Spectres of domesticity: Carly Holmes’s ‘Piece by Piece’ and Tessa Hadley’s ‘Bad Dreams’

Abstract

Abstract This article offers interpretations of two contemporary gothic short stories, which position themselves in the literary tradition of the domestic uncanny. Both Carly Holmes’s ‘Piece by Piece’ and Tessa Hadley’s ‘Bad Dreams’ install repetition (doubling, seriality, narrative double loop) as a structural device and link it to the motif of work, to create spectres that haunt their respective domestic spaces. Whilst the former piece of short fiction does so by activating some of the classical topoi of the haunted house tale, with a twist, the latter showcases healing as well as destructive effects that work produces, both in its performance and its undoing. Using Freud’s definition of the uncanny as their backdrop, the readings of both stories draw on some of Jacques Derrida’s theorizations in Spectres of Marx and the interview ‘Spectographies’: of the spectre as a figuration of deconstructive in-between-ness; on the spectre’s visor effect of being in the gaze of that which itself cannot be seen and of work as a trace. As its main thesis, this piece proposes that work, in Holmes’s ‘Piece by Piece’ and Hadley’s ‘Bad Dreams’, is not only a spectral activity in itself but also creates haunting presences-in-absence.