Domesticity and Horror: the Woman-in-House Novel
Recently, Edgar and I have discussed assembling focused reading lists, separate from our normal book reviews. These would be more tightly focused on a genre or topic and provide the basic tools to familiarize yourself with them. This first one is focused on a genre.
The description of "genetic relationship” as a term is largely borrowed from “Ur-Fascism” by Umberto Eco.
We’ve talked about genre a fair amount on this website. At root, a genre is a collection of related works that share a kind of genetic relationship – that is, to borrow from Umberto Eco, if we have a collection of works that display traits (let’s borrow further, and say the sequence ABC, BCD, CDE, EFG) then there is an affinity between them that becomes noticeable, to the point where ABC and EFG resemble one another even if there is only the most basic crossover.
Right now, I want to talk about a common subgenre within horror, which I am coming to call the “woman-in-house” novel. These are not simply haunted house novels; they are not simply feminist horror novels; these are not simply gothic novels. They display a constellation of traits that makes them identifiable as the same kind of thing.
The basic formula is simple. A woman at the latter edge of her young adulthood or the leading edge of middle age leaves the domestic situation that she built for herself – often, but not always, abandoning a partner who either died, deceived her, or became abusive. She returns to her family home, which is often, but not always, a major site of trauma for her: this older trauma is eclipsed by the newer, more recent trauma. It is perhaps not less than the new trauma, but it is less fresh. There, she makes an attempt to continue her life, but encounters some kind of rot in the family tree: a monster, a horror, a forgotten sin. This rot threatens to consume her and she fights against it, eventually overcoming it.
Two important things run through this genre: the nuclear family and history.
Since the end of the long 1950s, much ink has been spilled about the peril to the nuclear family. Ever since the neoliberal turn made women have had to choose between being dependent homemakers or overworked worker-homemakers. The end of the Fordist compromise meant that it is impossible for the average family to survive on just one income, but men often don’t pick up the slack in the labor of what the Marxists call “social reproduction” – the necessary but unremunerated labor to ensure that life continues, which puts more and more pressure on women. The domestic sphere has long been the world of women, but because they are not able to invest time in it, a certain amount of decay appears to set in. Part and parcel to this is what Ellen Willis called “family chauvinism” in her piece “The Family, Love It or Leave It”, published in The Village Voice in 1979. This is a strongly biologically-fundamentalist view of what constitutes a family – that is, a collection of people who share a lineage. This is where the “nuclear family” comes from; a genetically unrelated, reproductive man/woman pair and a collection of children. This is in contrast to the common trope of the “found family”, which is often a reality in queer subcultures: a group of people who create a home, described by Robert Frost, memorably as “the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
Image of Ellen Willis, c. 1970. Image taken from a review of her work in Dissent magazine, and used without permission.
Note: I am not saying that the prior situation was good, either for women or for people in general. What I am saying is that the new situation is bad and women often have to bear the blame for it being bad. Neither situation was or is good and the act of simply comparing them doesn’t set up a dichotomy where one is preferable.
The other issue, history, is a bit messier. Many of these works are American, and so stem from a settler-colonialist past. The acknowledgment that we live on blood-drenched ground is a cornerstone of the Southern Gothic genre, which is – itself – obsessed with history. But the collective history is made up of family histories, which are made up of individual histories. There is no solid division between the individual and collective when it comes to history, and so we cannot ignore the collective when it comes to the individual. Each of these stories is about coming to terms with the past: personal, familial, and – in a sense – collective.
Many of these stories, also, I believe, have a debt to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and the Stanley Kubrick version of The Shining.
The former is fairly easy: it is an early example of the domestic being the site of horror, though there is also a certain medical angle to it. The narrator, in treatment for hysteria, is confined to a room with yellow wallpaper and begins hallucinating something in the pattern, a trapped entity. This is commensurate with early ideas for the treatment of hysteria, which was to enforce gender roles in a draconian fashion: men were required to be active – riding horses and chopping wood, that sort of thing – while women were required to be passive – thus being confined to a single room and ordered to undergo bed rest. Gilman’s narrator eventually goes mad and kills her husband, presumably after suffering a psychotic break. However, I have a different conclusion: it doesn’t matter for the story whether the narrator suffered a psychotic break or became possessed by the King in Drag, because either option is equally fictitious to us, the reader. It doesn’t matter whether the metaphor lands on the real or supernatural conclusion, because both options are equally unreal to us. Focus on the metaphor, not on the question of what this sub-reality says is real within it.
The latter is a bit more of a long walk. I – among others – differentiate between the Kubrick and King version of The Shining. It is my belief that many of these works are written by people who have been thinking about the figure of Shelley Duvall and what she underwent on the set of the Shining, being abused and gaslit by Hollywood’s foremost (alleged, [possible]) serial killer director, Stanley Kubrick among others. Some of them have a bit of the story of The Shining as an inspiration, but I think that Shelly Duvall is the godmother of this genre, because the collision of the real horrors and the imagined horrors form a particular gothic picture that is remixed and recut to form a foundational text for these works.
That’s real exhaustion and terror on her face. It makes the movie harder to watch than any of the fictitious elements do.
So let’s look at the books. I’ll be linking to our reviews and giving only the barest touch upon the plot, and mostly concerned with establishing the connection between them to what I tend to call the “myth” structure of the genre (it’s paradigms) and how it’s in conversation with the themes.
The Red Tree by Caitlin R. Kiernan
My first example – the chronologically earliest one I’ve got that I’ve read – is a homonormative take on the genre, starring an individual that could have been easily positioned as a lesbian Jack Torrance. Sarah Crowe is an author on sabbatical in New England over the summer, who takes refuge from the summer heat in the basement of her rented cottage and finds a manuscript that suggests thins about the house. She is joined – later in the novel – by Constance, a much younger sculptor that Crowe forms a semi-romantic relationship with. This is Crowe’s first relationship after the death of her prior partner, Amanda, and the two seem to converge in her mind.
So, I’m not going to make the common mistake of positioning either party in a sapphic relationship as “the man”, though Crowe doesn’t fit the same archetype as most of these stories, nor is she returning to her family home and grappling with her family history. She is, however, an older woman, and has much history of her own to grapple with and this mirrors the history of the house in which she finds herself.
There is a great deal of the “Yellow Wall-Paper” here, though, and I don’t just say that because Kiernan is a woman writing about women’s issues. It is an example of a story that does its best to remain ambiguous on the narrator’s sanity or possible contact with supernatural forces. I find it rewarding to read it in the latter way, but there are pieces of evidence that it may be “in her head” to some extent. It will never be cleared up because, as the opening of the book reveals, Crowe committed suicide and what we are reading is her last manuscript. All there is to learn about the situation is present here, and it is probable that her final confrontation with whatever was there, beneath the great red oak, did not go her way.
The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher
Many of Kingfisher’s books could fit the genre in question. I’m personally more a fan of her later book, The Hollow Places, but (a) The Twisted Ones fits the description of the genre better, and (b) I’ve got a book later on entitled The Hollow Kind and wanted to avoid confusion.
Melissa, AKA Mouse, is a freelance graphic designer who has just gone through a breakup. This gives her the freedom to leave town and take care of unattended-to family business: cleaning out her deceased grandmother’s home in North Carolina. Her grandmother was a singularly unpleasant person, with something rotten to her core, but she had remarried to a British man named Cotgrave later in life, and while Mouse had never bonded with Cotgrave there was always the question of why.
It turns out that “Cotgrave” was the same character as featured in Arthur Machen’s The White People. After encountering the titular menaces, he fled to America, only to discover that these fae monsters were present in the Appalachians as they had been in Britain – had, in fact, been there since before Pangea split apart. However, Mouse’s grandmother was singularly unpleasant to the degree that they were repelled, so he decided to take up and be the best husband to the meanest-old-woman-with-hoarder-tendencies anyone had ever met.
The trap that Mouse falls into is caused by the relationships of the nuclear family, chained back through the generations, and she is rescued by the found family that exists just over the property line, made up of three unrelated adults: Foxy, Skip, and Tomas, who help and help protect her and her dog, Bongo, are among the kindest characters in the book.
To spoil the story, the white people are no longer in control. They are assisted by a race of servitors that have become domineering and set in their ways as the birth rates of the white people fall. They are casting about for a human who possesses a small measure of their blood, who can potentially bear children for their masters, even though only two of their masters remain: a senile old man, and a formerly human woman who wants Mouse to take her place so that she can escape. In short, the menace that pursues Mouse is forced pregnancy that will also probably commit a great deal of infanticide if her offspring aren’t suitable. Thankfully, she manages to escape, and the dog survives, too.
Revelator by Daryl Gregory
(Reviewed here.)
One of the more common stylistic devices present in this genre of novel first appeared to me when I read Revelator: the narration often jumps back and forth in alternating chapters between past and present. The storyline alternates between Stella Wallace’s childhood in the great Smokey Mountains and her adulthood as a bootlegger. The Wallace family has lived in those mountains for generations, and believes in a strange, schismatic religion: their god lives in the mountain behind their house. The Wallace women can talk to it as Revelators, and the Wallace men write down their ravings and interpret them.
Stella managed to escape her grandmother’s house – a period of wandering in the wilderness is apparently common for Wallace women, though oftentimes they manage to return. Stella’s mother didn’t, and so she was raised by her grandmother, who taught her how to speak to God, whom they call “Ghostdaddy” and receive his revelation. Farm life is difficult, and the Wallaces have few amenities in the family home.
In her adulthood, after her grandmother’s death, she returned, hoping to rescue her young cousin, Sunny, from becoming a tool of her fanatical uncle. In the process, she has to come face to face with the nature of the Ghostdaddy and the Wallace family, learning why they had been chosen and what it means for them.
There is a lesson here: the idea that one of the most important things in the world is putting a stop to cycles of abuse and freeing children from it. It’s a moral I can get behind, and it is presented in a somewhat confused fashion due to the other qualities of the book, but it comes through loud and clear for most of the novel’s time.
Sundial by Catriona Ward
Departing the southeast for the southwest, Sundial dresses the essentials up in new clothing: gone is the kudzu, canebrake, and misty hills. The Southwest is split between crystal-waving new age beliefs and atomic horror, and Sundial walks the line.
The two periods here are Rob bringing her young daughter, Callie, to her family home, which is called “Sundial”, and Rob in her youth, with her twin Jack, preparing to leave Sundial. Rob is not a particularly good mother, believing that her daughter is developing a number of “dark triad” qualities and believing that she can help sort it out with a trip back to the place where – it turns out – she was experimented on as a child for just those reasons.
The project that her parents were running at Sundial was taking dogs that would otherwise have been put down for attacking people and operating on them to make them docile and social creatures. The implication, made long before it is confirmed, is that Jack and Rob were subjects in the next phase of the experiment – but one of them was the Control group, unmodified.. They had been abused to the point of retaliation and guilty of some kind of horrific violence back before they were able to form stable memories, and they were adopted by this couple who operated a strange kind of mixed commune/research complex.
The idea is, essentially, that each person is an experiment in their youth. Their parents change some qualities and attempt to make a well-adjusted human come out, and – in time – the subject of the experiment goes on to conduct experiments of their own. Of course, this is complicated because no one is raised in a blank white clean room. Things happen, and it’s necessary to adjust as time goes on, something that Rob and her husband struggle with. It’s a fascinating metaphor for family, and one that I feel has legs.
The Hollow Kind by Andy Davidson
(Reviewed here.)
Split between the 1980s and the 1920s, this story concerns Nellie Gardner returning to Redfern Hill – the turpentine plantation that her grandfather owned and operated – after separating from her abusive husband (who, again, is an English teacher with anger management problems. As such, he’s another Jack Torrance figure.) The house that she and her young son move into is set in a hundred acres of pine forest in Georgia, and they discover that – again – there is some kind of horrific thing soaked into the very land.
More than any of the others, this story feels like an attempt to do a Southern Gothic version of The Shining, privileging Wendy’s perspective over that of her husband and son. It even features Nellie’s father as a kind of stand in for Halloran, and a horrific worm-thing in the place of the ghosts that dwell in the Overlook.
It’s a good enough novel, though it really feels like Davidson identified the traits that make this kind of novel and set out to write something that meets them – it isn’t that the story beats are unjustified or unwarranted, but it simply feels to be most concerned with being in conversation with these other works. It has a certain number of things to say, and succeeds competently enough with its project, but it feels like the seams are visible in places.
The Good House by Tananarive Due
I reviewed this one last week, so forgive me for not going in to more depth on this one. Due is in conversation with a particular kind of American Folk Horror in this one – the kind Stephen King explored in It and David Lynch explored in Twin Peaks: the town with a dark secret. However, it’s a particular kind of town with a dark secret. Sacajawea is not Innsmouth. On its surface, it is first and foremost a deceptive idyll.
What Due does here, though, is not the standard implementation. In both Twin Peaks and It, and other works that draw from the same well, there is a consciousness of the Settler-Colonial past. We live on stolen ground, soaked in the blood of the original inhabitants. Oftentimes, these former inhabitants are characterized as more “in tune” with nature and so in possession of arts to combat the evil within the land.
While Due does not erase Native Americans, as a number of similar writers do, she is interested in telling a story that draws not from an imagined indigenous past but one that draws from voudoun and the old religion of enslaved Africans. There is a promethean theft from the gods, but it is the theft of a magic word from Legba, the Loa who serves as an intermediary between humans and the gods. There is a monster here, but it is a bad spirit recognizable to the practitioners of Afro-Caribbean religions.
Even if it were not as competently written on a line-by-line level as it is, it would be a fascinating concept. One cannot fault Due for limiting herself.
There are many more books of this type – I happen to think that this sort of story is one of the dominant strands of literary horror at this point in time. In talking about it with Edgar, they coined the term “post-feminist gothic” to describe it. Which is not to say “post-” as in “no longer”, but “post-” the way that “post-COVID” or “post-colonial”: we have moved past the initial stage and are grappling with the implications at work here.
Much of the social change since the neoliberal turn – since the end of the Long 1950s – has been like a wish made on a cursed monkey’s paw. You get what you asked for, but not without externalities, costs, and unforeseen consequences. What it means to be a woman – something that I would say I don’t really know much about, beyond what I have read and heard others say – is part of a long narrative, but in the time of the neoliberal turn, women have been released from the home, have been made into workers, and given more financial and legal autonomy.
But the history is there, and the ideas that we inherit, which don’t match are sublated. These concepts and institutions are like machines that have been switched off and put back in the storage shed, but continue to tick away with pent up waste heat, a kind of presence in the dark.
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