5. Small Town Heterotopias

While previous chapters offered a reading of American haunted house and just as disturbing suburban spaces from the perspective of narrow spatial experience, which, first and foremost, comes out of individual and subjective confrontation with spatially very localized sources of horror, a larger map on which to trace various American nightmares can be derived from the notion of a small town. The idea of different houses, various families, and neighborhoods that become in some way threatened or are threatening, mirrors, once again, Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” and the troublesome experiences within his own community. As Brown ventures into the forest, he gradually becomes more and more aware of an existential paradigm parallel to his everyday life. His town, neighbors, friends, and even his spouse are corrupted—metaphorically and literally—by the forest and the entity that manifests itself within it. And while the forest acts as a prohibitive space, a location where the demonic becomes articulated, and as such offers a polarity-based understanding of space, whereby the small-town functions as a safe haven against the surrounding threats, Brown realizes that the actual evil (or its potential) is not necessarily confined to a particular space, but that it is instead present within the hearts and minds of his fellow townsmen and women. The process that unfolds in Hawthorne’s short story—and that will mark the development of the small-town horror subgenre—is therefore built around two separate stages. The first stage is the identification of a threatening space, a location whose nature symbolically resembles any of the previously addressed haunted spaces. The exploration of the map of the American small town—naturally, within the confines of the genre—will most often reveal a location whose function and symbolic value is similar to the prototypical gothic castle, the haunted house, or the violent, dark forest, yet it stands in direct spatial opposition to them. Furthermore, all of these opposing and subversive spaces are characterized by their fluidity and tendency to model themselves according to the horrors that trod within them, or more precisely, they are most often articulated through an autoreferential loop, where their level of threat, morbidity, and outright horror comes out of the opposition with the spaces that are presented as “normal”. The polarity ensuing from this initial stage presents the readers or the viewers with a clear divergence between a small town’s cultural, social, moral, etc., qualities and the corrupting nature of (haunted) spaces. This binarity, however, mirroring once again the unfortunate circumstances of Young Goodman Brown, is not stable; instead, it keeps challenging the imposed spatial boundaries between the two settings until their inevitable violent breakdown. Although simple in its eventual manifestation of violence, the relationship between these two spaces is rather complex. To understand these complexities, it is necessary to explore and define what lies outside of the boundaries of normal and, therefore, safe space. To do so, it is helpful to step outside of rigid theoretical paradigms and briefly look at the historical and literary attempts of mapping the (un)known spaces. Therefore, an analogy could be drawn between the coexistence of these spaces and the fantastic structure and functionality of the medieval mappaemundi. Although they were initially used as an instructional tool to teach about significant Christian historical events rather than to record a particular location, they are a valuable source giving insight into different aspects of medieval life (Woodward 1987, 286). However, in addition to their historical value, these ideological rather than geographical accounts of the world offered a particular mapping of the sensibilities and cultural realities of the known world while at the same time providing multilayered interpretations of what lay in those still unexplored regions. As Peter Turchi argues in his analysis of the relationship between writers and cartography, focusing primarily on the concept of blank (unexplored) regions illustrated in the maps, the yet undiscovered and unconquered parts of the world were often depicted through drawings of sea serpents, dragons, griffins, as well as other mythological creatures, including “freakishly exotic people” (2009, 34). These maps were not precise, or for that matter geographically valuable, since, as Turchi explains, the “[g]eographic features, people and nations were omitted”, and what was left in their place were “spiritual landmarks” (2009, 35). David Woodward goes further in his historical readings of the content and meaning of the mappaemundi by delineating three different analytical directions: the historical and geographical facts; the marvels, legends, and traditions; and the symbolic content (1987, 326). While the historical and geographical facts were heavily informed by the “classical and biblical” (1987, 326), drawing, first and foremost, from the Old Testament and anxiously stressing “that knowledge of the earth was of strictly secondary importance to the Christian whose eyes should be on a higher spiritual plane” (1987, 326), the narrative offered by the legends and tradition was much more creative and imaginative. “Representations of monstrous races and historical legends on mappaemundi reflected the medieval craving for the bizarre and fantastic” (1987, 330), but, despite being entertaining, such representations raised an issue with the fathers of the church—especially when it came to monstrous races. As Woodward describes it, the idea of other/monstrous races opened up the question of their humanity and descendance from Adam and Noah, as well as the possibility that such creatures might have a soul and that this soul had to be saved (1987, 332). Among different uses of the mappaemundi, Woodward points out an example of medieval missionaries who found it necessary to convert the so-called “Cynocephali-the dog-headed peoples sometimes associated with Islam” (1987, 332), and in doing so confirm the absolute power of the Gospel. However, the list of semi-mythical and undoubtedly monstrous races was not limited to the dog-headed peoples: the outskirts of the Catholic-centric mappaemundi were populated with all kinds of creatures, such as the Anthropophagi, the man-eaters from Africa; the Cyclopes which were found in Sicily and India; the Troglodytes or cave dwellers from Ethiopia; and a plethora of other fantastic beings (1987, 331). Their dissemination was depicted in relation to, and as far as possible from, the “civilized center of the Earth-Jerusalem” (1987, 332), while at the same time, as Woodward puts it, “within the reach of the left arm of Christ” (1987, 332). This interesting approach in describing space—and consuming it as a potential didactic instrument—mirrors itself onto the creation of the American small-town geography. Even though the initial premise of the town, usually presented through the introductory narrative, eases the reader/viewer into an appreciation of the aesthetic qualities of this type of space, only to be followed by a presentation of the immaculate nature and moral innocence of its inhabitants, a second glance of the presented image uncovers the existence of problematic spatial paradigms. The evidencing of a spatial polarity, regardless of the problematized spaces, leads to a conditioned perception of opposition between what could metaphorically be understood, to borrow Eliade Mircea’s idea, as a sacred and profane space. By observing the small town as an ideological construct that perpetuates its virtuosity almost as a sacred dogma and consequently becomes a type of sacred space on its own, the existence of a profane spatial paradigm becomes unavoidable. As all human geographers agree, these spatial realities and divisions are a product of the humans themselves and their subjective experience. If applied to the small-town setting, it becomes obvious that it is the experience and belief of the townspeople, at least on a superficial level, that dictates the type of space that will be articulated. As seen in countless horror narratives, a utopian articulation and perpetuation of a small-town identity can be equated to a dogmatic, if not even religious praxis that leads to a specific understanding of space. As Mircea argues when discussing the interaction between religion, sacred spaces, and the individual experience, a very clear distinction appears between spaces. “For religious man”, Mircea explains, “this spatial nonhomogeneity finds expression in the experience of an opposition between space that is sacred—the only real and really existing space—and all other space, the formless expanse surrounding it” (1987, 20). The perception and construction of space—be it from the perspective of the different mappaemundi or the readings Mircea proposes—is set upon an opposition between the mediated center reinforced through its ideologies and the uncontrolled periphery of the map filled with a variety of (subversive) monsters.