Unsettling America : the malevolent house motif in American fiction

Abstract

In setting out to understand the exact nature of the American haunted house, I have endeavoured to become familiar with a wide range of novels and short stories by American authors, from the beginning of the nineteenth century up until the present day, in which houses imbued with a malign supernatural agency feature prominently. In doing so, it became possible to isolate a number of central characteristics which American fiction of this kind did not fully share with its English or European equivalents. First and foremost, such frightening fictional houses frequently appear in texts which are themselves fundamentally concerned with the nature of space, and particularly with the long-standing cultural construction of America as a space devoid of (Anglo European) historical associations. More specifically, such texts engage directly with the representation of America as a space which has been explored from east to west, and which enshrines within its self image such binary oppositions as freedom/restriction, openness/ enclosure, emptiness/ plenitude, unknown/ known, wilderness/ civilisation, anarchy/ culture and, ultimately and somewhat inevitably, male/female. In particular, the entire nexus of oppositions privileges or the masculine sphere of action and movement, forging out into the empty spaces of the wilderness, over the feminine sphere of passivity and immanence, firmly settled in the thickly plotted, highly codified and spatially divided or reticulated realm of social and cultural existence. At the same time, however, the very emphasis placed upon autonomy and liberty in American culture means that the individual dwelling itself overlaps with the notion of (masculine) American selfhood. Domestic space is therefore both central and alien to this form of subjectivity, eliciting fear and desire in the male subject. Above and beyond this, the very nature of wilderness space - it disorientating lack of reference points or familiar markers of place or culture - means that the definition of American masculinity is undermined from within by fictional male characters’ fear of the very thing that they are exhorted to embrace. In order to conceal this fear while emphasising men’s discomfort in domestic, feminine space, American Gothic fiction frequently situates an avatar of feminine malevolence within the houses that it codes as dangerous and terrifying. What is paradoxical about these demonic female figures is that, as I shall demonstrate, they are often depicted as rendering domestic space frighteningly empty by cleaning it excessively - a trope laden with figurative significance within American culture. At the same time, however, by functioning as a central stable point in the fluid American landscape, these female figures equally serve to reduce such disturbing emptiness, at the same time as being blamed for causing it.