Women and Domestic Space in Contemporary Gothic Narratives: The House as Subject

Abstract

At the heart of many gothic narratives sits a house, a trope that has remained consistent from its literary beginnings. The title of a work so often cited as the first fully formed gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), signposts the centrality of a family house within these fictions. Whereas a century of gothic writing continued to use the crumbling ancestral castle as a site for terror and horror, later work embraced a variety of domestic settings: from Emily Brontë’s remote moorland farmhouse to Stephen King’s contemporary reimaginings in North America. In addition, the domestic space is frequently a place of containment and entrapment, especially for a female subject. Andrew Hock Soon Ng directs his focus on this recurrent theme in his scholarly work, Women and Domestic Space in Contemporary Gothic Narratives: The House as Subject. This would be a worthy examination in itself except that Ng makes a simple change of perspective that shines new light on the study of gothic narratives. As stated in the second part of his title, he moves from discussing domestic space as metaphor or projection of a troubled psyche to examining the house as a subject in its own right. As domestic space and the female subject are frequently placed in a relationship to one another, Ng acknowledges that the shift in focus to the house as subject may be problematic in that woman is once more made object. However, he makes a compelling argument that the connection between woman and house, when viewed through the prism of his thesis, can instead be empowering for the female subject/object; because this can be a dialectical relationship. Further, in Ng’s argument, in the intimacy between the two, the house as spatial entity ultimately destabilizes gender.

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