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[...] although the house’s interior may be tainted by dark secrets, and capitalism may have devalued its status as private property in the modern era, none of these phenomena has resulted in the abatement of humankind’s desire for what it continues to singularly represent: the idea of home. Here is where we inscribe our presence in most intimate ways, infusing into it “our activities and physical possessions, but also . . . our aspirations and dreams”: this, according to Witold Rybczynksi, is what signifies “inhabiting” (Rybczynksi: 171), or its derivation, “to habit,” which also means “to dress” and “to accustom” (Rybczynksi: 169). Implied in this chain of complementary definitions is the house’s function to protect us while we continue to grow accustomed to ourselves; as a mirror and an extension of ourselves, the house would necessarily reflect us most distinctively, revealing, in some cases, even facets of our subjectivity of which we are unaware.

Andrew Hock Soon Ng, from Women and Domestic Space in Contemporary Gothic Narratives: The House as Subject

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Criticizing Simone de Beauvoir’s sweeping reduction of all domestic work to immanence (read deindividualized, repetitive, and uncreative), Young makes a distinction between housework, which complies with de Beauvoir’s sentiment, and homemaking, which, according to Young, is inseparable from the task of preservation: “Homemaking consists in preserving the things and their meaning as anchors to shifting personal and group identity. But the narratives of the history of what brought us here are not fixed, and part of the creative and moral task of preservation is to reconstruct the connection of the past to the present in light of new events, relationships, and political understandings.” (Young: 154) Like Herrington with regard to spatial similitude, Young also stresses the importance of things, rather than human subjectivities, in relation to homemaking; as she asserts, “The activities of homemaking thus give material support to the identity of those whose home it is . . . . Homemaking consists in the activities of endowing things with living meaning, arranging them in space in order to facilitate life activities of those to whom they belong, and preserving them, along with their meaning.” (Young: 151)

Andrew Hock Soon Ng, from Women and Domestic Space in Contemporary Gothic Narratives: The House as Subject

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It is possible, on the one hand, to interpret this looping as stasis, which, as trauma studies indicate, reveals the subject’s inability to organize a narrative around her subjectivity. In other words, as a result of trauma, the subject is now locked in an originary moment she can neither relinquish nor remember, and is thereby doomed to keep repeating this moment. Until and unless she is unstuck, not only will her subjectivity remain undeveloped, but it will also be incoherent because the corresponding narrative that necessarily gives it definition has been jeopardized.

Andrew Hock Soon Ng, from Women and Domestic Space in Contemporary Gothic Narratives: The House as Subject

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[...] melancholia, according to Freud, is the condition of mourning that becomes indefinite and gradually affects the psychic life of the subject as his ego begins to experience “inhibition and circumscription” due to “exclusive devotion to its mourning, which leaves nothing over for other purposes or other interest” (Freud 1917: 153). This occurs because the subject is unable to relinquish the object-love, or “what [not whom] it is he has lost” (Freud 1917: 155, emphasis in the original). This condition is unconscious, and therefore unrecognized by the subject, but as with all psychic damages, there will be manifest symptoms indicating its presence. One of the more distinctive is the tendency for self-reproach exhibited by the subject over matters that reinforce his ties to the object-love. This is because the subject’s ego has “established an identification . . . with the abandoned object,” and has transformed “the loss of the object . . . into a loss in the ego [,] and the conflict between the ego and the loved person . . . into a cleavage between the criticiz-ing faculty of the ego and the ego as altered by the identification” (Freud 1917: 159). In other words, in identifying with the object-love, the ego has also incorporated the object-love’s identity, which is then turned against itself and expressed as (self)-criticism. Importantly, however, as the adjective “abandoned” implies, melancholia is profoundly narcissistic because it is the ego’s assertion of self-preservation; by incorporating the object-love into itself, the ego’s fundamental aim is to prevent a part of itself from becoming lost. But an inevitable result is the rupturing of the subject’s psyche because his ego has been “complicated by the conflict of ambivalence” (Freud 1917: 167): the ego is now caught in a tug-of-war between love and hate as it simultaneously attempts to detach from, while preserving, his libidinal object-love. In this regard, what is indirectly revealed in the act of self-reproach is simultaneously an unconscious reaffirmation of longing for, and an inadmissible desire to also separate from, the object-love that has become firmly lodged within his ego.

Andrew Hock Soon Ng, from Women and Domestic Space in Contemporary Gothic Narratives: The House as Subject

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It is likely because the horror genre trades on realizing the improbable that its intense symbology—variously exaggerated, grotesque, obscene, and fantastical—is capable of bearing meanings associated with our deepest, often inadmissible, apprehensions, whether at an individual or a collective level. As critic Brigitte Cherry asserts, horror can be “easily adaptable at addressing a range of ideological issues. Horror films invariably reflect the social and political anxieties of the cultural moment” (Cherry 210). Horror narratives, to rephrase Cherry, function as allegories of the contemporary, and if we look beyond their monsters and ghosts, gore and violence, and if we are attentive enough, we will discover there are other concerns being addressed in them that reflect social and political issues of their historical and cultural moments.

Andrew Hock Soon Ng, from Women and Domestic Space in Contemporary Gothic Narratives: The House as Subject

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[...] to experience the “reality of the real” characterizing intensive space, we must rethink space as perception and sensation rather than as measurement. Here, what Deleuze repeatedly states about depth in Difference and Repetition to reinforce the link between depth and intensive space—that is, the principle that “depth is simultaneously the imperceptible and that which can only be perceived”—is equally applicable to intensity, which “is simultaneously the imperceptible and that which can be sensed” (Deleuze 1997: 230–31). The imprecision of such means of apprehension is, in fact, compatible with the nature of depth that is partly always hidden, thus directly implicating this space with a degree of uncertainty. Based on the explication above, it can be concluded that the fold is a kind of intensive space capable of generating multiple intensities, and by extension, varying sensations and perceptions. In this regard, it is not merely how the pli is perceived or sensed that makes it intriguing, but also the kinds of perceptions and sensations it generates that consequently affect us.

Andrew Hock Soon Ng, from Women and Domestic Space in Contemporary Gothic Narratives: The House as Subject

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It is possible that Sethe’s trauma may be less to do with her refusal to bear witness (again) to the distressing event than it is an incapacity to be a witness altogether. As Dori Laub observes, “it was inconceivable that any historical insider could remove herself sufficiently from the contaminating power of the event so as to remain a fully lucid, unaffected witness, that is, to be sufficiently detached from the inside to stay entirely outside of the trapping roles, and the consequent identities, either of the victim or the executioner.” (Laub: 66) Accordingly, trauma is the victim’s inability to properly see the “contaminating” event, thus compromising her objectivity. When her witnessing is placed under erasure and results in her experience “no longer communicable even to” herself, the traumatic event becomes potentially a nonevent—it “never took place. This loss of the capacity to be a witness to oneself and thus to witness from the inside is perhaps the true meaning of annihilation, for when one’s history is abolished, one’s identity ceases to exist as well” (Laub: 66–67).

Andrew Hock Soon Ng, from Women and Domestic Space in Contemporary Gothic Narratives: The House as Subject

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[...] subjectivity not only leaves impressions on space but becomes space’s trace through the act of living. In a sense, then, and paradoxically, to occupy space is also to be occupied by space, in that what is projected onto spatiality eventually takes on a separate existence that could either invigorate one’s sense of presence further or function as the catalyst initiating the intrusion of the inadmissible to rupture its occupant’s meaningfulness.

Andrew Hock Soon Ng, from Women and Domestic Space in Contemporary Gothic Narratives: The House as Subject

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[...] Walter Benjamin once wrote: “to live means to leave traces” (Benjamin 1986: 155). In the interiority of lived space, Benjamin contends, the inhabitant can transform objects from their commodity status to aesthetic ones having private meanings for her. While the outside, social space, “besieged by technology” (Benjamin 1986: 154–55), has increasingly “derealize[d]” her (Benjamin 1986: 155), home becomes “not only the universe but also the etui of the private person,” a place where the inhabitant can realize herself (as though living in “a better” world [Benjamin 1986: 155]) and, more importantly, leave an impression to mark her having “been” at all.

Andrew Hock Soon Ng, from Women and Domestic Space in Contemporary Gothic Narratives: The House as Subject

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To appropriate Wigley’s theory further, the flat’s “white surface actively assists the eye by erasing its own materiality, its texture, its color, its sensuality, as necessarily distracting forms of dirt . . . . Neither material nor immaterial, it is meant to be seen through. By effacing itself before the eye it makes possible, it produces the effect of an eye detached from what it sees.” (Wigley: 360) In this sense, Lee’s home, detached and stripped of its materiality and sensuousness, becomes merely an “object available for appropriation by [his] detached eye” (Wigley: 360), which is, of course, the prerogative of masculine visual pleasure. Whiteness domesticates the house for the male gaze precisely by installing the latter as detached and penetrating.

Andrew Hock Soon Ng, from Women and Domestic Space in Contemporary Gothic Narratives: The House as Subject

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[...] a mirror image may correspond, but can never achieve similitude, with the object it reflects because an image is fundamentally an inverted representation of the original and is ultimately unreal (like the “will-o’-the wisp,” which is false, harmful light). Implied is that the image’s apparent identicalness to the prototype is already compromised by difference. An ego that derives a sense of subjectivity from a mirror is therefore liable of losing itself in that “other space,” that is, the realm of representation, and become replaced by an image of self instead. As a result, obsession with the mirror becomes inevitable as the ego struggles to ground its subjectivity by constantly turning to its reflected image in order to reassure itself of presence.

Andrew Hock Soon Ng, from Women and Domestic Space in Contemporary Gothic Narratives: The House as Subject

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[...] as Merleau-Ponty has shown, the perceiving subject and the space perceived via objects are not straightforwardly distinguishable entities, but are instead dialectically and organically intersected (Merleau-Ponty: 293). As such, even as the subjective gaze endows space and its corresponding objects with meaning, space and objects also provide the subject with the “means” to come into being. In other words, what gives meaning to subjectivity is largely linked to how the subject negotiates and identifies space and its contents with her gaze.

Andrew Hock Soon Ng, from Women and Domestic Space in Contemporary Gothic Narratives: The House as Subject

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Space, according to Merleau-Ponty, may be independent of the subject, but it nevertheless also extends from her, and, as such, has the potential to function as both a platform upon which subjectivity is staged and a canvas onto which desires are inscribed. But space also determines the configuration of the subject to a point by either serving as a mirror from which the subject derives her sense of self-image or affecting her unconscious to subtly recalibrate the coordinates of her subjectivity. Indeed, as noted earlier in my discussion of interiority, space can and does accommodate an unconscious property that insinuates itself in ways that are often more “felt” than “known.” As Merleau-Ponty notes in Phenomenology of Perception, such spatial “disturbance does not affect the information which may be derived from perception, but discloses beneath ‘perception’ a deeper life of consciousness” (Merleau-Ponty: 329). Elsewhere in the same study, he states that space “. . . by its magic, confer its own spatial particularizations upon the landscape [and subject, I would add] without ever appearing itself” (Merleau-Ponty: 296; emphasis mine). The nonappearance of spatiality that is nevertheless particularly “present,” as I understand it, is the spatial unconscious, which the subject registers predominantly in indirect ways. Encountering such a space exposes the extent to which subjectivity inadvertently shapes space, and to which such a performative in turn resignifies the subject’s position. In this sense, both space and subject are potentially collapsed into each other to thoroughly problematize notions of self and other, male and female, seen and unseen, reality and refraction. Space becomes, at once, a stage in and through which the subject moves as she responds and gives definition to it, and a screen upon which the subject’s (un)conscious desires and fears become inscribed. It is clear from the preceding discussion, then, that the subject/space relationship is more dialectical than hierarchical.

Andrew Hock Soon Ng, from Women and Domestic Space in Contemporary Gothic Narratives: The House as Subject

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[...] the domestic interior is undoubtedly more than “place” and “centre”; it is, for lack of a better term, an experience that, as a result of dwelling, is borne of its occupant’s conscious and (especially) unconscious desires, but also exceeds them, becoming in the process an independent property now integral to the architecture capable of implicitly influencing its occupant’s subjectivity.

Andrew Hock Soon Ng, from Women and Domestic Space in Contemporary Gothic Narratives: The House as Subject

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[...] interiority denotes “an act of exclusion, as much as one of inclusion. Interiority is [among other things] elitist and selective . . . the incorporation of mechanism of control . . . and hence an explicit manipulation of an environment to achieve and construct a desired space. Desire, space and control coincide in interiority” (McCarthy: 113, my emphasis). As such, while interiority invariably implies spatial categories like limits, boundaries, and territories to thereby separate the included from the excluded (a constituent of exteriority), these categories are also ultimately unstable and subjected to porosity, shifts, redefinition, and renegotiation, all of which suggests that interiority is also “a responsive phenomenon” (McCarthy: 115). And because interiority is constructed, controlled and “displaced environment” that reflects the occupant’s will-to-power over it, it thus enables “certain possibilities of habitation to occur” (McCarthy: 120), possibilities that would otherwise remain prohibited and unexpressed if not for interiority.

Andrew Hock Soon Ng, from Women and Domestic Space in Contemporary Gothic Narratives: The House as Subject

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Witch-hunting may be another name for religious persecution in the play, but in England in the 1630s the ruling ideology set its victims against one another. The view that a virtuous woman has to be chaste, quiet and subservient leads Burton to regard his fellow prisoners as devils. It is they rather than Laud who are the makers of a popish purgatory. He displaces his anger at the powers which have incarcerated him onto a group of women below him who make a noise. This episode encapsulates the means by which the Lancashire women were overmastered by the stories that surrounded them. Burton accuses those who lodge him near the witches of ‘malice’, but sees the female prisoners as evil itself. They are the first cause, the darkness and ‘hell’ from which there is no escape. This is an extraordinary view of a group of captive women, with power only to give birth to children and noise.

Robert Poole, from The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories

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Potts’s Discoverie is certainly instructive, for its omissions and imperfections (both deliberate and naïve) teach a harsh lesson about blind trust in authority, reliance on official accounts and the infallibility of the written word in history. Potts cannot tell us what witchcraft ‘really’ was, for his accounts conflict and his glosses do not disguise this fact. He cannot tell us all that we need to know about witch trials, for he refuses to be open about the nature of his sources or full in his account of procedure. But he can tell us what he believed early modern readers wanted to read about witchcraft, what his patrons wanted him to produce, and something of what a reasonably well-educated legal official thought of the job he was doing in trying witches, rooting out conspirators, and writing accounts of their crimes. Describing himself as unable to ‘paint in extraordinary terms’, he can nevertheless sketch for us a picture of the Lancashire witches, although some of his lines are uncertain and smudged and an understanding of the perspective is all-important in evaluating the picture’s worth.

Robert Poole, from The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories

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