No Horror Like Home:
Women and Domestic Space in New England Gothic Literature
Anna Maria Kneale
English Studies, University of Southern Denmark
Supervisor: Sten Pultz Moslund
Front page illustration: "Haunted Dolls House", drawing ©Laurie Lipton (www.laurielipton.com)
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Abstract
Gothic narratives tend to privilege one particular subject above all others: women’s
entrapment in domestic architectural spaces. This thesis aims to investigate the relationship
between women and the home by means of chronotope theory, phenomenology and the
concept of the uncanny in three classic New England Gothic works: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
The House of the Seven Gables, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper”, and
Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. By viewing the chronotope of the Gothic home
as the organising device for heroine-centred Gothic literature, this thesis ultimately makes a
case for the view that time and space can be used for subversive feminist purposes in Gothic
fiction by calling attention to patriarchal power structures in the home.
Chapter one is divided into three subsections; section 1.1 introduces feminist
phenomenological and socio-cultural approaches to time and place, focusing in particular on
women’s embodied experience of being in the world. The aim of this section is to provide an
understanding of the Gothic home not just as a metaphor, but as a lived space saturated
with bodily, temporal and gendered rhythms and routines. Moreover, this section illustrates
how socio-cultural and phenomenological approaches can be combined to form a unified
feminist approach to the Gothic home, and introduces various theoretical concepts from
prominent phenomenologist theorists, particularly Iris Marion Young and Gaston Bachelard.
Section 1.2 briefly explains Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope theory and defines the
chronotope of the Gothic home as a motivic/minor chronotope which is derived from
Bakhtin’s chronotope of the castle and characterised by historical time and adventure-time
in particular. This section also discusses how local history has a direct impact on the
chronotope of the Gothic home in New England literature, and how other motivic
chronotopes, such as the chronotope of the idyllic home and the chronotope of the
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threshold, interact dialogically with the chronotope of the Gothic home. Lastly, it is
explained how feminists have made use of chronotopic analysis, despite the gender
blindness of Bakhtin’s original theory.
Finally, section 1.3 discusses the spatiotemporal uncanny as a crucial term for
understanding the aesthetics and effects of the chronotope of the Gothic home. In this
section, uncanny adventure-time is more closely defined as a cyclical repetition of past
events. In addition, ontological instability is discussed as a vital characteristic of the
chronotope of the Gothic home. Lastly, it is explained how Bachelard’s phenomenological
approach can be combined with the uncanny through the notion of psychic spaces, and how
feminist authors can make use of the uncanny as a phenomenon of estrangement.
Chapter two is divided into separate chronotopic analyses and close readings of the
three primary works, starting with Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables in section
2.1, continuing with Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” in section 2.2, and ending with
Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House in section 2.3. Section 2.1 focuses firstly on the
chronotope of the Gothic home in the literary period of Romanticism and the patriarchal
history of the titular house in the novel, and secondly on the two central female characters
in the novel, Hepzibah and Phoebe Pyncheon. The analysis finds that Hawthorne’s
chronotope of the Gothic home involves several different yet correlated types of
dominance: the patriarchal dominance over women, the aristocratic and capitalistic
dominance over land, and the dominance of abstract modernity over the Romantic
embodied connection with nature. In addition, a case is made for the view that Hawthorne’s
portrayal of Phoebe can be viewed as empowering, despite her similarity to the
stereotypical angel in the house.
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Section 2.2 focuses firstly on the contextual background for Gilman’s development of
the chronotope of the Gothic home, namely her personal experience with the rest cure
treatment and her Modernist emphasis on interior and subjective time and space. The
second part of the analysis involves a close reading of how gendered power structures in the
home influence dimensions of time and space, and interprets the yellow-papered room as a
domestic asylum where the boundaries between inner and outer, self and other collapse.
Section 2.3 likewise begins with a contextual perspective on Jackson’s development
of the chronotope of the Gothic home in the 1950s and argues that The Haunting of Hill
House can also be viewed as an early example of Gothic postmodernism. The second part of
the analysis provides a close reading of the protagonist, Eleanor Vance, as a homeless
heroine and the titular house as an oppressive, uncanny and monstrous maternal space.
Lastly, the defining characteristics and developments of the Gothic chronotope in these
three works are summed up in the final conclusion.
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Contents
Abstract ........................................................................................................................................ 1
Laying the Foundation: Introduction............................................................................................. 5
Chapter 1: Constructing the Framework: Methodology .............................................................. 10
1.1 The Feminist Approach to Place in Phenomenology and Radical Human Geography .............. 10
1.2 Chronotope Theory, Phenomenology and Feminist Criticism.................................................. 21
1.3. The Spatiotemporal Uncanny ................................................................................................ 31
Chapter 2: Furnishing the Interior: Analysis ................................................................................ 36
2.1 The House of the Seven Gables ............................................................................................. 36
Hawthorne’s Romantic Chronotope of the Gothic Home ............................................................. 36
Homemaking as Liberation .......................................................................................................... 43
2.2. “The Yellow Wall-Paper” ...................................................................................................... 61
Gilman’s Feminism and Interior Architecture in Context .............................................................. 61
Breaking Free or Breaking Down .................................................................................................. 66
2.3. The Haunting of Hill House ................................................................................................... 79
Jackson’s Chronotope of the Gothic Home in the Age of Supermother ........................................ 79
The Homeless Heroine................................................................................................................. 86
Applying the Finish: Conclusion .................................................................................................. 99
Works Cited .............................................................................................................................. 102
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Laying the Foundation: Introduction
Any student of the Gothic soon realises that despite the heterogeneous body of literature
that the term applies to, Gothic texts are consistently characterised by their “relentlessly
‘architectural’ obsessions” (Castle 689). Despite the sublime grandeur of the imposing,
crumbling castles that abound in early Gothic romances, literary Gothic buildings have
always been connected to the domestic space of the home: Horace Walpole, author of the
first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764), not only started a fad among the English
aristocracy for turning their own homes into Gothic castles during the late 18th century
revival of Gothic architecture, but also established a literary tradition for depicting the
Gothic castle as an arena for family horror and domestic terror. Sigmund Freud also draws
on examples from Gothic literature in his seminal essay “The Uncanny” (1919), where he
defines the uncanny as that particular species of the frightening which occurs when the
homely and the unhomely converge as a result of the return of the repressed (Freud 148).
Freud’s essay thus contains the idea of the home as a site of horror; a motif that became
central to the Gothic genre when American Gothic writers began to replace the medieval
European castle with a setting that was much more familiar to their readers: their own
households.
Nicole Reynolds has stated that “[t]he archetypal Gothic plot can be said to have its
origins in the fate of a house” (Reynolds 92), but the formulaic Gothic plot relies just as
much on a persecuted heroine who is figuratively or literally imprisoned in her own home by
a male villain. Just as the depiction of the Gothic home has changed over time, the depiction
of the Gothic heroine who occupies it has changed accordingly, however, and it is the aim of
this thesis to explore the Gothic heroine’s complex relationship with the home in New
England Gothic literature from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century. This is done
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through a close reading and, as will be explained, a chronotopic analysis of Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow
Wall-Paper” (1892) and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959).
In these three works, inhabited Gothic space becomes a site of terror in a complete
inversion of what Gaston Bachelard refers to in his classic The Poetics of Space (1958) as the
“felicitous space” of the home: “the space that may be grasped, that may be defended
against adverse forces, the space that we love” (Bachelard xxxv). It becomes the task of the
Gothic heroines in all of these works to navigate the domestic space of the home, which is
typically gendered as a female sphere, when it is not idyllic, but dysfunctional and
threatening. In doing so, they reveal the underbelly of normative constructions of
domesticity and homeliness, and show that the Gothic home can be seen not only as a
negative space of terror and imprisonment for women, but also as a site of resistance where
patriarchal discourses and domestic ideologies are exposed, confronted and subverted.
In order to compare the developments pointed to in the analyses to earlier
conventions in Gothic literature, references will also be made to works ranging from Sally
Sayward Wood’s Julia and the Illuminated Baron (1800), Louisa May Alcott’s A Long Fatal
Love Chase (1866), and Madeline Yale Wynne’s short story “The Little Room” (1895) all of
which are set in or written by authors from New England. Although most of the included
works are written by women, this study deliberately avoids the gender essentialist view that
divides Gothic writing into different categories depending on the biology of the author. The
selected works are therefore referred to as ‘heroine-centred Gothic’ in order to
differentiate them from the subgenre of Female Gothic, defined by Ellen Moers as Gothic
works by women writers (Moers 138). While Hawthorne’s male point of view is taken into
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account, it will be argued that both male and female authors may use the inherent
subversive tendencies of the Gothic to empower women.
As will be illustrated in the analyses, spatiality is always intertwined with
temporality. In his influential essay collection The Dialogic Imagination (1975), Mikhail
Bakhtin refers to “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are
artistically expressed in literature” as the ‘chronotope’ of a text and argues that “it is
precisely the chronotope that defines genre and generic distinctions” (Bakhtin 84).
According to Bakhtin, the motivic chronotope that characterises early Gothic literature is
the castle (Bakhtin 245-246), but Bakhtin also argues that chronotopes are potentially
historical and change over time (Bakhtin 84). This is evidenced by the change in Gothic
settings across the Atlantic from grandiose castles to domestic households, resulting in a
new motivic chronotope which can simply be called ‘the chronotope of the Gothic home’.
This new chronotope is by no means final or unchanging, however, and this thesis
takes a diachronic chronotopic approach to Gothic literature in order to show how it reflects
the changing socio-cultural anxieties and literary aesthetics in New England in the periods of
Romanticism, Modernism and early Postmodernism. Bakhtin argues that chronotopes shape
“the image of man in literature” (Bakhtin 85), and chronotopic analysis is therefore not only
useful for understanding how the Gothic home shapes the plots that take place within it,
but also for interrogating constructions of gender that are specific to the genre. In addition,
this study combines chronotope theory with a feminist phenomenological and socio-cultural
approach to place in order to examine both the Gothic heroine’s embodied way of being in
the world, the material space of the Gothic home and the social power structures that
shape gender relations within it. Finally, Freud’s concept of the uncanny is included as a key
term in describing the function of Gothic domestic space.
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While Gothic literature has often been examined through the lens of feminism and
spatiality studies, there is still unexplored ground left to cover. Seminal gender readings of
Gothic spatiality, such as Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic
(1979) and Kate Ellis’ The Contested Castle (1989), make no mention of the Gothic home as
a chronotope and focus predominantly on British Gothic texts written before the mid-19thcentury. In addition, many scholars emphasise the wilderness factor and the frontier
experience in American Gothic literature instead of domestic interiors. In order to make a
foray into some of this uncharted territory, the choice falls on New England Gothic – a
subgenre which has received little scholarly attention unlike the subgenre of Southern
Gothic which has a host of literary criticism dedicated to it.
It is no coincidence that the Northeast and the Deep South form the Gothic poles of
America: both regions have dark histories that, like the uncanny, refuse to be fully repressed
and continue to resurface in the arts. While Southern Gothic literature typically deals with
historical issues of race and slavery, New England has its own history of Puritan anxiety,
supernatural fears, and persecution during the infamous Salem witchcraft trials. As Anne
Williams notes, these histories are intertwined with the history of patriarchy which was
“notably more influential in the history of these areas than it was in that of other areas”
(Williams 265). As will be seen in the analyses, the Gothic home is always, to some extent, a
manifestation of an oppressive patriarchal mentality. This mentality has several dimensions
which result in different, yet correlated, types of dominance that tend to be expressed by
the same chronotopicity; a dehumanising, unnatural and alienating organisation of time and
space in total contrast to Bachelard’s embodied, organic and nurturing felicitous space.
While this study focuses mainly on the interior space of the house, the liminal spaces
between the private household and the public realm will also be discussed. The crossing of
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thresholds is vital to the construction of the Gothic home, and to Gothic horror in general,
since it always involves either the intrusion of sinister forces into the formerly secure home
or, as is the case in the primary literary works examined in this thesis, the transition from
the comparative safety of the outside to a sinister house. The dichotomy between inside
and outside is also crucial in feminist readings of Gothic literature, since the Gothic heroine
always struggles with entrapment inside the home, while the outside world tends to be a
masculine domain. As Moers points out, the 18th century Gothic heroine was prohibited
from any solitary outdoors movement, and the labyrinthine Gothic castle was the only
literary setting in which she could freely explore, travel and confront dangers while still
remaining indoors and therefore respectable (Moers 197). While the outside sphere is also
masculinised in most of the literary works examined in this thesis, it will be seen that the
garden plays a central role as a liminal, feminised, natural space where regeneration and
restoration may take place or where uncanny female desires may manifest.
Since this thesis employs a diverse range of critical approaches it is necessary to
discuss at some length how they can form a unified theoretical framework. Chapter one
therefore focuses firstly on the combination of phenomenological, socio-cultural and
feminist approaches to place, and secondly on Bakhtin’s chronotope theory, as tools for
reading Gothic fiction. Lastly, the uncanny is discussed as a spatiotemporal term in relation
to chronotope theory and feminism. Following these methodological considerations, the
three primary literary works are analysed in chronological order, and the development of
the chronotope of the Gothic home is discussed continuously from one work to the next and
summarised in the final conclusion.
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Chapter 1
Constructing the Framework: Methodology
1.1 The Feminist Approach to Place in Phenomenology and Radical Human Geography
A brief historical overview of the development of spatiality studies shows that the
theoretical approach to place has undergone significant changes over the last few decades
and that the perception of place as both a subjective experience and as a product of gender
relations is relatively new. This, in turn, explains why Gothic Spatiality Studies is also a
relatively new field, despite the genre’s longstanding preoccupation with time and place. As
Tim Cresswell explains in Place: A Short Introduction (2004), place was predominantly
eclipsed by a preoccupation with regional geography before the 1970s, which was devoted
to describing the idiographic differences between regions and had little interest in
reflections on the broader concepts of place and space (Cresswell 17-18). Throughout the
1970s, many geographers grew increasingly dissatisfied with the idiographic approach of
regional geography, however, resulting in the emergence of spatial science, a new scientific
branch which employed quantitative methods to study general spatial patterns and
processes (Cresswell 19). Finally, the lack of attention to the human component within
spatial science led to a counter-reaction by a new theoretical school, humanistic geography,
which emphasised the subjective experience of place (Cresswell 19-20).
While humanistic geography can include a broad range of conceptual approaches,
two of its most influential founders, Yi-Fu Tuan and Edward Relph, predominantly drew on
the philosophy of phenomenology (Cresswell 20). The phenomenological approach to place
can be summed up as the view that place is primary to meaning. Put differently,
phenomenologists are interested in the pre-cultural and trans-historical essence of place
and in our direct bodily and emotional experiences as emplaced beings (Cresswell 22). This
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philosophical approach was criticised by a number of humanistic geographers who had been
influenced by Marxism, post-colonialism and feminism from the 1970s to the 1990s. They
formed the theoretical field of radical human geography, and contrary to the
phenomenologists, they viewed socio-cultural meaning as primary to place, arguing that
places are social constructs determined by power structures and policies of exclusion
(Cresswell 26-27, Massey 254-56).
Clearly, radical human geography has contributed to feminist debates by showing
that places are not gender neutral, but are produced according to a set of gender norms. For
example, the radical human geographer Doreen Massey recalls how, as a little girl, she felt
that a valley near her childhood home, which had been converted to football and rugby
pitches, was off-limits to her: “all this huge stretch of Mersey flood plain had been entirely
given over to boys” (Massey 185). Likewise, many of the formative studies of Gothic
spatiality can be seen as extensions of this socio-cultural approach to place: Moers argues
that Gothic settings reflect the spatial restrictions placed on women in the 18th as a result of
patriarchal power structures (Moers 185-214), Ellis claims that the Gothic depicts the “failed
home” in order to show the underside British domestic ideology (Ellis ix-xii), and Gilbert and
Gubar find that houses in women’s fiction during the 19th century represent female
imprisonment in a male-controlled society (Gilbert and Gubar 83-85).
However, the socio-cultural approach to place tends to overlook the body’s relation
to the world, because it focuses solely on the relations between people and how such
relations are organised in shared spaces. Phenomenology, on the other hand, focuses on the
relation between people and the material world; a relation which is crucial in Gothic fiction,
where characters often fuse with the setting as they are entombed within houses and suffer
from spatial fears which are directly related to the bodily experience of being in the world,
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such as claustrophobia and agoraphobia. Feminism and phenomenology share an interest in
the subjective bodily experience and the mundane problems of everyday life (Butler 1988,
519), but feminist phenomenologists also aim to re-interpret the classic texts and theories
of the founding fathers of phenomenology, namely Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and to relate them to gender (Schües 1-2). By combining these
feminist interpretations of phenomenology with a feminist socio-cultural approach, it is
possible to form a more complete feminist theory of place which shows the connections
between social power structures and women’s subjective experience as emplaced beings,
both of which play a crucial part in heroine-centred Gothic literature.
Iris Marion Young’s seminal essay “Throwing like a Girl: A Phenomenology of
Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality” (1980) exemplifies how the
phenomenological focus on the subjective bodily experience can inform feminist theories of
place and space. According to Young, the modalities of feminine motility are characterised
by “an ambiguous transcendence, an inhibited intentionality, and a discontinuous unity”
(Young 35). In brief, ambiguous transcendence refers Simone de Beauvoir’s claim in The
Second Sex (1949) that women who live in patriarchal societies are perceived as Other in
relation to men, and therefore experience a basic tension between two levels of existence:
transcendence and immanence 1 (Young 32). Young argues that this existential tension
defines and inhibits the feminine way of being in the world: “feminine bodily existence is …
1
Beauvoir and Young’s use of the terms immanence and transcendence differs somewhat from that of other
influential modern philosophers. Gilles Deleuze, among others, does not view immanence as inferior to
transcendence, but instead describes immanence as a total immersion in the concrete world which allows
active bodily movement and freedom. Beauvoir, on the other hand, has a clear preference for transcendence
over immanence. To her, transcendence denotes future-directed bodily activity which engages with a world of
possibilities, while immanence denotes a passive state of being where the body simply submits to the status
quo and therefore becomes a prison – a state which Beauvoir associates with women’s subordinate status as
objects for men. Beauvoir and Young do not call for transcendence from the body, but for transcendent bodily
activity (Haynes 88-89).
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overlaid with immanence, even as it moves out toward the world in motions of grasping,
manipulating, and so on” (Young 36).
The second modality of feminine bodily existence concerns a central
phenomenological concept: intentionality. Cresswell defines intentionality as “the
‘aboutness’ of human consciousness” and explains that “we cannot (the phenomenologist
would argue) be conscious without being conscious of something. Consciousness constructs
a relation between the self and the world” (Cresswell 22). Merleau-Ponty elaborated on this
concept by holding that intentionality can be located in motility, since “the possibilities
which are opened up in the world depend on the mode and limits of the bodily ‘I can’”
(Young 36). According to Young, this relation between the self and the world becomes
inhibited for women, because they lack confidence in their bodies’ capacity to fulfil the
physical tasks they engage with (Young 37). Lastly, Young describes how there is a
discontinuous unity between the different parts of women’s bodies, since they tend to focus
on using only one body part while leaving the rest immobile, and between their intended
actions and their motility, as they approach tasks with “timidity, uncertainty, and hesitancy”
(Young 34, 38).
Young finally combines these phenomenological observations with a critical sociocultural perspective when she insists that “[i]nsofar as we learn to live out our existence in
accordance with the definition that patriarchal culture assigns to us, we [women] are
physically inhibited, confined, positioned, and objectified” (Young 42). According to Young,
one of the primary characteristics that women are assigned in patriarchal society is that
they are fragile and easily broken: “The girl learns actively to hamper her movements. She is
told that she must be careful not to get hurt, not to get dirty, not to tear her clothes, the
things she desires to do are dangerous for her” (Young 43). While Massey’s previously
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mentioned childhood experience of being excluded from the football fields shows that the
open, active world of sports is gendered as masculine, Young shows that the gendering of
space does not only result in women being excluded from certain social activities and their
associated places, but also in differences between the very way in which men and women
perceive spatiality and comport themselves in relation to the world.
More importantly, Young’s theory is a useful tool for understanding the relationship
between female characters and spatiality in Gothic literature. Julia Vallace, the main
character of Sally Sayward Wood’s Julia and the Illuminated Baron, the first Gothic novel
published in New England, is a prime example of the archetypal heroine of early Gothic
literature: a young, beautiful, defenceless woman who is threatened by bodily and sexual
harm. She is constantly persecuted, kidnapped and imprisoned. She trembles, falters, and
faints – usually, like the sexually beleaguered Pamela in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or
Virtue Rewarded (1740)-, as a means of escaping situations where she cannot remain
conscious and retain her respectability. When faced with overwhelming obstacles she
slumps into a completely passive “death-like stupor … like a statue” (Wood 187) and simply
awaits rescue. In short, she is the very embodiment of the restricted, inhibited femininity
that Young describes.
It would be a mistake to perceive the apparent weakness of the Gothic heroine as an
innate part of her femaleness, however, and most Gothic heroines do in fact possess
curiosity and courage, and typically put up a brave fight against imprisonment in the home
and the sociocultural expectations to their bodies. Instead, the apparent contradiction
between the Gothic heroine’s weakness and strength can be read as ‘ambiguous
transcendence’, caught as she is between her yearning for freedom and her status as an
imprisoned object. For example, in the beginning of Louisa May Alcott’s Gothic novel A Long
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Fatal Love Chase, written half a century after Julia and the Illuminated Baron, the spirited
heroine Rosamond is determined to escape from her dreary, isolated home and enjoys
testing her courage by walking around the edge of the roof of her house without touching
the balustrade (Alcott 16-17). Later in the novel, Rosamond finds that her bodily capacity
has been eroded along with her self-confidence by the male villain who pursues her, and
she is unable to repeat her earlier feat when she needs to escape from a locked room
through the window and cross a roof: “I find I have lost my steady nerves, firm foot and
brave heart. The way was very short … but I was forced to crawl and cling and drag myself
along the dizzy edge where once I should have walked without a fear” (Alcott 104). This
illustrates Young’s main point perfectly: women are not born spatially and bodily inhibited,
but become so after sexist oppression has damaged their belief in their bodily capacities.
Moreover, Rosamond’s confident walk around the rooftop illustrates the total bodily
freedom that can only occur when socio-cultural codes and restrictions are not present to
inhibit one’s movements. Although Rosamond is testing the boundaries of her house in a
rather extreme way, which strongly indicates that she feels spatially restricted there and
longs to occupy a larger, more open world, her isolation means that she has never been
conditioned by society to believe that she is physically incapable of certain types of activity.
This results in a completely uninhibited intentionality, a competent handling of her body as
a tool, which opens up new possibilities of being in the world. In addition, Rosamond’s
balancing feat requires very high bodily awareness, where all of her muscles, motor skills
and perceptual powers are engaged in keeping her body upright, something which she
consciously trains herself to do, in contrast to the low bodily awareness or pre-reflective
intentionality that we normally associate with routine activities in the home. Rosamond’s
intentionality and bodily awareness at this point in the novel is therefore a stark contrast to
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her later experience as a persecuted Gothic heroine whose objectified body is no longer
fully under her control.
The combination of the phenomenological and the socio-cultural approach to place
is not only useful for interpreting the feminine bodily experience of being in the world, as
depicted in Gothic literature, but also for examining women’s relationship with the home.
As radical human geographer Gillian Rose points out in Feminism and Geography: The Limits
of Geographical Knowledge (1993), prominent phenomenologists such as Relph, Tuan and
Bachelard agree that “home is the exemplar of place” (Rose 53), but Rose counter-balances
this idealised view of the home with a critical feminist socio-cultural perspective by pointing
out that “[f]eminist analyses of power relations … have understood homes and communities
as sites of oppression” (Rose 56). According to Rose, the classic phenomenologist view of
the idyllic home is masculinist because it “marginalizes alternative accounts” (Rose 56) by
excluding female subjectivities (Rose 55-56). Likewise, Gilbert and Gubar also question “the
extraordinary discrepancy between the almost consistently ‘felicitous space’ [Bachelard]
discusses and the negative space we have found” (Gilbert and Gubar 88).
Bachelard’s study primarily deals with the role of the imagination in the concept of
home. He is interested in the house “as a tool for analysis of the human soul” (Bachelard
xxxvii) and therefore his examinations are not based on actual houses, but on the
“oneirically definitive house” which “belongs to the literature of depth, that is, to poetry”
(Bachelard 13). Bachelard’s oneiric house and the Gothic home can be seen as two sides of
the same coin: both are archetypal images of home, both are saturated with the past - for
Bachelard’s “unforgettable house” (Bachelard 15) is based on fond memories of the
childhood home - and both may be depicted as sentient and anthropomorphic forces
(Bachelard 46), but where the oneiric house promises protection and inspires comforting,
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nostalgic daydreams, the Gothic home is the monster in the feminist nightmare of
domesticity. Bachelard’s oneiric house can therefore clarify the function of the Gothic home
by comparison: the most salient point throughout The Poetics of Space is that human beings
always try to re-establish their connection to home in the imagination, and to be torn away
from home-ness is the most terrible thing imaginable. This is precisely the terror that the
Gothic home encompasses by turning the homely into the unhomely. As will be explained in
section 1.2, Gothic works often juxtapose the Gothic home with idyllic homes, such as
Bachelard’s romantic “hut dream” (Bachelard 35), in order to reinforce this difference.
There are also crucial temporal differences between Bachelard’s idealised home and
the critical feminist view of home. Bachelard envisions the felicitous home as a place where
time can be freely spent as one chooses, but when the home becomes a prison for women,
as it constantly does in Gothic literature, it means that not only space but also time is used
as a means of social control. As Christina Schües points out in Time in Feminist
Phenomenology (2011), time is directly related to power (Schües 11) and “when you
consider the question of ‘who controls whose time?’ you can determine the hierarchy of a
relationship” (Schües 68). In Julia and the Illuminated Baron, the Baron clearly exercises this
kind of temporal and spatial control over Julia when he takes her prisoner as punishment for
refusing to marry him, as does the husband of Gilman’s narrator when he subjects her to a
rest cure treatment for her perceived hysteria in “The Yellow Wall-Paper”.
Moreover, Bachelard’s felicitous space is infused with leisure time in contrast to
work time, which is more strictly scheduled and faster-paced. As Alison Blunt and Robyn
Dowling point out in Home (2006), however, “home can also be considered a workplace,
especially for women” (Blunt and Dowling 16) and domestic labour creates a vastly different
temporal experience that may, at its worst, make home a site of drudgery rather than
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leisure. While Rose, Beauvoir and many other feminist critics view domestic routines as a
mindless, repetitive grind (and release from such routines as liberating), it is important to
note that this is a relatively modern perception. Julia, who is modelled after the Puritan
work ethic, embodies a very different view: “She had been used to active industry from her
infancy. Not an hour of her life had passed unoccupied. She considered idleness the parent
of every evil … and employment as one of her greatest privileges” (Wood 89). Therefore, it is
the interruption of her domestic routine that she finds most distressing as a prisoner: “She
had never found the day too long. But now, shut up in a lonely prison … she found the time
hung heavy upon her hands” (Wood 90).
To Julia, place becomes unhomely when the predictable and cyclical domestic
routine that she is familiar with is replaced with uncertainty and suspense. Only by resuming
work is she able to regain a measure of temporal control over her situation and so lessen
her captors’ power over her: “She asked the woman that attended her for work, plain useful
sewing she preferred, and she was soon furnished, and in this found a resource against her
sorrows and a solace in her affliction” (Wood 90). While Julia operates within a patriarchal
system and, arguably, lets herself be defined by patriarchal values, her experience illustrates
that domestic work is simply a rhythm, defined by the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre as
the “interaction between a space, a time and an expenditure of energy” (Lefebvre 1992, 15),
and as such it is not inherently oppressive or liberating, but has the potential to be either,
depending on both the historical context and individual women’s lived experience.
As Young stresses in “House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme” (1997),
domestic work is not universally experienced by contemporary women as negative
immanent activity either (Young 138). Based on Heidegger’s distinction between building
and cultivating as two aspects of dwelling in his classic essay “Building Dwelling Thinking”
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(1954), Young argues that the cultivation of homeliness is gendered as feminine while
building is masculine. Although Heidegger “seems to privilege building as the worldfounding of an active subject” (Young 124), Young argues that domestic routines can also
have “world-making meaning” by “endowing things with living meaning, arranging them in
space in order to facilitate the life activities” (Young 140-141). When undertaken as a
“meaningful human project” (Young 138), domestic work can therefore be a transcendent
bodily activity. As we shall see, domestic routines also have a liberating potential in The
House of the Seven Gables while The Haunting of Hill House shows them at their most
oppressive, arguably in response to the role of the 1950s housewife.
Another important difference between Bachelard’s ideal home and the
Gothic home is that Bachelard identifies felicitous space with the female maternal body
(Bachelard 7, 45) - a motif which usually turns sinister in Gothic literature. Gilbert and Gubar
argue that “[t]o literally become a house, after all, is to be denied the hope of that spiritual
transcendence 2 which, as Simone de Beauvoir has argued, is what makes humanity
distinctively human” (Gilbert and Gubar 88). While being embodied is simply a fact of life
‘becoming a house’ roots the body in a passive existence and depersonalises it by making it
an object to be owned and inhabited by someone else. Beauvoir argues that the
physiological interiority of women’s bodies makes them more susceptible than men to
‘becoming a house’ in this negative passive sense; although she warns that “rash people”
tend to draw “dubious analogies” (Beauvoir 50) between women’s role as passive receptors
in the sexual act and their natural role in the home, women’s biological cycle means that
2
The word ‘spiritual’ is somewhat misleading here, since it presupposes a mind/body dualism in Beauvoir’s
theory. In fact, Beauvoir views all human beings as embodied consciousnesses; as Judith Butler explains in her
reading of The Second Sex, Beauvoir was influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist view on the body as “a
mode of becoming” since it is “always involved in the human quest to realize possibilities” (Butler 1986, 38).
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“[f]rom puberty to menopause she is the principal site of a story that takes place in her and
does not concern her personally” (Beauvoir 62).
Similarly, Gilbert and Gubar argue that the physiological prospect of ‘housing’ a
foetus within themselves may lead women writers to “conflate anxieties about maternity
with anxieties about literary creativity. Alternatively, troubled by the anatomical ‘emptiness’
of spinsterhood, she may … fear the inhabitations of nothingness and death, the
transformation of womb into tomb” (Gilbert and Gubar 88). As will be seen, these
observations on the connection between the physiological interiority of women’s bodies
and their identification with the interiors of their houses come into play in The House of the
Seven Gables, “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and The Haunting of Hill House, all of which depict
the home as the a site of birth- or maternity-related anxieties.
Finally, it is important to note that gender relates as much to time as to place. As
Carolina Nunez Puente puts it: “gender is a relative concept depending on the chrono-tope
(time-space) it occupies” (Puente 104). Put differently, gender is a social construction that
takes place over time, as Beauvoir’s suggests in her famous sentence, “one is not born, but
rather becomes, a woman” (Beauvoir 330). This process can also be described by Lefebvre’s
term ‘dressage’: “To enter into a society, a group or nationality is to accept values (that are
taught) … but also to bend oneself (to be bent) to its ways … It bases itself on repetition”
(Lefebvre 1992, 39). Likewise, gender theorist Judith Butler argues that gender is “an
identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler 1988, 519) which are
performed in response to socio-cultural discourses and norms.
These gendered performances have distinct temporalities: Beauvoir and other
seminal feminist theorists, such as Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous, describe feminine time
as cyclical and masculine time as linear, but this distinction is clearly based as much on
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cultural assumptions about gender roles as on inherent biological qualities. Women’s
biological cycles may link them to the cyclicality of nature as well as to the cyclicality of
domestic routines in the home, but being biologically female does not exclude one from
performing simultaneously within a masculine linear temporality or vice versa. As Butler
argues, the terms masculine and feminine are problematic in themselves in this respect,
since the binary gender system forces men and women into categories where the bodily
possibilities are already given (Butler 1988, 521-522). While characters in early Gothic novels
tend to fit neatly into masculine and feminine roles based on their sex, we shall see how
women’s roles in the home are opened up to new possibilities as heteronormative gender
roles begin to be questioned in The Haunting of Hill House.
1.2 Chronotope Theory, Phenomenology and Feminist Criticism
Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson state in Mikhail Bakhtin – Creation of a Prosaics (1990)
that “[a]s critics, we must probe not just representations but also the very grounds for
representing” (Morson and Emerson 370). The grounds for representing, for instance,
women and the home in Gothic works, are constituted by the chronotopes embedded in
those works. As mentioned previously, chronotopes are the spatiotemporal frameworks of a
given text, the term having its etymology in the Greek words for time and place, cronos and
topos (Vice 200). Although chronotopes can be compared to contexts, there are two crucial
differences: firstly, while time and space are often discussed as separate parts of the context
in literary studies, the chronotope expresses the interconnectedness of the two terms.
Secondly, chronotopes serve a much more important function than simply providing the
setting for the plot; instead, they are “the organizing centers for the fundamental narrative
events of the novel” (Bakhtin 250).
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In other words, chronotopes give shape to the plot and propel it forwards, because
they determine the underlying view of time and space in the text, and therefore the
possible events that can take place within it (Morson and Emerson 369-372). This means
that chronotopes are not simply static backgrounds but “a way of understanding experience
… a specific form-shaping ideology for understanding the nature of events and actions”
(Morson and Emerson 367). Like Bachelard, Bakhtin is interested in the subject’s direct
experience of time and space. Moreover, neither Bachelard nor Bakhtin focus on actual
places, but on the way time and space has been imagined and depicted in literature. As Bart
Keunen puts it in “The Chronotopic Imagination in Literature and Film” (2010), Bakhtin is “a
true philosopher of the imagination” (Keunen 36) – a description which applies equally well
to Bachelard. In this sense, Bakhtin’s chronotope theory can be viewed as a tool for
investigating the phenomenology of the imagination.
Bakhtin differentiates between two types of chronotopes on different levels of
abstraction: major chronotopes which can be described as the overall chronotopic
impression of a single work or genre (Bemong and Borghart 6), and minor chronotopes
which can also be called “chronotopic motifs” (Bemong and Borghart 6, Morson and
Emerson 374,). Morson and Emerson describe minor chronotopes as “congealed events”
(Morson and Emerson 374) because they function as condensed conjoined temporal and
spatial markers for a specific type of action. For example, the chronotope of the castle and
the chronotope of the Gothic home are minor chronotopes which encompass a certain type
of actions and events within the major generic chronotope of the Gothic. As a minor
chronotope, the chronotope of the Gothic home is merely an “echo of the generic whole”
(Morson and Emerson 374), but it is still extremely relevant for exploring the development
of heroine-centred Gothic texts, where the motif of the home is absolutely central.
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The chronotope of the Gothic home will be discussed and redefined continuously
throughout this study, but it is possible to offer a broad initial definition here: the
chronotope of the Gothic home is essentially a more private and intimate re-imagining of
the chronotope of the castle. The diachronic development from castle to house is in line
with Bakhtin’s discussion of “the decline of the chronotope from a communal to a more
privatized, bourgeois form” (Vice 204). Bakhtin is predominantly interested in the
development of chronotopes as literary history, and he argues that there has been a gradual
development from the “utter exteriority” (Bakhtin 133) of ancient Greek literature where
“every aspect of existence could be seen and heard” (Bakhtin 134) to an image of man in
literature which became “distorted by his increasing participation in the mute and invisible
spheres of existence” (Bakhtin 135).
By the 18th century, the chronotope of the public square, which characterises the
exteriorised forms of ancient and carnivalesque literature, had largely been replaced by
interiorised domestic spaces (Vice 204) which gave expression to “a new private sense of
self, suited to the drawing room” (Bakhtin 143). Although the castle is also an interior form
which harbours a great many secrets in its labyrinthine rooms, it is a significantly more
public arena than the ordinary household, since castles are not only homes, but also sites of
commerce and national politics. Bakhtin laments this development from open, public spaces
to closed, private ones because he believes it results in a gradual loss of free space (Bakhtin
143), but it is crucial to note that the development has also resulted in a much more
psychological kind of literature which depicts the inner workings of the human psyche, such
as the conflation of women’s spatial and bodily anxieties outlined in the previous section.
Moreover, this new “drawing-room world of private individuals” (Bakhtin 144) appeals to a
new kind of readership; snooping readers who are “placed in the position of spies and
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eavesdroppers” (Vice 206). This kind of readership is intensified in Gothic works after the
mid-19th century, where the chronotope of the Gothic home provides a window into the
deplorable private lives not just of others but of Others - the madwomen in the attics - by
revealing the dark underside of domestic settings and routines.
Like the chronotope of the castle, the chronotope of the Gothic home is “saturated
through and through with a time that is historical in the narrow sense of the word, that is,
the time of the historical past” (Bakhtin 245-246). Bakhtin argues that historical time
dominates the castle because of its status as “the place where the lords of the feudal era
lived” (Bakhtin 246) and the many visible traces of this era, such as “its architecture, in
furnishings, weapons, the ancestral portrait gallery, the family archives and in the particular
human relationships involving dynasty primacy and the transfer of hereditary rights”
(Bakhtin 246). The chronotope of the Gothic home is also oriented towards the past, except
on a smaller scale: instead of being the site of governing historical figures, it is the site of the
historical past of a family. Visual forms of the family’s historical past also abound in the
Gothic home, as can be seen from the genre’s obsession with old family portraits, heirlooms
and documents.
Although it is the private past that dominates the sense of time in the chronotope of
the Gothic home, it may also contain traces of the cultural past, especially in New England
Gothic literature. After the American Civil War, castles would have been seen by most
Americans as emblems of the tradition of European and British royalty from which they had
recently declared their independence, but wealthy American settlers were not always
prepared to abandon the privileged life of the aristocracy. Faye Ringel mentions in her
article “New England Gothic” (2013) that a number of “[m]edievalist millionaires, true
‘Robber Barons’, built dream castles” (Ringel 147) in New England during these years. As
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Ringel notes, these American castles were abandoned when the fashion changed, leaving
New England dotted with impressive but crumbling buildings which “remain the very image
of the haunted house in the popular mind” (Ringel 147). The chronotope of the Gothic
home in New England, then, has retained its castle-like visual aspect because of this cultural
and architectural history and its disturbing implications of a class-based topography of
us/them.
Because they are rooted in the historical past, Gothic homes are often saturated
with a seemingly stagnant temporality. Gothic temporality is not motionless, however, but
depends on extraordinary events for its suspenseful effect. As Dale Townshend writes in his
introduction to The Gothic World (2014), the chronotope of early Gothic works can be
defined as “adventure-time in Gothic-architectural space” (Townshend xlii). Bakhtin
associates adventure-time with the ancient Greek romance and describes it as “highly
intensified but undifferentiated … an extratemporal hiatus between two biological
moments” (Bakhtin 90) and “a time of exceptional and unusual events, events determined
by chance” (Bakhtin 116). As Townshend notes, adventure-time is “composed of so many
digressions, interruptions, false turns and circuitous events” (Townshend xlii). This
temporality is considerably more prominent in Gothic works that rely heavily on either
romance or supernatural horror, but even more psychological and realistic Gothic works
tend to be interspersed with moments of adventure-time.
In Greek adventure-time, the characters do not age or mature, and time is
“composed of a series of short segments that correspond to separate adventures” (Bakhtin
91). When Gothic characters in adventure-time do appear to age or mature, it is often
merely a result of failing the tests and trials they are subjected to. This ‘testing’ is a
“compositional-organizing device” that Bakhtin identifies with the “adventure novel of
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ordeal” (Bakhtin 106) which is almost structurally identical to the early Gothic novel. For
example, in Julia and the Illuminated Baron, Julia passes a series of tests during her
imprisonment when she is approached by the son of one of Baron’s men who is prepared to
betray his father in order to help her. Julia first passes a test of honour when she rejects his
offer of assistance, since she “would not have involved a fellow creature in guilt for a world
and liberty” (Wood 94). When the young man, deeply impressed with her morals, offers to
marry her, Julia passes another test of virtue by rejecting him in order to stay faithful to her
first (and temporarily lost) love. As Bakhtin explains, the purpose of this testing is to place a
series of obstacles between the hero and heroine “that retard and delay their union”
(Bakhtin 87), including a typical moment of “captivity and prison, and attempt on the
innocence of the hero and the heroine”, until finally “[t]he novel ends happily with lovers
united in marriage” (Bakhtin 88).
While Julia and the Illuminated Baron follows this structure almost schematically,
later Gothic novels tend to be more psychological, as characters are generally depicted as
being changed by their experiences in 19th century novels (Morson and Emerson 377-378).
Time in Gothic works after this point therefore more closely resembles the special sort of
everyday time found in “the adventure novel of everyday life” which depicts “the course of
the hero’s … life in its critical moments” (Bakhtin 111). In this type of novel, the initiating
force is not pure chance, but “the hero himself”; adventure-time is “grounded in individual
responsibility” and follows the sequence of “guilt  punishment  redemption 
blessedness” (Bakhtin 116, 119, 118), although the final two links are sometimes left out in
Gothic works. Characters portrayed in this special everyday time have agency and undergo
transformations, unlike characters in typical adventure-time who are ruled by forces beyond
their control and therefore remain “completely passive, completely unchanging” (Bakhtin
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105). Regardless, Gothic works always depend on moments of adventure-time for its
suspenseful effect. Bakhtin argues that adventure-time is introduced by words such as
“‘suddenly’ and ‘at just that moment’ … for this time usually has its origin and comes into its
own in just those places where the normal, pragmatic and pre-mediated course of events is
interrupted’” (Bakhtin 92).
Morson and Emerson state that adventure-time cannot take place in the home
because “if adventures took place at home, a network of specific habits, customs, and
relations would limit the power of pure chance” (Morson and Emerson 379). The Gothic
home is an exception to this rule, however, because it renders all of those familiar habits,
customs, and relations suddenly unfamiliar and strange, and thereby becomes a possible
site of adventure. While Greek adventure-time has “no indications of historical time”
(Bakhtin 91) and progresses linearly towards a specific goal such as the reunion of lovers,
adventure-time in Gothic works hinges on uncanny cycles of past events which are situated
in the home and continually resurface, as will be explained in detail in the following section
on the spatio-temporal uncanny and exemplified in the analyses.
It is important to note that a single work may contain several minor chronotopes
which contradict or supplement each other within the unifying ground of the major generic
chronotope (Bemong and Borghart 7, Bakhtin 252). One of the chronotopes that most
obviously interacts with the chronotope of the Gothic home is the chronotope of the
threshold, the defining chronotope of liminal spaces. Bakhtin describes the chronotope of
the threshold as an indicator of “crisis and break in a life” (Bakhtin 248). Crossing a
threshold often marks a decisive turning point in the plot and saturates it with a suspenseful
temporality, and the chronotope of the threshold typically introduces adventure-time in the
Gothic home. In Gothic literature, the crossing of the threshold is also connected to the
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superstition that vampires and other supernatural evils cannot harm the inhabitants of a
home unless they are first invited in. It may also be that the evil does not enter from the
outside, but that the house itself is the evil into which an innocent individual unwittingly
steps when she crosses the threshold to the Gothic home, as hinted at by the feminist
criticism discussed in the previous section, where the domestic space itself is perceived as
uncanny.
To give a concrete example of threshold symbolism from Alcott’s A Long Fatal Love
Chase, crisis time is first introduced when Rosamond is about to leave the house, but is
stopped by the antagonist who enters at the same time: “the girl … turned to leave the
room with a proud step. The sight of a stranger pausing on the threshold arrested her”
(Alcott 4). As is typical of heroine-centred Gothic literature, Rosamond’s escape from the
house is prevented by this male villain who is free to cross the threshold between inner and
outer space as he wishes, and whose entry into the house marks a decisive break and crisis
in her life. Although the chronotope of the threshold often involves a meeting in Gothic
works, it is not the chance meeting that Bakhtin associates with the chronotope of the road
(Bakhtin 90, 243). Instead, meetings that take place on the threshold to the Gothic home
usually have a preordained character, reinforcing the Gothic world view of time and space
as beyond human control.
Another important liminal space in Gothic fiction which marks the threshold
between ‘home’ and ‘world’ is the garden. In heroine-centred Gothic works, gardens are
often enchanted places of possibilities where life-changing encounters take place, echoing
the temptation of Eve in the Garden of Eden. Gardens can also represent spaces where life
is grown and nurtured, however, which links them thematically to motherhood. If they are
properly tended they may therefore constitute positive, regenerative feminine spaces in
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contrast to the threatening and stagnant interior of the Gothic home. Gardening also has a
distinct temporal aspect, since it is based on the cycle of the seasons, the cycle of growth
and decay, and trust that one’s labours will bear fruit – in short, the same predictable
temporality found in the chronotope of the idyllic pastoral home. Well-tended gardens may
therefore extend the intimacy of the home into the natural environs surrounding it, while
overgrown and untended gardens only add to the unhomely decay of Gothic houses – a
temporal process which can challenge the stability and security of the home if left
unchecked. As will be seen, both of these functions are present in The House of the Seven
Gables where gardening has a crucial effect on the chronotope of the Gothic home.
The idyllic home is another minor chronotope which often competes with the
chronotope of the Gothic home. For example, in Julia and the Illuminated Baron Julia’s
childhood home resembles Bachelard’s romantic ‘hut dream’: “a neat cottage”
characterised by “perfect simplicity” (Wood 8). Later in the novel, this romantic first home is
contrasted with the Gothic mansion in which Julia is kept prisoner. Bakhtin describes idyllic
time as “a blend of natural time (cyclic) and the everyday time of the more or less pastoral
(and at times even agricultural) life … a dense and fragrant time, like honey, a time of
intimate lovers’ scenes and lyric outpourings” (Bakhtin 103). Bakhtin’s description of the
idyllic chronotope closely resembles Bachelard’s description of the felicitous dream home; a
place of nostalgic daydreams and poetry where time seems to be pleasantly suspended or
move in tune with the slow natural rhythm of the bucolic life. Unlike Greek adventure-time
which “lacks any natural, everyday cyclicality” (Bakhtin 91), natural cyclicality does play a
part in the chronotope of the Gothic home. However, while the idyllic chronotope depicts
people existing in harmony with natural rhythms, these rhythms become threatening and
distorted in most Gothic works.
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The chronotope of the Gothic home and the chronotope of the idyllic home are
essentially different discourses about the home, represented as congealed events, which
interact dialogically. Dialogism means “double-voicedness” (Vice 45) and refers to Bakhtin’s
theory that the world consists of multiple meanings which constantly compete, influence
and interact with each other, and that mimetic literature must reflect this multitude of
meanings (Bakhtin 426). It is through the concept of dialogism that chronotope theory can
also be linked with socio-cultural and feminist approaches to place: although Bakhtin shares
Bachelard’s phenomenological interest in time and space in the artistic imagination, it is
important to note that Bakhtin also views chronotopes as “historically and socially
inscribed” (Pearce 110). To Bakhtin, the subject’s lived experience of time and space can
never be entirely separated from social discourses and power structures because, as Lynne
Pearce puts it in Reading Dialogics (1994), “the Bakhtinian subject is an incontrovertibly
social subject, he or she is formed through an ongoing process of dialogic exchange with his
or her various interlocutors”, “a dynamic inscribed by power” (Pearce 4). In literature,
characters occupy different chronotopes which reflect these competing discourses about
the world, including those concerning gender.
Feminist critics differ over Bakhtinian theory. His theory of grotesque and
carnivalesque literature is generally embraced by feminists, since it celebrates the
cavernous female body “as the source of all flow and change” (Morson and Emerson 451),
and depicts female biological cycles as a transcendent outward flow (in contrast to
Beauvoir’s view of the menstrual cycle as alienating and immanent). Yet Bakhtin’s
chronotope theory has also been accused of reducing women to “narrative devices or
functions … in male centred-action” (Vice 217). Likewise, Pearce refers to chronotope theory
as “blindly gender neutral” (Pearce 175), echoing the feminist criticism of Bachelard. While
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Bakhtin does not discuss gendered chronotopes, the dialogic interaction between
chronotopes can present a challenge to hegemonic patriarchal discourse. As Nancy Glazener
points out, “[Bakhtin’s] assertion that literature represents a struggle between socioideological languages unsettles the patriarchal myth that there could be a language of truth
transcending relations of power and desire” (Glazener 155). For example, it will be seen in
the analysis of The House of the Seven Gables how the idyllic chronotope is occupied by a
female character, Phoebe, in a way that presents a challenge to the Gothic chronotope,
which is occupied by the male, patriarchal antagonists.
1.3. The Spatiotemporal Uncanny
This study does not make use of the psychoanalytic approach as a whole, but attempts to
incorporate the general idea of the uncanny into the conceptual frameworks discussed in
the two previous sections. “The Uncanny” differs from most of Freud’s other writings by
dealing with literary aesthetics, but Freud’s approach is still mainly psychological. As a
psychological concept, the uncanny refers to the resurfacing of “something that was long
familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed” (Freud 148).
‘The psyche’ refers both to that of the individual and to the collective memory of a society,
since it may be either the disowned personal past or the past of a specific culture which
returns to haunt us (Freud xlii, Tatar 170). However, the uncanny also has a distinctly
spatiotemporal dimension which links it to the chronotope of the Gothic home: it describes
a temporal dislocation of the past into the present which is repeated involuntarily and
compulsively, and it is often artistically expressed in spatial and architectural terms.
Freud gives the example of being lost in a labyrinthine city and involuntarily
returning to the same street, or stumbling time and again upon the same object in a dark
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room, to explain the uncanny quality of this “unintended repetition” (Freud 144). Uncanny
repetition differs somewhat from the usual “random contingency” (Bakhtin 92) of
adventure-time in that it “forces us to entertain the idea of the fateful and inescapable”
(Freud 144), that is, that something more than pure chance is involved. Unlike Greek
adventure-time, the temporal uncanny does not progress linearly from a starting point to a
finishing point, but repeats itself in an endless cycle or, in works where time both progresses
and repeats itself, a spiral. However, because these repetitions occur suddenly and
irrationally, leaving us disoriented and uncertain, the suspenseful effect of adventure-time is
maintained. Likewise, there may be linear sequences within the larger cycle or spiral of time
in which separate adventures play out. This kind of time can therefore be called ‘uncanny
adventure-time’. The many circuitous events of uncanny adventure-time may fool one into
thinking that time advances progressively, but in fact it always leads back to the same, or an
extremely similar, result. For example, in Julia and the Illuminated Baron, Julia often
believes she has escaped from her enemies, only to be imprisoned again under different, yet
similar circumstances. These repetitions are therefore simultaneously familiar and strange –
another inherent aspect of the uncanny.
As Hugh Haughton notes in his introduction to Freud’s essay, the uncanny always
“begins at home” (Freud xlii), for nothing can be more disturbing than the collapse of
familiarity in the most familiar of places. The uncanny is also etymologically linked with the
space of the home: as Freud explains, the German word “Heimlich” is primarily defined as
“’belonging to the house, to the family, or: regarded as belonging to it” (Freud 126). Maria
Tatar notes that “’[c]anny’, a word that originally pertained to special knowledge, was also
used to describe domestic comfort, while heimlich, a word that concerns the home, came to
signify secret knowledge” (Tatar 170). This is a crucial point: at first glance, it may seem that
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the negative prefixes of ‘uncanny’ and ‘unheimlich’ express the exact opposite of the
homely, but Freud stresses that heimlich actually has a double meaning, since it can also
denote concealment (Freud 133), making it “increasingly ambivalent, until it finally merges
with its antonym unheimlich” (Freud 134). As Tatar notes, “The genesis of this double
meaning becomes evident if one reflects on the nature of a house or home. A house
contains the familiar and congenial, but at the same time it screens what is familiar and
congenial from view, making a mystery of it” (Tatar 169).
The chronotope of the Gothic home is characterised by these uncanny loops and
repetitions within heimlich time and space. Heimlich time and space is ontologically stable;
it corresponds to the reality that one knows and trusts based on memory and experience,
but in the Gothic home certain rooms can suddenly become spatially and temporally
unstable, and create a mystery within the otherwise ordinary and familiar time/space of the
home. This results in a deeply disturbing experience where the homely and the unhomely
converge. Madeline Yale Wynne’s short story “The Little Room” illustrates this perfectly: a
newlywed woman recounts to her husband how her mother visited the family home for the
first time in years after getting married and was shocked to find that a door which normally
opened unto a small room suddenly revealed a china closet instead. This ontologically
unstable space keeps changing from small room to china closet, but only after long absences
from the house, which causes the characters to doubt their memory, their sanity and each
other. The narrator’s mother is left in an “agony of perplexity” (Wynne 224) when the little
room reappears after her husband’s death, but when the narrator brings her own husband
to the house, the china-closet is back, leading him to believe that his wife fabricated the
entire story, and causing a rift between them: “A cloud had come between them; he was
hurt; he was antagonized” (Wynne 226). In addition to the possible feminist reading of the
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little room as a distinctly feminine space which is only visible to the unmarried women,
Wynne’s short story illustrates how uncanny time repeats itself and causes homely intimacy
to be lost between family members as they are alienated from each other and their home.
Freud also points to the doubled self as uncanny. Like ontologically unstable
time/space, doubling makes the heimlich organisation of time and space collapse, since it
not only divides the psyche, but also displaces the self spatially and temporally. In “The Little
Room” the narrator’s aunts are uncanny doubles: Aunt Hannah is “Vermont New England –
boiled down” while Aunt Maria, is “an echo” of her sister (Wynne 219, 223). The aunts
consistently deny that the house has been altered, thereby contributing to the ontological
confusion. Moreover, the aunts’ “stony eyes” (Wynne 229) make them appear not quite
human and links them materially to the house. The uncanny is always ‘housed’ within a
container or vessel – in this case both the family home and the aunts -, but as Anthony
Vidler notes in The Architectural Uncanny (1992), the uncanny is “not a property of the
space itself nor can it be provoked by any particular spatial conformation” (Vidler 11).
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” (Vidler
11). For example, the uncanny space in “The Little Room” can be read as the psychological
experience of finding that the notion of shared memories of space is illusory.
Both Freud and Carl Gustav Jung read architectural images as symbolic of aspects of
the psyche (Heathcote 8, 63), a reading which is well-suited to the Gothic, for as Terry Castle
notes, its “physical and psychological space are routinely confounded” (Castle 678). It may
appear that a psychological reading of the Gothic home is at odds with a phenomenological
approach to place, considering Bachelard’s criticism of the psychoanalytical approach to
literature in The Poetics of Space. However, while Bachelard argues that psychoanalysis
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intellectualises poetic images to the point where their immediate meaning is lost (Bachelard
xxiv, 47-48), he does draw upon the notion of psychic spaces. For example, his description of
the “psychology of the house” (Bachelard 17) closely resembles the Freudian personality
model: the cellar is “the dark entity of the house, the one that partakes of subterranean
forces” and the attic is “the rational zone of intellectualized projects” (Bachelard 18),
descriptions which closely resemble the id and the superego. Edward S. Casey mentions in
Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (2013) that “Bachelard is aware of the parallel course
he is on with Freud – and Jung as well” (Casey 288) in topoanalysis, which Bachelard defines
as “the systematic psychological study of the localities of our intimate lives” (Bachelard 8)
and in which “descriptive psychology, depth psychology, psychoanalysis, and
phenomenology all come together in a common enterprise” (Casey 288).
Furthermore, the uncanny can be viewed as a phenomenon of estrangement. As
Dylan Trigg explains in Memories of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny (2012):
“phenomenology’s overarching achievement is to draw our attention to the strangeness of
things … through attending to the natural world in an unnatural manner” (Trigg 26). Trigg’s
point is that we take the everyday world for granted and only truly become aware of its
facticity when we are estranged from it (Trigg 25-26). Trigg’s claim can also be applied to
gender - another concept which we normally take for granted until it becomes problematic
and suddenly stands out. As Marlene S. Barr argues in her feminist reading of the patriarchal
uncanny: “Shocked after encountering the victimized female protagonist (the patriarchal
uncanny), feminist readers identify with her, hesitate, and wonder how she (and they
themselves) will survive” (Barr 200-201). In this sense, the uncanny can be part of a feminist
discourse by causing readers to pause and re-evaluate the normative organisation of time,
space and power, as will be exemplified in the analysis of “The Yellow Wall-Paper”.
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Chapter 2
Furnishing the Interior: Analysis
2.1 The House of the Seven Gables
Hawthorne’s Romantic Chronotope of the Gothic Home
Nathaniel Hawthorne states in the preface to The House of the Seven Gables that he hopes
“the book may be read strictly as a Romance, having a great deal more to do with the clouds
overhead, than with any portion of the actual soil of the County of Essex” (Hawthorne 3).
Despite this statement, which seems to disconnect the novel from the physical place and
historical reality, The House of the Seven Gables is firmly rooted in regional history. As
Charles L. Crow notes in History of the Gothic: American Gothic (2009), “[t]he house of the
title was a real structure in Hawthorne’s Salem (and a tourist attraction today)” and the plot
of the novel “while fictional, resembles actual events of the Salem witchcraft trials” (Crow
49). Moreover, Jarlath Killeen explains in History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1825-1914
(2009) that one of the aims of the Gothic romance is to “interrogate versions of legitimacy
central to national mythology … by configuring [the past] as grotesque and monstrous”
(Killeen 28-29), and this is precisely what Hawthorne does through the central motivic
chronotope of the titular house. By telling his story as a Gothic romance, Hawthorne is able
to saturate the seven-gabled house with symbolic meaning and create a parallel between its
dark structure and the oppressive world order it is founded upon; a world order which
involves patriarchal dominance over women, aristocratic (and capitalistic) greed for land,
and the abstract rationality of modernity over the Romantic connection with nature. In
addition, the structuring influence of the house on the activities of its inhabitants prompts
the reader to reconsider conceptions of homeliness, domesticity, and ownership of bodies
as well as land in the American imagination.
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The poetics of the House of the Seven Gables are explicitly Gothic and plainly recall
the chronotopes of earlier Gothic works: castle-like, this “imposing edifice” is “a specimen of
the best and stateliest architecture of a long-past epoch”, and like gargoyles on a Gothic
cathedral, “[i]ts whole exterior was ornamented with quaint figures, conceived in the
grotesqueness of a Gothic fancy” (Hawthorne 10, 11). Architect and designer Edwin
Heathcote argues in The Meaning of Home (2012) that gargoyles “draw you in, almost
mesmerically” and mark the façade of a building as “a face from a different, dream-like
world” (Heathcote 105). In the chronotope of the Gothic home, gargoyles essentially let
visitors know that ‘here be dragons’, marking it as an enigmatic space where time and place
are unknowable and unreliable.
Like turrets on a castle or spires on a cathedral, “the seven gables pointed sharply
towards the sky, and presented the aspect of a whole sisterhood of edifices” (Hawthorne
11). While the verticality of cathedrals is normally said to represent an upwards movement
towards heaven, verticality in fictional Gothic buildings is typically an image of patriarchal
power. As Lefebvre argues in The Production of Space (1974), architectural verticality
“introduces a phallic or more precisely a phallocratic element into the visual realm; the
purpose of this display, of this need to impress, is to convey an impression of authority to
each spectator. Verticality and great height have ever been the spatial expression of
potentially violent power” (Lefebvre 1974, 98). Arguably, the cluster of pointed gables
represents the same phallic dominance and transgressive masculine posturing, while the
many gables testify to the house-owner’s surplus of financial power through a surplus of
space. In short, the patriarchy’s phallic ascendency and the aristocracy’s extravagant use of
space are represented here by the same vertical architecture.
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The House of the Seven Gables not only shows the traces of patriarchal power in its
architecture; it is also founded on a patriarchal family myth. As mentioned in section 1.2,
adventure-time in the everyday novel of adventure is often founded on guilt and personal
responsibility for a crime, and this is also the case in The House of the Seven Gables, where
the titular house has been built “over an unquiet grave” (Hawthorne 9), on land that Colonel
Pyncheon, the powerful Puritan progenitor of the Pyncheon family, has stolen from
Matthew Maule, a member of the lower-class whom the Colonel has persecuted and caused
to be executed as a witch 3. Hawthorne, who was descended from Salem witchcraft judges
“whose legacy apparently haunted the author all his life” (Crow 49), illustrates the hypocrisy
of the Pyncheons’ Puritan ancestor by making it clear that the “invidious acrimony in the
zeal with which he had sought the condemnation of Matthew Maule” (Hawthorne 8) is
motivated by greed for the other man’s small plot of land. Contrary to all Puritan restraint,
Colonel Pyncheon’s claim to the land has been “unduly stretched, in order to make it cover
the small metes and bounds of Matthew Maule” (Hawthorne 7).
Moreover, by making Pyncheon’s self-interested accumulation of land, wealth and
power the founding event for his chronotope of the Gothic home, Hawthorne connects
patriarchal dominance over the home with aristocratic dominance over place. As will be
seen, both types of dominance have an alienating and dehumanising effect: in Maule’s case
through the dispossession of his pastoral plot of land and in Hepzibah Pyncheon’s case
through the self-alienation of her body.
Colonel Pyncheon also represents an oppressive and domineering rationalism in
contrast to the Romantic spirit of freedom, imagination and intimate connection with
3
The fact that Maule does appear to have some affinity with the supernatural (he is consistently referred to as
a wizard and casts a curse on Pyncheon as revenge) only serves to mark him as Other, which links him to the
other Others who become victims of masculine oppression in the novel, namely women and womanish men.
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nature. As Crow notes, “[f]or the Romantics, the greatest evil is to be found in obsessive
rationalism combined with authority” (Crow 4). Likewise, Carol Margaret Davison notes that
the Gothic romance “frequently offers the reminder that Enlightenment Reason involves a
perverse, emotional repression that has dramatic and grotesque ramifications” and
“excessive reason” is therefore typically the “paramount characteristic of the heartless
Gothic villain” (Davison 52). As the Puritanical version of this type of villain, Colonel
Pyncheon is “[e]ndowed with common-sense, as massive and hard as blocks of granite,
fastened together by stern rigidity of purpose” (Hawthorne 9). When he steals Maule’s land
the Colonel rationalises place in abstract terms of ‘acres’, ‘metes and bounds’ and ‘mouldy
parchments’, making it an artificial space removed from nature.
Colonel Pyncheon and Matthew Maule’s dispute over land ownership can be
described as competing chronotopes. In contrast to the House of the Seven Gables, “the logbuilt hut of Matthew Maule” (Hawthorne 9) resembles Bachelard’s image of “the primitive
hut, of prehistoric man” (Bachelard 31), which is characteristic of the chronotope of the
idyllic rural home and a more elemental way of being in the world. While Colonel Pyncheon
represents a despotic aristocratic power which legitimises its claim to land by inherited
wealth rather than by direct engagement with the world through labour, Maule represents
the free pioneering spirits who “would have laughed at the idea of any man’s asserting a
right – on the strength of mouldy parchments … - to the lands which they or their fathers
had wrested from the wild hand of Nature by their own sturdy toil” (Hawthorne 19). Like an
American Adam in a New World Garden of Eden, Maule has built his simple home on land
that he has “hewn out of the primeval forest, to be his garden-ground and homestead”
(Hawthorne 7). Thus, Colonel Pyncheon’s crime against Maule is also a crime against the
national mythology of America as the virgin land of free pioneers, and in this sense the
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novel does precisely what Killeen identifies as one of the primary functions of the Gothic
romance by calling attention to the dark aspects of the nation’s past and interrogating
national versions of legitimacy. Pyncheon’s “hard and grasping spirit” (Hawthorne 237) is as
much a part of the national character as Maule’s self-reliant, pioneering spirit, Hawthorne
seems to say, and the former threatens to crush the latter with materialistic greed.
The natural environment reflects the site’s transition from an idyllic to a Gothic
chronotope: Maule’s hut is placed in pastoral surroundings at the end of a “cow-path”, then
called by “the humbler appellation of Maule’s Lane”, near a “natural spring of soft and
pleasant water” (Hawthorne 6). After the Seven Gables erected in its place, Maule’s Lane is
renamed to Pyncheon-street, which redefines the area in terms of ownership and removes
it further from nature by making it urban rather than rural. Likewise, “the water of Maule’s
Well, as it continued to be called, grew hard and brackish” (Hawthorne 10), turning from a
symbol of the land’s idyllic purity to a Gothic symbol of nature tainted by guilt. By keeping
its original name the well also resists the redefinition of ownership and causes Maule’s
presence to linger uncannily in the garden of the House of the Seven Gables. In this sense,
the idyllic chronotope associated with Maule’s way of being in the world has not been
eradicated, but continues to exist on a repressed level in the shape of the well “which
Nature might fairly claim as her inalienable property, in spite of whatever man could do to
render it his own” (Hawthorne 88).
Matthew Maule’s presence is not the only one that haunts the House of the Seven
Gables, however. At the moment of his execution, Maule curses Colonel Pyncheon,
prophesising that “God will give him blood to drink!” (Hawthorne 8). Maule’s prophecy is
fulfilled when the Colonel is found dead with blood on his collar during the housewarming
festivities, but the curse does not end there. Instead, Maule’s curse curves the Pyncheons’
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straight line of descent into the self-repeating cycle that characterises uncanny adventure
time, as Colonel Pyncheon is seemingly “gifted with a sort of intermittent immortality on
earth” and reborn whenever “the fortunes of the family were low” (Hawthorne 19). His
reincarnations “clung to the ancestral house, with singular tenacity of home-attachment”
(Hawthorne 20) and usually suffer the same bloody death as the original. The House of the
Seven Gables thus becomes a repository of ancestral guilt for all the succeeding generations
of Pyncheons who “were troubled with doubts as to their moral right to hold on to it”, yet
seem destined to “commit anew the great guilt of his ancestor, and incur all of its original
responsibilities” (Hawthorne 20).
Guilt always has the harmful effect of anchoring one in the past, but as the uncanny
doubling of Colonel Pyncheon shows; this is an unfinished past which refuses to remain in
the annals of family history. In addition, the Colonel’s portrait, which hangs in the room
where he died, becomes the “Evil Genius of his family” (Hawthorne 21). As the genius loci of
the house, the Colonel’s presence permeates it with the inescapable influence of the past
and shapes human relationships into a patriarchal dynasty, compelling all of his male heirs
to “send down his estate in the line marked out by custom, so immemorial, that it looks like
nature. In all Pyncheons, this feeling had the energy of disease” (Hawthorne 23).
This diseased energy is also evident in the Pyncheons’ obsessive search for a missing
deed which can legitimise their aristocratic aspirations by giving them the rights to a tract of
land “more extensive than many a dukedom, or even a reigning prince’s territory, on
European soil” (Hawthorne 18). As revealed by the end of the novel, Thomas Maule, the son
of Matthew Maule and hired architect of the House of the Seven Gables, has hidden the
deed in a secret compartment in the house behind the portrait of Colonel Pyncheon. Maria
Tatar notes that this secret “serves as a matrix for the uncanny events in the House of the
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Seven Gables” (Tatar 175): not only is the hidden deed a prime example of an uncanny
mystery existing within the home, but it is also guarded by the ghost of the Colonel, the
personified spectre of wealth (Tatar 175-176). Moreover, the search for the deed is the
driving force behind uncanny adventure-time in the Seven Gables: the story of Alice
Pyncheon (an interpolated glimpse into the less distant past which will be discussed later)
and Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon’s persecution of Clifford Pyncheon (the main plot of the novel’s
present time) are separate sequences which progress linearly from beginning to end, but
they are also cyclical repetitions of the same recurring theme: the current Pyncheon
patriarch’s ruthless quest to obtain the missing deed and expand his empire 4.
Finally, the direct connection between all this Gothic history and the House of the
Seven Gables has the effect of disturbing the natural and heimlich rhythm of the house:
“The terror and ugliness of Maule’s crime, and the wretchedness of his punishment, would
darken the freshly plastered walls, and infect them early with the scent of an old and
melancholy house” (Hawthorne 9). Ageing and decay are part of the natural rhythm of any
house, but here that rhythm is made uncanny because it is temporally displaced and
accelerated. Bachelard argues that the homely, felicitous house is a shelter against nature
where “the house’s virtues of protection and resistance are transposed into human virtues.
The house acquires the physical and moral energy of a human body” (Bachelard 46). Instead
of being a shelter against the destructive forces of nature, however, the Seven Gables is
overwhelmed by the natural force of chronic decay. With its seemingly “human
countenance” (Hawthorne 5) and its resemblance to “a great human heart, with a life of its
own” (Hawthorne 27), the Seven Gables has the energy of a human body, but unlike
Bachelard’s felicitous home it is an unhealthy body, unfit to protect what it shelters. The
4
Notably, the deed is for land that Pyncheon has bought from Native Americans, hinting at another crime
against Others in the national past.
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house therefore perpetuates the energy of disease that characterises the Pyncheons and
mirrors the moral degeneration of their family line.
Ultimately, the Pyncheons may inhabit the House of the Seven Gables, but they are
never truly at home there, and with Bachelard’s emphasis on the horror of being torn away
from home in mind, this is a much worse implication of Maule’s curse than the occasional
death by apoplexy among the male members of the family. Like Maule’s dispossessed
descendants, who become impoverished transients, “living here and there about the town,
in hired tenements, and coming finally to the alms-house, as the natural home of their old
age” (Hawthorne 25), Colonel Pyncheon’s descendants are essentially made homeless.
Therefore, the only possible resolution in the novel is to re-establish a sense of home by
reorganising time and space into a homely pattern. This task naturally falls to the women in
the house, for while men - Colonel Pyncheon, Matthew Maule and later, Jaffrey Pyncheon,
the capitalist reincarnation of the Colonel who has “proved himself the very man to build up
a new house” (Hawthorne 59) in the country, are the house-builders in the novel, the act of
homemaking is depicted as distinctly feminine. In this sense, The House of the Seven Gables
exemplifies how Heidegger’s “distinction between constructing and preserving, as two
aspects of building and dwelling, is implicitly gendered” (Young 127), as Young claims.
Homemaking as Liberation
The central characters in the novel’s present time (160 years after the 17th century
beginnings of the house) are Hepzibah Pyncheon, the “wretchedly poor” old maid who now
occupies the Seven Gables “in an extremely retired manner”, and her cousin Phoebe
Pyncheon, “a little country-girl of seventeen” (Hawthorne 24), who later moves in with her.
The two male characters who also inhabit the Seven Gables, Holgrave, a young artist who is
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the descendant of Matthew Maule, and Clifford Pyncheon, Hepzibah’s beloved brother who
has been wrongfully imprisoned for a murder that Jaffrey has committed and returns home
after serving a thirty-year sentence, are far more marginal to the plot, as their displacement
to the remote attic rooms of the house indicates.
Prior to Phoebe’s arrival Hepzibah has “dwelt in strict seclusion; taking no part in the
business of life, and just as little in its intercourse and pleasures” for “above a quarter of a
century” (Hawthorne 31). The ‘business of life’ clearly belongs to the chronotope of the
town, in which the House of the Seven Gables sits like a “cold, sunless, stagnant” island,
inhabited by a “torpid recluse” (Hawthorne 31). The chronotope of the Gothic home
occasionally exists within or alongside the chronotope of a town, but its boundaries are
always visibly and spatially demarcated: even when it was newly built, the House of the
Seven Gables “rose, a little withdrawn from the line of the street, not in modesty, but in
pride” (Hawthorne 11). In the present time “[t]he street, in which it upreared its venerable
peaks, has long ceased to be a fashionable quarter of the town; so that, though the old
edifice was surrounded by habitations of modern date, they were mostly small … and typical
of the most plodding uniformity of common life” (Hawthorne 26-27).
This ‘plodding uniformity’ is typical of the chronotope of the provincial town. As
Bakhtin puts it, “[s]uch towns are the locus for cyclical everyday time … there are no events,
only ’doings’ that constantly repeat themselves” (Bakhtin 247). The provincial town’s cyclical
temporality, a “viscous and sticky time which drags itself through space” (Bakhtin 248), may
seem to resemble Hepzibah’s “innumerable yesterdays” (Hawthorne 31) within the house,
but there is a crucial difference: the repeated ‘doings’ of the townspeople constitute a social
and predictable everyday rhythm while the House of the Seven Gables is entirely given over
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to the temporality of decay, a slow disintegration without growth or renewal, encapsulating
Hepzibah within its wooden walls like a coffin.
From the outside, nature is slowly reclaiming the house and reshaping it into a
picturesque ruin: it is overshadowed by the massive Pyncheon-elm which “gave beauty to
the old edifice and seemed to make it a part of nature”, the garden is overgrown with “an
enormous fertility of burdocks, with leaves, it is hardly an exaggeration to say, two or three
feet long”, “green moss … had long since gathered over the projection of the windows, and
on the slopes of the roof” and flower-shrubs grow on its gables where “the decay of the roof
gradually formed a kind of soil for them” (Hawthorne 27-28). Although nature is depicted as
benign in these quotes, it does not have a restorative effect on the homeliness of the house.
On the contrary, the house exerts its gloomy influence over its natural surroundings: “it was
both sad and sweet to see how Nature adopted herself to this desolate, decaying, gusty,
rusty, old house of the Pyncheon family; and how the ever-returning Summer did her best
to gladden it with tender beauty, and grew melancholy in the effort” (Hawthorne 28). A
gardener is needed to domesticate the wilderness (like Maule in his ‘primeval forest’) before
it can become homely, and while the reclusive Hepzibah “would hardly have come forth –
under the speck of open sky, to weed and hoe” (Hawthorne 87), we will see how a gardener
does eventually turn up in the shape of Phoebe to facilitate a return to the idyllic
chronotope.
The interior of the house is equally unhomely and “time-darkened” (Hawthorne 32).
The furniture is marked by a lack of use and comfort, from the chairs which are “straight and
stiff, and so ingeniously contrived for the discomfort of the human person that they were
irksome even to sight” (Hawthorne 33) to Hepzibah’s “dusty writing-desk” (Hawthorne 73),
and the rooms are filled with heirlooms that point towards the past sins of the family: the
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armchair that Colonel Pyncheon died in, a harpsichord which “looked more like a coffin than
anything else” and contains the “dead music” (Hawthorne 73) of Alice Pyncheon, the map of
the eastward Pyncheon territory and, of course, the portrait of the Colonel himself.
Trapped in this shadowy, tomb-like realm, Hepzibah is cut off from the ‘common life’
that saturates the homogenous townhouses. Much later in the novel, Clifford and Hepzibah
desire to follow Phoebe to church, only to discover that “[t]he warm sunny air of the street
made them shiver. Their hearts quaked within them at the idea of taking one step further”
(Hawthorne 169). Entirely separated from the steady rhythm of everyday life and the
substantiality of everyday activities, they are forced to realise that “[w]e are ghosts! We
have no right among human beings – no right anywhere but in this old house, which has a
curse on it and which we are doomed to haunt” (Hawthorne 169). The decay of the house
indicates the crumbling order of the old aristocracy. Clifford and Hepzibah feel like ‘ghosts’
because they are literally living in the past – Clifford in the personal past of his lost youth
and Hepzibah in the historical past where “a born lady” (Hawthorne 37) had to remain in the
private sphere of the house and avoid “sordid contact with the world” (Hawthorne 39).
Unlike the prototypical Gothic heroine, exemplified by Wood’s Julia Vallace,
Hepzibah has not been confined to the House of the Seven Gables by any individual male
villain. Instead, she is anchored to the house by out-dated patriarchal conceptions of
femininity which have caused her to fuse with her ancestral home to the point where she is
nearly dehumanised: the “creaking joints of her stiffened knees” echo the creaking of the
floorboards; the “rigid and rusty frame” of her body resembles the frame of the house; her
“forbidding scowl” is akin to the “impending brow of the second story”; and “her very brain
was impregnated with the dry-rot of its timbers” (Hawthorne 30, 34, 27, 59). Essentially, her
identification as a lady has reduced Hepzibah to an object in the patriarchal household.
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Thus, Hepzibah’s motility is overlaid with the bodily modalities that Young calls immanence
and discontinuous unity; her objectified body moves in “spasmodic jerks” and her actions
are carried out with “fidgety reluctance” (Hawthorne 31).
As Annegret S. Ogden notes in The Great American Housewife (1986), most actual
ladies were responsible for “running a graceful home for the purpose of breeding new
aristocrats” (Ogden 33), and in that sense reduced to their biological function, but Hepzibah
is deprived even of this purpose: “she never had a lover – poor thing, how could she? – nor
ever knew, by her own experience, what love technically means” (Hawthorne 32). Since she
is neither a wife nor a mother, Hepzibah fails to fulfil the proper role of the stereotypical
Victorian lady within the patriarchal aristocracy, and therefore she is unable to renew or
continue the patriarchal world order. The satirical comparison between the Pyncheons and
their chickens illustrate how the values of the aristocracy have led to its demise: “It was
evident that the race [of chickens] had degenerated, like many a noble race besides, in
consequence of too strict a watchfulness to keep it pure” (Hawthorne 89). This has led to a
situation where there are no ‘suitable’ men left for Hepzibah to marry, leaving her “a timestricken virgin” (Hawthorne 34) and “an antiquated virgin” (Hawthorne 136), whose “love of
children had never quickened … and was now torpid, if not extinct” (Hawthorne 39). These
descriptions recall Gilbert and Gubar’s discussion of womb/tomb imagery and “the
anatomical ‘emptiness’ of spinsterhood” (Gilbert and Gubar 88): like the Seven Gables,
Hepzibah’s body houses only death.
Although the narrator’s pejorative comments on Hepzibah’s unmarried and childless
state could be perceived as sexist, the care that the narrator expresses for her as the story
evolves suggests otherwise. By figuring Hepzibah as Gothic – and sometimes even as a
Gothic parody (Pfister 148) - Hawthorne is not criticising her life as an independent and
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solitary woman, but rather her misguided attempt to live up to an anachronistic patriarchal
ideal of femininity, as well as the social position of the genteel spinster who imprisons
herself in a grand mansion and becomes obsolete and invisible, cut off from a daily work
and social rhythms of the chronotope of the town. As Hepzibah comes to realise: “what
other dungeon is so dark as one’s own heart! What jailor so inexorable as one’s own self!”
(Hawthorne 169).
All of Hepzibah’s repressed desires and maternal instincts are directed towards
Clifford, and in an attempt to put an end to her financial problems and sustain a home for
him, she decides to open a cent-shop in the front gable of the house. The cent-shop is “a
subject of no slight mortification” (Hawthorne 29) to Hepzibah and her predecessors. It was
originally added to the house by a particularly miserly member of the family, but
“[i]mmediately upon his death the shop-door had been locked, bolted, and barred”
(Hawthorne 29) in order to re-establish the boundary between the chronotope of the town
and the Seven Gables and the correlated class hierarchy, as well in an attempt to repress
the family’s troublesome history of materialistic greed. The crucial difference between
Hepzibah and the original shop-keeper is that her purpose in opening the shop is based on
selfless love rather than greed. As she tells Clifford: “Alone I might have been content to
starve. But you were given back to me!” (Hawthorne 113).
The cent-shop is dominated by the chronotope of the threshold since it not only sits
on the literal threshold between the public sphere of the town and the private sphere of the
house, but also represents a point of break and crisis in Hepzibah’s life as “the instant of
time when the patrician lady is to be transformed into a plebeian woman” (Hawthorne 38).
As Bakhtin explains:
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“The word ‘threshold’ itself already has a metaphorical meaning in everyday usage (together with its
literal meaning), and is connected with the breaking point of a life, the moment of crisis, the decision
that changes a life (or the indecisiveness that fails to change a life, the fear to step over the
threshold). In literature, the chronotope of the threshold is always metaphorical and symbolic,
sometimes openly but often more implicitly” (Bakhtin 248).
The narrator of The House of the Seven Gables plays with this metaphorical meaning and
indicates the importance of the cent-shop to the narrative structure of the novel by
commenting that “we are loitering faint-heartedly on the threshold of our story”
(Hawthorne 34) as Hepzibah prepares to open her shop. As Bakhtin notes, the chronotope
of the threshold is often “combined with the motif of the encounter” (Bakhtin 248).
Opening the shop allows the plot to move forward because it creates a permeable and
liminal space within the chronotope of the Gothic home where encounters and
confrontations can take place. To Hepzibah, these encounters are always indicators of crisis
time. As she unbars the shop door she feels that “a flood of evil consequences would come
tumbling through the gap” (Hawthorne 40) and the first ringing of the shop bell “at once set
every nerve of her body in responsive and tumultuous vibration. The crisis was upon her!”
(Hawthorne 42). Although Hawthorne describes her fears in comically melodramatic terms,
her anxiety is somewhat justified, since it is not primarily wares, but gender roles, class
differences and power relations that are negotiated in the cent-shop.
Significantly, Hepzibah’s first customer is Holgrave, the present-time representative
of the Maules and the radical voice of future-oriented change, who gives her his fervent
approval: “Do you really think, Miss Hepzibah, that any lady of your family has ever done a
more heroic thing, since this house was built, than you are performing in it to-day? Never; and if the Pyncheons had always acted so nobly, I doubt whether old wizard Maule’s
anathema … would have had much weight with Providence against them” (Hawthorne 45).
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As Holgrave’s praise indicates, Hepzibah is essentially taking a first step, however
reluctantly, towards collapsing the Pyncheon aristocracy and dissolving the class-based
conflict between the Pyncheons and the Maules by becoming a wage-earner. As Joel Pfister
points out in The Production of a Personal Life – Class, Gender and the Psychological in
Hawthorne’s Fiction (1991), “Hawthorne uses Holgrave to formulate the moral that
Hepzibah must acknowledge” (Pfister 154) when he says that “[t]hese names of gentleman
and lady had a meaning, in the past history of the world … In the present, and still more in
the future condition of society – they imply, not privilege, but restriction” (Hawthorne 45).
Similarly, Holgrave’s statement that running the cent-shop will make Hepzibah “feel
whether it is not better to be a true woman, than a lady” (Hawthorne 45) formulates the
moral that, unlike the stilted and artificial lady, a ‘true woman’ lives an active and
productive life. As will be seen, this moral is embodied in Phoebe who is described as “a true
New England woman” (Hawthorne 73-74).
Hepzibah rejects this moral with the words “These are new notions … I shall never
understand them; neither do I wish it” (Hawthorne 45) and therefore she never manages to
break free from the House of the Seven Gables of her own volition. However, through her
association with the threshold chronotope, Hepzibah unintentionally effects a subtle
subversion of the traditional gender roles. As the breadwinner who supports an invalid
(surrogate) spouse, Hepzibah assumes the traditionally masculine role in the relationship
between herself and Clifford. This gender reversal is reinforced by Clifford’s “[f]eminine
traits, moulded inseparably with those of the other sex” which make Hepzibah think that
“they persecuted his mother in him! He never was a Pyncheon!”, his bursts of “a woman’s
passion of tears”, and his “affection and sympathy for flowers” which is “almost exclusively
a woman’s trait (Hawthorne 60, 113, 147).
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Sue Vice notes that “the threshold chronotope has particular resonance for the
construction of a gender-aware chronotope” because its “metaphorical meaning derives
from the boundary between private [feminine] space and public [masculine] space” (Vice
216). While Hepzibah never manages to become a ‘true woman’, the liminal space of the
cent-shop becomes a site of resistance which allows her to embrace the masculine side of
her personality and act as Clifford’s protector. This is foreshadowed when she first glimpses
Jaffrey through the shop window and mentally resists his look of “exceeding displeasure”
(Hawthorne 59) and reclaims the House of the Seven Gables as her own with the thought:
“Take it as you like it, Cousin Jaffrey! … Take it as you like it! You have seen my little shopwindow! Well! – what have you to say? is not the Pyncheon house my own, while I’m alive?”
(Hawthorne 58). When Jaffrey later enters the cent-shop and demands to see Clifford,
Hepzibah “issued forth, it would appear, to defend the entrance, looking, we must needs
say, amazingly like the dragon which, in fairy tales, is wont to be the guardian over an
enchanted beauty” (Hawthorne 126). In this complete reversal of gender roles, where
Hepzibah is the ‘guardian’ and Clifford is the ‘enchanted beauty’, the formerly timid and
trembling Hepzibah finally becomes powerful, if only momentarily.
Ultimate, however, Hepzibah finds it impossible to restore the homeliness which
could potentially heal her brother; despite opening the cent-shop, resisting Jaffrey and
repeatedly asserting that “Clifford has a home here!” (Hawthorne 128), she is simply too
reluctant to relinquish her identity as a lady and too domestically incompetent to reverse
the uncanny atmosphere of the house. Although Nina Baym, one of the literary critics who
makes a case for viewing Hawthorne as a feminist, makes a persuasive argument for viewing
Hepzibah as both heroine and protagonist of the novel, she is forced to admit that all of
Hepzibah’s ‘heroic’ deeds tend to be indirect, unintended and coincidental (Baym 614).
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Phoebe, on the other hand, embodies an active and present-oriented way of being in the
world, which enables her to replace the Gothic effects of the house with domesticity and
provide Clifford with what “the outcast … instinctively pines for – a home!” (Hawthorne
141). Although critics are often quick to dismiss Phoebe as “the Angel in the House” whose
“power is illusory” (Haack 318) and “a potential victim needing rescue” with “no defiance in
her nature” (Baym 607), it is Phoebe, not Hepzibah, who finally sets things aright in the
house and dispels Matthew Maule’s curse. Contrary to Baym’s assertion that “[s]he is not a
heroine” (Baym 607), it will be seen in the following analysis of her homemaking abilities
that Phoebe is both fearless, capable of transcendent bodily activity and constantly
associated with images of nature and goodness; in short, a heroine – even if the depiction of
her as the ideal True Woman and Angel in the House complicates her role as a feminist
heroine.
It is immediately clear that the chronotope of the Gothic home is an alien realm to
Phoebe: she is “widely in contrast … with everything about her. The sordid and ugly
luxuriance of gigantic weeds, that grew in the angle of the house, and the heavy projection
that overshadowed her, and the time-worn framework of the door; - none of these things
belonged to her sphere” (Hawthorne 68). As “a native of a rural part of New England”
(Hawthorne 69), Phoebe’s sphere is the idyllic rural chronotope. As the daughter of “a
young woman of no family or property” (Hawthorne 24) Phoebe has not inherited the
Pyncheons’ aristocratic delusions or lifestyle. As Hepzibah asserts; “Phoebe is no Pyncheon.
She takes everything from her mother!” (Hawthorne 79). Phoebe is not frightened or
alienated by her new surroundings, however. Instead, her presence at the house is
naturalised through her association with the sun: “even as a ray of sunshine, fall into what
dismal place it may, instantaneously creates for itself a propriety in being there – so did it
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seem altogether fit that the girl should be standing at the threshold” (Hawthorne 68-69).
Likewise, Phoebe has no immediate fear of the house; just as the “cheery glow” (Hawthorne
68) of her smile is reflected on the faces of those she bestows it upon, she fills the House of
the Seven Gables with her own light instead of being absorbed into its darkness.
While Phoebe’s heroism is no more intentional than Hepzibah’s (she is too sensible
to credit the supernatural and too trusting to suspect Jaffrey), she shows none of Hepzibah’s
fidgety hesitancy or “habitual sluggishness” (Hawthorne 76); instead, she is “admirably in
keeping with herself, and never jarred against surrounding circumstances” (Hawthorne 80),
“of that quickness and activity of temperament that she seldom long refrained from taking a
part, and generally a good one, in what was going forward” (Hawthorne 110), and
homemaking is an innate ability that she carries with her wherever she goes:
“Little Phoebe was one of those persons who possess, as their exclusive patrimony, the gift of
practical arrangement. It is a kind of natural magic, that enables these favored ones to bring out the
hidden capabilities of things around them; and particularly to give a look of comfort and
habitableness to any place which, for however brief a period, may happen to be their home. A wild
hut of underbrush, tossed together by wayfarers through the primitive forest, would acquire the
home-aspect by one night’s lodging of such a woman” (Hawthorne 72).
Phoebe enacts all of the small rituals that constitute the rhythm of everyday time which has
previously been entirely absent in the House of the Seven Gables: when she wakes up after
her first night in the house, she feels momentarily disoriented by its gloom, but does not
allow it to deter her from carrying out her usual routine: “Nothing, indeed, was absolutely
plain to her, except that it was now early morning, and that, whatever might happen next, it
was proper, first of all, to get up and say her prayers” (Hawthorne 71). By adjusting her daily
routine to the natural and predictable cyclicality of night and day, and by doing what is
‘proper’ regardless of ‘whatever might happen next’, Phoebe counteracts the ontological
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instability and uncanny adventure-time of the chronotope of the Gothic home and replaces
it with the stable, predictable and natural rhythms of the idyllic chronotope, and thus, she
also counteracts the oppressive male dominance that has twisted time and space in the
house.
Having finished her prayers and gotten dressed, Phoebe immediately proceeds to rearrange her dismal room into a homely space. Her domestic activity is “genial” (Hawthorne
73) – entirely without any trace of drudgery or uncanny mechanical quality. Having “no
preliminary design” she simply “gave a touch here, and another there; brought some articles
of furniture to light, and dragged others into the shadow; looped up or let down her curtain;
and in the course of half-an-hour, had fully succeeded in throwing a kindly and hospitable
smile over the apartment” (Hawthorne 72). Phoebe demonstrates how domestic work can
be both a creative and transcendent bodily activity. Bachelard explains how “housewifely
care weaves the ties that unite a very ancient past to the new epoch. The housewife
awakens furniture that was asleep” (Bachelard 68). This is precisely the kind of “homely
witchcraft” (Hawthorne 72) that Phoebe practices. By becoming absorbed in the present
without any ‘preliminary design’ and investing her activities with positive emotion and
intimate care through her light touches here and there, Phoebe gradually brings the house
back to life.
This kind of housework, in which emotions are projected onto “every piece of
furniture that wants to be friends” (Bachelard 71) until everything seems to have a ‘kindly
and hospitable smile’, is a key aspect of homeliness which both Bachelard and Young argue
is gendered as feminine. Bachelard claims that “[a] house that shines from the care it
receives appears to have been rebuilt from the inside … In the intimate harmony of walls
and furniture, it may be said that we become conscious of a house that is built by women,
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since men only know how to build a house from the outside” (Bachelard 68). Likewise,
Young argues that “[h]omemaking consists in the activities of endowing things with living
meaning” (Young 140), a process which she refers to as “preservation, a typically feminine
activity” which is “traditionally devalued – at least in Western conceptions of history and
identity” (Young 125). The importance that Hawthorne places on Phoebe’s ability to rebuild
the House of the Seven Gables from the inside and endow its objects with living meaning
strongly resists this masculinist devaluation. However, while Hawthorne’s positive depiction
of Phoebe’s homemaking abilities can be said to be empowering for women, she is clearly
modelled after the ideal of the 19th century cult of domesticity which Barbara Welter
famously denounces in her article “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860” (1966).
Phoebe embodies all of the “attributes of True Womanhood” which Welter divides
into “four cardinal virtues – piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity” (Welter 152).
Welter partially bases her article on Coventry Patmore’s narrative poem The Angel in the
House (1854) in which the ideal wife is described as a self-sacrificing domestic angel. Phoebe
is also consistently described as angelic: “Angels do not toil, but let their good works grow
out of them; and so did Phoebe” (Hawthorne 82). In descriptions such as this, Haack
correctly notes that Phoebe’s housework is “decorporealized” (Haack 318): it is not a
physical effort involving dirt and perspiration, but miraculously ‘grows’ out of her presence.
While Haack may therefore be correct in stating that this stereotypical depiction of Phoebe
as the angel in the house detracts from the view of The House of the Seven Gables as a
feminist text, it is important to note that Hawthorne’s narrator stresses that there can be
“no morbidness in Phoebe; if there had been, the old Pyncheon house was the very locality
to ripen it into incurable disease” (Hawthorne 137): only someone as “orderly and obedient
to common rules” (Hawthorne 68) as Phoebe could hope to transform the diseased energy
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of the house into homeliness. In this sense, Phoebe’s “limit loving and law abiding” (Baym
607) nature is actually her best defence against the house. Phoebe needs no defiance, since
her purpose is not to revolutionise but to naturalise the House of the Seven Gables. True,
Phoebe is no radical feminist heroine, but Hawthorne may still be said to be a feminist
author, given his depiction of an extremely oppressive and immoral patriarchal system
which is counteracted by a young woman’s innate sense of right and wrong.
Phoebe’s homemaking is achieved through gardening as well as housework; another
transcendent bodily activity where Phoebe’s creative powers are combined with physical
labour. Phoebe is consistently described with floral imagery in contrast to the rigid forms of
Hepzibah and Colonel Pyncheon, and she not only naturalises the house by bringing literal
garden flowers into it, but also “impregnated it … not with a wild-flower scent - for wildness
was no trait of hers – but with the perfume of garden-roses, pinks, and other blossoms …
which nature and man have consented together in making grow” (Hawthorne 143). By
‘impregnating’ the house with organic life Phoebe transforms the formerly mentioned
womb/tomb imagery associated with Hepzibah.
Moreover, the garden is another liminal space and therefore charged with
encounters. These are not the confrontational encounters of the cent-shop, however;
instead, the natural chronotopicity of the garden constitutes a space where all beings can
co-exist peacefully and allows Phoebe and Holgrave, the young descendants of Colonel
Pyncheon and Matthew Maule, to work in the garden as “fellow-laborers” (Hawthorne 93).
Their efforts restore it to a homely place of tranquillity and intimacy. For example, the
formerly “ruinous arbor” becomes “an interior of verdant seclusion, with innumerable
peeps and glimpses into the wider solitude of the garden” (Hawthorne 145), resembling
Bachelard’s image of the nest-like refuge. Bachelard argues that the nest inspires “cosmic
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confidence” in the world and recalls the “security of our first home” (Bachelard 103).
Moreover, “[t]he nest is a lyrical bouquet of leaves” (Bachelard 103), inspiring dreams and
poetry.
The garden is therefore not only soothing to Clifford’s oppressed Romantic spirit, but
also inspires Holgrave to tell Phoebe his story of Alice Pyncheon: Matthew Maule II, a young
carpenter and “the wizard’s grandson” (Hawthorne 189), uses his mesmeric powers to turn
the fair and proud Alice into his puppet and cause her destruction in return for her erotically
objectifying look of “admiration – which she made no attempt to conceal – of the
remarkable comeliness, strength and energy of Maule’s figure” which makes him feel
reduced to “a brute beast” (Hawthorne 201). Hoping that Maule will reveal the
whereabouts of the missing deed in return for allowing the mesmerism to take place, Alice’s
father, Gervayse Pyncheon, has “sold his daughter for the mere hope of getting a sheet of
yellow parchment into [his] clutch” (Hawthorne 206). While Gervayse trades his daughter
like a commodity, Maule substitutes the appropriation of land with the appropriation of her
body. When Holgrave finds that his story has a mesmeric effect on Phoebe, past and
present briefly collide, creating a parallel situation in which the garden momentarily
becomes a space of dangerous temptation. Holgrave resists the temptation to “establish an
influence over this good, pure, and simple child, as dangerous and perhaps as disastrous, as
that which the carpenter of his legend had acquired and exercised over the ill-fated Alice”
(Hawthorne 212), thereby rejecting the ancestral pattern of gendered violation and abuse of
power. Thus, the old rift between Pyncheons and Maules is finally healed in the
regenerative and equalising space of the garden.
Despite the many crucial events and encounters in the cent-shop and the garden,
the climax of the story takes place in the dark interior of the house. When Phoebe briefly
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leaves to visit her mother, the Gothic atmosphere of the house immediately reasserts itself:
during her absence the days pass “heavily and drearily”, “the black roof and walls of the old
house look more cheerless than ever before” and “[t]he garden, with its muddy walks and
the chill, dripping foliage of its summer-house, was an image to be shuddered at”
(Hawthorne 223). It is during this explicitly Gothic time that Jaffrey again enters the house,
forcing his way past Hepzibah, and threatens to use his powerful position in society to
incarcerate Clifford in an asylum if he does not reveal the whereabouts of the hidden deed,
which Jaffrey incorrectly assumes that Clifford knows. Hepzibah identifies the uncanny
repetition of the Colonel’s original crime precisely when she says to him: “Alas, Cousin
Jaffrey, this hard and grasping spirit has run in our blood, these two hundred years! You are
but doing over again, in another shape, what your ancestor before you did, and sending
down to your posterity the curse inherited from him!” (Hawthorne 237). Baym argues that
Jaffrey’s choking death during this confrontation can be indirectly attributed to Hepzibah:
“In traditional Gothic fashion, a seemingly supernatural event has a scientific, a medical,
explanation. Jaffrey’s encounter with Hepzibah kills him because she has, at least for a time,
faced him down, forcing him into fatal exertion” (Baym 613).
For an entire chapter, the narrator lingers over the dead body of Jaffrey. His “fixed
gaze”, his limbs which have “not stirred”, and the absence of any bodily rhythm, down to
“any, even the slightest, irregularity of breath” (Hawthorne 268) saturates the parlour with
the temporality of death; a time that is entirely frozen. The only audible rhythm is “the
ticking of his watch” (Hawthorne 268), signifying mechanical clock-time which has now
become meaningless but still uncannily continues in the absence of human life. Likewise,
the narrator’s ironic comment that “[i]t is odd … that a gentleman so burthened with
engagements – and noted, too, for punctuality – should linger thus” (Hawthorne 269) and
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his persistent prompting of the dead man to move and resume his busy and strictly
scheduled life becomes extremely uncanny: “Why, Judge, it is already two hours, by your
own undeviatingly accurate chronometer!” (Hawthorne 270). Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon, a
powerful member of society, is depicted as a slave to his own ‘chronometer’, having lived a
life where time is strictly planned and measured in the abstract of hours and minutes:
“This was to have been such a busy day! … he was to meet the State-street broker … Half-an-hour
later … there was to be an auction … The next affair was to buy a horse … And if he have
time, amid the press of more urgent matters, he must take measure for the renewal of Mrs
Pyncheon’s tombstone … After this comes something more important. A committee of his political
party has besought him for a hundred or two of dollars” (Hawthorne 271-272).
As these quotes illustrate, Jaffrey’s life has been saturated with the temporality of
capitalism and modernity; a functional, rationalised and linear temporality where time is
literally money; a temporality which places economic growth rather than human growth at
its centre. While Phoebe is also, in her own words, “as nice a little saleswoman, as I am a
housewife” (Hawthorne 78), she invests the cent-shop with emotions and sociability,
chatting at length with her customers and tempering her bargaining with “native truth and
sagacity” (Hawthorne 79). Jaffrey, on the other hand, has set aside half-an-hour for dealing
with Hepzibah since “these women are apt to make many words where a few would do
better”, indicating the contrast between elastic feminine time, which makes room for
digressions and ‘many words’, and the economising inflexibility of linear masculine time.
A similar criticism of the accelerated temporality of modernity is indicated when
Hepzibah and Clifford flee the house after Jaffrey’s death and board a train where they see
“the world racing past them … Everything was unfixed from its age-long rest, and moving at
whirlwind speed” (Hawthorne 256). In this temporality, place becomes blurred and
indistinct, leaving no room for tranquil repose. Despite Clifford’s ecstatic relief at being
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physically unbound from the House of the Seven Gables, Hepzibah feels just as mentally tied
to it as ever: “This one old house was everywhere! It transported its great, lumbering bulk,
with more than railroad speed, and set itself phlegmatically down on whatever spot she
glanced at” (Hawthorne 258). More than ever, it becomes clear that entrapment in the
house is a psychological condition for Hepzibah rather than a physical one, and the uncanny
repetition of the image of the house everywhere she looks indicates the futility of this
manner of escape.
Instead, the final resolution comes when Phoebe and Holgrave meet at the scene of
Jaffrey’s death where they confess their love for each other and agree to marry. Through
their union, the lost American Eden is finally restored: “They transfigured the earth, and
made it Eden again, and themselves the first two dwellers in it” (Hawthorne 307). In her
dismissal of Phoebe as a heroine, Baym states that “as her stay in the house lengthens, she
begins to droop” (Baym 607). However, when Phoebe’s “petals sometimes drooped a little,
in consequence of the heavy atmosphere about her” (Hawthorne 143) it is not a sign of
defeat, but maturation. As she puts it herself, she has grown “a great deal older … and, I
hope, wiser, and – not exactly sadder – but certainly with not half so much lightness in my
spirits!” (Hawthorne 214).
Having acquired the “moral weight and substance” which previously set apart “the
woman and the girl” (Hawthorne 138), Phoebe can lead the entire cast of characters to a
new home – Jaffrey’s country estate – where they found a family based on equality, as
indicated by the inclusion of Uncle Venner, an impoverished old man who has long been a
friend of the family, in the household. Usually, the aristocratic world order is restored in
Gothic works when the rightful heir is reinstated – this is the case in Julia and the
Illuminated Baron, for example, when the dispossessed Julia’s noble heritage is eventually
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revealed – but here a new American world order is approached. Ultimately, Baym is correct
in stating that “Hawthorne identifies the better centuries coming with what he considers
womanly values” (Baym 617), however, these are not the values of Hepzibah, as Baym
claims, but of Phoebe, whose homemaking magic has not only lifted the curse from the
disputed land of the Maules and Pyncheons, but has also domesticated the restless
Holgrave, who, in a complete reversal of his earlier hope for the day when “no man shall
build his house for posterity” (Hawthorne 183) now wishes that the country-house was built
to last for many generations “in stone, rather than in wood” (Hawthorne 314).
2.2. “The Yellow Wall-Paper”
Gilman’s Feminism and Interior Architecture in Context
Charlotte Perkins Gilman allegedly wrote “The Yellow Wall-Paper” as an indictment of the
American neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell’s now infamous rest cure treatment for
neurasthenia 5, which Gilman underwent in 1887 (Shulman viii). In her essay “Why I wrote
‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” (1913) Gilman explains that the short story is a direct response to
Mitchell’s instructions for her to “’live as domestic a life as possible,’ to ‘have but two hours’
intellectual life a day,’ and ‘never touch pen, brush or pencil again, as long as I lived’” – a
treatment which brought her “so near the border line of utter mental ruin that I could see
over” (Gilman 331). By transforming her personal experience into a Gothic horror story
Gilman thus meant to “save people from being driven crazy” (Gilman 332) by a cure that
was worse than the disease.
5
Neurasthenia is a now obsolete medical term used to describe ”a more prestigious and attractive form of
female nervousness than hysteria” (Showalter 134) prevalent among educated, middle-class American women
in the late 19th century. Weir’s rest cure involved isolation, sensory deprivation and excessive feeding, which
effectively infantilised the patient and reduced her to ”childlike obedience” (Showalter 139).
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As Robert Shulman states in his introduction to The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other
Stories (1995); “it is too limiting to see the story simply or even primarily as an exposure of
Mitchell” (Shulman viii), yet Gilman’s personal experience with mental illness and the rest
cure does impact the development of the chronotope of the Gothic home in the short story
in a number of ways. On the most basic level, Gilman’s explicit criticism of the contemporary
medical system (Mitchell is mentioned by name in the short story) shifts the critical focus to
the present; while the chronotope of the Gothic home is primarily centred on the past in
earlier Gothic literature, including historical versions of patriarchy such as the aristocratic
mentality that keeps Hawthorne’s Hepzibah confined to the home in The House of the Seven
Gables, Gilman depicts a woman who is confined to her home by the sexual politics
currently in place.
Significantly, the short story does not take place in a sanatorium away from family
and friends like the actual rest cure (Blackie 66), but in a domestic setting with the
narrator’s husband, John, as her primary physician and her sister-in-law, Jennie, as her
nurse. The narrator is therefore rendered doubly powerless by a male authority figure who
is both her doctor and her husband. As she puts it: “If a physician of high standing, and one’s
own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one
but temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency – what is one to do? My
brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing” (Gilman
3). Simply put, Gilman is not interested in merely disparaging Mitchell’s methods, but in
showing how the medical establishment is another aspect of the patriarchal system, how
the two are intertwined in the domestic ideology of the late 19th century, and how this
directly impacts women’s way of being in the home by transforming it into an uncanny
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insane asylum where male authorities – doctors who may also be husbands and brothers rule supreme.
In this sense, Gilman’s chronotope of the Gothic home involves an intensification of
the subversive feminist strand found in Hawthorne’s chronotope of the Gothic home in The
House of the Seven Gables that exposes patriarchal systems by depicting their Gothic
underbelly. As Elaine Hedges puts it in her “Afterword” (1973), which is often credited with
reintroducing the short story to the scholarly community by calling attention to its
sociocultural importance (Golden 88); “In its time … the story was read essentially as a Poeesque tale of chilling horror – and as a story of mental aberration. It is both of these. But it is
more. It is a feminist document, dealing with sexual politics at a time when few writers felt
free to do so, at least so candidly” (Hedges qtd. in Golden 90). Similarly, Catherine J. Golden
points out in her introduction to Annette Kolodny’s analysis of the short story, “A Map for
Rereading” (1980), that while “The Yellow Wall-Paper” is written within the Poe-esque
tradition of unreliable and insane narrators, Poe “makes madness a character flaw” while
“Gilman daringly projects mental derangement onto a middle-class wife and mother and
makes the home, the sacrosanct sphere for dutiful women, the source of madness” (Golden
93).
While the chronotope of the Gothic home always involves a turn towards the
interior architecture of the house as well as the psyche (as explained in section 1.2), Gilman
arguably moves towards even greater architectural and psychic interiority in “The Yellow
Wall-Paper”. Firstly, the crucial events of the story are set not only in a room, but in the
(psychic) space that the narrator perceives behind the wallpaper. Instead of focusing on the
dark history of the house (although it does appear to have one, as will be discussed later), as
Hawthorne does in The House of the Seven Gables, Gilman zooms in on the seemingly
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ordinary objects of the room to reveal their uncanny potential, as will be seen in the
following analysis. Secondly, Gilman employs a limited first-person perspective, giving the
story a far more narrow and introspective focus than Hawthorne’s novel, and therefore also
a greater emphasis on the subjective experience of time.
In her discussion of the short story, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz notes that “Gilman
allowed her primary character to speak in her own voice … Perhaps without intending it,
Gilman drew on her own utterances in her journal … [which] contained a record of her own
unstable voice” (Horowitz 176). Gilman’s decision to leave her narrator unnamed (or to give
her a generic name, if ‘Jane’ mentioned at the end of the short story refers to the narrator)
indicates that the character should be seen as an everywoman of late 19th century New
England society rather than as a fictionalised version of Gilman herself. However, the
unstable, subjective narrative voice can be seen as an attempt to dig into the unknown
layers of the human mind and use the Gothic as a language to convey that which was nearly
beyond words in Gilman’s pre-Freudian era: a woman’s inner experience of a fragmenting
sense of self and reality as a result of sexist oppression in the home.
Arguably, all of these features mark “The Yellow Wall-Paper” as a forerunner to
Modernism. In “Modernist Gothic” (2014) John Paul Riquelme notes that “like modernist
writing, the Gothic involves a literary and cultural dynamic that challenges many entrenched
cultural attitudes, often by evoking the connections between apparent opposites that a
realistic style would avoid” (Riquelme 20). In “The Yellow Wall-Paper” this obviously
includes the connection between the homely refuge and the unhomely prison, which serves
to illustrate how easily one might become the other. In addition, Marianne Dekoven argues
in “Modernism and Gender” (2011) that the “progressively deranged first-person narration
and its use of dream structure as an ordering principle” (Dekoven 213) in “The Yellow Wall64
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Paper” is another formal feature of Modernism. As Dekoven suggests here, the focus on the
interior self is an important feature of Modernist writing. This is also evident in Virginia
Woolf’s famous Modernist manifesto “Modern Fiction” (1925) where she urges modern
authors to “[l]ook within” and depict life as it really is; “a luminous halo, a semi-transparent
envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” (Woolf 2089,
1925) – something which Gilman seems to anticipate in “The Yellow Wall-Paper”.
Finally, Michael Levenson argues in “From the Closed Room to the Open Sky: Vectors
of Space in Eliot, Woolf, and Lewis” (2007) that this interiorisation is typically given spatial
form in Modernist fiction. As he puts it: “Modernism begins in a room” (Levenson 2). In his
reading of T.S. Eliot’s “Preludes”, Levenson describes the tension between solace and
claustrophobia that characterises the Modernist room:
“Unlike the house, the room can be there when you are, present to the senses, open to introspection.
It is a container, giving both the solace of envelopment – a refuge from the world – and the anxiety of
enclosure – the buried self. The modernist room is typically single and self-contained. It is not a house
for a family. It is a box for the brain … Within the room you inhabit, you watch the ‘sordid images’ that
constitute your soul: they flicker on the ceiling, reverberating in the close space” (Levenson 5).
Although Levenson does not mention “The Yellow Wall-Paper” in his article, his description
of Eliot’s Modernist room is strikingly similar to Gilman’s room where the narrator watches
“a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure” (Gilman 8), which can be interpreted as her
own uncanny double, flicker across the yellow wallpaper. Of course, the Modernist room
also constitutes a positive image of liberation for women; Woolf has famously argued for
the importance of having ‘a room of one’s own’ where women may freely exercise their
creative powers in writing (Woolf 2092, 1929). Gilman’s room can be seen as a Gothic
inversion of that room, despite predating it by several decades: a place where writing is
strictly prohibited and the active imagination is forced to find less healthy outlets.
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Breaking Free or Breaking Down
The central motivic chronotope of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” is a traditional Gothic home: an
old, forbidding mansion which the narrator and her husband have rented for the summer.
The mansion immediately inspires the narrator with Gothic daydreams: “It is very seldom
that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer. A
colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of
romantic felicity – but that would be asking too much of fate!” (Gilman 3). This opening
paragraph attests to the narrator’s imaginative and poetic nature - Bachelard might call her
“a dreamer of houses” (Bachelard 27) - and indicates that she longs for the thrills of a Gothic
adventure, perhaps as an escape from the everyday monotony of her ordinary life. Of
course, her thought that this would be ‘asking too much of fate’ is rather ironic, since the
narrator does become the central character in a Gothic situation during her stay at the
house, not as the romantic heroine in a supernatural tale, but as the more realistic
madwoman in the attic. This creates an interesting reversal where supernatural ghost
stories merely inspire ‘romantic felicity’ while true horror is to be found in women’s real,
lived experience in the patriarchal household.
Although it is the yellow-papered room within that becomes the principal site of
uncanny events in the story, it is important to note that the encapsulating house is marked
as a patriarchal edifice: it is described as ‘ancestral halls’, a ‘colonial mansion’ and a
‘hereditary estate’, indicating its origin as one of those New England ‘castles’ built by
settlers with aristocratic pretensions and therefore orienting it towards both the regional
past and a familial past, both of which are underpinned by patriarchal traditions, as signified
by the words ‘ancestral’ and ‘hereditary’. The narrator also mentions that the house makes
her “think of English places that you read about, for there are hedges and walls and gates
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that lock, and lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and people” (Gilman 4). In
addition to the prison-like aspect of the ‘walls and gates that lock’, which foreshadow the
narrator’s entrapment in the house, this class-based topography further establishes the
connection between the house and aristocratic European history. While nothing else is
revealed about its architecture it does have several stories and thus the vertical structure
which gives the Gothic home its air of imposing (and possibly phallocratic) arrogance.
J. Samaine Lockwood argues in “Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Colonial Revival” (2012)
that by setting her story of female entrapment in this colonial, past-oriented mansion
Gilman “depicts late-nineteenth-century women as not having entered national historical
time, as being trapped in the same colonial condition as their early-American foremothers”
(Lockwood 91). As stated earlier, Gilman’s feminist criticism is primarily directed at the
contemporary sexual politics in the home, but as Lockwood suggests, her choice of setting
indicates that those politics are inseparable from the historical oppression of women in the
home. To put the same point in chronotopic terms; the mansion can be seen as a physical
manifestation of a historical time and its inherent power structures, and as a chronotope it
therefore shapes the plot into an uncanny repetition of that time in the present. Unlike
Hawthorne who suggests that only women who cling to the past, like Hepzibah, suffer from
stagnating confinement in the home, Gilman shows that the history of imprisoning women
in houses is still very much alive in the present. Another common Gothic characteristic of
the house is its history of trouble between the “heirs and co-heirs” (Gilman 4). Like the
House of the Seven Gables and, as will be seen, Hill House, this house is also a contested site
where home ownership, whether defined by legal property rights or legitimate ways of
being in the home, are up for debate; something which also resurfaces in the relationship
between the narrator and John during their stay.
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While the narrator intuitively senses the Gothic atmosphere and potentially uncanny
history of the house, maintaining that there is “something queer about it” and wondering
“why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted?” (Gilman 3),
John laughs condescendingly at her ideas. Her total opposite, he is “practical in the
extreme”, has “no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition” and “scoffs openly
at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures” (Gilman 3). His refusal
to accept anything beyond the tangible, material reality is evidenced by his reaction to the
narrator’s feelings about the house when he responds that “what [she] felt was a draught,
and shut the window” (Gilman 4). Clearly, there is a resemblance between John and
Hawthorne’s antagonists in The House of the Seven Gables, Colonel Pyncheon and Jaffrey
Pyncheon, all of whom embody the “obsessive rationalism combined with authority” (Crow
4) and the “excessive reason” (Davison 52) that both Crow and Davison identify with the
stock villain of Gothic romances. Davison, who also views the conflict between John and the
narrator as a carry-over “from Radcliffe’s day when excessive rationalism, associated with
men, faced off against excessive sensibility, associated with women” argues that the house
becomes “an Americanized, domesticated format of the psychically charged contested
castle” (Davison 57) where the literary struggle between masculine reason and authority
and female sensibility and lived experience traditionally takes place (Davison 51, 57).
John’s excessive rationalism is obviously linked to his profession as a doctor. Using
his authority as a doctor to overrule his wife’s lived experience, John “does not believe that
[she] is sick” (Gilman 3), reduces her legitimate concern for her mental health (which has
been read by various critics as post-natal depression due to her phobic attitude towards her
baby) to hysteria, and enforces a rest cure in which she is “absolutely forbidden to ‘work’”
(Gilman 3), since he “hates to have [her] write a word” (Gilman 5). He constantly urges her
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to show “proper self-control” (Gilman 4) and “not to give way to fancy in the least” (Gilman
7), and he fails to comprehend the complex inner workings of her psyche, knowing only that
“there is no reason to suffer” (Gilman 6). In this sense, medical science itself becomes
monstrous in the short story as a system of excessive, tyrannical rationality which
suppresses emotions, creativity and imagination, which are gendered as the feminine way
of being in the world.
This tyrannical oppression does not only take place through opposing discourses John’s medical diagnosis versus the narrator’s secretly scribbled “unofficial version of
events” (Davison 56) in her diary - but also in the organisation of space and time in their
shared house. Significantly, it is John who decides that they must stay in the yellow-papered
room upstairs while the narrator “wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza and
had roses all over the window, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz-hangings” (Gilman 4). It
is possible to read the narrator’s preference for the downstairs room as an implicit rejection
of John and a wish to have a room of her own, since he objects that “there was only one
window and not room for two beds, and no near room for him if he took another” (Gilman
4). However, it can also be argued that as an intuitive dreamer of houses, the narrator
prefers this room because it most closely resembles Bachelard’s felicitous space. While large
rooms can denote luxury, smaller rooms are cosier, more intimate spaces and therefore
more homely. In addition, this room has pretty, old-fashioned decorations, giving it an
atmosphere of homely nostalgia, and the piazza and rose-covered window connects it
directly to nature and organic life, marking it as a healthy, nurturing space of regrowth and
repose where the narrator may actually have recovered, had she been allowed to occupy it.
Bachelard argues that “the motto of the dreamer of dwellings” is: “Housed everywhere but
nowhere shut in” (Bachelard 62). The crucial difference between the room the narrator
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wants and the one she gets is precisely that while the downstairs room would house her
comfortingly, the yellow-papered room shuts her in.
Temporal control is another crucial part of the rest cure treatment. Firstly, John
isolates the narrator from meetings and events by dictating guest time in the house: while
he does decide to have “[her] mother and Nellie and the children down for a week” (Gilman
8) to celebrate the Fourth of July - a date which Lockwood claims serves as an ironic
reminder of how the Nation’s independence does not extend to women (Lockwood 103) –
he refuses to allow “stimulating people” (Gilman 7) to visit. Secondly, he extends his
spatiotemporal control over the house to the narrator’s body. Time is decidedly not her
own; John “hardly lets [her] stir without special direction” and she has “a schedule
prescription for each hour of the day” (Gilman 4). In addition, the time she spends writing is
quite literally stolen time, since John has forbidden her to write at all. This tyrannical
organisation of space and time in the home naturally threatens to rob the narrator of all
autonomy. It also changes the experience of writing, which the narrator claims is normally a
“great relief to [her] mind” (Gilman 3), into a draining struggle: “I did write for a while in
spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good deal – having to be so sly about it” (Gilman 34). In short, John determines what kind of experiences his wife has and for how long,
perfectly illustrating Schües’ earlier mentioned point (in section 1.1) that temporal control
determines the social hierarchy of shared places and can be used as a means of oppression.
The liberating potential of homemaking found in Hawthorne’s novel is non-existent
here; instead of naturalising the Gothic home and the human relations within it like
Hawthorne’s Phoebe, the narrator’s sister-in-law, Jennie, “a perfect and enthusiastic
housekeeper … [who] hopes for no better profession”, simply acts as John’s accomplice in
keeping the narrator confined and, according to the narrator, “believes it is the writing
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which made [her] sick!” (Gilman 8). By creating this contrast between Jennie as submissive
and domestic - an ideal True Woman - and the narrator as a poet, Gilman indicates that the
women who are deemed hysterical are those who dare to hope ‘for a better profession’
than housekeeping. The narrator’s own lack of domesticity is indicated by her attraction to
natural spaces: she describes the garden in sensual language as “delicious” (Gilman 4) and
admires the wildness of its “riotous old-fashioned flowers, and bushes and gnarly trees”
(Gilman 6). Its “mysterious deep-shaded arbors” (Gilman 6) seem to invite the introspective
and imaginative contemplation that she is constantly discouraged from inside the house,
and its “numerous paths” (Gilman 7) suggest a world of multiple possibilities in contrast to
the rigid schedule that John sets out for her. Clearly, then, the garden appears to be a space
of feminine values – even if the comparative freedom it offers is tempered by its walls and
gates.
The most marked difference between the chronotope of the Gothic home in “The
Yellow Wall-Paper” and earlier chronotopes is found in the yellow-papered room, which
functions as the uncanny and ontologically unstable nexus of the house, however. This is
where the narrator’s mental state gradually deteriorates, until the boundaries between
homely and unhomely, past and present, self and other, and inside and outside begin to
break down. The room, which the narrator refers to as “the nursery at the top of the house”
(Gilman 5), is permeated with the ambiguity that characterises the uncanny. It is “a big, airy
room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore”
(Gilman 5), which at first glance indicates freedom of movement and open access to the
outside world, only to be contradicted by a closer look at the windows which are “barred”
(Gilman 5), the “gate at the head of the stairs” (Gilman 6) and the “great immovable bed”
which appears to be “nailed down” (Gilman 9). The “rings and things in the walls” (Gilman 5)
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also have ambiguous potential, signifying either, as the narrator assumes, that the room has
been used for bodily exercise or, as the reader might assume, for bodily constraint.
The narrator’s interpretation of these features as evidence of the history of the room
as “nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium” (Gilman 5) contrasts with other
possible and more disturbing readings. As Davison notes, multiple critics have read the
room as a former asylum (Davison 58), not only because of its “paraphernalia of
confinement” (Gilbert and Gubar 90), but also because it has traces of violent rage and
destruction which cannot be reasonably attributed to the behaviour of children (although
this is precisely what the narrator does): “the floor is scratched and gouged and splintered,
the plaster itself is dug out here and there” (Gilman 8), the wallpaper is “stripped off … in
great patches all around the head of [her] bed, about as far as [she] can reach” (Gilman 5)
and the bedstead is “fairly gnawed” (Gilman 17).
Yet another layer of ontological and temporal uncertainty is created here, as the
reader begins to suspect that it is in fact neither children nor a former mental patient who
has caused the destruction, but the narrator herself: this is indicated by her odd emphasis
on the torn paper being exactly within her reach from the bed and the fact that she
eventually gets “so angry that [she] bit a little piece off one corner [of the bed]” (Gilman 18).
Likewise, the long “smooch” (Gilman 15) on the wall, which is initially presented as an
already-existing feature of the room, may actually have been made by the narrator creeping
along the wall, given her sudden and startling confession: “I always lock the door when I
creep by daylight” (Gilman 16). In this sense, the boundary between past and present
becomes blurred and unreliable. Notably, the ‘smooch’ is also uncanny in itself since it
signifies compulsive repetition: it appears to have been “rubbed over and over” and runs
dizzyingly “[r]ound and round and round – round and round and round” (Gilman 15).
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Even if the room is read as a nursery rather than a former insane asylum, it still has a
deeply uncanny resonance by signifying a return to an earlier developmental stage. As
Davison notes, “[t]he immediate and most disturbing implication is that she is infantilized in
this former nursery” (Davison 58). Such a reading is reinforced by John’s “consistent
patronizing and insistence on her progress despite her protests” as well as “his habit of
addressing her with such diminutives as ‘blessed little goose’ and ‘little girl’” (Davison 58).
Furthermore, some critics have read the “smouldering unclean yellow” (Gilman 5) colour of
the wallpaper, which makes the narrator think of “old foul, bad yellow things” (Gilman 14),
and its “yellow smell” (Gilman 15) as additional symbols of this infantilisation: for example,
William Veeder argues that “the peculiar yellow odor suggests urine and that the
permeated wallpaper represents – among many other things – the saturated diaper of
childhood” (Veeder 48). In this reading, creeping becomes another sign of regression
(crawling on all fours like an infant) and the room itself becomes womb-like (Veeder 51-52).
The titular wallpaper is, of course, the uncanniest feature of all. In reading the
wallpaper, it is important to firstly reiterate Vidler’s point that the uncanny is “not a
property of the space itself” but “a representation of a mental state of projection” (Vidler
11). This is exactly what happens in the short story: since “John is away all day, and even
some nights” (Gilman 5) the narrator spends the majority of her time in the room with
nothing else to occupy her than studying the “sprawling flamboyant pattern” of the
wallpaper which is “dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to
constantly irritate and provoke study” (Gilman 5). As Crow puts it: “The narrator’s fixation
on irritating details of her surroundings will be psychologically credible to anyone who has
spent time in a sick-room” (Crow 121). By directing such intense focus onto a mundane
object, the narrator makes it a screen for her mental projections.
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The narrator observes that the wallpaper “looks at [her] as if it knew what a vicious
influence it had” (Gilman 7), illustrating how she invests it with emotion, consciousness and
intention. Like Bachelard’s poet-housewife, embodied by Phoebe in The House of the Seven
Gables, the narrator thus “awakens” an inanimate object “that was asleep” and provides it
with “a new reality of being” (Bachelard 68). The crucial difference is that while Phoebe did
so by interacting with her objects by means of transcendent, intimate and healthy activities,
the narrator can only invest the wallpaper with the negative emotions that the alienating
immanence of her situation engenders. This makes it come alive in a way that is decidedly
unfriendly and unhomely, in contrast to the “kindly” (Gilman 7) and homely furniture that
the narrator remembers from her childhood.
As the narrator’s psychological and physical situation conflates in the wallpaper, it
also becomes a text that documents her deteriorating mental state. Notably, this creates a
temporal situation which differs from Hepzibah’s in The House of the Seven Gables: time is
not frozen while space slowly crumbles in death-like decay here, but progresses steadily as
the narrator’s condition gradually becomes worse. Her initial reaction to the wallpaper is
that she “should hate it … if [she] had to live in this room long” (Gilman 5). This hatred,
which is arguably a projection of her anger at being confined to a room not of her own
choosing, gradually turns into morbid fascination: “I’m getting really fond of the room in
spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper! It dwells in my mind so” (Gilman
9). By the end of the short story, she has descended into mania and delusion: “Life is very
much more exciting now than it used to be. You see I have something more to expect, to
look forward to, to watch” (Gilman 14). Since she has no other way to channel her
“imaginative power and habit of story-making” (Gilman 7), the narrator essentially begins to
read a story into the wallpaper, something which gives her a sense of autonomy and
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authority, however illusory. As she puts it: “There are things in that paper that nobody
knows but me, or ever will” (Gilman 11).
Lying on the bed, she follows the pattern “by the hour” (Gilman 9) and observes how
“it changes as the light changes. When the sun shoots through the east window – I always
watch for that first long, straight ray – it changes so quickly I can never quite believe it”
while “by moonlight, it becomes bars!” (Gilman 12-13). While critics often read these ‘bars’
as yet another symbol of the narrator’s imprisonment in the house (Gilbert and Gubar 90), it
is often overlooked that the wallpaper essentially functions as a time-piece in these lines,
showing not clock-time but the narrator’s subjective experience of time’s passage. To the
reader, the changing light on the wallpaper indicates the agonisingly slow crawl of time in a
space without events, but the process is accelerated and condensed in the narrator’s mind;
to her, the light ‘changes so quickly’ that the wallpaper seems to continually shift and
change into new constellations. In her mind, this creates an escape from the numbing
dullness of her actual situation since the changing pattern and emerging figures in the
wallpaper constitute events and meetings that she can ‘look forward to’. In this sense,
breaking down mentally also means breaking free mentally from the constraints of time and
space – although, as will be seen, this should not be romanticised as actual release, but
must instead be viewed as an act of desperation with a tragic outcome.
Finally, the boundaries between interior and exterior space are literally blurred in
the wallpaper. When the narrator notices the “sub-pattern” which can only be perceived “in
certain lights, and not clearly then” (Gilman 8) the formerly two-dimensional wallpaper
becomes three-dimensional. It is within this space within space that the female figure
appears. Put differently, physical and psychological space converges to the point where the
narrator’s double, arguably the embodiment of all her frustrated and repressed desires,
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appears within the very walls that confine her. Notably, it is also possible to read the figures
behind the wallpaper as an actual supernatural manifestation; a “collective of ghostly
women” (Lockwood 101) as Lockwood puts it, who have left their marks on the room which
confined them and now haunt it and the narrator. While earlier Gothic literature tends to be
either explicitly supernatural or, as in the case of The House of the Seven Gables, make it
clear that ghosts are to be understood as metaphors and “must by no means be considered
as forming an actual part of our story” (Hawthorne 281), Gilman leaves the matter open for
interpretation and thereby adds to the ontological uncertainty of the short story.
To sum up, the “torturing” (Gilman 12) pattern of the wallpaper which is “not
arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry” but “run[s] off
in great slanting waves of optic horror” (Gilman 9) denotes perceptual confusion and a
maddening loss of meaning and limits which may subvert John’s oppressive rationality, but
only by plunging the narrator into insanity instead. Given the plethora of interpretations
that the wallpaper has inspired among analysts, it can even be said that its true power as a
symbol lies in its ability to place the reader in an analogous situation to the narrator when
she “determine[s] for the thousandth time that [she] will follow that pointless pattern to
some sort of conclusion” (Gilman 9). Critics have read the wallpaper as a symbol of
everything from “the oppressive structures of society in which she finds herself” (Gilbert
and Gubar 90) to “racial fears of national invasion” (Heilman qtd. in Golden 115). While
many of these interpretations are convincing, the attempt to settle on a definitive symbolic
meaning of the wallpaper mirrors the narrator’s own: “when you follow the lame uncertain
curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles,
destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions” (Gilman 5).
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Therefore, it may be more fruitful to discuss the wallpaper in terms of how it affects
the chronotope of the Gothic home. Wynne’s “The Little Room” is written in the same time
period as “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and is also centred on an uncannily unstable room
(indicating a general tendency to depict ontologically unstable and subjective spaces in
Gothic fiction at the advent of Modernism), but Gilman’s chronotope involves a much more
radical ontological instability. While Wynne’s little room changes back and forth between
two separate realities at certain intervals, Gilman’s room – and especially the wallpaper –
constantly flickers between a multitude of simultaneously existing yet mutually exclusive
temporalities and ontologies. This creates a paradoxical space which is impossible to grasp;
a space which is the physical manifestation of insanity. This is also what gives the “The
Yellow Wall-Paper” its subversive potential: by presenting John’s temporal control over his
wife - something which was considered rational and normal in the late 19th century - as
monstrous, dehumanising, and ultimately resulting in the extremely uncanny situation in
the yellow-papered room, Gilman achieves what Trigg and Barr view as the main function of
the uncanny (see section 1.3): to give her readers pause and make them question normative
values.
In the final scene of “The Yellow Wall-Paper”, the narrator’s ego has dissolved so
completely that she identifies entirely as the creeping figure, exclaiming that “[i]t is so
pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please!” (Gilman 18) and calling
out to John that “I’ve got out at last … in spite of you and Jane” (Gilman 19) – ‘Jane’
presumably referring to her former self. At this point Gilman’s subversion of the normative
perception of gender, power and sanity is complete. In a total reversal of their usual roles,
John is desperately pounding on the door and crying for an axe to break it down in a fit of
nervous emotion while the narrator’s tone is calmly rational and condescendingly
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triumphant, despite her obviously insane behaviour: “It’s no use, young man, you can’t open
it!” (Gilman 18). She even reclaims some control over the thresholds of the house, having
thrown the key out of the window and repeating its position “by the front door under a
plantain leaf” (Gilman 19) until John is compelled to go and retrieve it.
Gilbert and Gubar view John’s “unmasculine swoon of surprise” (Gilbert and Gubar
91) upon opening the door as another indication of the reversal of gender roles, but also
argue that “[m]ore significant are the madwoman’s own imaginings and creations, mirages
of health and freedom with which her author endows her like a fairy godmother showering
gold on a sleeping heroine” (Gilbert and Gubar 91). What they overlook, however, is that
the narrator has not been freed; in fact, she has “securely fastened” (Gilman 18) herself to
the marriage bed with a rope and no longer wants to go outside: “For outside you have to
creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow” (Gilman 18). Green, the
colour of vibrancy and health, has been replaced with yellow, the colour of disease,
indicating that any subversion she has achieved has come at the cost her sanity and
therefore her freedom. Although creeping - an exceedingly physical, even animalistic, kind
of motility - obviously breaks with the socio-cultural expectations of her body, it also
signifies a regression to a degraded, dehumanised state. When the narrator creeps over
John’s prostrate body it can therefore be interpreted not as a victory, but rather as the ruin
of both spouses, and so Gilman’s indictment of patriarchy as something that destroys men
as well as women is complete.
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2.3. The Haunting of Hill House
Jackson’s Chronotope of the Gothic Home in the Age of Supermother
For Shirley Jackson as for Bachelard “the Mother image and the House image are united”
(Bachelard 45), but while Bachelard depicts the maternal house as the exemplar of safe and
comforting spaces, Jackson’s Gothic fiction is obsessively preoccupied with unhomely
houses and unmothering mothers. Of all her uncanny literary houses, the quintessential
womb/tomb is the titular house of The Haunting of Hill House. Hill House is described as “[a]
mother house … a housemother, a headmistress, a housemistress” (Jackson 211) by Luke
Sanderson, the dishonest and womanising young heir to the house and one of the three
assistants who accompany Dr. John Montague on his investigation of its alleged paranormal
activity (the other two are the shy, vulnerable Eleanor Vance and the confident, glamorous
psychic Theodora). In Luke’s words; “It’s all so motherly … Everything so soft. Everything so
padded. Great embracing chairs and sofas which turn out to be hard and unwelcome when
you sit down, and reject you at once” (Jackson 209). Eleanor, the protagonist of the novel,
goes to Hill House in the hope of starting a new life after spending the last eleven years
caring for her tyrannical, invalid and recently deceased mother, but instead finds that she
has simply returned to a monstrous womb; “I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a
monster, and the monster feels my tiny movements inside” (Jackson 42).
While both The House of the Seven Gables and “The Yellow Wall-Paper” also draw
upon womb/tomb imagery to some extent, Jackson’s chronotope of the Gothic home is
clearly much more explicitly gendered as feminine. It is saturated with maternal imagery: to
mention just a few examples, the very name of the house suggests curvy, feminine forms,
the door has “a heavy iron knocker that had a child’s face” (Jackson 36), and as Luke also
observes, “the single most repulsive aspect [of the house] is the emphasis upon the globe”
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(Jackson 210). As Tricia Lootens puts it in “’Whose Hand was I Holding?’” (1991): “Surely one
of the most terrifying aspects of Hill House’s haunting is its intimacy, which is
simultaneously familial and erotic” (Lootens 167). Richard Pascal notes in “Walking Alone
Together: Family Monsters in The Haunting of Hill House” (2014), that it is now a “familiar
view that the psychological drama of The Haunting of Hill House traces the ultimately
unsuccessful struggle of Eleanor … to construct a unified adult personality in defiance of a
voracious mothering force embodied by Hill House” (Pascal 469) 6. While this
psychoanalytical reading of Eleanor’s experience in Hill House is compelling, it is important
to note that Jackson’s focus on the uncanny maternal aspect of the Gothic home can also be
seen as a reflection of the actual chronotope of her own times. In order to explain this, it is
necessary to take a brief glance at women’s role in the home during the 1950s.
As Ogden explains, allied victory at the end of World War II meant that GIs returned
home to reclaim their jobs and reunite with their families, resulting in “an unprecedented
baby boom” (Ogden 171) as well as “renewed focus on domesticity and homemaking”
(Ogden 174) during the 1950s. Not only homemaking, but motherhood, now became the
central goal in the lives of women. As Ogden puts it, “[t]he wife of the 1950s saw herself –
and was encouraged to do so by the media and the pressure of society – as supermother,
plain and simple” (Ogden 174). However, underneath the glossy surface of the Golden Age
of America, a time often remembered for its affluence, security, and nuclear family values,
lurked deep anxieties about motherhood and domesticity 7. Betty Friedan claims in her
second-wave feminist classic The Feminine Mystique (1963) that a profound sense of
6
See Kahane 341-342; Rubenstein 317-319; and Hattenhauer 161-162 for this interpretation.
Not to mention Cold War anxiety, anti-communist paranoia and the stifling conformity of the ever-expanding
suburbs. While none of these developments are directly related to the topic of this thesis, they may still be
said to form the Gothic undercurrents of the era and therefore indirectly impact Jackson’s chronotope of the
Gothic home.
7
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emptiness and desperation permeated the lives of 1950s housewives who could no longer
ignore “that voice within women that says: ‘I want something more than my husband and
my children and my home’” (Friedan 32). In David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950),
another influential sociological analysis of the 1950s, the suburban housewife is described
as “a prisoner at home … with small children” (Riesman qtd. in Hague 74). Moreover, Ogden
notes that as Freud’s theories about early childhood experiences gained influence, mothers
became aware that “they walked a fine line between overprotectiveness and inattention.
Thus, “the young wives of the fifties inherited the guilt bred by Freud and his followers in
the thirties” (Ogden 175) and supermother’s dark double, “the overprotective mother”
(Ogden 175), a smothering, domineering, devouring figure, made her appearance.
As Pascal explains, “the familial dominance of the patriarch was becoming a shared
and even contested privilege, as the widely reported spectre of the obsessively manipulative
mother became prominent” (Pascal 466). Jackson’s reorientation of the chronotope towards
maternal dominance can therefore be seen as a response to this new socio-cultural
development. It is crucial to note that this does not make Hill House a space of female
empowerment, however. On the contrary, it is as much a manifestation of the patriarchal
mentality as the other Gothic houses examined in this study. Jane Gallop has argued in
“Reading the Mother Tongue: Psychoanalytic Feminist Criticism” (1987) that “the institution
of motherhood is the institution of patriarchy” since “[t]he masculine is inscribed in
motherhood: patriarchal discourse structures the institution and experience of motherhood
as we know it” (Gallop 322, 328). Supermother’s dark double, the domineering mother, is
not the initiator of a new, liberating matriarchy, but a monster bred by patriarchy. As Ogden
argues, “[t]hese were the ‘vipers’ who, out of boredom or frustration, interfered in
everyone’s life” (Ogden 175, my italics).
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Despite its overwhelmingly feminine architecture, Hill House is endowed with a
tower, linking it architecturally to phallocratic culture. The tower is also linked thematically
to patriarchal dominance through its function as a library where Hugh Crain, the
puritanically-minded patriarch who has built Hill House “to suit his mind” with “every angle
slightly wrong” (Jackson 105), has stored a grotesque manual for his daughter which
commands her to remain pure and submissive or “burn forever” in Hell (Jackson 169).
Intended partly as a family home where Crain “hoped to see his children and grandchildren
live in comfortable luxury” (Jackson 75) and partly as “a showplace, like the Winchester
House in California or the many octagon houses” (Jackson 105), Hill House was meant to
serve the twin purposes of breeding ground for Crain’s patrilineal dynasty and impressive
display of his power and wealth, just like the House of the Seven Gables was for Colonel
Pyncheon and, even more importantly, just like the bodies of actual women who married
such patriarchs. Hill House should thus be seen as a physical manifestation of the
oppressive, dehumanising, and alienating aspects of motherhood that patriarchy engenders.
Moreover, Hill House can also be seen as a physical manifestation of the feelings of
emptiness and disillusion which, according to Friedan, permeated the homes of many 1950s
housewives as a result of sexist oppression. The opening lines of the novel read:
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks
and katydid are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills,
holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within,
walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay
steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone”
(Jackson 3).
By placing ‘absolute reality’ in opposition to dreams in these lines, Jackson seems to suggest
that dreams are a necessary filter which shield us from a deeper, total reality, so far beyond
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any system of interpretation that any glimpse of it would drive us mad; since it is impossible
for any live organism to exist entirely without dreams (as dreams are a crucial part of inner
life) glimpses of absolute reality can never break the filter entirely, but will instead turn
dreams into insanity 8. As a ‘live organism’ existing ‘under conditions of absolute reality’ Hill
House has gone insane from the absence of dreams, arguably not unlike supermother’s dark
double, the 1950s housewife for whom the American dream of the nuclear family proved to
be false and illusory, who was prevented from pursuing any other dream outside the home,
and as a result became sometimes domineering and tyrannical, sometimes neurotic
(Friedan 20-21) 9. In a similar reading of these lines, Lootens argues that “[w]hat Hill House
reveals to its guests is a brutal, inexorable vision of the ‘absolute reality’ … of nuclear
families that kill where they are supposed to nurture” (Lootens 167).
Hill House, built by Hugh Crain to be a dream home for his patriarchal family, has a
history of crushing dreams as well as women: “Hugh Crain’s young wife died minutes before
she was first to set eyes on the house, when the carriage bringing her … was overturned in
the driveway, and the lady was brought … lifeless … into the home her husband had built for
her” (Jackson 75). Like John’s excessive rationalism and tyrannical organisation of time and
space, which leaves insanity as the only escape in the absence of healthy daydreaming in
Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper”, Hill House represents a monstrous and oppressive reality
where dreams, and therefore also people, fall apart. As Jackson’s omniscient third-person
8
Jackson’s concept of absolute reality can thus be compared to Jacques Lacan’s ‘order of the real’. As Fred
Botting explains, “the real remains what is, an unspeakable is, an impossible, inexpressible, ineffable and
undifferentiated space outside language” (Botting 24).
9
It is worth noting that in different contexts absolute reality may imply a multiplicity of possibilities in an
infinitely open space. For example, in Lacanian psychoanalysis infants are believed to perceive the real as “a
time of fullness and completeness that is subsequently lost through the entrance into language” (Felluga).
However, when glimpses of absolute reality are filtered through the social construction of motherhood in
patriarchal society, as is the case in Hill House, they become monstrous and oppressive.
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narrator states: “It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place
for people or for love or for hope” (Jackson 35).
Bachelard also hints at the importance of imbuing a house with dreams when he
argues that "[a] house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of
stability” (Bachelard 17). Without dreams – that is, illusions of a reliable reality – time, space
and reality are revealed to be maddeningly unstable. Even more significantly, Bachelard
states that “if a house is a living value, it must integrate an element of unreality. All values
must remain vulnerable, and those that do not are dead” (Bachelard 59). Hill House, in its
dreamless, insane state, is not just dead, but a living-dead house. Hawthorne’s House of the
Seven Gables becomes a living organism because “[s]o much of mankind’s varied experience
had passed there – so much had been suffered, and something, too, enjoyed – that the very
timbers were oozy, as with the moisture of a heart” (Hawthorne 27); Gilman’s yellow
wallpaper is instilled with consciousness when it becomes a screen for the narrator’s mental
projections; but Hill House stands alone “without concession to humanity” (Jackson 35). As a
manifestation of the most unhomely of spaces, the most unmothering of mothers, “a place
of contained ill will” (Jackson 82), Hill House is alive without being inhabited and inhabited
without life, as exemplified by Crain’s first wife who enters her new home as a literal corpse.
Instead of absorbing the spirits, emotions and dreams of people, Hill House simply destroys
them, as will be seen in the following analysis.
Darryl Hattenhauer refers to The Haunting of Hill House as an example of “protopostmodernism” (Hattenhauer 2) and lists a number of formal features in the novel which
anticipate Postmodernism, such as the disunified plot and lack of conflict resolution,
unreliable narration, absurdist humour, and intertextuality (Hattenhauer 3-10). Arguably,
the most Postmodern feature of the novel is actually the concept of absolute reality as
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something that is beyond language or comprehension, and the correlated realisation that all
attempts to grasp reality are merely ‘dreams’, that is, social constructions which we filter
reality through, however.
Throughout the novel, the characters constantly ask: “Why are we here? What is
wrong with Hill House? What is going to happen?” (Jackson 66). Dr. Montague’s purpose for
assembling the group is to answer these questions; to learn the cause of the disturbance at
Hill House and, potentially, restore it to a state of normality. This is, of course, the standard
formula for haunted house stories, and it is testament to the novel’s inherent self-reflexivity
(another Postmodern trait) that this formula is thoroughly undermined: unlike the haunting
of the House of the Seven Gables, which is the result of a specific event, there is no
explanation for the haunting of Hill House (except, of course, for the possible explanation
that patriarchy itself is the founding event; as will be seen, the only possibility of salvation at
Hill House appears to be the disruption of the patriarchal system through same-sex desire
between Eleanor and Theodora). Dr. Montague’s attempt to fully grasp the nature of Hill
House through science is therefore doomed to fail, just like his wife, who turns up late in the
story, fails comically at communing with the spirits through séances, since both are merely
systems of interpretation with which to filter absolute reality. While Gilman’s Modernist
development of the chronotope of the Gothic home depicts a subjective, inner reality of
time and space, Jackson’s postmodern chronotope suggests that reality can never be
grasped; any attempt to do so can only result in insanity.
Moreover, Jackson draws attention to the fictionality of her own attempt to depict
domestic space under conditions of absolute reality by means of Gothic conventions:
Theodora sarcastically wonders if Count Dracula might reside somewhere in the house
(Jackson 48), Luke jokes that they might find a disembodied hand in the soup (Jackson 69),
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and Eleanor worries about “being left behind in an attic” (Jackson 99) like the stereotypical
madwoman. As Hattenhauer argues, the group’s light-hearted banter where Luke claims to
be a (Hemingway-esque) bullfighter, Dr. Montague a pilgrim, Theodora a princess, and
Eleanor a courtesan also indicate that “[t]he characters sense that they are characters
constituted by prior texts” (Hattenhauer 171). By recycling stock characters and Gothic
conventions Jackson creates an uncannily defamiliarising sense of having been in this
mansion before.
The Homeless Heroine
Eleanor’s life before Hill House is nothing short of a domestic nightmare. Her everyday
routines before her mother’s death are described as an unending cycle of unpleasant,
monotonous chores: “[c]aring for her mother, lifting a cross old lady from her chair to her
bed, setting out endless little trays of soup and oatmeal, steeling herself to the filthy
laundry” (Jackson 7). Clearly, ‘caring’ for her mother is a set of mechanical actions without
affection for Eleanor, who “genuinely hated” her mother, a woman whose relationship with
her daughter “had been built up around small guilts and small reproaches, constant
weariness, and unending despair” (Jackson 6). As a symbol of the lack of nurturance in this
dismal, loveless, unhomely home, the kitchen is “dark and narrow, and nothing you cooked
there ever had any taste or color” (Jackson 111). In this reversal of roles, where the (grown)
child becomes the parent and the elderly parent becomes a spoiled and demanding child,
Eleanor is essentially trapped in the cycle of bad motherhood; that is, mothering as a chore
without love or real nurturance. As will be seen, Eleanor is continually figured not only as a
daughter, but also as a mother throughout the novel, indicating the difficulty of escaping
these constellations for women in the age of supermother.
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Eleanor’s isolation in her mother’s house has been so complete that at the age of
thirty-two she “had no friends”, “no one to love”, “an inability to face strong sunlight
without blinking” and finds it “difficult to talk, even casually, to another person without selfconsciousness and an awkward inability to find words” (Jackson 6-7). During her domestic
confinement, time has stood still for Eleanor and, like the narrator of “The Yellow WallPaper”, she desperately longs for the kind of adventure-time where the progression of time
becomes tangible through a series of meetings and events: “During the whole underside of
her life, ever since her first memory, Eleanor had been waiting for something like Hill House
… had held fast to the belief that someday something would happen… Eleanor, in short,
would have gone anywhere” (Jackson 7-8).
It is worth noting that Eleanor’s home before Hill House has also been a
predominantly female space where her mother, obviously one of those domineering ‘vipers’
described by Ogden, and her sister Carrie, her mother’s favourite and double, have ruled
supreme. Eleanor’s father died when she was twelve years old, and while he is only
mentioned briefly, he is depicted as a positive figure for Eleanor through his association with
summer: when he was alive “it had seemed to be summer all the time; she could not
remember a winter before her father’s death on a cold, wet day” (Jackson 15). Clearly,
Eleanor’s father was no patriarchal villain – instead, it is her mother and sister’s
internalisation of patriarchal norms which has made them organise the shared space of the
home into a socially-determined hierarchy with the unmarried, childless Eleanor at the
bottom and her mother and married sister (a mother herself) at the top. Shortly after her
father’s death “showers of stones had fallen on their house, without any warning or any
indication of purpose or reason” (Jackson 7). Dr. Montague invites Eleanor to Hill House
because he believes this to be a “poltergeist phenomena” caused by Eleanor herself,
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something which she vehemently denies, sticking to her mother’s explanation that “the
neighbours did that” (Jackson 73); the reader, however, perceives that while ‘poltergeist’
may be just another filter through which to explain something beyond words or reason, the
stone showers are clearly related to Eleanor’s repressed rage at being confined to this
oppressive female space after her father’s death.
Eleanor’s life is compartmentalised into three distinct periods: a happy time before
her father’s death; her mother’s eleven-year-long regime after his death; and the present
time at the novel’s beginning three months after her death. At this time, Eleanor is
relegated to a cot in the nursery in her sister’s home, clearly indicating her status as a
dependent, and her sister and brother-in-law make a combined effort to patronise and
infantilise her when she asks permission to use the car, which she half owns, to go to Hill
House. By questioning her motives for going as well as her ability to “bring [the car] back in
good condition” (Jackson 12), they essentially enact the roles of controlling parents with
Eleanor in the role of an unreliable adolescent, and so the cycle seems about to begin anew
with Eleanor as an unhappy child and her sister as her domineering mother. This time is
saturated with the temporality of the threshold, as Eleanor must decide whether to stay at
her sister’s house or try to break out of the cycle. This is a time of crisis and break in her life,
but also a time of open possibilities. Eleanor has a distinct sense of time slipping away from
her and passing her by, and she regrets having lacked the initiative to set in motion the
chain of events she longs for. For example, instead of treasuring her early, happy memories,
she wonders “what had been done with all those wasted summer days; how could she have
spent them so wantonly?” (Jackson 15) and “each year … the warm wind would come down
the street where she walked and she would be touched with the little cold thought: I have
let more time go by” (Jackson 15). It is her desperate sense of needing to grab hold of time,
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to enter it, and fill it with meaningful events that makes Eleanor decide to cross the
(figurative and literal) threshold and take the car – a symbol of agency and freedom without her sister’s permission, thinking “I am going, I am going, I have finally taken a step”
(Jackson 15).
As soon as she sets out on her trip, Eleanor enters the chronotope of the road.
Bakhtin stresses “the close link between the motif of meeting and the chronotope of the
road” and argues that “[i]n the chronotope of the road, the unity of time and space markers
is exhibited with exceptional precision and clarity” (Bakhtin 98). Eleanor senses the mythic
importance of setting out on the road to Hill House, feeling that “[t]he journey itself was her
positive action, her destination vague, unimagined, perhaps non-existent” (Jackson 17) and
she has a vague awareness that this marks the real beginning of her life, thinking “[t]ime is
beginning this morning in June” (Jackson 18). However, Eleanor has been too oppressed for
too long to take advantage of the freedom of the open road: she reminds herself that
pulling in to the side of the highway was “not allowed … she would be punished if she really
did” (Jackson 15), and while her destination is as yet unimagined, it is also predetermined,
since she dutifully follows “that magic thread of road Dr. Montague had chosen for her”
(Jackson 15).
While the chronotope of the road only offers an enticing but illusory freedom for
Eleanor, her progress through time and space is still marked by a series of meetings,
however. Notably, several of these meetings involve mother images, foreshadowing that
the plot will not progress linearly towards a happy resolution, but will curve into an
uncanny, cyclical return to the same kind of oppressive time and space that Eleanor is
escaping from. The first meeting takes place as she hastens to pick up the car and “crashed
into a very little lady, sending packages in all directions” (Jackson 12). This old lady has an
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uncanny resemblance to Eleanor’s mother and her repeated cries of “damn you damn you!”
(Jackson 13) cause Eleanor to revert to her old behaviour as a guilty, submissive and dutiful
daughter, apologising profusely and paying for a taxi to take the lady home. Eleanor ascribes
a positive meaning to this meeting because of the old lady’s parting promise to pray for her,
however. This tendency to “[seek] out omens everywhere” (Jackson 19) further indicates
her failure to see herself as the agent of her own fate, despite having taken that first step
across the threshold.
Another important meeting takes place at a country restaurant where Eleanor
observes a family while eating her lunch and overhears the small daughter refusing to drink
her milk because “[s]he wants her cup of stars” (Jackson 21). While the girl’s mother tries to
persuade her to drink the milk, Eleanor thinks: “Don’t do it … insist on your cup of stars;
once they trapped you into being like everyone else, you will never see your cup of stars
again; don’t do it; and the little girl glanced at her, and smiled a little subtle, dimpling,
wholly comprehending smile, and shook her head stubbornly at the glass” (Jackson 22). For
Eleanor, who mentally praises the “wise, brave girl” (Jackson 22) for her resistance, the cup
of stars becomes an important and recurring symbol of self-possession and nonconformity;
something that Eleanor has lacked entirely in her unhomely home.
Several other ‘meetings’ on the road only take place in Eleanor’s imagination, but
they still function as markers of the progressive movement of time and space as they are
inspired by the places she drives by: the “soft, welcoming country” inspires an pastoral
daydream of “chasing butterflies or following a stream, then come at nightfall to the hut of
some poor woodcutter who would offer [her] shelter” (Jackson 17). A “vast house, pillared
and walled ... with a pair of stone lions guarding the steps” (Jackson 18) inspires a luxurious
daydream of eating dinner at a “gleaming table”, sleeping under “a canopy of white
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organdy”, and undertaking domestic routines as transcendent activities invested with care
and intimacy: “Every morning I swept the porch and dusted the lions, and every evening I
patted their heads good night, and once a week I washed their faces and manes and paws
with warm water and soda and cleaned between their teeth” (Jackson 18). This daydream
includes another mother image, this time a positive one: “A little dainty old lady took care of
me” (Jackson 18). A row of oleanders on each side of a gate inspires a threshold fantasy of
stepping through to find “that I have wandered into a fairyland” where “the queen waits,
weeping, for the princess to return” – another good mother with whom Eleanor imagines
living “happily ever after” (Jackson 20).
While all these daydreams of inhabiting and mothering are comforting, they also
indicate that Eleanor can only conceive of herself in domestic settings – even when her
dreams involve a random excursion into nature, she always ends up in a house. In her
daydreams, being housed provides her with an identity and a set of relations to people and
objects. Notably, these relations always place her in the role of daughter, mother or
occasionally as the object of desire for a man, indicating that even in her imagination and on
the open road, Eleanor is not free from the constrictions that society places on women’s
ways of being in the world. Moreover, the idyllic home only exists in Eleanor’s imagination
as a competing chronotope to the real, unhomely houses in the novel. Although the settings
that inspire her idyllic daydreams are real places in the novel, Eleanor has no actual lived
experience with any of them, since she continues to drive by. The cup of stars, the stone
lions, and the oleanders all become images of this intangible, illusory homeliness that
Eleanor longs for, but never finds: for example, when Theodora asks where she lives,
Eleanor invents a story about having her own apartment furnished with all of these objects
(Jackson 88).
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As Eleanor nears Hill House time and space seem to tighten around her, becoming
considerably darker and more constricting, thereby signalling her transition from the open
chronotope of the road to the claustrophobic chronotope of the Gothic home. The nearby
town of Hillsdale is “a tangled, disorderly mess of dirty houses and crooked streets” which
manages “to be dark and ugly, even in the sunlight” (Jackson 23, 24). Eleanor, who senses
vaguely that she has failed to take advantage of the freedom of the road with the thought
“it’s my last chance”, nevertheless feels “bound to stop in Hillsdale” (Jackson 23). Hillsdale is
a particularly dismal version of the chronotope of the provincial town where time has
slowed to a deadening crawl: when Eleanor questions a waitress about visitors coming to
the town, “the girl flashed at her, from what might have been an emptiness greater than
any Eleanor had ever known” and responds: “’Why would anybody come here?’ … ‘There’s
not even a movie’” (Jackson 25).
Even closer to Hill House, nature also becomes Gothicised with “unattractive hills”
and “thick, oppressive trees” (Jackson 27). At this point, Eleanor’s lack of any real agency
becomes clear: “Why am I here? She thought helplessly and at once: why am I here?”
(Jackson 28). Once again she finds herself in the chronotope of the threshold, as Hill House
is encircled by the barrier that typically separates the chronotope of the Gothic home from
the rest of the world; in this case a stone wall with a “tall and ominous and heavy” gate
“locked and double-locked and chained and barred” (Jackson 28). Mr. Dudley, the caretaker
who is “as dark and unwelcoming as the padlock” (Jackson 28), makes it clear that this is
another point of break and crisis in Eleanor’s life by giving her several dire warnings and
telling her: “You won’t like it here … You’ll be sorry I ever opened that gate” (Jackson 31).
Eleanor mistakenly thinks, “Hill House … you’re as hard to get into as heaven” (Jackson 29).
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The opposite, of course, will turn out to be the case: Hill House is, in fact, as hard to get out
of as hell.
Like Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables and Gilman’s yellow-papered room, Hill
House is saturated with a “vile”, “diseased” energy (Jackson 33). Also like the House of the
Seven Gables, it has an anthropomorphic façade. Heathcote writes that “[f]or most of
architectural history, the façade has been a device for representing decorum, in the rhythm
of its openings” (Heathcote 107). The rhythm of Hill House’s openings is, in a word, insane:
“the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a
touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice” (Jackson 34). The interior architecture of Hill
House also constitutes a rhythm of maddening, perceptual confusion: with its rooms laid out
in “concentric circles” (Jackson 100) with “a very slight slant toward the central shaft”, Hill
House is “a masterpiece of architectural misdirection” where doors swing shut
automatically and its inhabitants have extreme difficulty in finding their way around;
returning, uncannily, to the same rooms when they meant to go elsewhere, and feeling like
they are standing on a ”shipboard” (Jackson 106).
The spatial instability of Hill House also extends to the perception of time within. The
characters repeatedly become confused about how much time has passed, as time seems to
stretch out and become arrested because they are left in a constant state of nervous
anticipation. Theodora finds that “this waiting is nerve-wracking, almost worse than having
something happen” while Eleanor, with her usual tendency to place agency outside herself,
perceives that “[i]ts not us doing the waiting … It’s the house. I think it’s biding its time”
(Jackson 152). The paranormal events are carefully paced knots of sudden, intense horror
separated by long intervals of viscous, heady, and hazy time, lulling the characters into a
state of drowsy idleness: “Time passed lazily at Hill House … wrapped around by the rich
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hills and securely set into the warm, dark luxuries of the house, [they] were permitted a
quiet day and a quiet night – enough, perhaps, to dull them a little” (Jackson 149). In short,
uncanny adventure-time at Hill House is created by a womb-like space that suddenly,
unexpectedly and yet repeatedly turns into a tomb.
Hill House seemingly mothers the group through the housekeeper, Mrs. Dudley, who
keeps everything “in perfect order” (Jackson 186) by obsessively reiterating that the dishes
“belong on the shelves”, “[t]he linen … belongs in the linen drawers in the dining room. The
silver belongs in the silver chest. The glasses belong on the shelves” (Jackson 101) and
keeping an equally mechanical, undeviating routine of serving and clearing away after
meals. In contrast to the tasteless food of Eleanor’s mother’s kitchen, the group is
repeatedly amazed at the sumptuous meals served by Mrs. Dudley. However, just as there is
nothing maternal about the person of Mrs. Dudley, whose mechanical domesticity is
uncannily dehumanising, the true nature of Hill House is revealed by the fireplace which
“looked chill in spite of the fire” (Jackson 59) and the nursery, “[t]he heart of the house”,
which has “the very essence of a tomb”, “an indefinable air of neglect” and a “wall of ice” at
the threshold (Jackson 119-120).
Hill House essentially seduces and then breaks Eleanor with a mix of enticing
illusions of maternal nurturance and a series of shocks which play upon her guilt concerning
her mother’s death. First, something wakes Eleanor in the night by calling her name and
pounding on the walls. With this uncanny repetition of the sound of her mother calling and
knocking on the wall to summon her, Hill House makes the drowsy Eleanor call out to it
“’[c]oming, mother, coming’” (Jackson 127). The full impact of this incident is not made clear
until much later when Eleanor reveals that “[i]t was my fault my mother died … She knocked
on the wall and called me and called me and I never woke up” (Jackson 212). Later, Hill
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House again addresses Eleanor with “a distinctly motherly injunction” (Pascal 469) written in
blood on a wall: “HELP ELEANOR COME HOME” (Jackson 146). At the same time, Hill House
also places Eleanor in the role of a mother by approaching her with childlike “little pattings”
and “small seeking sounds” (Jackson 131), and later “a little soft cry which broke her heart”
and makes her think “I will not let anyone hurt a child” (Jackson 162).
The most subtle effect of Hill House is its structuring influence on the relationships
between its inhabitants, however. Lootens states that the group “play[s] at being a family”
(Lootens 166), but it might be more accurate to say that as a mother house modelled after
the patriarchal mentality, Hill House actively shapes interpersonal relations into those of a
nuclear family. Eleanor, Hill House’s chosen victim, is infantilised immediately upon entering
it, feeling “like a child sobbing and wailing, I don’t like it here” (Jackson 37), but all of the
three younger adults are soon placed in the roles of the elderly Dr. Montague’s children: he
consistently addresses Luke paternally as “my dear boy” and jokingly refers to them as
“three willful, spoiled children who are prepared to nag me for your bedtime story” (Jackson
69-70). After spending just one night in the house, the group feels that “they were a family,
greeting one another with easy informality” (Jackson 97).
While Eleanor initially basks in the group’s familial intimacy, Hill House gradually
sows discord between her and Theodora in particular. Theodora, who has no paternal last
name and only goes by the masculine ‘Theo’, lives with a ‘friend’ whose gender is never
specified, and literary critics therefore commonly assume that she is a lesbian or bisexual,
and view the increasing intimacy between her and Eleanor as a briefly blossoming, but
ultimately doomed, same-sex relationship 10. On her way to Hill House, Eleanor has been
10
Including Lootens 182, Haggerty 141-150 and Pascal 472
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trying in vain to remember the words to a line from a song 11 , which finally come to her as
she enters the house: “Journeys end in lovers meeting, she thought, remembering her song
at last” (Jackson 36). Eleanor first tries to apply these lines prophetically to herself and Luke.
When they meet privately, Eleanor asks him to “[t]ell [her] something that only [she] will
ever know”, believing that “[she] will know how he holds [her] by what he answers”
(Jackson 165). When his answer is “I never had a mother”, Eleanor’s “shock was enormous”
(Jackson 166). Clearly, this heterosexual relationship will only trap her in the same role that
she had in her own mother’s house. Theodora, on the other hand, a sexually liberated artist
who owns her own shop and wears slacks and vivid colours, in contrast to the oppressed,
homeless Eleanor whose “Mother would be furious” (Jackson 41) if she could see her
wearing pants, seems to offer a new way of being in the world, free from sexual repression.
The relationship between the two women is constantly disrupted by the house,
however; when they first bond in the garden a mysterious apparition which they nervously
decide must have been “a rabbit” (Jackson 54) drives them back inside, a paranoid
argument erupts between them after Eleanor’s name is mysteriously written in chalk on a
wall, and when the same message appears above Theo’s bed and her closet is smeared with
foul-smelling blood Eleanor is gripped by an “uncontrollable loathing” (Jackson 157) for her.
Although she mothers her by cleaning the blood off her and dressing her in her own clothes,
she “hat[es] to touch her” and thinks “she is wicked … beastly and soiled and dirty” (Jackson
158) – echoing the exact thoughts that her own mother would have had about a woman like
Theodora. Hattenhauer has a very literal reading of this incident, stating that Eleanor
“apparently smears menstrual blood on Theodora’s clothing and then blocks out any
11
Eleanor never seems to realise that the song is “O Mistress Mine” from Twelfth Night, act II, scene III by
William Shakespeare which, as Lootens notes, involves “an exiled, sexually ambiguous heroine [who] finds a
new home, a lost brother, and true love” (Lootens 170).
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memory of doing so” (Hattenhauer 163). This cannot be the case, however, since the blood
mysteriously vanishes at the end of the novel (Jackson 238). Instead, it seems that Hill
House has soiled Theodora’s clothes in order to provoke Eleanor’s feelings of abject loathing
and drive the two women apart. Hill House, in short, is not about to allow Eleanor to create
a new home with Theodora outside of the patriarchal, heteronormative system.
Finally, when they walk together in the garden after a fight, and feel that “there was
only the barest margin of safety left them; each of them moving delicately along the
outskirts of an open question … ‘Do you love me?’” (Jackson 174-175), such a question is
prevented from being asked by a ghostly vision of “a picnic party on the grass in the garden.
They could hear the laughter of the children and the affectionate, amused voices of the
mother and father” (Jackson 176). This image of seemingly perfect nuclear family bliss
inspires them with extreme horror, Theodora screaming “’don’t look back – don’t look –
run!’” (Jackson 177). Theodora does look back, and although it is never revealed exactly
what she sees, her shocked repetition of Eleanor’s name indicates that whatever Hill House
has shown her, it has clearly established that Eleanor belongs to it. To Eleanor, this is
indicated in spatiotemporal terms: “[she] felt the room rock madly, and time, as she had
always known time, stop” (Jackson 178). Notably, the intangible, inexpressible nature of
these visions indicate that they are glimpses of absolute reality filtered through whatever
images Eleanor and Theodora need to grasp them, and so they take the shape of ‘a rabbit’
and ‘a picnic’, although they obviously represent something far more terrifying.
From this point onwards, Eleanor finds herself merging with Hill House. She feels
that she is “disappearing inch by inch into this house” (Jackson 201) and finally decides to
“relinquish my possession of this self of mine, abdicate, give over willingly what I never
wanted at all” (Jackson 204). Called by the house, she goes into the library; a space which
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she has previously refused to enter because she associates its “cold air of mold and earth”
and “odor of decay” (Jackson 103, 228) with her mother’s death, but which now feels
“deliciously, fondly warm” (Jackson 232) and womb-like. Climbing the stairs to the tower
where an earlier female resident hung herself (a foreshadowing that Eleanor, too, is headed
for suicide), Eleanor thinks: “No stone lions for me … no oleanders; I have broken the spell
of Hill House … I am home, I am home … Time is ended now” (Jackson 232). As this line
indicates, coming ‘home’ to Hill House means to enter a tomb; to be unborn.
Eleanor is narrowly rescued from the tower by Luke, but only to be told to leave Hill
House, something which is, of course, impossible for her at this point. Telling herself that “I
won’t go, and Hill House belongs to me” (Jackson 245), Eleanor kills herself by crashing her
car into the gate – another uncanny repetition of the several other deaths that have taken
place there, including the death of Hugh Crain’s first wife. While Eleanor believes that her
death will make her one with Hill House, thinking “I am really really really doing it by myself”
(Jackson 245), the final lines of the novel illustrate just how wrong she is: in a sudden
moment of clarity just before crashing into the tree she thinks, echoing the thought she had
upon first arriving at Hill House, “Why am I doing this?” (Jackson 246). In the absolute reality
of Hill House Eleanor still has no agency, her sacrifice makes no difference, and her dreams
of finally coming home turn out to be nothing but an illusion. Thus, the novel ends cyclically,
with same the lines as it began: “Hill House, not sane, stood against its hills … and whatever
walked there, walked alone” (Jackson 246).
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Applying the Finish: Conclusion
Gothic literature may be rooted in the past, but its ability to depict the underbelly of
normative constructions of power and gender in domestic space assures its continued
relevance. The Gothic home is far more than just a backdrop for the action; it is an artistic
representation of women’s lived experience in homes that are not safe or nurturing, and it
therefore serves a crucial feminist purpose by making readers pause and question
organisations of time and space in what is, arguably, the most important of all shared
places. The aim of this study has been to illustrate how such an understanding of the Gothic
home in heroine-centred Gothic works can be achieved through the combined theoretical
frameworks of feminist criticism, humanistic geography, chronotope theory and the
spatiotemporal uncanny. Moreover, by focusing specifically on New England Gothic
literature and taking a diachronic chronotopic approach to three classic works within this
subgenre from the literary periods of Romanticism, Modernism and Postmodernism
respectively, a case has been made for the view that the Gothic home is always linked to the
socio-cultural and historical context of a specific geographical location, as well as to the
literary aesthetics of the time.
The three analyses reveal that the chronotope of the Gothic home also has a number
of distinct characteristics which remain more or less the same, regardless of the time period
in which it appears: it is invariably a manifestation of the patriarchal mentality, but at the
same time it is occupied by a female character who experiences it as a place of entrapment,
isolation and dehumanising oppression. Its spatial dimensions are arranged vertically as an
expression of masculine, and possibly phallocratic, power; it is always large and labyrinthine
– as seen in “The Yellow Wall-Paper”, Gothic space expands in complex ways even when it is
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confined to a single room – and it is demarcated as a self-contained world, causing it to have
a claustrophobic effect regardless of its size. If this boundary is made permeably, as in
Hepzibah’s cent-shop in The House of the Seven Gables, it signals the dissolution of the
Gothic effects of the home and its gradual transition back into ordinary society. As seen in
The Haunting of Hill House, its power is supreme when the boundary cannot be crossed,
resulting in the death of the heroine who can never leave or reorganise time and space into
a homely pattern.
Temporally, it is always oriented towards the familial past, and the progression of
time follows the general pattern of uncanny adventure-time, that is, the repeated, cyclical
dislocation or doubling of past events or developmental stages in the present, creating an
ontologically unstable and defamiliarising effect. Bodily rhythms and domestic routines are
either frozen and immanent, as is the case in the House of the Seven Gables before
Phoebe’s arrival, or rigid and mechanical, as Mrs. Dudley exemplifies in Hill House, and time
itself always becomes oppressive, either because an individual villain uses it as a means of
social control, like John does in “The Yellow Wall-Paper”, or because the house itself
remains trapped in a dysfunctional past, like the House of the Seven Gables, or actively uses
uncanny adventure-time to torture its inhabitants, like Hill House.
The development of the chronotope of the Gothic home can be summed up as a
movement towards greater interiority, ontological instability and architectural sentience.
Hawthorne’s chronotope of the Gothic home shows the influence of Romanticism as a
manifestation of the oppression of abstract rationality and modernity over imagination and
nature. In The House of the Seven Gables women are the cultivators of the home, and
Hawthorne’s heroine Phoebe is therefore able to use her transcendent domestic abilities to
naturalise the Gothic home, thereby resolving the central conflict of the novel.
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While Hawthorne views domesticity in a positive light, Gilman depicts domesticity as
a hindrance to women’s freedom in the home, particularly the freedom to express
themselves artistically. By drawing on her personal experience with the rest cure treatment
as well as Modernist aesthetics, Gilman’s chronotope constitutes a far more psychological
space where the boundaries between inside and outside collapse. Finally, it is maintained
that the titular wallpaper derives its power as a symbol from its ability to generate a
multiplicity of meanings, thereby creating an ontologically unstable and paradoxical space
which functions as a manifestation of insanity, while at the same time achieving a deeply
uncanny effect that causes readers to pause and question power relations in the home.
Jackson’s chronotope of the Gothic home reflects the maternal dominance of a time
where motherhood became oppressive when filtered through patriarchal values, and
therefore marks a new development in the chronotope by being explicitly gendered as
female. Moreover, the concept of ‘absolute reality’, which can be seen as the most
Postmodern feature of the novel, is central to Jackson’s depiction of Hill House as a space
where homeliness is revealed to be a mere illusion. In Jackson’s bleak world of fundamental
homelessness and deceptive dreams, the only possibility for creating a new, less oppressive
home appears to be through love that falls outside of the heterosexual norm.
The House of the Seven Gables, an aristocratic family crypt, the yellow-papered
room, a domestic asylum where well-meaning doctor-husbands become the monsters that
drive their patient-wives to insanity, and Hill House, a sentient force of unhomeliness in
what is often depicted as the homeliest decade of the 20th century, all involve different
types of patriarchal dominance and therefore different constellations of time and space, but
for each of their heroines, as for the real women who have lived, and still live, under
oppressive conditions in domestic spaces, it remains true that there is no horror like home.
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