4. Domestic Horrors

In the multitude of different types of spaces that can be found and analyzed within the American horror genre, the house stands as an almost unique creation. Metaphorically distilled from the European spatial experience, with the gothic castle serving as an architectural and symbolic point of reference, the house develops as somewhat of a centerpiece within the horror discourse and as part of a larger popular culture context. Therefore, this chapter aims to understand the geography defining the American haunted house and to outline some of the correlations between the creation and elaboration of this unique spatial and narrative paradigm and the critical discourse that often accompanies and characterizes the horror genre. Although a prolific source of inspiration and interpretation, as confirmed by countless narratives centered around the haunted house/mansion trope, the proposed analysis will also extend to the concept of American suburban spaces that, by functioning as a natural extension of the space of the house, reinforces and further develops many of the previously established critical discourses. However, to adequately explore the cultural and symbolical sedimentation that characterizes the construct of the house, together with its later extensions and variations, it is once again necessary to consider the historical dimension of the addressed trope. With the development of the early American literary production, which strongly relied on the existing European trends and traditions, a number of issues were raised regarding the ability to discover a truly American literary voice. As previously addressed, one of the key elements apparently missing was the absence of any real history, at least from the perspective of the colonizers, which hindered the possibility of culturally referencing different issues and creating art by doing so. Gothic fiction, in particular, although popular among the readerships, had trouble finding roots within the new setting predominantly due to the inherent necessity of the European gothic genre to rehash and, more often than not, criticize its own history. The spatial concept of the gothic castle functioned as an almost perfect example of this merging of history, culture, and literary praxes, where the proposed space offered a temporal insight into a distant past of a nation (the actual or fictional one), and by doing so uncovered or added a type of departure from normalcy traditionally premised around dominant and not well-intentioned male figures, damsels in distress, monsters or monster-like figures, aberrant behavior, and so on. And while the list of figures, evil doers, and distressed ladies expanded over the decades, the spatial component remained almost completely unchanged, firmly outlined by the necessity to project a sense of historicism while simultaneously providing a spatial paradigm that prevented its participants from escaping. The gothic castle, or abbeys, subterranean vaults, graveyards, etc., later on, was distinctly marked by the inability to be adequately mapped and defined, with the unfortunate protagonists being forced not only to escape the imminent threat but also having to confront the metaphoric failure of the map in front of them. Although this idea of spatial fluidity became a trope within the horror genre, with different characters having to escape different (unmappable) spaces, this spatial quality was not something that was completely retained during the adaptation process between the construct of the castle and its later itineration in the form of the house. As it will be argued in this chapter, the American house within the genre is in fact a natural and unavoidable extension of the European castle, but instead of simply replicating the narrative/experiential patterns, it adopts a variety of previously existing features, only to exponentially expand them in a multitude of other directions. Introduced and initially adapted by Charles Brockden Brown in his novel Wieland: or, The Transformation: An American Tale (1798), the house presented itself as a versatile setting that could adequately mimic the gothic features offered by its European counterpart. Not nearly as dark and menacing, at least not in Brown’s early adaptation of the trope, and without a significant historical background, the space of the house relied on the idea of domesticity and intimacy. While the concept of a gothic castle assured a unique gloomy atmosphere, emphasized by its architectural distinctiveness, the storylines presented within it did not infer a sense of connectedness between the characters, the described activities, and the space itself. The castle functions on its initial premise of architecturally condensed history and symbolic meaning, within which the characters become temporally and functionally contextualized, without the actual ability to affect or interact with the surrounding spaces, especially when observing the possibility of inscription of meaning into the proposed medieval spatial context.