksi: 169). Implied in this chain
of complementary definitions is the house’s function to protect us
while we continue to grow accustomed to ourselves; as a mirror and an
extension of ourselves, the house would necessarily reflect us most
distinctively, revealing, in some cases, even facets of our subjectiv-
ity of which we are unaware. The uncanny, for example, may be a
disturbing feature of domestic space, but it is fundamentally an inte-
gral component of our subjectivity that we somehow no longer know.
Thus, in concluding my study with a position that foregrounds the
house’s redemptive dimension, I am also asserting that its tendency
for equivocation is also what makes its affirmative references all the
more precious.
N ot e s
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
article (1989) on Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth (1905), Cynthia

Wall’s reading (1993) of Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724), and Karen
Chase’s essay (1997) on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), among
others.
9. In both her essay, “The Use of Fiction to Interpret Architecture
and Urban Space” (2000a), and book, Walls Have Feelings (2000b),
Shonfield primarily considers fiction associated with film rather than
literature.
10. I recommend Charles Rice’s article (2004) for a useful overview,
which takes into careful account cultural and aesthetical shifts that
influenced the design and decoration of interior space beginning in
the nineteenth century.
11. I draw primarily on Charles Rice’s (2004) insights, which go directly
against traditional scholarship, such as Mario Praz’s An Illustrated
History of Interior Decoration from Pompeii to Art Nouveau (1964),
a study that more or less views the interior as historically stable and
unchanging.
12. This point with regard to the limitation in Grosz’s observation is
based on this quoted passage alone, for Grosz is clearly more nuanced
in her reading of space and fundamentally—as will be evident in later
references to her work—agrees with Merleau-Ponty’s position on the
organic relationship between space and the subjective gaze.
13. Cf. James Krasner’s perspective in my concluding chapter.
14. The most subversive of which, in Douglas’s assessment, is to “be phys-
ically present” at home “without joining in its multiple coordination,”
such as coming and going without permission or informing another
member of the household, refusing to partake in family meals, or pre-
ferring to occupy sections of the house—like the garage or the tree
house—that are not part of the main building (Douglas: 301).
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
(affected through the cult of sensibility) (Smith 1994: 45). My essay,

however, is only concerned with Lee’s apartment.
17. For discussions on Love’s parody of sensibility, see Day (1998).
18. Carter is aware of the surrealist movement’s entrenched misogyny, as
expressed in her Shaking a Leg: Journalism and Writings (512) and
“The Alchemy of the World” (72–73).
19. I disagree with Christina Britzolakis’s (1997) interpretation, which
consistently plots Annabel as predominantly fetishized (objecti-
fied/commodified) and victimized by Lee and Buzz. Concentrating
solely on the scene of her death, in which she is described as a fantastic
thing, and the afterword, Britzolakis’s Marxist-feminist interpretation
fails to acknowledge that Annabel performs fetishizing herself and, to
an extent, also victimizes others.
20. Later, when Annabel is working in a ballroom and Lee would come
escort her home after work, she would sometimes spy on him while
he waits for her “to see what he was like when he was by himself for
lately she sometimes wondered if he existed at all when she was not
beside him to project her idea of him upon him” (79).
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
Rosemary’s Baby, which is also set in an apartment, would be the more

obvious choice for comparison with The Exorcist since it is also an
occult horror that deals with similar issues (motherhood, repressed
desires, and fears), its depiction of space in terms of its influence on
the protagonist is more subtle. Those interested in the spatial sig-
nificance of Rosemary Baby should consult Sharon Marcus’s essay
(1993).
4. Here, I follow Rosemary Jackson’s (1991) classification of horror as a
kind of fantasy narrative.
5. As Kate Soper observes, Kant’s perspective of the noumenal is nec-
essarily ambiguous, for while he acknowledges in nature a world
“beyond the powers of human cognition” and views this as “a resis-
tance in Nature itself to its subsumption within human knowledge,”
he is also fundamentally suspicious of this teleology (Soper: 45).
6. My discussion of The Exorcist is based on the version originally
released in theaters. In the Director’s Cut version released in 1979,
several deleted scenes that were restored (like the infamous “spider-
walk” scene) suggest the supernatural presence infiltrates the entire
house, not just Regan’s bedroom. These scenes are admittedly very
few and adds nothing to the story, thus possibly the reason for their
deletion in the first place.
7. Careful attention to the film will reveal blatant inconsistencies
between the house’s upper story exterior and interior; this is because
the interior is actually a set design built in a Manhattan studio, where
much of the events in the narrative is filmed. Also, the house’s upper
story had to be physically manipulated by adding an extra wing to it
to give the appearance that Regan’s room is located closer to the steps
onto which Father Karras is flung by the entity toward the end of the
story. For details, see Travers and Rieff (1974).
8. For a discussion of the relationship between the Victorian house and
haunting in the American popular culture, see Burns (2012).
9. Examples of horror films with inimical bedrooms are Psycho (mother’s
room), Poltergeist (interestingly, it is the parent’s bedroom that first
registers the presence of “them”), and The Entity (1981, in which the
protagonist is supernaturally raped in her own room).
10. Sara Williams’s (2001) treatment of Blatty’s novel also deliberately
eschews the narrative’s supernatural premise by recasting Regan’s
possession as hysteria.
11. Apart from Chris and Regan, the house is also occupied by two
servants and Chris’s assistant when she comes in for work.
12. Adrian Schober notes an incongruity in the film here: “When doc-
tors recommend that Regan be institutionalized, Chris is adamant
that ‘I am not going to lock my daughter in some goddamn asy-
lum.’ Yet, ironically, it is she who locks her daughter away in her
bedroom in the manner of a nineteenth-century madwoman in the
attic” (Schober: 74).
212 N ot e s
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
material heterogeneity . . . . [F]olding favours linkage over aporia.

Folding architecture creates continuities between site and struc-
ture, implementing conceptual designs that entrain perception to
follow patterns that connect outside and inside, both physically
and psychologically . . . . In such architecture, where the outside
is a fold of the inside, the conceptual and perceptual become
increasingly indiscernible.
(Harris: 37)
N ot e s 213
For a critical explication on the Rebstockpark periphery, see Williams

(2000).
22. For a discussion of the film’s emotional effect, specifically disgust, on
audience, see Laine (2011).
23. See Rydzewska (2011), on the surrealist aesthetics in Repulsion.
24. As with my (tacit) application of the pli to reading The Exorcist that
allows both the film’s supernatural and psychological premise to be
foregrounded, my analysis of the apartment in Repulsion as a pli would
simultaneously correspond with the standard view of the apartment
advanced in scholarship and reflect my particular position regarding
spatial agency.
25. Deleuze’s point about the relationship between extensive and inten-
sive space bears striking resemblance to the relationship between
fantasy and the real in psychoanalysis. As Slavoj Žižek asserts, the
“relationship between fantasy and the horror of the Real that it con-
ceals is much more ambiguous than it may seem: fantasy conceals this
horror, yet at the same time, it creates what it purports to conceal, its
‘repressed’ point of reference” (Žižek 1999: 92).
26. Views include childhood sexual abuse (Freeland), anxiety over a
possible loss of virginity (Marten), and the trauma of diaspora
(Rydzewska), among others.
27. Colin literally breaks down the door in a desperate attempt to see her,
while the landlord uses his master key to open the door.
28. See Ng (2015, forthcoming).
29. Invented and constructed by the American ophthalmologist Adelbert
Ames, Jr., in 1934, the Ames Room’s objective is to create an optical
illusion whereby everything appears distorted. For a discussion of the
“Ames Room” mechanism in Repulsion, see Caputo (esp. 105–06).
30. See Adorno (2005, esp. 38–40).
31. I will discuss “the uncanny” in the chapter conclusion.
32. While Steiner agrees with Adorno’s view on the changing significance
of home in the modern era, her essay primarily criticizes his read-
ing of Kierkegaard, whose view Adorno claims is overly idealistic and
therefore represents a false picture of the private sphere that is more-
over influenced by Kierkegaard’s own bourgeois sentiments. Steiner,
instead, demonstrates that Kierkegaard’s perspective is much more
nuanced.
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
in terms of the folding and heterotopic capacities afforded by the

labyrinth, because it does not locate such spatial aberration within
the domestic interior.
2. In fact, the tale from which Freud derived his concept—
E.T.A Hoffman’s “The Sandman” (1816)—relies heavily on the motif
of the double to drive its narrative.
3. For a discussion of the narrative twist in The Others, see Wilson (2006)
and Briefel (2009).
4. I use the terms “double,” “doppelgänger,” and “alter-ego” inter-
changeably in my discussion. Readers interested in a taxonomy
differentiating these categories should consult Schneider (2004).
5. Proponents of this framework include Freud (as implied in his
essay on the uncanny) and Otto Rank, whose study The Double:
A Psychoanalytical Study (1971) remains an important reference. For
a more recent study, see Pizer (1998).
6. See Herdman (1991).
7. As Grace instructs her servants, “no door in this house must be
opened without the previous one being closed [actually locked] first”
to ensure minimum sunlight in the house and prevent the children
from accidentally exiting into/entering a room where sunlight is
present. Elizabeth Bronfen adds that “The act of keeping light out
of the house . . . also signifies her need to prevent the triple murder
from coming to light, that is to prevent it from moving from a posi-
tion of repression in the unconscious to one of conscious recognition”
(Bronfen: 21).
8. For a discussion of Catholicism in the film, see Giral and Rosales
(2011).
9. In Georg Simmel’s assessment, doors are what give places their unity
and separate them from the rest of space; but “Exactly because the
door can be opened, its being shut gives a feeling of being shut out,
that is stronger than the feeling emanating from a solid wall” (Simmel:
409). When Simmel’s point is slightly adjusted and read against this
episode in The Others, it is then possible to argue that the shutting
door figuratively signifies Grace being shut out from herself. This,
in turn, metonymically relates to psychic split, whose reparation can
only be achieved when she finally claims her traumatic experience and
identify with her house.
10. Postmortem photography, or memorial portraiture, was popular right
up to the early part of the twentieth century as a means to com-
memorate the dead in visual form one last time. Earlier in the
film, while looking through various postmortem photographs con-
tained in an album, Grace had mistakenly assumed they were pictures
depicting people asleep. However, Grace’s curiosity quickly turned
into disgust upon clarification from Mrs. Mills, who is instructed
to immediately expel the album from the house. For an insightful
N ot e s 215
discussion of postmortem photography in The Others, see Bruce

(2007).
11. Kristeva’s perspective on melancholia, especially in its relation to
depression, will be more resonant in my discussion of The Orphanage.
12. A possible example of this circumstance is hinted in my discussion
of the ruin in Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop (see Chapter 1).
Arguably, Carter’s choice of setting for the episode of Melanie’s
epiphany is not an arbitrary one: as a signifier of culture’s destruction
by time, the ruin immediately evokes a melancholic sensation that at
once confronts the subject with the totality of oblivion and invigorates
her to cherish her world even more.
13. See, for example, the essay, “The Meaning of Your Absence” by
Neimeyer et al. (2002).
14. This line unmistakably references the influential BBC children’s
program Listen with Mother, which was broadcasted in the fifties.
15. Also, The Others is an English-language film, while The Orphanage
retains Spanish as its medium.
16. I will discuss Abraham and Torok’s other concept, incorporation, in
relation to the film in the next section.
17. Emphasis here belongs to Ziarek (73).
18. Arguing that the melancholic’s defiance is reflective of a “battle with
symbolic breakdown” (Kristeva 1987: 9), Kristeva is nevertheless
careful to qualify that this does not therefore imply some kind of
consciousness. Using the example of “aesthetic—and, in particular
literary—creation” (including “religious discourse in its imaginary fic-
tional essence”), she explains how its conscious deployment in the
“elaboration” of the subject’s melancholia (by which she means para-
doxically relieving the ego from, and reinforcing its attachment to, loss
at the same time) is not tantamount to the subject becoming aware of
her condition.
This literary or religious representation is not an elaboration in the
sense of a “becoming conscious” of the inter- and intra-psychical
causes of moral pain. In this it differs from the psychoanalytic
path that promises to dissolve the symptom. This literary (and
religious) representation, however, has a real and imaginary effi-
cacy: belonging more to the order of catharsis than of elabora-
tion, it is a therapeutic method used in all societies throughout
the ages.
(Kristeva 1987: 9, 1989: 24)
Kristeva would further narrow what she means by “therapeutic
method” to “sublimatory solutions” (Kristeva 1987: 9, 1989: 25),
thereby retaining melancholia within the unconscious even as the sub-
ject exercises an elaboration of her condition via literary creation.
To a point, Kristeva’s sublimatory solutions, in which mourning is
worked “by establishing a symbolic system particularly language”
216 N ot e s
(Kristeva 1989: 63), coincide with Abraham and Torok’s notion of

introjection.
19. Fort/da, meaning “gone” and “not gone,” forms the basis of a
psychoanalytical concept that attempts to understand how a subject
gains mastery over the trauma of loss. Freud learned these terms from
his grandson, who was overheard uttering them while playing a soli-
tary game. For details, see The Interpretation of Dreams (parts 1/SE
4 and 2/SE5).
20. For Sara Maitland (1991: xi), atmosphere is the most important
feature of the horror story because it is what identifies the genre.
21. Laura is also shown performing heavier work like moving furniture
and carpentering in this sequence, albeit in brief shots, and basi-
cally to establish the point that she did everything unassisted, thereby
exemplifying her resolve.
22. See Foucault (1988).
23. For one, Laura is not certain that her son is dead; her depression,
in this sense, is to do with worry and the failure to locate him, and
not the result of her ego’s incorporation of an object-love in order to
repudiate loss; secondly, Laura is clearly conscious of her disavowal,
and as such, her condition is incompatible with melancholia, which is
unconscious.
24. See, for example, Liam Lacey’s review in Globe and Mail (Decem-
ber 26, 2007, retrieved at November 27, 2013).
25. Indeed, there is no standard iconography of purgatory; however, the
most common iconography usually depicts purgatory as a landscape
gesturing toward hell, but with souls in fervent prayer and angels on
site to encourage them. For a fascinating study of the iconography’s
interesting, if complex, history, see Matsuda (1997).
26. Light is in fact an important trope in the film and metonymically
connected to both Laura and Aurora (which means “dawn”). Its asso-
ciation to Laura (which means victory) is implied early in the film
when she convinces Simõn that the disused lighthouse across from
where they live still functions except that it now transmits only “invis-
ible” light, by secretly using a clock to reflect light against his room
window to look as if it is coming from the lighthouse. In this way, just
as Aurora is able to illuminate a path for Laura when she is confronted
by darkness, Laura is able to conjure up light when there is none to
metaphorically identify her significance in the film.
27. The view that Laura epitomizes the good mother can be poten-
tially undermined by a particular instance in the film. Here, in a
frantic search for Simõn upon her release from the bathroom dur-
ing the fateful housewarming episode, Laura would accidentally place
obstructions against the secret door to the basement, thereby effec-
tively consigning Simõn to his room. In this regard, it is arguable
that Laura is complicit in her son’s death, and thus, like Grace, is
N ot e s 217
a bad or dangerous mother. The tenability of this view, however,

can be easily disqualified; unlike Grace, who—notwithstanding her
insanity–deliberately kills her children, Laura’s act is both an acci-
dent and the result of ignorance. In this regard, neither can her act
be labeled murder, which is premeditated, nor can she be termed
bad or dangerous, both of which are value judgments applied to
conscious acts.
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
218 N ot e s
books, along with his replica of a library often found in nineteenth-

century homes belonging to aristocrats, would as a result become for
Alison a symbol of his deception.
11. See also Cook’s brief article, “Queering Domesticities” (2012).
12. See Spiegelman (1978, n.p.).
13. It is noteworthy that Bechdel’s dual tones for Fun Home, white and
cesious, are also suggestive of visibility underwater.
14. For other perspective on this final image, see Lemberg (138–30), Pearl
(300), and Watson (48–50).
Wo r k s C i t e d
Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok. “A Poetics of Psychoanalysis: ‘The Lost

Object: Me.’ ”Trans. Nicholas T. Rand, SubStance, 13. 2 (1983): 3–18.
Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok. “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection
versus Incorporation” (1972), in The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psy-
choanalysis (vol. 1). Ed. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Trans. Nicholas
T. Rand. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1994. 125–38.
Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok. “The Topography of Reality: Sketching
a Metapsychology of Secrets.” Trans. Nicholas T. Rand, Oxford Literary
Review, 12. 1 and 2 (1990): 63–68.
Abraham, Nicolas and Nicholas Rand. “Psychoanalytic Esthetic: Time,
Rhythm, and the Unconscious,” Diacritics, 16. 3 (1986): 2–24.
Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralis: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Trans.
E. F. N. Jephcott. London/New York: Verso, 2005.
Agnew, Jean Christophe. “A House of Fiction: Domestic Interiors and the
Commodity Aesthetic,” in Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display
of Goods in America, 1880–1920. Ed. Simon J. Bronner. New York: The
Henry Drancis du Pont Winterthur Museum/Norton, 1989. 133–55.
Agrest, Diane. “Architecture from Without: Body, Logic, Sex,” Assemblage, 7
(1988): 28–41.
Alexander, Flora. Contemporary Women Novelists. London: Arnold, 1989.
Arnold, Dana and Margaret Iversen. Art and Thought. London: Blackwell,
2003.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. 1964. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston:
Beacon, 1969.
Backus, Margot Gayle. The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child
Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order. Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 1999.
Bahloul, Joëlle. The Architecture of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household
in Colonial Algeria, 1937–1962. Trans. Catherine du Peloux Ménagé.
Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Boston: Mariner Books,
2006.
Benjamin, Walter. “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” Reflections.
Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken, 1986. 146–62.
Benjamin, Walter. “Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collec-
tion,” in Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. London:
Fontana, 1973. 61–69.
220 Wo r k s C i t e d
Bigwood, Carol. “Renaturalizing the Body (with the Help of Merleau-

Ponty),” Hypatia, 6. 3 (1991): 54–73.
Blatty, William Peter. “Elsewhere,” in 999. Ed. Al Sarrantonio. London:
Hodder and Stoughton, 1999. 561–664.
Bloomer, Jennifer. “Pale House, Silenced Stairs,” Assemblage 37 (1998):
46–67.
Boudreau, Kristin. “Pain and the Unmaking of Self in Toni Morrison’s
Beloved,” Contemporary Literature 36. 3 (1995): 447–65.
Briefel, Aviva. “What Some Ghosts Don’t Know: Spectral Incognizance and
the Horror Film,” Narrative, 17. 1 (2008): 95–108.
Britzolakis, Christina. “Angela Carter’s Fetishism,” in The Infernal Desires of
Angela Carter: Fiction, Femininity, Feminism. Ed. Joseph Bristow and Trev
Lynn Broughton. London: Longman, 1997. 43–58.
Bronfen, Elisabeth. “Visuality-Textuality: An Uncanny Encounter,” Image &
Narrative, 11. 3 (2011): 7–24. Retrieved at October 12, 2013. http://
www.imageandnarrative.be/index.php/imagenarrative/article/view/
90/65.
Bruce, Susan. “Sympathy for the Dead: (G)hosts, Hostilities and Mediums
in Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others and Postmortem Photography,” Dis-
course, 27. 2 and 3 (2005): 21–40.
Burgin, Victor. In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Burgin, Victor. “Perverse Space,” in Sexuality and Space. Ed. Beatriz
Colomina. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992. 219–40.
Burns, Sarah. “ ‘Better for Haunts’: Victorian Houses and the Modern
Imagination,” American Art, 26. 3 (2012): 2–25.
Büssing, Sabine. Aliens in the House: The Child in Horror Fiction. New York:
Greenwood Press, 1987.
Butler, Ivan. “The Horror Film: Polanski and Repulsion” (1967), in The Hor-
ror Film Reader. Ed. Alain Silver and Jason Ursini. New York: Limelight
Editions, 2000. 77–86.
Caputo, Davide. Polanski and Perception. London: Intellect Books, 2012.
Carter, Angela. “The Alchemy of the World,” in Expletives Deleted: Selected
Writings. London: Vintage, 2006. 67–74.
Carter, Angela. Love. 1971. New York: Viking, 1988.
Carter, Angela. The Magic Toyshop (1967). London: Virago, 1981.
Carter, Angela. Nights at the Circus. 1984. London: Vintage, 1994.
Carter, Angela. “Reflections.” Fireworks. 1970. London: Virago, 1988.
81–102.
Carter, Angela. Shaking a Leg: Journalism and Writings. Ed. Jenny Uglow.
London: Chatto, 1997.
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Cavallaro, Dani. The Gothic Vision: Three Centuries of Horror, Terror and Fear.
London/New York: Continuum, 2002.
Wo r k s C i t e d 221
Chase, Karen. “Jane Eyre’s Interior Design,” in New Casebook: Jane Eyre. Ed.
Heather Glen. New York: Macmillan, 1997. 52–67.
Chase, Venessa. “Edith Wharton: The Decoration of Houses and Gender in
Turn-of-the-Century-America,” in Architecture and Feminism. Ed. Debra
Coleman, Elizabeth Danze, and Carol Henderson. New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1996. 130–60.
Cherry, Brigitte. Horror. London/New York: Routledge, 2009.
Chute, Hillary. “An Interview with Alison Bechdel,” Modern Fiction Studies,
52. 4 (2006): 1004–13.
Chute, Hillary and Marianne DeKoven. “Introduction: Graphic Narrative.”
Modern Fiction Studies, 52. 4 (2006): 767–82.
Cixous, Hélène. “Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das
Unheimliche (The ‘Uncanny’),” Trans. Robert Dennomé, New Literary
History, 7. 3 (1976): 525–48.
Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. Keith and Paula Cohen,
Signs, 1. 4 (1976): 875–93.
Clover, Carol. Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror
Film. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Colomina, Beatriz. “Introduction,” in Sexuality and Space. Ed. Beatriz
Colomina. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000. iii–v.
Colomina, Beatriz. “Split Walls: Domestic Voyeurism,” in Sexuality and Space.
Ed. Beatriz Colomina. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992.
73–130.
Constant, Benjamin. Adolphe. 1816. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1980.
Cook, Matt. “Queer Domesticities,” in The Domestic Space Reader. Ed. Ciara
Briganti and Kathy Mezei. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.
173–79.
Copjec, Joan. “Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety” (1991), in The Horror
Reader. Ed. Ken Gelder. London/New York: Routledge, 2000. 52–63.
Corey, Susan. “The Religious Dimensions of the Grotesque in Literature:
Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” in The Grotesque in Art and Literature: Theolog-
ical Reflections. Ed. James Luther Adams and Wilson Yates. Grand Rapids,
MI, and Cambridge, MA: William B. Eerdmans, 1997. 227–42.
Cowan, Susanne. “The Gendered Architecture of Home in Cinematic Space,”
Built Environment, 26. 4 (2000): 303–13.
Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine. London/New York: Routledge,
1993.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly and Eugene Rochberg-Halton. The Meaning of
Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1981.
Cvekovich, Ann. “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home,”
Women Studies Quarterly, 36. 1 and 2 (2008): 111–28.
Cwerner, Saulo B. and Alan Metcalfe. “Storage and Clutter: Discourses and
Practices of Order in the Domestic World,” Journal of Design History, 16.
3 (2003): 229–39.
Davidson-Pégon, Claire. “Sub-Urban Gothic: Angela Carter’s The Magic

Toyshop.” Une Littérature de l’inquiétude. Paris: l’Harmattan and Aix-
Marseille, Université de Provence, 8 Annales du Monde anglophone, 1998.
148–56.
Day, Aidan. Angela Carter: The Rational Glass. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1998.
DeLanda, Manuel. “Space: Extensive and Intensive, Actual and Visual,” in
Deleuze and Space. Ed. Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2005. 80–88.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam. London: Athlone Press, 1986.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994.
Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. S. Hand, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1988.
Deleuze, Gilles.“The Fold.” Trans Jonathan Strauss. Yale French Studies, 80
(1991): 227–47.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark
Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1977.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian
Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Donald, Moira. “Tranquil Havens? Critiquing the Idea of Home as the
Middle-Class Sanctuary,” in Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth-
century Interior. Ed. Janet Floyd and Inga Bryden. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1999. 103–20.
Donaldson, Susan V. “Telling Forgotten Stories of Slavery in the Postmodern
South,” The Southern Literary Journal, 40. 2, Special Issue: History,
Memory and Mourning (2008): 267–83.
Douglas, Mary. “The Idea of Home: A Kind of Space,” Social Research, 58. 1
(1991): 287–307.
Doyle, Laura. Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic
Modernity, 1640–1940. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Trans.
Willard R. Trask. New York and London: Harcourt, 1987.
Ellis, Clifton. “The Mansion House at Berry Hill Plantation: Architecture
and the Changing Nature of Slavery in Antebellum Virginia,” Perspectives
in Vernacular Architecture, 13. 1 (2006): 22–48
Ellis, Kate Ferguson. The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of
Domestic Ideology. Ubana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989.
Etlin, Richard A. “Aesthetics and the Spatial Sense of Self,” The Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56. 1 (1998): 1–19.
Fantasia, Annette. “The Paterian Bildungsroman Reenvisioned: ‘Brain-
Building’ in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,” Criticism,
53. 1 (2011): 83–97.
Finney, Brian H. “Tall Tales and Brief Lives: Angela Carter’s Nights at the
Circus,” Journal of Narrative Technique, 28. 2 (1998): 161–85.
Flaxman, Gregory. “Transcendental Aesthetics: Deleuze’s Philosophy of
Space”, in Deleuze and Space. Ed. Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. 176–88.
Foster, W. H. “Women Slave Owners Face Their Historians: Versions of
Maternalism in Atlantic World Slavery,” Patterns of Prejudice, 41. 3 and
4 (2007): 303–20.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan
Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1977.
Foucault, Michel. A History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Trans. R. Hurley.
New York: Vintage, 1990.
Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age
of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Vintage, 1988.
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, 16. 1
(1986): 22–26.
Foucault, Michel. “Panopticism,” in The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow.
New York: Pantheon, 1984. 206–13.
Fraiman, Susan. “Shelter Writing: Desperate Housekeeping from Crusoe to
Queer Eye,” New Literary History, 37. 2 (2006): 341–59.
Freedman, Ariela. “Drawing on Modernism in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home,”
Journal of Modern Literature, 32. 4 (2009): 125–40.
Freeland, Cynthia. The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror.
Boulder: Westview, 2000.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams (1913). The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vols. IV and V. Trans.
James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1975.
Freud, Sigmund. “Psycho-Analytical Notes on an Autobiographical Account
of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)” (1911). The Standard Edi-
tion of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. XII. Trans.
James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1975. 3–82.
Freud, Sigmund. “The ‘Uncanny’ ” (1919). The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. XVII. Trans. James
Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1975. 217–52.
Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Trans. David McClintock. London: Penguin,
2003.
Frichot, Hélène. “Stealing into Gilles Deleuze’s Baroque House,” in Deleuze
and Space. Ed. Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2005. 61–79.
Furst, Lilian R. All Is True: The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction.
Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1995.
Galloway, Janice. Blood. London: Minerva, 1991.
Galloway, Janice. The Trick Is to Keep Breathing (1989). London: Minerva,
1991.
Gamble, Sarah. Angela Carter: Writing from the Front Line. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1997.
Garber, Marjorie. Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses. New York:
Pantheon, 2000.
Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman
Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. Yale: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2000.
Giral, Anabel Altemir and Ismael Ibáńez Rosales. “Otherness in the Other:
Haunting the Catholic Other, Humanizing the Self,” in Roman Catholicism
in Fantastic Film: Essays on Belief, Spectacle, Ritual and Imagery. Ed.
Regina Hansen. Jefferson: McFarland, 2011. 275–86.
Goddu, Teresa A. “The African American Slave Narrative and the Gothic”, in
The Companion to American Gothic. Ed. Charles Crow. London: Blackwell,
2014. 72–83.
Goddu, Teresa. A. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Gordon, Beverly. “Woman’s Domestic Body: The Conceptual Conflation of
Women and Interiors in the Industrial Age,” Winterthur Portfolio, 31. 4
(1996): 281–301.
Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time, and Perversion. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. St. Leonards,
NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1994.
Handley, William R. “The House a Ghost Built: Nommo, Allegory, and the
Ethics of Reading in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” Contemporary Literature,
36. 4 (1995): 676–701.
Hanson, Ellis. “Knowing Children: Desire and Interpretation in The Exorcist,”
in Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children. Ed. Steven Bruhm and Natasha
Hurley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 107–36.
Hanson, Julienne. Decoding Homes and Houses. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge
Harris, Paul A. “To See with the Mind and Think through the Eye: Deleuze,
Folding Architecture, and Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers,” in Deleuze and
Space. Ed. Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2005. 16–35.
Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter.
New York: Perennial, 2001.
Hetherington, Kevin. “In Place of Geometry” The Materiality of Place,” in
Ideas of Difference: Social Spaces and the Labour of Division. Ed. Kevin
Hetherington and Rolland Munro. London: Blackwell/The Sociological
Review, 1997. 183–99.
Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London: Methuen,
1991.
Jameson, Fredric. “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism,
Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject.” Yale French
Studies, 55/56 (1977): 338–95.
Jesser, Nancy. “Violence, Home, and Community in Toni Morrison’s
Beloved.” African American Review 33. 2 (1999): 325–45.
Kane, Patrick. “Authors Who Come up with the Goods: Janice Galloway,”
in Tinsel Show: Pop, Politics, Scotland. Edinburgh: Polygon/Women, 2000,
1991.
Kane, Patrick. Tinsel Show: Pop, Politics, Scotland. Edinburgh: Poly-
gon/Women, 2000, 1991.
Kawash, Samira. “Haunted Houses, Sinking Ships: Race, Architecture, and
Identity in Beloved and Middle Passage,” The New Centennial Review, 1. 3
(2001): 67–86.
Kelly, Sean Dorrance. “Seeing Things in Merleau-Ponty,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty. Ed. Taylor Carman and Mark
B. N. Hansen. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
74–110.
Kinchin, Juliet. “Interiors: Nineteenth-Century Essays on the ‘Masculine’
and the ‘Feminine’ Rooms,” in The Gendered Objects. Ed. Pat Kirkham.
Manchester. Manchester University Press, 1996. 12–29.
Kirby, Kathleen M. “Thinking Through the Boundary: The Politics of
Location, Subjects and Space,” Boundary, 2. 20 (1993): 173–89.
Krasner, James. Home Bodies: Tactile Experience in Domestic Space. Columbus:
The Ohio State University Press, 2010.
Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon
S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
Kristeva. Julia. Desire in Language. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and
Leon S. Roudiez. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980.
Kristeva, Julia. “On the Melancholic Imaginary.” Trans. Leon S. Roudiez,
New Formations, 3 (1987): 5–18.
Kryzwinska, Tanya. “Demon Daddies: Gender, Ecstasy and Terror in the Pos-
session Film” (1999), in The Horror Film Reader. Ed. Alain Silver and Jason
Ursini. New York: Limelight Editions, 2000. 247–68.
Kuntze, Donald. “Architecture as Reading: Virtuality, Secrecy, Monstrosity,”
Journal of Architectural Education, 41. 4 (1988): 28–37.
LaBelle, Jenijoy. Herself Beheld: The Literature of the Looking Glass.
Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1988.
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. A. Sheridan, New York/London:
Routledge, 1977.
Lacey, Liam. “Ghost Story Exploits but Doesn’t Scare,” Globe and
Mail, December 26, 2007. Retrieved at November 27, 2013. http://
www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/ghost-story-exploits-but-doesnt-scare/
article726926/
Laine, Tarja. “Imprisoned in Disgust: Roman Polanski’s Repulsion,” Film-
Philosophy, 15. 2 (2011): 36–50.
Lang, Karen. “The Dialectics of Decay: Rereading the Kantian Subject,” The
Art Bulletin, 79. 3 (1997): 413–39.
Laub, Dori. “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle,” in
Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1995. 61–75.
Lawrence, David. “Fleshly Ghosts and Ghostly Flesh: The Word and the Body
in Beloved,” in Toni Morrison’s Fiction: Contemporary Criticism. Ed. David
Middleton. New York and London: Garland, 2000. 231–46.
Le Corbusier. Towards an Architecture. Trans. John Goodman. Los Angeles:
Getty Publication, 2007.
Lee, Alison. Angela Carter. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith.
London: Blackwell, 1991.
Lemberg, Jennifer. “Closing the Gap in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home,”
Women’s Studies Quarterly, 36. 1 and 2 (2008): 129–40.
Leslie-McCarthy, Sage. “ ‘I See Dead People’: Ghost-seeing Children as
Mediums and Mediators of Communication in Contemporary Horror Cin-
ema,” in Lost and Othered Children in Contemporary Cinema. Ed. Debbie
Olson and Andrew Scahill. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012. 1–18.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans.
Alphonso Lingis. Hague: Duquesne University Press, 1969.
Lewis, Tyson and Daniel Cho. “Home Is Where the Neurosis Is: A Topogra-
phy of the Spatial Unconscious,” Cultural Critique, 64 (2006): 69–91.
Lydenberg, Robin. “Under Construction: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home:
A Family Tragicomic,” European Journal of English Studies, 61. 1 (2012):
57–68.
MacAndrew, Elizabeth. The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. New York: Columbia
Maitland, Sara. “Introduction,” in The Virago Book of Ghost Stories. Ed.
Richard Dalby. London: Virago, 1991. x–xv.
Marcus, Sharon. “Place Rosemary’s Baby,” Differences, 5. 3 (1993): 121–53.
Marin, Louis. Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Practice. Trans. Robert
A. Vollrath. New York: Humanity Books, 1984.
Marten, Nina. “Don’t Touch Me: Violating Boundaries in Roman Polanski’s
Repulsion,” in Virgin Territory: Representing Sexual Inexperience in Film.
Ed. Tamar Jeffers McDonald. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010.
138–56.
Martin, Valerie. Property. London: Abacus, 2003.
Matsuda, Takami. Death and Purgatory in Middle English Didactic Poetry.
Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1997.
McCarthy, Christine. “Towards a Definition of Interiority,” Space and Cul-
ture, 8. 112 (2005): 111–25.
McGlynn, Mary. “ ‘I didn’t Need to Eat’: Janice Galloway’s Anorexic Text
and the National Body,” Critique, 49. 2 (2008): 221–36.
McGlynn, Mary. “Janice Galloway’s Alienated Spaces,” Scottish Studies
Review, 4. 2 (2003): 82–97.
McGlynn, Mary. “Janice Galloway,” Review of Contemporary Fiction, 61
(2001): 7–40.
Meikle, Denis. Roman Polanski: Odd Man Out. London: Reynolds and
Hearn, 2006.
Melchor-Bonnet, Sabine. The Mirror: A History. Trans. Katharine H. Jewett.

London/New York: Routledge, 2002.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1962. Trans. Colin
Smith. London: Routledge, 2002.
Metzstein, Margery. “Of Myths and Men: Aspects of Gender in the Fiction
of Janice Galloway,” in The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies. Ed. Gavin
Wallace and Randall Stevenson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1993. 136–46.
Mezei, Kathy and Chiara Briganti. “Reading the House: A Literary Perspec-
tive,” Signs, 27. 3 (2002): 837–46.
Milbanks, Alison. Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian
Fiction. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992.
Miller, J. Hillis. “Boundaries in Beloved,” Symplokē, 15. 1–2 (2007): 24–39.
Millington, Gareth. “Meaning, Materials and Melancholia: Understanding
the Palace Hotel,” Social & Cultural Geography, 6. 4 (2005): 531–49.
Moran, Joe. “Housing, Memory and Everyday Life in Contemporary
Britain,” Cultural Studies, 18. 4 (2004): 607–27.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. London: Picador, 1988.
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.
New York: Vintage, 1992.
Navarro-Yashin, Yael. “Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects: Ruination
and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge,” Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, 15 (2009): 1–18.
Neimeyer, Robert A. Luis Botella, Olga Herrero, Meritxell Pacheco, Sara
Figueras, and Luis Alberto Werner Wildner, “The Meaning of Your
Absence: Traumatic Loss and Narrative Reconstruction,” Loss of the
Assumptive World: A Theory of Traumatic Loss. in Ed. Jeffrey Kauffman.
London/New York: Routledge, 2002. 31–48.
Ng, Andrew Hock Soon. “Coping with Reality: The Solace of Objects and
Language in Janice Galloway’s The Trick Is to Keep Breathing,” Critique,
53. 3 (2012): 238–50.
Ng, Andrew Hock Soon. Dimensions of Monstrosity in Contemporary Narra-
tives: Theory, Psychoanalysis, Postmodernism. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004.
Ng, Andrew Hock Soon. “Intimate Spaces, Extimate Occupants: The Bed-
room in Horror Films,” in Spaces of the Cinematic Home. Ed. Eleanor
Andrews, Stella Hockenhull, and Fran Pheasant-Kelly. London/New York:
Routledge, 2015 (forthcoming).
Ng, Andrew Hock Soon. “Introduction: Reading the Double,” in The Poetics
of Shadows: The Double in Literature and Philosophy. Ed. Andrew Ng Hock
Soon. Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2008. 1–15.
Ng, Andrew Hock Soon. “Subjecting Spaces: Angela Carter’s Love,” Contem-
porary Literature, 49. 3 (2008): 412–37.
Norquay, Glenda. “Janice Galloway’s Novels: Fraudulent Mooching,” in Con-
temporary Scottish Women Writers. Ed. Aileen Christianson and Alison
Lumsden. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. 131–43.
Palmer, Paulina. “From ‘Coded Mannequin’ to Bird Woman: Angela Carter’s

Magic Flight,” in Women Reading Women’s Writing. Ed. Sue Roe.
Brighton, UK: Harvester, 1987. 177–205.
Pearl, Monica. “Graphic Language,” Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism,
30. 3 (200): 286–304.
Pensky, Max. Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourn-
ing. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993.
Pizer, John. Ego-Altar Ego: Double and/as Other in the Age of German Poetic
Realism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories
of Art. London: Routledge, 1988.
Punter, David. Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law. Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 1998.
Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: The Modern Gothic. London:
Longman, 1996.
Rank, Otto. The Double: A Psychoanalytical Study (1971). Trans. Harry
Tucker. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
Rashkin, Esther. Unspeakable Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Culture.
New York: SUNY Press, 2008.
Reineke, Martha J. Sacrificed Lives: Kristeva on Women and Violence.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.
Rice, Charles. “Rethinking the History of the Interior,” The Journal of
Architecture, 9. 3 (2004): 275–87.
Robinson, Sally. Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in
Contemporary Women’s Fiction. New York: State University of New York
Press, 1991.
Roe, Sue. “The Disorder of Love.” Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of
Angela Carter. Ed. Lorna Sage. London: Virago, 1994. 60–97.
Rosa, Joseph. “Tearing Down the House: Modern Homes in the Movies,”
in Architecture and Film. Ed. Mark Lamster. New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 2000. 159–67.
Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2009.
Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. “Daughters Signifyin(g) History: The Example of Toni
Morrison’s Beloved,” American Literature, 64. 3 (1992): 567–97.
Russo, Mary. The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity. New York:
Routledge, 1994.
Rybczynski, Witold. The Most Beautiful House in the World. New York:
Penguin, 1990.
Rydzewska, Joanna. “Transnational Subjectivity: Trauma and Displacement
in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion,” Journal of British Cinema and Television,
8. 3 (2011): 337–56.
Sage, Lorna. Angela Carter. Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994.
Sage, Lorna. Women in the House of Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1992.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.
Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Schneider, Steven Jay. “Introduction: ‘Psychoanalysis in/and/of the Horror

Film,” in Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Worst Nightmare. Ed.
Steven Jay Schneider. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
1–14.
Schober, Adrian. Possessed Child Narratives in Literature and Film: Contrary
States. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004.
Sedgwick, Eve. Kosofsky. The Coherence of the Gothic. New York/London:
Methuen, 1980.
Shiner, Larry E. “Sacred Space, Profane Space, Human Space,” Journal of the
American Academy of Religion, 40. 4 (1972): 425–36.
Shonfield, Katherine. “The Use of Fiction to Interpret Architecture and
Urban Space,” The Journal of Architecture, 5. 4 (2000a): 369–89.
Shonfield, Katherine. Walls Have Feelings: Architecture, Film and the City.
London/New York: Routledge, 2000b.
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from
Brontë to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Showalter, Elaine. Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s
Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Sibley, David. “Comfort, Anxiety, and Space,” in Architecture—The Subject
Is the Matter. Ed. Jonathan Hill. New York/London: Routledge, 2001.
107–18.
Simmel, Georg. “The Bridge and the Door” (1909). Trans. Michael Kearn,
Qualitative Sociology, 17. 4 (1994): 407–12.
Smith, Colin. “The Notion of Object in the Phenomenology of Merleau-
Ponty,” Philosophy, 39. 148 (1964): 110–19.
Smith, Patricia Juliana. “All You Need Is Love: Angela Carter’s Novel of Sixties
Sex and Sensibility,” Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14. 3 (1994): 24–29.
Smith, Patricia Juliana. “ ‘The Queen of the Waste Land’: The Endgame
of Modernism in Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop,” Modern Language
Quarterly, 67. 3 (2006): 333–61.
Smith, Paul Julian. Spanish Practices: Literature, Cinema, Television. London:
Legenda, 2012.
Soper, Kate. What Is Nature? Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.
Spiegelman, Art. Breakdowns: Portrait of an Artist as a Young %@*!.
New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
Spiers, Miriam Brown. “Daddy’s Little Girl: Multigenerational Queer Rela-
tionship in Bechdel’s Fun Home,” Studies in Comics, 1. 2 (2010): 315–35.
Spurr, David. Architecture and Modern Literature. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2012.
Steiner, Henriette. “On the Unhomely Home: Porous and Permeable Interi-
ors from Kierkegaard to Adorno,” Interiors, 1 and 2 (2010): 133–48.
Stewart, Susan. “The Epistemology of the Horror Story,” The Journal of
American Folklore, 95. 375 (1982): 33–50.
Teyssot, Georges. “The Disease of the Domicile.” Trans. Alan Jones and Janet
Abrams, Assemblages, 6 (1988): 72–97.
Thacker, Andrew. Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Mod-

ernism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre.
Trans. Richard Howard. Cleveland and London: Press Case of Western
University Reserve, 1973.
Tolmie, Jane. “Modernism, Memory and Desire: Queer Cultural Production
in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home,” Topia, 22 (2009): 77–94.
Travers, Peter and Stephanie Rieff. The Story Behind “The Exorcist.”
New York: Signet Books, 1974.
Van der Kolk, Bessel A., and Onno van der Hart. “The Intrusive Past: The
Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma,” in Trauma: Explo-
rations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1995. 158–82.
Vidler, Anthony. Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.
Walker, Lynne. “Homemaking: An Architectural Perspective,” Signs, 27. 3
(2002): 823–35.
Walker, Lynne and Vron Ware. “Political Pincushions: Decorating the Aboli-
tionist Interior, 1787–1865,” in Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth-
century Interior. Ed. Janet Floyd and Inga Bryden. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1999. 58–84.
Wall, Cynthia. “Gendering Rooms: Domestic Architecture and Literary Arts,”
Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 5. 4 (1993): 349–72.
Walter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American
Quarterly, 18. 2 (1966): 151–74.
Warhol, Robyn. “The Space Between: A Narrative Approach to Alison
Bechdel’s Fun Home,” College Literature, 38. 3 (2011): 1–20.
Watson, Julia. “Autographic Disclosures and Geneologies of Desire in Alison
Bechdel’s Fun Home,” Biography, 31. 1 (2008): 27–58.
Weissberg, Liliane. “ Gothic Spaces: The Political Aesthetics of Toni
Morrison’s Beloved,” in Modern Gothic: A Reader. Ed. Victor Sage
and Allan Lloyd Smith. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996.
104–120.
Whitlock, Gillian. “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of the Comics,” Modern
Fiction Studies, 52. 4 (2006): 965–79.
Wigley, Mark. “Untitled: The Housing of Gender,” in Sexuality and Space.
Ed. Beatriz Colomina. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992.
327–89.
Williams, James. “Deleuze’s Ontology and Creativity: Becoming in Architec-
ture,” Pli, 9 (2000): 200–19.
Williams, Raymond. Problems in Materialism and Culture. London: Verso,
1980.
Williams, Sara. “ ‘The Power of Christ Compels You’: Holy Water, Hysteria,
and the Oedipal Psychodrama in The Exorcist,” Literature, Interpretation,
Theory, 22. 3 (2011): 218–38.
Wilson, George. “Transparency and Twist in Narrative Fiction Film,” The

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 64. 1 (2006): 81–95.
Winter, Kari. Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change: Women and Power in Gothic
Novels and Slave Narratives, 1790–1865. Athens/London: University of
Georgia Press, 1992.
Wolfreys, Julian. Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and
Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002.
Wolfreys, Julian. “Dwelling with Dickens and Heidegger,” in The Domestic
Space Reader. Ed. Ciara Briganti and Kathy Mezei. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2012. 339–43.
Young, Iris Marion. Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philoso-
phy, and Policy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Ziarek, Ewa. “Kristeva and Levinas: Mourning, Ethics, and the Feminine,”
in Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writing. Ed. Kelly
Oliver. New York/London: Routledge, 1993. 62–79.
Žižek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out.
New York: Routledge, 1996.
Žižek, Slavoj. “Fantasy as a Political Category: A Lacanian Approach,” in
The Žižek Reader. Ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright. London:
Blackwell, 1999. 87–101.
Žižek, Slavoj. “Introduction: The Spectre of Ideology,” in Mapping Ideology.
Ed. Slavoj Žižek. London: Verso, 1994. 1–33.
Index
abject, abjection, 21, 28, 114, Amenábar, Alejandro, 9, 143,

157 159, 180
abolitionist, 64 see also The Others
Abraham, Nicolas, 22, 145–6, 161, Ames Room, The, 134, 136, 138
163–5, 170–1, 178–80 see also Repulsion
absence anorexia, 53, 187
disavowal of, 164, 166, 168, 179, antebellum, 72
180 apartment, 21, 107–8, 123, 126–39
as presence, 31, 89, 153, 157, see also Love, Repulsion
164, 174 apparition, 119, 143, 165
see under ghost, self; see also see also ghost
melancholia, The Others, The architect, 34, 55, 61, 86
Orphanage architectural discourse, 12–13, 57
absurdist, 46 architecture, 1–2, 5–6, 8, 11–13, 17,
actor, 28, 40, 46–7, 51, 56, 58, 109, 19, 26, 56, 63–5, 67–70, 76–7,
112 85–8, 91–2, 94, 98, 100–1,
Addams Family (cartoon), 106, 108, 120, 122–3, 143–5,
200–1 151, 154, 165, 168, 179,
Adorno, Theodor, 137, 140–1 186–7, 192, 195–6, 199
see also homeless ambiguity in, 63–4, 100–1, 120,
aesthetics, 65, 175 122
see also under Fun Home comparison to the comic form,
Africa, 57 196
afterlife, 174 as double, 39, 149–57
afterwardness (Nachträglichkeit), as event, 123–4
198 film as, 157–65
agency, 4, 13, 35, 54, 98, 104, 114, as filmic atmosphere, 6
117, 127, 172 fold (pli) in, see fold
Agrest, Diana, 67, 86–7 as gendered, 55, 57, 61, 70,
see also transsexual operation 76–7, 85, 86–7, 111
under architecture as haunting, 143, 144
Alberti, Leon Battista, 86 history of, 86–8
Algeria, 198 in literature and film, 5–7, 168
allegory, 21, 89, 108, 139, 140–1 as masquerade, 39, 61
see also The Exorcist, Repulsion as melancholy object, see
altruism, 163–5 melancholy object
234 Index
architecture—continued Bechdel, Alison, 4, 22–3, 185–6,

modernist, 34, 55 193–4, 196–7, 199–202
as monstrous, 1, 63–4 see also comics, Fun Home
nonclosure in, 63–4, 101 bedroom, 8, 21, 29–30, 35, 69, 72,
premodern, 61 75–6, 94, 96, 103, 105–7,
property (Lefebvre) in, 9, 11–13, 110–12, 114–20, 122, 124–5,
20, 21, 26, 30, 42, 61, 65, 133–5, 154
67–8, 80, 91, 104, 110, 112, in The Exorcist, 21, 103, 105–7,
185, 187, 198, 201–2 110, 111–12, 114–20, 122,
as redemptive, 186, 187 124–5
structural weakness in, 6 as feminine space, 69, 72, 76
as transsexual operation (Agrest), Beer, Gillian, 166
67, 85–7 Beloved, 1, 3, 10, 18, 20, 63, 65–6,
as uncanny (Vidler), 68, 88, 68, 87–100, 104–5, 123, 126,
91–8, 112–13 143, 145, 147–8, 194, 202
as untranslatable (Kuntze), 63–4, see also fantastic
69, 101 Benjamin, Walter, 8–9, 29, 50,
see also double, fold, haunting, 53–5, 62, 155
house, interiority Bernstein, Basil, 152
Arnold, Dana, 121 Bible, The, 71, 151
artwork, 10, 51–2, 54, 60, 128, Bigwood, Carol, 16
158–9, 187, 195, 197–8, binary logic, 8, 14, 107, 121, 124,
199–202 126, 134, 138, 146, 149, 161,
see also Fun Home 166, 181–2
asylum, 38, 211 bipolar, 121
atheism, 167 Blatty, William Peter, 8, 107,
attic, 8, 109 112–13
audience, 7, 46, 105, 117, 119, 125, “Elsewhere”, 113–14
147, 159 see also The Exorcist
autobiography, 193, 217 body, 5, 12, 15–16, 22–3, 26–7, 28,
autographic, 22–3, 186, 193, 195, 29, 31, 33, 37, 40, 45, 48, 53,
198, 201 60, 67, 68, 72, 76, 81–2, 86–7,
see also Fun Home and under body 96, 99, 110–16, 118–20,
122–3, 127, 130, 134–5,
Bachelard, Gaston, 7, 58 138–9, 148, 161, 166, 188–92
Backus, Margot Gayle, 194 as object, 16, 189, 191
Bahloul, Joëlle, 198 relationship to architecture, 5, 48,
Barrie, J. M. Peter, Pan, 181 86, 96, 127
Barthesian, 51 relationship to space, 15–16, 23,
Bates Mansion (Psycho), 108 26, 33, 37, 67, 76, 112, 114,
bathroom, 134, 160, 176, 202 135, 192
Baudelaire, Charles, 9 as text, 188–9
Bayona, Juan Antonio, 9, 143, 159, woman as, 111, 138, 139
166 bohemian, 27
see also The Orphanage borders, 80, 138, 157
Index 235
Boudreau, Kristin, 99–100 children, 21, 111, 132, 144–9,

boundary, 9, 13, 18, 33, 35, 88, 151–4, 157–64, 166–8, 171–8,
91–2, 106–7, 138, 161, 171, 181, 187, 194–6, 200–1
172, 173, 199 see also under ghost, The Others,
bourgeois, 5, 111, 137, The Orphanage
140–2 children’s games, 113, 162, 171,
breast, 50, 56, 73, 81–2, 164 173–4
bricolage, 188 Cho, Daniel, 137
Briganti, Ciara, 5 chores, 171–2
British, 19, 25, 147 Christian theology, 159
Bronfen, Elisabeth, 154 Chute, Hillary, 197–8
Brontë, Charlotte: Jane Eyre, 3 cinema, 6, 125, 131
building, see architecture Cixous, Hélène, 188
bulimia, 187 claustrophobia, 45, 53, 109, 135
Burgin, Victor, 20, 67, 80, clutter, 29, 53, 59, 109
125–6 Colomina, Beatriz, 13, 20, 28, 39,
Butler, Ivan, 127 55–6, 112
comics, 193, 195–6, 198, 201
Conjuring, The, 108
camera techniques, 106, 108–9, convent, 132
117, 125, 131, 134, 152–4, Copjec, Joan, 121–2
162, 168–70
cottage, 72–3, 77–8
cannibalism, 167 Cowan, Susanne, 6
capitalism, 26, 141 cracks (wall), 127, 135–6
Caputo, Davide, 138 see also Repulsion, walls
Carter, Angela, 4, 19, 25–6, 38, Creed, Barbara, 21, 106, 113–14
41–2, 44–5, 49–50, 52, 61, crucifix, 114–16
182, 202 see also The Exorcist
Alchemy of the World, 52 Crusoe, Robinson, 48
see Love, The Magic Toyshop crypt, 3, 13, 178, 180, 182
cartoon, 200–1 cryptofantasy, 179
Caruth, Cathy, 92–3, 148 cryptophore, 146, 179
castration (symbolic), 51 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 112
catharsis, 215 Cvetkovich, Ann, 195
Catholic Church, The, 142 Cwerner, Saulo, B., 59
Catholic iconography, 70, 178
Catholicism, 115, 121, 148, 151, Dada, 52
178 Danielewski, Mark: The House of
see also purgatory Leaves, 2
catoptric, 32 daughter, 32, 70, 87–9, 94, 96, 115,
Cavallaro, Dani, 113–14 117, 142, 193, 197, 200, 201,
cemetery, 38, 180 211
cesious, 197 Day, Aidan, 52
Chase, Venessa, 72 de Beauvoir, Simone, 172
chiaroscuro, 34, 125 defamiliarization, 13, 144
236 Index
deindividualization, 172 Dickens, Charles, 5

DeKoven, Marianne, 198 difference, 31, 44, 106, 122–3, 125,
DeLanda, Manuel, 128 147, 152, 155, 166, 172, 182
Deleuze, Gilles, 21, 106, 107, differences, 122
109–10, 122–9, 132, 134, 136, dirty home, see under home
137, 139–40 disassociation, 36, 121, 189
Difference and Repetition, 129 distance, 10, 14, 70, 79, 128–9,
A Thousand Plateaus (with Felix 132, 134–5, 182, 195–6
Guattari), 137 domestic, 1, 3, 6–11, 18, 21, 25–9,
Deneuve, Catherine, 107 32, 35, 40, 42, 45, 48, 59,
depression, see under melancholia 61–2, 66, 69, 71–2, 79–80, 85,
depth, 14, 21, 46, 107, 122, 128–9, 104–6, 112, 116, 148–9,
132, 134–6, 138 171–2, 190, 199, 201, 203
as intensive space, 128–9 see also house, interiority
de Quincy, Thomas, 79 Donaldson, Susan V., 66
derealization, 10, 35–7, 39, 40, 41, door, 47, 49, 77, 94, 116–17,
62 125, 134, 148, 151, 152,
desire, 4, 10, 11–12, 19, 21, 22, 27, 173, 199
30, 32–3, 35, 36, 37, 39, 41–2, doorknob, 171, 173
46–8, 52–5, 58–9, 61, 67, 73, doppelgänger, see double
80–5, 87–8, 94–5, 97, 100, double, 5, 21, 39–40, 42, 44, 47,
103, 104, 106–7, 111–16, 118, 50, 57, 84, 89, 94, 122, 125,
120–2, 126, 130–3, 136–7, 145, 147–51, 153, 157,
141, 145, 150, 155–6, 162–4, 179–80, 201
173, 176–8, 182, 186, 200, see also under melancholia
202–3 Douglas, Mary, 18
for home, 137 Doyle, Laura, 64
homoerotic, 46–7, 59, 73–4, drawing, see artwork
81–3, 106, 114, 119 duplicity, dwell, 98
incestuous, 41, 83, 106, 115–16, dwelling, 7–8, 11, 17–18, 23, 34–6,
119 40, 49, 61, 63, 67, 73, 87, 91,
object cause of, 110, 122 99, 103, 127, 137, 144, 192,
as reflected by the house, 27, 198
28–9, 30
relationship to interiority, ecriture feminine, 188
9–10, 39 Eden, Garden of, 158–9
relationship to space, 12, 55 ego, 21, 30–1, 34–5, 40, 42, 55, 83,
transsexual, 67, 73, 84–5, 87; see 104, 121, 124, 141, 145–6,
also architecture under 149–51, 154, 156–7, 164–5,
transsexual operation 168, 170, 174, 178–80
unconscious, 11, 12, 21, 80, 83, lack in, 42, 44, 50–1, 53, 55–6,
104, 111–16, 120–1, 126, 60, 84
132–3, 150, 163, 164, 186, eighteenth century, 5, 69, 108
202 Eisenman, Peter, 8
diaspora, 80 Eliade, Mircea, 69, 100
Index 237
Elizabethan, 46 fantastic, the (Todorov), 3, 68,

Ellis, Kate Ferguson, 4 89, 98
elsewhere, 22, 133, 141, 146–7, fantasy, 27, 33, 49, 52, 55, 80, 85,
154, 156–7, 159–61, 168, 104, 121, 128, 161, 174–6,
176–8, 180–3 178
see also The Others, The Orphanage father, 13, 71–3, 78–80, 82–6, 99,
emasculation, 20, 29, 50, 52, 76 106, 115, 119, 187, 193–9,
encryption, 21, 68, 110, 146, 201–2
179–81, 186, 194 femininity, 10–11, 71, 111, 131,
English, 104 138
epistemology, 16 feminism, 4, 6, 25, 49, 207–8
erasure, 13, 42, 60, 93, 111, 115, fetish, 53–4, 57
118, 122, 138, 146, 166, 168, fiction, 3, 16, 19, 40, 64, 66, 77,
179, 188–9 89, 105
Ernst, Max, 52 modernist, 195–6
erogenetic, 155 postmodern, 25, 66, 77
Eros, 155, 176 realism in, 28, 45, 101, 127
eroticism, 115 fifteenth century, 86
ethics, 89, 137, 162, 174, 176–7 Filarete (Antonio di Pierro
Etlin, Richard, 33 Averlino), 86
event, 3, 32, 93, 109, 121, 123–4, film, 1–3, 5–8, 9, 20–2, 36,
144–5, 148, 165, 176, 185 103–10, 113–15, 117–21,
exorcism, 110, 113–14, 119, 121 124, 126–7, 130–2, 135,
The Exorcist (film), 8, 10, 20–1, 138–9, 141, 143–52, 154–5,
103–8, 108–26, 127, 137, 140, 157–62, 166–71, 174–8, 181,
142, 154, 202–3 186
as allegory, 108, 139–42 diegetic elements in, 158, 169,
coldness in, 118 212
see also under bedroom haunted house in, 1–3, 20–2,
extensive space, 77, 128–9 103
see also intensive space scholarship in, 5–7
exteriority, 8–9, 13, 125, 131–3, fisheye lens, 134
157 Flaxman, Gregory, 128
extimate, 21, 104, 107, 109, 110, fold (pli), 21, 106–7, 109, 120,
113, 120–2, 124–6, 128, 133, 123–9, 133, 134–9, 141, 154,
135, 137–8 172
eye, 76, 81, 118 foreshadowing, 30, 32, 116, 172,
192
family, 1, 3, 6, 25–7, 34–5, 37–8, fort/da, 167, 216
40–1, 45, 70, 88, 111, 113, Foster, W. H., 66
119, 132, 145, 147–8, 151, Foucault, Michel, 19, 28, 38, 41,
154, 178–81, 186–7, 193–4, 61, 74, 111, 161, 171, 182
195, 196, 199–200 “Ship of Fools”, 171
family romance, 194 Freedman, Ariela, 96
Fantasia, Annette, 196–8 Freeland, Cynthia, 114
238 Index
French, 30, 38, 69 God, 149

Freud, Sigmund, 2, 9, 13, 20–2, 38, Goddu, Teresa, 64
82–3, 91–2, 104, 105, 113, Gordon, Beverly, 70, 86
140, 141, 144–5, 147, 149–51, Gothic, The, 1–5, 8, 10–11, 13,
155–6, 161, 163, 166–7, 194 18–19, 25–6, 47, 64–5, 69,
Frichot, Hélène, 123 105, 108, 113, 126, 144–5,
Friedkin, William, 8, 20, 103, 112, 147–8, 185–6, 193–5, 200
121 American Gothic, 64–5
see also The Exorcist house in, 1, 3–4, 11, 13, 18,
Fun Home, 4, 22, 185–7, 193–203 185–6
aesthetics in, 196–8 relationship to horror, 19
as Gothic, 193–5 scholarship, 7–8, 144
see also father Goya Awards, 159
furniture, 9, 37, 54, 70, 97, 109, Grand Guinol, 28
116–17, 152, 190, 196 grief, 21–2, 44, 81, 144, 146, 159,
161, 164, 165, 175, 177, 187
Galloway, Janice, 22, 186–7, 201–2 Grosz, Elizabeth, 13–16, 29, 49, 52,
see also The Trick is to Keep 59–60, 116, 120
Breathing grotesque, 52, 65, 106, 113, 122,
Garber, Marjorie, 37 139
garden, 32–4, 38, 42–5 Guattari, Felix, 137
gaze, 14–16, 39–40, 49–50, 52–7, Gubar, Susan, 4
59, 60, 74–6, 90, 112, 131, guilt, 3, 97, 119
189
Genesis, Book of, 158 habitation, 9, 18, 30, 36, 37, 39, 46,
genre, 1, 4, 6, 18, 20, 25, 64, 103, 48–9, 56–8, 63, 85, 123–4,
124, 126–7, 139, 175, 186, 127, 129, 165–6, 185, 193,
193–4 203
Georgetown, 108 hallucinations, 93, 127, 133, 135
German, 44, 91, 140 Handley, William, 88–9
ghost, 9, 65, 89–92, 95–6, 98, Hanson, Ellis, 4, 113, 119
104–5, 123, 139, 143–7, 152, Hanson, Julienne, 4
157, 159, 160–1, 166, 168, haunting, 2, 7, 18, 20, 22, 68,
171, 173–5, 177–9 88–93, 95–6, 98, 104, 112,
as absence, 89 143–8, 152–3, 159–61,
definition of, 105 165–70, 174, 203
as insurrection, 166 definition of, 104
as memory, 90–1, 96 as history, 104
as presence, 147, 179 as melancholia, 95, 146, 165–7,
see also abject, haunting, The 168, 174
Others, The Orphanage as metaphor, 7, 146
ghost story, 98, 144, 159 relationship to trauma, 20, 93
Gilbert, Sandra, 5 see also ghost, house, melancholia
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins :“The Hawthorne, Nathaniel: The House of
Yellow Wallpaper”, 1 Seven Gables, 3
Index 239
hearth, 11, 26, 62 horror (genre), 1, 13, 19–21, 46,

Hegelian, 185 64, 66, 103–5, 107–8, 111–14,
hegemony, 26, 31 124, 126–7, 139, 144, 154,
Heidegger, Martin, 5 169, 175, 186
height, 37, 117 atmosphere in, 108, 112, 119,
heimlich (homely), 2, 91, 144 147, 159, 169
hermetic, 131–2, 139 ecological, 104
Herrington, Kevin, 161, 171–3 psychological, 105, 126
heterogeneity, 52–3, 126 relationship to the Gothic, 19
heteronormativity, 141 slavery as, 64
heterotopia, 19, 37, 38–9, 41–2, supernatural, 3, 8, 9, 92, 104,
61–2, 182 105, 112–14, 115, 120, 127,
as placeless place, 38–9 144
see also under mirror see also (The) Gothic
Hitchcock, Alfred: Psycho, 108 house, 1–11, 13, 16–23, 26–32,
Hodgson, William Hope: The House 34–7, 39–42, 44, 47–9, 51–2,
on the Borderland, 2 55–7, 59, 61–77, 79–80,
Hoffman, E.T.A.: “The 86–101, 103–12, 115, 118,
Sandman”, 2 123–5, 129, 134–7, 139–48,
Hollywood, 2, 108 150–7, 159–62, 165–74,
home, 2, 7, 10–11, 13, 17–18, 25, 176–82, 185–7, 189–94,
27–8, 30, 32, 34–5, 37–9, 196–203
41–2, 49, 51–2, 57, 59, 61–2, aliveness of, 68, 88, 98
68, 70–3, 74, 76, 79–80, 81–3, as ambiguous, 4, 8, 10, 18, 19,
85, 86–7, 89, 91–2, 94, 101, 25, 26, 28, 35, 40, 42, 47,
105, 108, 111, 119, 130–2, 49, 61, 71, 109–10, 186,
135, 137–8, 140–1, 144, 198, 202
151–2, 157, 160, 162, 164, atmosphere in, 37, 72, 194,
173, 186–7, 189–90, 195–7, 200–1
199–201, 203 as comfort, 2, 7, 13, 22, 43,
dirty (Jameson), 7, 17, 18 72, 92, 116, 123, 141,
idea of, 7, 203 202
middle-class, 20, 66, 69, 70, 71, as dissimulation, 42, 61
72, 80, 87, 109 as duplicitous, 4, 19, 26, 41, 182,
as modern, 20, 28, 39, 48 200, 202
as opposed to house, 7, 13, 18 as entombment, 179
see also domestic, interiority, as entrapment, 4, 10, 13, 26, 39,
hearth, heimlich, 55, 62, 87, 96, 106, 140–1,
homemaking, house, 203, 207
unheimlich as extension of subjectivity, 9, 12,
homelessness, 137, 140 16, 33, 63, 68, 118, 122,
homemaking, 172–4 151, 191
homoerotic(ism), see under desire gender ambiguity in, 86–7
homosexuality, 83, 115, 193 as gendered, 20, 65–6, 67, 68,
Hooch, Pieter de, 10 69–73, 76, 77, 85, 103
240 Index
house—continued incorporation, 22, 146, 151, 161,

as haunted, 1, 2, 4, 8, 9, 18, 21, 163, 170, 178–80, 183
95, 103–5, 108, 112, 143–8 and failure of language, 170
as historically determined, 16–17, see also introjection, melancholia
19, 48 inertia, 44
as metaphor, 1–3, 5–7, 73–4; see infanticide, 20, 97, 147
also entrapment, slavery inhuman, 64, 75
as paradox, 5, 31, 36, 56, 62, insanity, 127
73–4, 87, 112, 140–1; see also intensive space, 107, 110, 122–3,
entrapment, private property, 125, 128–9, 132, 134, 136
slavery see also depth, extensive space
as redemptive, 185–203 interiority, 7–13, 17–18, 21, 25,
as reflection of self-image/desire, 27–30, 32, 39, 42, 45, 48, 50,
6, 30–1, 47 53, 60–2, 66, 68–9, 71, 73, 76,
relationship to woman, 4, 85, 87, 106, 109, 110, 116,
10–11 125, 131–2, 136, 138, 140–1,
152, 157, 160–1, 170, 174,
as sentient, 16, 25, 103, 105,
186, 200, 203
114, 117–18, 185
intertextuality, 65, 195
as theater box, 28, 39, 40, 47,
introjection, 22, 146, 156,
55–6, 112, 201
161, 162–5, 170, 171, 197,
see also defamiliarization,
200
domestic, dwelling, (The)
mouth work in, 164, 170
Gothic, hearth, home,
significance of language in, 164
haunting, interiority,
see also incorporation, melancholia
plantation
Iraq, 198
housecleaning, 190 irony, 32, 41, 54, 58, 71, 73–4, 84,
housework, 172 198
humanness, 90 irrationality, 2, 61
humor, 193, 201 irreal, 91, 201
hypermasculinity, 51, 57 Iversen, Margaret, 121
hysteria, 153
Jackson, Shirley, 1, 3
The Haunting of Hill House, 1
id, 104, 149
We Have Always Lived in the
identity, 6, 15, 28, 32, 52, 55, 60,
Castle, 3
71, 79, 88, 93, 96, 99, 112,
Jameson, Fredric, 131, 137
120–2, 143, 150, 171–3, 179,
Jesser, Nancy, 94
190
Jewish, 198
ideology of separate spheres, 69, jouissance, 136
140–1 junk, 29, 57
illustration, see artwork see also clutter
imaginary, 32, 53, 81, 135, 160,
170, 201 Kane, Pat, 188
immanence, 155, 172 Kantian noumenon, 104, 185
immigrant, 126 Kawash, Samira, 88
Index 241
Kelly, Sean Dorrance, 96 Louisiana, 65

Kinchin, Juliet, 66, 69–71, 73 Love, 4, 19–20, 25, 28, 45–63, 182,
Kirby, Vicky, 92 202
kitchen, 47, 72, 94, 96, 134–5, 153, Lydenberg, Robin, 196, 200–1
171
Krasner, James, 187, 190 MacAndrew, Elizabeth, 108
Kristeva, Julia, 22, 81, 114, The Magic Toyshop, 4, 19, 25–30,
145–6, 155–7, 162, 165–8, 37–9, 41–2, 44–5, 47, 55, 62,
176–7, 181 74, 182, 202
Kuntze, Daniel, 63–4, 69, mansard roof, 108
100–1 mansion, 27, 29–32, 34–5, 39,
43–4, 69, 99, 101, 108,
labyrinth, 122–3 194–5
Lacan, Jacques, 21, 34, 107, 121, Marin, Louis, 146, 182
128 Marten, Nina, 130–1, 135–6
Écrits, 121 Martin, Valerie, 4, 20, 63, 65–7,
Laine, Tarja, 127 69–87, 100, 104
Lang, Karen, 44 see also Property
language, 66, 99, 104, 164–5, 171, masculinity, 20, 26, 29, 48–50, 52,
179, 187, 198 53, 57, 61, 66, 69–73, 76–7,
Laub, Dori, 93 85, 87, 115
Law, see Symbolic order masochism, 46, 52
law (of figure and ground), 128 maternal, 42, 44, 81, 130, 164,
law (housing), 2 171–2, 178
Lawrence, David, 95 McGlynn, Mary, 188
Le Corbusier, 18, 34 Meikle, Denis, 132
Lefebvre, Henri, 9, 19, 26, 28, melancholia, 21–2, 101, 144–6,
30–1, 37, 40–1, 65, 123, 150–1, 154–7, 159–63, 165–8,
185 170, 174, 176, 183
see also architecture under and depression, 22, 145
property in as dialectic, 22, 153, 155–6,
lesbian, 193 167
Levinas, Emmanuel, 141–2 as disavowal of loss, 21, 151, 161,
Lewis, Tyson, 137 162, 163, 164, 166–8, 174,
libidinal, libido, 78, 114, 150, 164, 178, 179–80
179 as incorporation vs. introjection,
Liebniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 123, 22, 145
125 as paradox, 168
limbo, 94 relationship to the double (The
see also elsewhere, purgatory Others), 149–53
liminality, 33, 53, 54, 80, 161, 168, relationship to mourning, 144–5
181 self-reproach in, 163
lived space, see house as transcendence, 22, 144–6, 150,
London, 45, 103, 107 154–9, 160, 161, 168,
Loos, Adolf, 55 176–8, 203
242 Index
melancholia—continued monument, 94, 101, 146

as unconscious, 21, 145 morality, 20, 65, 73, 78, 172, 175
see also incorporation, Morrison, Toni, 1, 3, 20, 63, 65–6,
introjection, melancholy 68, 87–8, 95, 100, 104, 123
object, mourning, The Others, see also Beloved
The Orphanage mother, 21, 32–4, 44, 70, 72, 77–8,
melancholy object, 22, 145–6, 155 81–4, 86–7, 90, 93–5, 97, 106,
Melchor-Bonnet, Sabine, 38, 39 113–16, 119, 130, 133, 142,
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 12, 14–16, 146, 148, 151–2, 157–8,
49, 59, 112, 127, 163, 192 160–2, 172, 174–5, 178, 181,
messiness, 29, 57, 59, 137 200–1
see also clutter, junk see also maternal, Beloved, The
metamorphosis, 60, 107, 134, Exorcist, The Others, The
138 Orphanage
metaphor, see under haunting, house mourning, 22, 43, 89, 143–4, 146,
see also water 150, 161–3, 167, 179–80, 187
metapsychology, 179 see also melancholia
Metcalfe, Alan, 59 Muslim, 198
metonymy, 36, 48, 50, 54, 58, 60, myth, 29, 51, 54, 60–1, 171
70, 79, 81, 90, 109, 116, 118,
174, 187–8, 192
narcissism, 30–1, 150, 163, 176
Metzstein, Margery, 190
Mezei, Kathy, 5 narrative technique, 3, 66, 76, 78,
98, 101, 119, 126, 158–9,
Milbank, Alison, 4
174–6, 178, 180, 186, 192,
Miller, J. Hillis, 88
194, 195, 200
Millington, Gareth, 155–6
ambiguity in, 3, 76, 78, 98, 119,
mirror, 19, 27, 29, 30, 31–2, 34,
126, 174–5, 192, 195
35, 37–40, 42, 47, 50, 55,
89–90, 103, 188, 194, 196 closure in, 175–6, 180, 186
as heterotopic, 19, 38 framed/framing in, 194, 200
mise-en-scéne, 21, 46, 106, 110, looping in, 158–9
116–17, 149, 178, 181 non-closure in, 176
misogyny, 208 twist in, 159, 178
modern living, 21, 108, 109, 140, unreliability in, 66, 76, 101
141, 203 see also fiction, storytelling
see also private property Navaro-Yashin, Yael, 157
Moller and Müller house, 55 New Orleans, 65, 69, 77, 81
monad, 21, 107, 123, 125–6, Ng, Andrew Hock Soon, 150
131–3, 134, 138, 142 nighttime, 33
see also hermetic, Repulsion nineteenth century, 20, 50, 65–6,
monastery, 132 69–70, 73, 76–7, 80, 85, 87,
monochrome, 197 140–1
monster, 3, 104, 139, 200 nomadology, 137–8, 141–2
monstrosity, 20, 45, 63–4, 100–1, nostalgia, 101, 162, 175
108, 126, 194 noumenon, 104, 185
Index 243
object, 6, 8–9, 13–18, 21–2, 30–1, paranormal, 2, 8, 106

43, 49–50, 53–9, 62, 74, 76, parody, 1, 35, 39–40, 50, 60,
78–9, 83, 85, 92, 109, 113–14, 76
116–17, 121–2, 128, 142–6, pastness, 87
150–2, 155–7, 161–5, 167–8, patriarchy, 4–5, 26–8, 39, 49
171, 176, 179–80, 189–92, Pensky, Max, 22, 145, 155–6
195–6, 201, 202 personification, 88, 95
as cause of desire, see under desire phallic, 57, 76, 81, 115
as confusion with subject, 54–6, phantasmal, 32, 84, 179–80
79 phantom, 29
household, 6, 8, 9, 13–14, 78, phenomenology, 12, 16, 100
116, 152, 189–90, 191, 192, photography, 30, 31–2, 57–8, 153,
196 182–3, 195, 199
as melancholic, see melancholy photophobia, 48
object photosensitivity, 148
relationship to space, 15, 92, 202 place, see under heterotopia, space
slaves as, 74 plantation, plantation house (sugar),
woman as, 16, 29 65, 67, 72–4, 77, 79–80, 100
object association game, see pli, see fold
children’s games Poe, Edgar Allen, 2–3
object-love, 83, 113, 145, 150 poison, 75, 166–7
objet petit a, 84–5, 121 Polanski, Roman, 10, 20, 103, 105,
ontology, 106, 121–2, 173 126, 132, 134
Orange Prize, 63 see also Repulsion
originary loss, 100, 144, 146, Pollock, Griselda, 17
161–5, 168 possession, 2, 18, 21, 95, 103,
see also under trauma 105–6, 109–10, 113–16, 119,
orphanage, 146, 160–2, 166 124, 126, 144
The Orphanage (El Orfanato), 7, 9, postfeminist, 19
21–2, 143–7, 159–83, 175, postmillennial, 194
203 postmortem, 153
orphans, 172, 181 preservation work, see homemaking
otherness, 89, 115, 122, 124, 183 presymbolic, 34
The Others, 9, 18, 21, 143–51, private property, 2, 21, 108, 137,
153–9, 166, 167, 177, 178, 140–2, 203
180, 181, 194, 202, 203 Property, 2, 4, 20, 63, 65–87, 99,
Ouija board, 108 101, 104
psyche, 7, 21–2, 28, 65, 68, 80,
panel (comics), 200–1 92, 97, 101, 103–4, 106,
see also comics 110, 112–14, 121, 125–6,
panning shot, 169 127, 133, 135, 138–9, 144,
panoptican, 35, 74–5, 77 146, 149–50, 155, 160, 164,
paradox, see under house, 179, 185–8, 192
melancholia psychiatric clinic, 187
paranoia, 20, 67, 80–5, 101 psychiatrist, 45, 51
244 Index
psychic, 168 Rueda, Belén, 177

psychoanalysis, 2, 4, 6, 10, 12, 13, ruins, 42–4, 47, 50, 157
16, 22–3, 67, 82, 84, 106, Rybczynksi, Witold, 203
113–14, 144, 146, 155, 161, Rydzewska, Joanna, 135, 138
179
Kleinian, 82 sacred, 69, 100, 167, 210
Lacanian, 21; see also Lacan, sadism, 40, 46, 73
Jacques sadomasochism, 50
real in, 128, 149 Sage, Lorna, 46, 175
see also Sigmund Freud Said, Edward, 80, 82
psychodrama, 3, 18, 104–5, 112 sameness, 122
psychopathology, 144 Satrapi, Marjani: Persopolis, 193
Pulitzer Prize, 63 Scarry, Elaine, 66
puppet, 35, 39–40 schizophrenia, 121
purgatory, 159, 178 scopophilia, 53
Scotland, 187
race, 18, 20, 64–6, 70, 73, 88 Scottish, 186
racism, 20, 101 secret self, see extimate
Radcliffe, Anne: The Mysteries of Sedgwick, Eve Kosovsky, 78–9
Udolpho, 1 self, 2, 12, 16, 19, 21, 27–8, 29,
Rand, Nicholas, 178 30–6, 39, 42–3, 48, 50, 53,
Rank, Otto, 149 55–6, 58, 62, 66, 77,
Rashkin, Esther, 164 79–80, 83, 96, 104, 107, 110,
reality, 12, 15, 29, 32, 36, 38, 40–2, 112–13, 115, 120–2, 124–6,
53–5, 80, 88, 98, 129, 134–5, 130–3, 138, 145, 149–50, 157,
139, 149, 161, 175, 180, 163, 167, 180, 187–93, 195
182–3, 187–9 as absence, 21, 34, 151, 153,
real, see under psychoanalysis 161, 178
regression, 34, 81, 171 as image, 12, 19, 27, 30–6, 39,
Reineke, Martha, 166–7 43, 57
rememory, 68–9, 98–101, 123 as secret, see extimate
Renaissance, 86–7 self-blame, 192
repressed, the, 106–8, 116, 118, self-objectification, 30, 54, 56,
121 191
repression, 10, 20–1, 28, 67, 80, 86, self-reproach, see melancholia
91, 93, 95, 98, 110–11, 113, see also body, double, identity,
115, 121, 124, 126, 131, 133, subjectivity
144, 148, 153, 193 seventeenth century, 48
Repulsion, 10, 20–1, 103–7, 111, sexuality, 12–13, 26, 28, 36, 45, 52,
120, 126–42, 154, 191, 203 55, 61, 111, 113, 193
as allegory, 108, 139–42 Shiner, Larry E., 100
Rice, Chris, 8–9, 18, 32 Shonfield, Katherine, 6, 136
Rochberg-Halton, Eugene, 112 shot (camera), 77, 108–10, 116–19,
Roe, Sue, 50, 52–4 131, 134, 136, 148, 152,
Romanticism, 50, 100 153, 168, 169, 177, 199–200
Index 245
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
transsexual operation, see under Vershaffel, Bart, 10–11

architecture victim, 13, 20, 47, 93, 101, 103,
trauma, 20, 22, 68, 91–8, 100–1, 153, 167, 175–6, 197
104, 126, 145–51, 154, 157–8, Victorian, 70, 108, 144, 211
178, 189, 192–5 Vidler, Anthony, 13, 20, 68, 91–2,
as failure to witness, 93–4 98–9, 105
as looping, 93–4; see also narrative violence, 20, 62, 66, 98, 114, 116,
under looping in 139, 201
as originary moment, 158–9 Virginia, 209
as unclaimed experience, 93, Vitruvius, 86
147–8 Voyeurism, 3, 35, 55–6, 112
The Trick is to Keep Breathing, 22,
185–93 Walker, Lynne, 69–70, 80, 85
tuberculosis, 153 walls, 3, 8, 18, 20, 28–9, 35, 37, 40,
Tunisian, 57 47–52, 56–7, 59, 60, 66, 68,
70, 77, 94, 109, 116, 127,
uncanny, the, 2–3, 13, 14, 20, 25, 135–6, 138, 144, 178, 180,
38, 98, 101, 105, 137, 141, 192
144–5, 150, 203 as white, 20, 28, 47–52, 70
see also under architecture Walpole, Horace: The Castle of
unconscious, the, 7, 9–12, 17, Otranto, 1
19–22, 25, 27–8, 31–2, 43, wardrobe, 116–17
48–50, 52, 54, 59, 62–3, 65, Warhol, Robyn, 195
67–8, 71, 78–80, 82–7, 92, washing, 132, 137, 171
94–5, 99, 103–4, 106–7, Washington, 108
110–12, 114, 116–21, 125, water, 1, 37, 48, 134, 201–2
133, 145, 148, 150, 151, see also The Trick is to Keep
153–6, 163–4, 168, 179, 187, Breathing, Fun Home
195, 197–8, 202–3 Watson, Julia, 195
see also desire, melancholia Weissberg, Liliane, 88
unfolding (pli), see fold whiteness, 29, 47–50
unheimlich, (unhomely), 2, 13, 18, Whitlock, Gilian, 217
91, 105–6, 110, 152 Wigley, Mark, 12–13, 20, 28, 36,
unhomely, 2, 13, 18, 91, 105–6, 48–9, 61, 189, 191
110 Williams, James, 122
unspeakable, 1, 10, 20–1, 65, 67, Williams, Raymond, 104
80, 92, 96, 98, 104, 106, 116, windows, 47, 75, 90, 108, 117–19,
121, 126, 145, 147–8 132, 151, 154, 177–8
see also desire under unconscious Wolfreys, Julian, 5, 143–4, 168
utopia, 37, 38–9, 41–2, 61, 146–7,
182–3 Žižek, Slavoj, 53, 149

Espaço

Încărcat de

Informații document

Titlu original

Drepturi de autor

Formate disponibile

Partajați acest document

Partajați sau inserați document

Opțiuni de partajare

Vi se pare util acest document?

Este necorespunzător acest conținut?

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

Espaço

Încărcat de

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies

Robert T. Tally Jr. is Associate Professor of English at Texas State Univer-

Andrew Hock Soon Ng

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above

Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United

ISBN 978-1-349-71086-7 ISBN 978-1-137-53291-6 (eBook)

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Integra Software Services

First edition: July 2015

2 Housing the Unspeakable: Valerie Martin’s Property and

3.1 The Exorcist: Fathers Merrin and Karras – priests or

Robert T. Tally Jr.

I would like to thank the series editor, Associate Professor Robert

● The section on Love in Chapter 1 appeared as “Subjecting Spaces:

The Subject of the House

G othic narratives have long privileged the house as one of their

quaint novel is arguably the precursor of this narrative type; other

branch of Gothic narratives Tzvetan Todorov identiﬁes as fantastic

and punishment. In this study, works featuring a duplicitous house

unfolding. As the title of this introduction means to intimate, the sub-

merely a ﬁgurative element in the story. In ﬁlms, the palpability of

this book, the spatial anomaly is either clearly or potentially a reﬂec-

a structural presence, but on its interiority and the objects corre-

control . . . and hence an explicit manipulation of an environment to

Possibly because negotiation with the domestic interior engenders

What happens to femininity when it is linked to domesticity? At ﬁrst,

The last sentence in the quote above is crucial as it serves to consoli-

theoretical framework underscoring my inquiry is phenomenology as

[E]ven though the deﬁnition of space is ostensibly the subject of archi-

Wigley astutely notes that the performance of guarding architecture

an unseen force that directly imposes and inﬂuences, I nevertheless

The subject’s relation to space . . . is not passive . . . rather, the ways in

Grosz’s point serves as an important reminder that space is “mean-

Accordingly, rather than a dominant, independent point of view

It is as an embodied subject that the subject occupies a perspective

What can be surmised from Grosz’s observations is that as much as

to this is also the problem that the representation of space, according

The argument above, when realigned to a perspective on architecture,

a pattern of space, governed by intricate conventions about what space

Implied in Hanson’s observation is the house’s functions as a locus

and, by extension, the kinds of relationship—whether gendered,

readily to my analytical trajectory that seeks to clarify some of its

property potentially threatens to sabotage such an exertion and, in the

introducing it in retrospect to my analysis of the ﬁrst narrative (The

In light of Max Pensky’s notion of melancholy object, what the ﬁlm

is accepted practice in psychoanalytical criticism, it is equally viewed

This study begins with a discussion of the late Angela Carter’s

associated with the house—as implied by the notion of the “hearth”—

The Magic Toyshop

Lady’s Chatterley Lover and Lorna Doone (2). Arguably, there is a

Her parents’ wedding photograph hung over the mantelpiece, where

Inasmuch as its symmetry is projected therein, the Ego is liable to

In Lefebvre’s assessment, a mirror image may correspond, but can

the mirror as if she were a photograph in her grown-up photo album”

Melanie’s sexual awakening and ﬁgurative re/displacement of her

The ﬂowers cupped . . . with a midnight, unguessable sweetness, and

In Patricia Juliana Smith’s assessment, the garden in this episode pur-

or the unfathomable.” When this perspective is framed against the

The House that Uncle Philip Built

transforming them into automatons and thus homogenizing every-

What was once familiar to Melanie has, as a consequence of sojourning

Heterotopic Duplicity and the Advent of Utopia

spatial concept developed by Michel Foucault. First introduced in