4 The House: Friend or Foe? Buildings, Dwellings, and Home in Fiction
ABSTRACT
Twentieth-century research in the human sciences suggests that the house in narratives deserves further attention beyond being regarded as the mere setting for a story. The impact of the idea of the home on the human mind is believed to generate intense psychological and emotional attachments which determine the way people relate to space and organize reality. This relationship with the home seems to go beyond the past or present human interaction held within the premises. For deeply engrained reasons, people often develop a one-to-one emotional connection with the house itself that occurs autonomously. In this regard, it could be argued that, to a certain extent, the home complements and expands the self. This chapter explores a series of different insights into the concept of the home, all of which converge into highlighting a primeval human need for a home which generates multifaceted relationships with buildings. For readers and writers, this implies that the house in a text will stand in a prominent place which will condition the way the house is understood.
The House: Friend or Foe? Buildings, Dwellings, and Home in Fiction
Several of the best-known names in literature, interestingly, do not belong to characters. Instead, they refer to houses, buildings or other inanimate architectural structures. Wuthering Heights, Satis House from Great Expectations, the house of Usher or Bly from The Turn of the Screw are names of literary houses that often prove to be easier to remember than the names of their inhabitants. The human mind seems to be provided with a psychological anchor which bonds individuals to the spaces they ← 95 | 96 → inhabit. Contemporary research in the human sciences, as will be pointed out below, suggests that the house in narratives deserves further attention beyond being regarded as the setting of the story. The marked presence of houses in fiction begins early in a reader’s lifetime, as it appears that the house is the most recurrent element in children’s literature not counting the children themselves. This may be due to the impact that the idea of home has on the human mind, an idea believed to generate, as will be seen, intense psychological and emotional attachments which could well determine the way people relate to space and organize reality. For these reasons among others, this chapter explores a number of insights into the concept of the home. The recurrent image of the house in literature suggests underlying levels of meaning that might remain veiled to the inattentive reader, yet could well be operative on lower levels of consciousness. Today, the analysis of houses has extended to other areas such as philosophy, architecture, sociology and lastly – most relevant to my purposes – literary criticism. The present chapter will explore the relevance of these studies to the literary theory and criticism and to textual analysis. The following pages aim to offer an assortment of diverse psychological insights into the concept of home, all of which suggest a primeval human fascination with home which, it will be my contention, influences literary interpretation. Examples of this will be seen in the context of a number of literary texts as the chapter draws to an end.
The Significance of Home to the Human Mind
Emotional response to a house is a common human trait which has received an increasing amount of attention in recent decades. Interwoven with the primeval need for shelter, there seem to be other aspects which only recently are receiving the attention they deserve. Architectural theorist Clare Cooper Marcus carried out a twenty-year study of these relations. She describes these dynamics as follows: ← 96 | 97 →
[There] is a very simple yet frequently overlooked premise: As we change and grow throughout our lives, our psychological development is punctuated not only by meaningful emotional relationships with people, but also by close affective ties with a number of significant physical environments, beginning in childhood. That these person-place relationships have been relatively ignored is partly due to the ways in which we have chosen to ‘slice up’ and study the world. (4)
Marcus found that behind the idea of the ‘home’ always stand profound human feelings associated with the intimate spheres of the person. To define the essence of what makes a house a home remains an elusive thing.
A justification of the emotional attachment to a house merely based on nostalgia for moments shared with other beings does not fully account for the bond between humans and houses. Feelings towards houses are often unconnected to people, in the same way that they are not necessarily directly linked to the amount of time spent in the building. To this end, there are houses that instantly feel welcoming and, at the same time, there are places which, regardless of the occupants or the furnishings, feel unhomely. Witold Rybczynski, professor of architecture and an architect himself, identified these emotional tensions in his clients, defining his experience as follows:
I had designed and built houses, and the experience was sometimes disturbing, for I found that the architectural ideals that I had been taught in school frequently disregarded – if they did not altogether contradict – my clients’ conventional notions of comfort […]. I found myself turning again and again to memories of old houses, and older rooms, and trying to understand what had made them feel so right, so comfortable. (1986: viii)
As Rybczynski points out, architects, developers and planners have recently started to take these compelling feelings into consideration, wondering which architectural features could meet the emotional needs of potential buyers in order to improve their sales. Significantly, the idea of finding the right house is not directly related to the wealth of the seeker. Some people can afford several houses but feel alienated in all of them, while others feel ‘at home’ in strikingly modest living spaces. Some may be mystified as to why they chose an inappropriate house for their needs – too small or too big, for example – only to discover later that these houses reminded them ← 97 | 98 → of real or imaginary buildings from their past which still reverberated in their unconscious (viii).
Since the 1970s, environmental psychology and sociology have appealed to the concept of ‘dwelling’ in an attempt to measure the liveability of a place (Flade 72). The findings point to an intimate connection between the person and the building, by which people personalise the living space according to their own identities, transforming a generic house into an individual home (72). This happens because, for deeply engrained reasons, humans react strongly to registers of the spatial spectrum such as the dwelling, the home country, the region and the neighbourhood, these being ‘the spaces people fight for and grieve over’ (Porteous 1995: 159).
The close association between the physical space of the home and the self is actually a determining component in our society and is used by the social order in several ways. An example of its importance is the acknowledgement of the need to personalise space. Teenagers often display posters, photos, clothes, etc. in disarray, thus making a statement about identity by the way they (dis)organise their environment, even though their identities might not be fully developed yet. This attitude of proclaiming identity in one’s own private space is prolonged in the current obsession with home decoration and renovation (Lewis and Cho 2006: 74).
Examples of deliberate manipulation of the personalization of space can be seen in the contrast between prisons and institutions like the army. When one is stripped of all freedom, the inmate is permitted to bring personally meaningful objects so that they may help in the assimilation of reclusion and minimise potential conflict. Conversely, when society wishes to mould a whole a group of individuals together who do have the option of leaving at will (as is the case in the army or in religious orders, for example), connection with the home is consistently precluded, and the attention of the group is deliberately focused away from personal items (Marcus 1995: 11). The prominence of the home in our society has also created social contradictions. For instance, in many countries it is mandatory to have an official identification document, while there are no regulations about having a residential address. However, in these same countries a person without a fixed address is viewed suspiciously and, in Western society, is labelled ‘homeless’ or transient. A lack of abode can be a serious, if not an ← 98 | 99 → absolute, impediment to finding a job, voting, opening a bank account or, ironically, renting a place to live (4). Tyson Lewis and Daniel Cho coincide with Claire C. Marcus in denouncing this social incongruity and extend their observation to the figures of the drifter and the wanderer, all nomadic and homeless, who were considered ‘a disturbance to the normative symbolic order that was structured around the traditional home’ (2006: 71).
There is further evidence of the human need for a healthy relationship with the home in that disturbances in this relationship can result in psychological disorders. When the home does not feel right – as for instance, homes with a lack of privacy or homes that are remarkably isolating – it can adversely affect mental health (Ewans et al. 2000: 529–30). Common disorders are what Marcus labelled as ‘domocentrism’ and ‘domophobism’.1 Domocentrics are profoundly connected to their house, and this relationship becomes a substitute for and barrier to a healthy interaction with other people (Marcus 1992: 82). Domophobics conversely feel secure in open spaces; they experience anxiety and discomfort at the thought of spending time in a home or having a fixed address, and find it extremely difficult to feel at home anywhere. Both conditions stem from the same primeval need for a balanced harmonious relationship with architectural space, where both extremes of excessive dependence and total rejection would be excluded.
Marcus explored the reactions of people who had lost their homes, and concluded that generally this was an emotionally demanding experience, which required a mourning period: ‘When the home is lost, the loss of the house has to be acknowledged and grieved before our consciousness opens up to new possibilities’ (14). The most difficult scenario of loss occurs when the building is destroyed. ‘Houses live and die. So do villages and city neighbourhoods. It seems a natural process […]. Unfortunately, individuals continue to develop attachments to buildings […], [and] so often these attachments come to grief when the objects of attachment – places – are destroyed’ (Porteous 1995: 151). When houses are deliberately destroyed or assaulted by third parties, in what has been referred to as ← 99 | 100 → ‘domicide’ (151), the occupants’ response to the attack has been noted as extremely intense. Similarly, when houses are broken into, people respond with a sense of violation and grief, as the house is felt to be part of the self. People whose houses have been burgled often scrub those houses as if their own physical bodies, as opposed to wood and bricks, had been breached (Marcus 1995: 243).
As all this evidence suggests, the relationship with the home seems to go beyond past or present human interactions held within the premises. It occurs autonomously in a one-to-one emotional connection with the house itself that is not based on the human group. In this regard, it could be argued that to a certain extent, the home complements and expands the self. To trace the point where this identification with the home begins, it is necessary to appeal to developmental psychology. This area of psychology confirms that the feelings for the house, which originate in early childhood, are independent from the family group. When the child begins to acquire knowledge of the world, he or she ‘recognises various objects by the sense of touch alone’ (Piaget 1956: xii). In the early years of life, thus, what is real is what is tangibly accessible, and is usually comprised of the home. The first home is linked to the person’s most fundamental identity because the two are undifferentiated. Given that early exploration of the world is based on ‘“proximity”, corresponding to the simplest type of perceptual structurization’ (6), the young child is not capable of distinguishing himself from his surroundings, which implies that the family home appears to be an extension of the body in as much as the self is an extension of the family house (Piaget 2007: 126). Furthermore, the child infers that all objects which present a certain measure of activity are in fact animated (174, 250). The home, thus, with constant activity such as opening and closing doors and windows, noises or changes of lighting, is very much a living extension of the child, a seemingly animated first universe rather than a purely architectural structure. This deepest-laid association between the home and the person is carried throughout life, and can be easily seen in fiction where buildings often echo the human attributes of their dwellers.
The leap from the home-world to the outer-world when children are old enough to attend school is a major mental milestone, in that they cross well defined physical boundaries and structures that separate home ← 100 | 101 → from the vast outside world in which they will later live. In The Poetics of Space (1958), the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard defines leaving the home as an critical transition (7). While it is true that infants exit their home on a regular basis, their relationship with the world outside is purely contemplative and normally takes place from a pram or a car, without physical access to what they see before them. Following Piaget and Bachelard’s ideas, it could be argued that most of the time there is no difference between what children see from the pram and what they see on the television in the lounge, and so to the child the outside world is not corporeal but equally fictitious.
The imprint left on the adult psyche by the childhood home is a permanent link to the childhood universe. It becomes a symbol of a lost comfort zone, where most of what was tangible was contained within the walls of the family home and represents safety. As the child grows older, traces of that connection with what was once understood as part of one’s self are likely to remain. The need for harmony with the place we inhabit is therefore explained by the fact that, at one time, it was constituted as part of the self and, for a long time, it was all that was real.
In the last decades, this earlier connection between the self and the home has in fact been used as a means to understand early human development. After several decades of worldwide travel studying different architectures from different cultures, architect and educator Olivier Marc noted that the way children see themselves is intimately related to their portrayal of houses, which become symbols for their emotional, mental, and even physical processes (1977: 76). Marc came to the conclusion that not only do houses represent the different cultures they stem from, but also that in all cultures, interestingly, the drawings of houses by children symbolize the individual human being. Furthermore, houses can stand as figurative representations of human trauma. Children will reach out to adults when they are in physical pain but are often reticent when it comes to talking about their emotional conflicts, as they fear their feelings might not be approved of by their elders. Marc describes this close link as follows:
[A]s he draws, the child is also constructing his self, disclosing to himself his own hesitations, obsessions, inhibitions or fears […]. He is consumed by emotions which ← 101 | 102 → he lacks the experience to hold in check […] [a]nd so the child draws himself as he draws his house; sad or smiling, open or closed, pleasant or aggressive, welcoming or forbidding, the houses take the form of so many facial expressions. At first the house he draws is symmetrical, as he is; sometimes it is a face, sometimes the representation of his whole physique, very often both. The house can be a face whose roof is a hat, or its frame may resemble the child’s body. (76–7)
House drawings can represent permanent or durable states of mind, but they may also reveal a momentary condition or a fleeting mind set. In his research, this architect came upon the circumstance that children who had a temporary physical condition would, until healed, depict the house accordingly. For instance, children with injured legs would draw leaning houses (77). Bachelard also notes the association between the house and the ‘psychic state’ of the child in that the representation of houses ‘bespeak intimacy’, given that these drawings appear to illustrate the children’s distress (1994: 72). Bachelard comments on the work done by the psychiatrist Françoise Minkowska, who analysed house drawings by Holocaust children, including those of children in hiding spots such as false ceilings or wardrobes.2 The drawing of a barrack by a child from a concentration camp accentuates the belfry steeple and the angles of the supporting structure, giving it a piercing appearance.3 The same distortion is applied to some of the chimneys on the roof, while the original structure of the barrack mostly follows right angles. Trees along the side assume an aggressive position as they partially block the bottom half of the building. Common traits of trees such as, trunk shape or colour have been altered by the painter, and what is left is a series of black twisted branches that seem to hold the barrack up in the air, like dark claws emerging from the otherwise white ground. ← 102 | 103 → Notably, this girl studied by Minkowska chose a red shade for some areas of the roof in a drawing which otherwise was entirely made up of shades of grey and black. The pointy structures, the claw-like branches, and the red shade all conjure up images of injury and damage. The houses drawn by both Holocaust victims and children in hideaways invariably reflected their feelings in those moments. These houses function as projections of their own selves; the association takes place unconsciously and is therefore free of restrictions or restraints. Considering the close association between home and person, it is not surprising that psychology appeals to this deep bond between humans and houses in order to understand the mind behind a representation of a house. Analogous mental processes are at work in the psyche of children and in writers’ creative minds: in the former, these processes are externalized by the choice of shapes and colours; in the latter, by the ways in which fiction is located in, and unfolds in relation to, its settings.
House and Psychoanalysis: Throbs in the Unconscious
The most significant advance in the study of the house is likely to be found in the rise of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis shifted the attention of psychology from what was a literal one-to-one communication between patient and therapist to the world of symbols and hidden meanings, taken to be gateways to the unconscious. Initially, dreams were looked at as premonitions, and houses were often interpreted literally as sheltering structures.4 However, there are early records of houses being interpreted on a psychological level and analysed as symbols representing other aspects of the dreamer’s life. One of the earliest written records of the study of houses ← 103 | 104 → on a symbolic level, and an antecedent to the creation of psychoanalysis in the twentieth century, is Artemidorus Daldianus’s study of dreams (second century ad). The diviner Artemidorus wrote the five-volume Greek work, the Oneirocritica, where he studied the symbolic potential of some objects. Allegedly, he was the first to identify formally the connection between the house and the human body in a section that he titled ‘The House, Image of the Self’. He realized that in dreams houses stood for the very person of the dreamer, thus reflecting psychic activity and being part of the inner landscape (Marc 1977: 67). He understood houses and dwelling structures as expansions of the human body and symbols of a person’s physical vulnerability. He explained that the lack of a house would therefore indicate a lack of security: ‘[S]omeone dreamt that his wall had been broken through […] all those things refer to the body’ (Artemidorus 1975: 199). He went on to amplify this description as ‘[a]ll objects that surround our person like, for example, a cloak, a house, a wall, a ship, and similar things, signify one another’ (199). Artemidorus’s interpretation presents a psychological insight, as opposed to a merely premonitory precedent.
Artemidorus took the first step in a trend which would reach its peak with the emergence of psychoanalysis. One of the first psychoanalysts to expand on the interpretation of the house was Wilhelm Stekel (1868–1940). He associated the house with the body of the dreamer, reading houses in terms of sexual anxieties (Stekel 1943: 420), and also expanded on the significance of houses by equating a former home with a person’s past. A person who, in dreams, lives in his old house, is a person who cannot face the present time: ‘He lives in the old house, that is to say in the past’ (439). By reading the building chronologically, Stekel shows that the house can function as a projection not only of a person, but also of the person’s past, highlighting the potential for the house to symbolize the individual in a different moment in time.
The turning point in the interpretation of houses as symbols takes place with Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961). Jung’s metaphor of the house as a symbol for the mind is possibly the most widely acknowledged to date:
I dreamed that I was in ‘my home,’ apparently on the first floor, in a cosy, pleasant sitting room furnished in the manner of the 18th century. I was astonished that I ← 104 | 105 → had never seen this room before, and began to wonder what the ground floor was like. I went downstairs and found the place was rather dark, with panelled walls and heavy furniture dating from the 16th century or even earlier. My surprise and curiosity increased. I wanted to see more of the whole structure of this house. So I went down to the cellar, where I found a door opening onto a flight of stone steps that led to a large vaulted room. The floor consisted of large slabs of stone and the walls seemed very ancient. I examined the mortar and found it was mixed with splinters of brick. Obviously the walls were of Roman origin. I became increasingly excited. In one corner, I saw an iron ring on a stone slab. I pulled up the slab and saw yet another narrow flight of steps leading to a kind of cave, which seemed to be a prehistoric tomb, containing two skulls, some bones, and broken shards of pottery. Then I woke up. (1980: 42–3)
Jung interpreted this house as an image of his own mind, in which the different levels stood for layers of his consciousness or unconscious, reflecting as well the evolution of his psyche. He explained his dream in the following manner:
It was plain to me that the house represented a kind of image of the psyche – that is to say, of my then state of consciousness, with hitherto unconscious additions. Consciousness was represented by the salon. It had an inhabited atmosphere, in spite of its antiquated style.
The ground floor stood for the first level of the unconscious. The deeper I went, the more alien and the darker the scene became. In the cave, I discovered remains of a primitive culture, that is, the world of the primitive man within myself – a world which can scarcely be reached or illuminated by consciousness. The primitive psyche of man borders on the life of the animal soul, just as the caves of prehistoric times were usually inhabited by animals before man laid claim to them. (1963: 184)
Later on in his life, Jung used this dream to illustrate the way the human mind works. Thanks to his analysis, his insights about house symbolism can be applied to the identification of meanings corresponding to the various areas of the dreamer’s psyche (especially the roof and foundations).
When Jung expanded this metaphor by making specific references to attic/cellar imagery, he made an insightful symbolic association between the house and buried anxieties in the mind. He uses this polarized imagery to represent the conscious/unconscious dualism and to illustrate the phenomenon of repression. Gaston Bachelard builds on this dual image by incorporating the notion of fear. Quoting Jung, he posits: ‘Here the conscious ← 105 | 106 → acts like a man who, hearing a suspicious noise in the cellar, hurries to the attic and, finding no burglars there decides, consequently, that the noise was pure imagination. In reality, this prudent man did not venture into the cellar’ (Bachelard 1994: 19).5 Subsequently, he builds on Jung’s metaphor as follows:
In the attic rats and mice can make considerable noise. But […] the creatures moving about in the cellar are slower, less scampering, more mysterious. In the attic, fears are easily ‘rationalized.’ Whereas in the cellar […] rationalization is less rapid and less clear; also is never definitive. In the attic, the day’s experiences can always efface the fears of night. In the cellar, darkness prevails both day and night, and even when we are carrying a lighted candle, we see shadows dancing on the dark walls. (19)
In Bachelard’s contribution, we can see where human anxieties would fit into the metaphor of the house of the human mind. Significantly, Bachelard positions anxieties not coming from the outside as in Artemidorus’s or Stekel’s analysis. Instead, they are placed inside the house, exemplifying the mind’s processing of trouble by locking fears up in the lower layers of the mind, a place where they can remind the psyche of their presence so that they can be dealt with and eventually exorcized. It is significant that anxieties and fears are visualized as part of the metaphorical house of the mind by Jung and Bachelard, revealing that such fears are part of what constitutes ourselves and what feels close or familiar to our experience.
In 1919, Sigmund Freud presented a theory which connected precisely the idea of home with what is familiar and with horror. According to his theory of ‘the uncanny’, what a person finds most unsettling is what touches or is related to the person’s own home or what is most familiar: ‘this uncanny element is actually nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed’ (Freud 2003: 148). In this essay, he defines the word ‘heimlich’ in his native language: ‘Heimlich, adj.: belonging to the house, to the family, or: regarded as belonging to it […] ‘intimate, cosily homely; arousing a pleasant feeling of quiet contentment, etc., of comfortable repose and secure protection, like the enclosed, comfortable house’ (126–7). ‘Unheimlich’, ← 106 | 107 → however, is defined as ‘what was meant to remain secret and hidden and has come into the open’ (132). Merging the two definitions together, Freud comes up with the following logic: ‘[The] word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which are not mutually contradictory, but very different from each other – the one relating to what is familiar and comfortable, the other to what is concealed and kept hidden’ (132). Here we see the same duality found in Jung’s attic/cellar images. The house as a whole therefore, is not entirely to be trusted, as it allows for the possibility that things which are safely hidden (in psychoanalytical language ‘repressed’), might, to our horror, unexpectedly reveal themselves.
In his theory of the uncanny, Freud posits that there is a unique quality about what is familiar to us, so that when it turns against us it becomes all the more disturbing and frightening. Freud proposes that our prior acquaintance with an object or place could be the precise property that makes the object/place particularly frightening to us. With regard to houses, the whole essay is presented in terms of familiarity with the family home, since the house emerges as the one entity/structure that hosts most of what can make us vulnerable. The house is at once what shelters us and conceals what, for various reasons, should remain hidden. Most importantly, Freud’s theory of the uncanny once again acknowledges people’s feelings of trust and human attachment to the home, which account for the sense of disorientation and betrayal when the home revolts against us. Freud notes that there are ‘particularly favourable conditions generating feelings of the uncanny if intellectual uncertainty is aroused as to whether something is inanimate or animate’ since children make no sharp distinction between these two categories (140–1). When this happens, former pleasurable feelings of safety are transformed into unsettling emotions. A feeling of betrayal is triggered when something trusted becomes contemplated as an enemy; however, our former attachment to this new enemy prevents us from letting go.
Freud’s ideas, which linked the literal and the repressed, have had a decisive influence on literary criticism. If Freud’s theory revolved around what was included in the home and therefore was familiar, Maria Tatar has explored specifically the uncanniness of buildings in a selection of emblematic houses in English fiction. Her study sheds further light onto ← 107 | 108 → the question of why human beings are so responsive to the concept of home. She concludes that, indeed, what made them mysterious was precisely that the houses stood on the border between the familiar and the strange:
[O]ne obvious point of departure for a study of the uncanny is the home. If we begin by looking at some of the familiar places in literature, it may be possible to recognize just what makes them mysterious or eerie. What, in short, makes a house unheimlich, or haunted? It is precisely in the border area between the familiar and the strange – at the point where heimlich and unheimlich merge in the meaning to suggest the sinister or treacherous. (Tatar 1981: 169)
Tatar’s ideas suggest that the reason why haunted houses perform successfully as agents of evil in horror fiction is precisely because this fiction feeds on our primeval psychological attachment to buildings, this being the reason why characters can never quite let go of the foul home until it is often too late.
The Early Conditioning: Children’s Literature
The prominent place of the house in fiction highlighted by Tatar has been noted by other critics. The relevance of architecture for the understanding of the literary text is stressed by Ellen Eve Frank, who claims that a central strategy in the self’s interaction with the world consists in placing oneself in relation to a building as part of human interaction with the environment. Because of this disposition, locations and buildings can function as spatial pointers, impacting on the reader’s understanding of the literary work as a whole:
[Man] and the world are composed of the same elements which either are or have the illusion of being spatial-temporal, […] he imagines his consciousness or experience to be bounded or located in particular space, within white walls, bodies, time, while what is outside his personal realm he imagines to be boundless as he thinks the universe is boundless. Because of this structural correspondence, we may read ← 108 | 109 → all structures […] with a mental ruler and a table of equivalents […]. A building […] is also a building of meaning. (1979: 6–7)
Indeed, it appears that the grasping of the spatial structure of a story is central to the construction of its meaning. A story set in an undefined moment in time seems easier to seize than a story lacking spatial references, which, as a consequence, appears fluid and unstable, impossible almost for the human mind to visualize. House imagery, which, as we have seen, figures prominently in the human understanding of space, functions as a psychic anchor when it comes to the creation of meaning.
The prevalence of architecture in fiction can crucially be discerned in children’s literature. Society trains children to focus on house imagery more than they or we might be aware of. Together with the children’s direct experience of the privileged position of the family home in Western culture, children’s literature persistently presents house imagery. The internalization of this imagery results in what could be referred to as an ‘over-susceptibility’ to representations of the house which will accompany them all their lives. Psychologist Virginia L. Wolf carried out a study in which she examined children’s literature about houses and its effects on the child reader. In her work, Wolf highlights the large quantity of houses in works written for children, and analyses the consequences for them as adult readers:
Images of home abound in children’s literature […]. In Fairy Tales and After, Roger Sale emphasizes the importance of snug and cosy places throughout the history of children’s literature […]. My impression is not only that home is the dominant place in children’s literature, but also that the house is the chief form […] [this dominant place] takes. (1990: 54)
Once again following Piaget’s ideas of oneness with the home, Wolf explains that ‘the celebration of place in children’s literature is essentially a celebration of the self at one with the world’ (56). According to Wolf, as children grow they are presented with fiction which is gradually distanced from the idea of a safe home, with stories revolving around the need to protect, find or recover a house, to finally and eventually reach the point at which it is understood that there was never the certainty of home initially perceived: the safe refuge once thought invulnerable is in reality subject to all sorts ← 109 | 110 → of threats and dangers. This leaves an increasing sense of nostalgia in the growing child which might be visualized as the ‘wake of home’ (56). At this point, the child has to renounce the illusions of power, certainty and safety. Wolf believes that these are not forsaken easily, and argues that the longing for the childhood ideal of home remains, creating a particular receptiveness to the idea of home and therefore to house imagery in fiction:
For some time the original and the new perceptions of reality both exist within the child until the new finally wins out over the original. Although Piaget never says so, we know that this victory is never complete or final. Psychology tells us that the child survives within each of us, continuing to influence our dreams and our behaviour. So the infant’s mythic experience of being at one with the world continues to haunt our imaginations, despite our adult awareness of its egocentricity. (55)
From Wolf’s theory about the plethora of homes in children’s literature interesting implications arise, further enhancing the relevance of the depiction of houses in the construction of meaning, as it adds to the underlying power of house imagery for the adult reader and writer. The profusion and gradual withdrawal of homes for young readers which eventually disappear would condition readers by creating a habit of actively searching for the house in the text, a situation that is prolonged into the adulthood both of the reader and of the writer. Readers will look for the house in the story with interest and nostalgia simply because that is what they were instructed to do when they were young. It is likely that on most occasions adult readers will be unaware of this predisposition and that their responses will take place on an unconscious level. In the case of the writers, is seems hardly surprising that this training would result into significant and coded recreations of house imagery in their literary creations. The need for the grown child to constantly search for a home is still present in the adult reader’s mind, ready to find the home in the text or, in the case of the writer, to provide it and endow it with symbolism. Our reading processes therefore would, to an extent, be determined by this oversensibility to narrative depiction of houses. In this way, Wolf’s account suggests that not only we are biologically programmed to be oversensitive to places of dwelling, but also that society trains us as children to be looking for meaning in home imagery. As Marcus has argued, humankind might have chosen not to slice up the world ← 110 | 111 → according to spatial constraints other than political delimitations, but this would not change the fact that the house does occupy a most prominent place in the organization of our society, a fact that might be muted but is nevertheless a highly operative force in the human psyche.
Drawing close to the end of this chapter, it seems necessary to make reference to some of the most emblematic fictional houses exemplifying this intimate bond between house and occupant. A limited number of works have been analysed specifically under the scope of the reciprocal human/building bond. Incontestably, Edgar Allan Poe’s House of Usher and the Usher brother and sister Roderick and Madeline stand as the main exponents of house-dweller narrative parallels. ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is a story about the mental and physical decay of these two siblings, the last of a lineage, and also that of the family manor, which collapses with its owners inside as the story reaches a conclusion. Poe remarkably shifts an important amount of narrative attention towards the house, which is highlighted by his choice of title, and sets up clear correlations between the building and its dwellers:
The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old wood-work which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air. Beyond this indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token of instability. Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn. (1986: 140)
Description of its proprietor follows accordingly:
I gazed upon him with a feeling half of pity, half of awe. Surely, man had never before so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher! […]. A cadaverousness of complexion […]; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a ← 111 | 112 → finely moulded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity; these features, with an inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple, made up altogether a countenance not easily to be forgotten. And now in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of these features, and of the expression they were wont to convey, lay so much of change that I doubted to whom I spoke. The now ghastly pallor of the skin, and the now miraculous lustre of the eve, above all things startled and even awed me. The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded, and as, in its wild gossamer texture, it floated rather than fell about the face, I could not, even with effort, connect its Arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity. (143)
By making explicit mention of the fissure, Poe is foretelling the imminent death of the owner of the property, something which would not have been the case if the description of the building had merely alluded to the overall architectural decay. As the house collapses in the end, the readers witness the foretold extinction of two entities which had been presented under equal parameters.
Poe is a renowned exponent of this use of house imagery but he is by no means the only example. Emily Bronte, Isabel Allende or Charlotte Perkins Gilman have also made lavish use of house imagery in a way which completed their narratives to an extent not far behind that of some of the main characters. Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange fittingly resemble the personality traits of the Earnshaws and the Lintons. In Allende’s House of the Spirits, the ‘big house on the corner’, as it is called in the village, is divided into two halves to host Esteban in the front area and Clara in the back rooms. Lastly, in Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, the stifling atmosphere in the country house’s yellow room reverberates of imposed isolation and imprisonment under the dictates of patriarchy. In this regard, the work of Rosalind Ashe, who has published several illustrated volumes on literary house analysis, should be highlighted as a catalogue of houses worthy of further scholarly study. Among these notably stand the main dwellings in Rebecca, Great Expectations, The Picture of Dorian Grey, The House of the Seven Gables, The Great Gatsby, Dracula, Jane Eyre, Little Women, The Portrait of a Lady, Middlemarch, Gone with the Wind, Robinson Crusoe and Alice in Wonderland, among many others. ← 112 | 113 →
All the evidence above suggests that, as Antje Flade (2007) phrases it in her study on the meaning of home, our psyches are ‘heavily swayed, in both positive and negative ways, by the spaces we move through and occupy’ (75). When applied to the mental processes involved in literary interpretation, the reader would inevitably try to complete the characters’ personas by positioning them in the material environments where they dwell. The books treated by Ashe stand as a small selection among the literary houses that still remain unattended and ignored by criticism. Hopefully, the amount of contemporary attention received by studies revolving around the psychology of the home will result in greater academic awareness of these unspoken yet crucial entities in a text.
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1 Individuals who suffer from this condition have also been referred to as ‘philobats’ by Michael Balint (228).
2 See the drawings by children from the Terezin concentration camp collected by Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Dicker-Brandeis taught art to some of the 15,000 children that stopped in Terezin on their way to different concentration camps. She hid thousands of these drawings and poems in two suitcases before she was sent to Auschwitz. The suitcases were eventually discovered and brought to worldwide attention with the publication of the book I Never Saw Another Butterfly in 1964.
3 Sonja Waldsteinová. ‘Terezín Barracks’ (Archives number 129.361, 22 x 30 cm). She is one of the 100 children that survived Terezin. See page 85 in I Never Saw Another Butterfly.
4 The Bible, for example, provides multiple instances of the human appeal to dream interpretation, often referring to them as visions of the night. Some of these references to the relevance of the interpretation of dreams in early Western cultures are Genesis 40:8; Acts 2:17; Numbers 12:6; Job 33:15; Joel 2:28; Daniel 2:1–3; Genesis 46:2 and Deuteronomy 13:1–5, among many others in both the Old and the New Testaments.
5 Bachelard is citing Carl Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1947).