Introduction: The Subject of the House Ingothic Narratives

Abstract

Gothic narratives have long privileged the house as one of their principal tropes. From its inception as a genre with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) to the latest Hollywood horror parody like Haunted House 2 (2014), the Gothic has consistently depicted the house not only as a setting for the unspeakable, but, in less clearer terms, as a site that actually invigorates it. Arguably, that many of its narratives identify the house in the title seems to suggest that the architecture’s prominence exceeds its function as backdrop but is in fact the very thing that engenders terror. Throughout its tradition, the Gothic has consistently recognized a quality invested in domestic space that has the power to unnerve, fragment, and even destroy its inhabitant unless something is done to arrest it and restore order and normalcy back to the house. The most obvious representation of such a circumstance is, of course, the haunted house tale;1 leaving aside haunted house films for the moment since I will be specifically discussing them in Chapter 3 (and Chapter 4), it is evident that within the Gothic canon are numerous works that noticeably or obliquely fall within this category of narratives, including Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho(1794), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s frequently anthologized “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1988), and Sarah Water’s The Little Stranger (2009).