Gothic Domesticity in Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms

The home, and domesticity, is not only central in the Western imaginary blurring the lines between domestic space and individuality, but the home can also be seen as an extension of the self, a scaffold to which we construct and critique our identity, built of mirror as well as mortar. But homes are also inherently haunted, dyschronous and disjointed from time, where the present wavers with ghosts of both past and future. Using the haunted house as a conceptual metaphor, this paper aims to delineate a framework to encapsulate and understand lingering afterlives of violence in both literal as well as conceptual ‘homes’. Exploring haunted houses as both literal figurative sites, we map out the frame of this metaphor using two examples, exploring both the meaning of ‘haunted’ as well as the structural scaffold of the house itself as it relates to afterlives of violence. Reading the Swedish People’s Home as a form of ‘haunted house’, we explore the effects of lingering violence built into the very foundations of this home, now making its return. We also explore how the analytical framework of the haunted house can be used to conceptualise the displacing effects of climate weirding, using the town of Acerado as an example, tracing the haunting effects of solastalgia and its asynchronic relationship with home. These examples are used to illustrate how our proposed framework can be used both to deconstruct the bones of the haunted house, as well as the ghosts haunting it. This does not only provide us with a lens to identify cultural, social or political trauma embedded in actual as well as symbolic structures, but it also allows us to challenge the boundaries of our ‘homes’; challenging deep-held notions of privilege and power, allowing us to identify and dismantle structures of inequality and oppression.

Directing O'Neill: <i>Mourning Becomes Electra, Long Day's Journey Into Night, Desire Under the Elms, Days Without End</i>

Ann-Marie MacDonald’s novel, Fall on Your Knees, is commonly characterized as a feminist novel or family saga. Many critics, such as Juliann Fleenor, have recognized a connection between the female or feminine novel and the Gothic, in particular, that female Gothic is concerned with household dramas and threats to women. A quick survey of the plot of this novel leaves no doubt that it is Gothic: There is a family curse, a haunted house, a young woman in peril of sexual violation, a concern for family bloodlines, spiritually hollow Catholicism, a woman confined to an attic, several dead mothers, family secrets including incest, and orphans who learn the truth about their parentage. One might argue that Gothic conven­tions do not a Gothic novel make. However, these plot elements are not superficial but are an integral part of the story. Still, while haunted houses, haunted people, and haunted bloodlines signify the Gothic, MacDonald does not merely replicate past Gothics; she uses the conventions to illustrate how racial prejudices cloud judgement. The perceived sin of miscegenation, and the anxiety to prevent it, haunts this text and haunts the bloodlines of the families, generation after generation.

Ann-Marie MacDonald’s novel, Fall on Your Knees, is commonly characterized as a feminist novel or family saga. Many critics, such as Juliann Fleenor, have recognized a connection between the female or feminine novel and the Gothic, in particular, that female Gothic is concerned with household dramas and threats to women. A quick survey of the plot of this novel leaves no doubt that it is Gothic: There is a family curse, a haunted house, a young woman in peril of sexual violation, a concern for family bloodlines, spiritually hollow Catholicism, a woman confined to an attic, several dead mothers, family secrets including incest, and orphans who learn the truth about their parentage. One might argue that Gothic conven­tions do not a Gothic novel make. However, these plot elements are not superficial but are an integral part of the story. Still, while haunted houses, haunted people, and haunted bloodlines signify the Gothic, MacDonald does not merely replicate past Gothics; she uses the conventions to illustr...

Patricia García’s article, “A Geocritical Perspective on the Female Fantastic: Rethinking the Domestic” approaches the question of the “female fantastic” from a spatial angle. Proponents of the female fantastic (for example E. Moers, S. Gilbert and S. Gubar and A. Richter) often coincide in a leitmotif that characterises this tradition: the haunted house. This leads to a great deal of studies centred on how female authors employ domestic spaces as a means to give voice to the lives of women invisibilised by patriarchy and, through the irruption of the supernatural, as a way to subvert domestic ideology. Whereas these studies have done much to give visibility to the work of female authors, they have also generated, as this article will argue, a limited understanding of the female fantastic. The first section of this article is of a theoretical nature and reflects on the methodological and conceptual limitations of such approaches to the female fantastic centred on domestic space. Instead of asking what the spaces of the female fantastic are, this section shifts the focus to: “which spaces are overlooked by placing such emphasis on the domestic?” The second part offers an alternative reading of the trope of the haunted house in female-authored fantastic fictions. Haunted urban apartments by Rhoda Broughton and Charlotte Riddell, and well-known haunted houses by Shirley Jackson, Ann Rivers and Patricia Esteban Erlés are employed as case studies to develop a feminist geocritical method that goes beyond domestic interiors and engages with a critical reflection on other spatial elements, such as external frames, scale, location and movement.

Davison offers a socio-historically contextualised, generically detailed overview of the haunted plantation house featured in Southern Gothic literature since the early nineteenth century. Discussing works by Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Nelson Page, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and Jim Grimsley, Davison analyses the haunted plantation house as a type of mortuary, a site ‘haunted by history’ and, more specifically, the slave-based economy that produced it. This chapter reveals this popular Gothic locale to be a fertile contact zone between racialised and gendered bodies—living and spectral—in which are staged uncanny encounters between the past and the present, the familiar/foreign, and domestic/imperial, rendered in order to advance a variety of cautionary messages about racism, misogyny, and homophobia, and to grant visibility and voice to those who were usually excluded, silenced, and invisible.

In this article, we attempt to unravel the family-based haunted house film patterns in both Malaysia and America. Certain types of tropes and attributes have been used by horror filmmakers over the years to define the family motif-pattern of haunted houses in the media. Some of these elements have undergone change over time but most of them still adhere to the rules that constitute the family-based haunted house film patterns based on two Malay films and two American films. These rules were compared and contrasted by applying a combination of two theories which were formulated by Propp and Bailey. Application of these formulas has resulted in the findings of twelve plot functions as examined in this article. Upon analysis of the corpus, it has also been found that there are 10 existing attributes of a haunted house. The findings suggest that the haunted house film pattern is not merely a motif but it is also able to exhibit a number of themes which are considered prominent in haunted house films such as the Manichean clash between good and evil. The convergence and divergence between the Malaysian and American horror flicks show that cultural and religious practices govern the ways in which good and evil are expressed. Keywords: family; patterns; structure; Haunted House; gothic; horror

Resonating with these pandemic times, Catherine Spooner has described the Gothic as a ‘malevolent virus’. In my paper, I will propose that the haunted house narrative, so central to American Gothic, has itself mutated in response to a backdrop of post-millenial social, political and financial collapse in a manner quite different to developments in the rest of the Gothic literary world. The narrative strand which has emerged, presents the reader with a new form of the Gothic male protagonist, whom the British psychologist R.D Laing in The Divided Self (1960), would describe as a ‘schizoid’ subject. Fragile, failing and fragmenting, he escapes a failing career, marriage and parenthood by removing his family to a quasi-domestic space which promises repair. House or hotel, these ‘haunted houses’ are different from the earlier ‘hungry houses’ identified by Gothic writer Stephen Graham Jones in his introduction to Robert Marasco’s classic haunted house novel, Burnt Offerings. This new quasi-domestic space, often combining work and home, rises up to meet the male schizoid, not merely as the traditional Gothic setting, but as a sentient being; a monster in its own right. His entrapment in this new Gothic labyrinth that is constantly shifting, expanding and shrinking, provides a performative stage on which the schizoid male is forced into an existential crisis beyond that of the trauma of spousal and parental failure, ultimately forcing him to confront what it is to exist in space and time. A reaction to the rise of neo-liberalism and toxic masculinity, this important strand to American Gothic embraces the multiplicity of the Gothic’s new forms and is evident in texts such as Steve Rasnic Tem’s, Deadfall Hotel, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Thomas Liggotti’s, The Town Manager, Jac Jemc’s, The Grip of It and Shaun Hamill’s A Cosmology of Monsters. Developing from their deeper roots in the Calvinist Gothic tradition of Hawthorne, Brockden Brown and Poe via the mid-century works of Stephen King and Robert Marasco, these new post- millennial narratives provide a space in which notions of masculine subjectivity are fundamentally challenged.

This paper looks at two ghost stories from the late nineteenth century-Henry James' ”The Ghostly Rental” and W. D. Howells' ”His Apparition”-in which people deal with the more mercenary aspects of owning haunted houses. The tales share with earlier Gothic fiction the anxiety over the breakdown of social order and moral chaos-in this case the infringement on private property rights and succession rights without legal remedy. At the same time they echo the traditional Gothic concern over identity, a significant part of which depends on property in American society. Real estate horror stories especially touched a cord with the reader in the late nineteenth century, however, because the age was called ”the golden age of housing for the common man” on the one hand, yet also noted for the so-called ”housing famine” on the other. Unstable property values due to economic developments and expanding moral perceptions coming from a market economy both added further to the worries over the financial wisdom and the ethical implications of real estate transactions. James' tale plays with the conflict between the Tenant from Hell and the Landlord from Hell, while highlighting the familial conflict between the moralistically stern father and the financially independent daughter. The real horror as James depicts it is poverty and entrapment in business relations, while the haunting and the sighting both challenge property rights and privacy. Howells' novella, in comparison, presents the apparition as elusive story material which the hero reshapes over and over with little satisfaction-until he finds the ideal audience in his future wife and thus gives the apparition the role of matchmaker in his own romance. As the guardian angel of the middleclass family, the specter helps exorcise the unbefitting original owner and knocks down the real estate value to the hero's price range. Placed in the Gothic tradition, James' story marks a transitional stage where the haunted ancestral hall is still used as a metaphor for the strife between family members, though the rental brings to light the economic nature of the conflict. Howells' transaction between unrelated characters, meanwhile, underscores the new anxiety over random victimization due to uncertain market factors. The two novelists, with their signature ambiguity and goodhumored irony, revise the conventional haunted house story to illustrate the haunting housing problems and transitional ethos of the age.

The Iceman Cometh as Crossroad in O'Neill's Long Journey LAURIN R. PORTER Family is a key theme linking Eugene O'Neill's historical cycle, written in the mid-I 930s, with the autobiographical dramas which followed: The Iceman Cometh , Long Day's Journey Into Night, A Moonfor the Misbegotten, and the one-act Hughie.I For approximately five years before writing Iceman in 1939, O'Neill's time and energy were almost totally devoted to the cycle, a series of plays he entitled A Tale ofPossessors Self-Dispossessed, which was to trace the development of America from 1755 to 1932, a span of almost two hundred years. His objective was to define the American experience by focusing upon a single family, the Melody-Harford clan, which he modelled indirectly after his own family. On June 5, 1939, having grown stale on the cycle (extant plays include A Touch ofthe Poet, More Stately Mansions, and, in scenario form, The Calms of Capricorn), he decided to put it aside temporarily and work on a play which had "nothing to do with" the cycle. The next day he noted in his Work Diary that he would do outlines of two new works, the "Jimmy-the-Pries!'s, Hell-Hole, Garden idea and the New London family one,,,2 pointing in this briefnotation to the plays which were to become his major achievements: The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey Into Night. It is ironic, in retrospect, that O'Neill thought of these plays as unrelated to those he had been working on so feverishly up to this point, since in all of them the theme of family is the pivot on which both action and meaning revolve. Indeed, one can see the cycle plays as preparation for the more obviously autobiographical Iceman, which in tum clears the way for what could finally be a direct confrontation with his biological family in Long Day's Journey Into Night and its coda, A Moon for the Misbegotten. Long Day's Journey and Iceman are linked in more than their simultaneous conception.3 Both, for instance, are set in 1912, a watershed year in O'Neill's life. The winter of that year saw his attempted suicide at Jimmy-the-Priest's, a The Iceman Cometh as Crossroad in O'Neill's Long Journey 53 New York waterfront dive where he had been living with burns and outcasts he later called his best friends. The summer saw him living with his family in a rare period of relative harmony at the New London Monte Cristo cottage; shortly thereafter he learned of his consumption and left for the sanitorium, where he made his famous resolution to become a playwright. Thus both personally and artistically, O'Neill's life turned around that year; Iceman and Long Day's Journey tell the story of his two "families" at that critical juncture. The use ofhis own family members as models for the Tyrones in Long Day's Journey is well known, as are the biographical sources for nearly all the characters in Iceman 4 What has not been brought into focus is the fact that Iceman, like Journey, is structured around the concept offamily. While at first glance this seems incongruous, given the all-male society at Harry Hope's saloon (the tarts are treated as members of the club), there are actually two "families" in this play: the family of the boarders, over which Hope presides in fatherly fashion, and a unit comprised of the three central characters, Larry Slade, Theodore Hickman (Hickey), and Don Parritt, which also functions as a family in several significant ways. It is this latter group which is of particular interest, since it reflects both O'Neill's own family (considerably displaced) as well as conflicting components in the playwright's personal experience and self-concept. As he approaches autobiography with increasing directness in this crucial play, O'Neill moves from oblique exploration of his family in the MelodyHarfords ' to a less disguised treatment of people he actually knew in The Iceman Cometh. At the same time, as I will argue in this article, his own family appears - still disguised, but...

Reviewed by: Housebound: Selfhood and Domestic Space in Contemporary German Fiction by Monika Shafi Anke Biendarra Housebound: Selfhood and Domestic Space in Contemporary German Fiction. By Monika Shafi. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012. Pp. xii + 238. Cloth $80.00. ISBN 978-1571135247 In the wake of the spatial turn, a number of recent publications (such as the edited volume Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture, by Jaimey Fisher and Barbara Mennel, 2010) have focused on domestic and public space both as an analytical category and an object of study in literature and film. Monika Shafi’s Housebound contributes to this discourse by broaching the question of “how local spaces respond, interact, and appropriate global economic, cultural, and social forces” (4). As the title indicates, her interest is the domestic space of the house, a site she sees emerging in contemporary German culture as “a prime site of identity, powerfully registering conditions of contemporary life, explored in both local and global environments and bearing the imprint of national traditions and transnational contexts” (4). Shafi’s book thus emphasizes the literary portrayal of globalized subjects in their intimate realms, which aligns with a position in cultural studies (taken by Anthony Giddens and Roland Robertson, among others) that finds a salient commentary on globalizing effects in the local and the private. In her readings, Shafi employs a variety of theoretical approaches to frame her textual findings, including cultural studies, critical theory, anthropology, sociology, and architectural studies. She offers detailed close readings of a number of prose texts written by important contemporary authors in the aughts. Her selection runs the gamut of well-known literary figures from East and West, including ethnic and nonethnic German-language authors of different generations, even if the small sample of one or two authors in each of these categories cannot be considered representative. In each of the six chapters, Shafi sets out to show how the authors deal with the trope of the house, reflect on literary traditions and communicate the links between selfhood and private space that she considers a hallmark of writing on the domestic realm. Chapter 1 centers on two novels by two female authors born in 1967, in East Berlin and Frankfurt am Main, respectively. Jenny Erpenbeck’s Heimsuchung (2008) and Katarina Hacker’s Der Bademeister (2000) both operate within the twin discourses of Heimat and ruin and thematize questions of memory within the context [End Page 217] of German history of the twentieth century. Shafi reads both structures—a house on a lake and a swimming pool in the former East Berlin, respectively—as synecdoche for the nation and witness to personal and historical trauma. The two family novels treated in Chapter 2—Arno Geiger’s Es geht uns gut (2005) and Katharina Hagena’s Der Geschmack von Apfelkernen (2008)—have at their center the act of inheriting a house, which Shafi intreprets as a creational act of establishing selfhood shaped by family identity and generational continuity. Whereas the main male protagonist in Geiger’s text gains freedom by disposing of his family history, Hagena’s female character renews the generational family model by moving into the inherited house with her own family. In this chapter, Shafi’s conclusions are more tentative than in other chapters. Despite focusing on gender constructions, she does not problematize the ways in which the protagonists’ behavior is gendered in and of itself, nor does she connect her readings back to the analytical framework of gender and modern masculinities she had set up in the beginning. Chapter 3 explores the space of country houses and the tradition of utopian spaces. In her readings of Walter Kappacher’s Selina oder das andere Leben (2005) and Monika Maron’s Endmoränen (2002), Shafi again highlights gender constructions, while foregrounding the discourse on modernity and America in both novels. Especially the interpretation of Selina is incredibly detailed, rich, and interesting. Freud’s concept of the uncanny provides the analytical framework for the readings in Chapter 4 and the “haunted houses” in a selection of Judith Hermann’s short stories and Susanne Fischer’s novel Die Platzanweiserin (2006). Even if one might not agree with every...

Architecture is persistently present in films; most human stories must take place somewhere. ⁠Architectural environments serve essential roles in cinematic world-making, conversely making cinema an ideal device to unravel the affective qualities of architecture. This dissertation proposes that film is not only a visual medium, but that in its world-making capacities it is a conveyor of haptic and kinesthetic experiences, which in consequence reveal to us the poetic, emotional, and experiential richness of place. To this end, the dissertation focuses on two key elements to support this argument. The first is, a specific approach to filmmaking: slow-cinema,2 which uses delay and the cinematic long-take ⁠as a way of engaging our empathy with the spatial experiences that films can produce. The second element is the haunted house as a location: the dissertation considers this as an essential place for psychosomatic health, where the ghost figure underscores the affective dimension of space. Each of the three chapters in this dissertation draws from phenomenology, film hermeneutics, and atmosphere theory to study portrayals of place through four haunted houses: an urban house through Luis Buñuel's Exterminating Angel (1962); a farmhouse and a palace through Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) and Cemetery of Splendour (2015) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul; and a suburban house through David Lowery's A Ghost Story (2016). As the text progresses, questions of memory, imagination, embodiment, and world-making become the subject matter. I paid particular attention to the processes of reciprocal co-creation between film and world, and between world and self. The dissertation concludes by shedding light on the affective entanglement we form with our houses, and the capacity of cinema to enrich critical architectural discourse on the places we dwell in our everyday lives.

Book Review| January 01 2001 Haunted Greece and Rome: Ghost Stories from Classical AntiquityRestless Dead: Encounters between the Living and Dead in Ancient Greece Haunted Greece and Rome: Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity, D. Felton.Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and Dead in Ancient Greece, Sarah Iles Johnston. Adrienne Mayor Adrienne Mayor Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Folklore (2001) 114 (451): 110–112. https://doi.org/10.2307/3592401 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Adrienne Mayor; Haunted Greece and Rome: Ghost Stories from Classical AntiquityRestless Dead: Encounters between the Living and Dead in Ancient Greece. Journal of American Folklore 1 January 2001; 114 (451): 110–112. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3592401 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Folklore Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2001 American Folklore Society2001 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Due to culture custom in Taiwan, people believe that the haunted house is unlucky. Therefore, determining the value diminution of haunted houses poses problems for real estate appraisers. However, throughout relevant literature on this issue, there have been very few discussions on the association between haunted properties and loss of real estate value. In this paper, from the perspective of appraisal, it is to discuss the influence of haunted houses on the value of real estate, and an empirical analysis is made with foreclosure transition data and regression model. The result indicates that the average price difference between haunted houses and non-haunted houses is USD 4,214/square meters, showing that the average loss degree of the haunted house is 36.59%. This study also gives some directions for haunted properties valuation in the future.

We all acknowledge that the haunted house that saw an effulgence in Victorian English literature looks back to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), the first text to call itself A Gothic Story in its second edition (1765), and transplants its castle replete with fragmentary ghosts, recalling that these are haunted by Walpole’s prefaces to both editions that urge readers not to believe in the medieval supernatural that underwrites his tale’s apparitions. Yet the decades that intervene between eighteenth-century Gothic and later Victorian hauntings (what we still call the Romantic era) produce only occasional haunted houses, and what appears in this vein exhibits a struggle, rooted in Otranto, over which elements of the Walpolean Gothic to convert, reject, half-employ, or half-satirize. By analyzing examples from Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House and Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” to Walter Scott’s The Antiquary and Byron’s Don Juan, this article shows that such insecurity in the Romantic haunted-house motif epitomizes the fundamental relationship of the Gothic to the Romantic. Here Gothicized houses become microcosms for abjecting the unresolved tugs-of-war among conflicting but pervasive ideologies over and against which Romantic writing strives to build its imaginative, and even its ironical, resolutions.