The Queer Uncanny by Palmer Paulina;

Author:Palmer, Paulina;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Published: 2015-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

The haunted house

The haunted house is a motif with enduring appeal for readers and spectators, receiving imaginative treatment in numerous novels and films. Wolfreys describes it as contributing to themes of ‘spectral transformation’ and the ‘blurring of boundaries’,15 as well as symbolically evoking the ability of the Gothic to survive and return in innovative forms. He also cites Mark Wigley’s thought-provoking definition of the uncanny itself as signifying a ‘“not-being-at-home”, an alienation from the house experienced within it’.16

The motif is admirably suited to queer treatment since several classic Gothic texts constructed around it refer either explicitly or covertly to homoerotic themes and involvements. Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, while differing in date of publication and the locations they employ, all utilize the haunted house narrative to explore the disturbing effect that same-sex desire can have on the hetero-patriarchal household. Society in the 1980s and 1990s found an additional reason to stigmatize the gay man as a polluting presence in the home. It treated him as a figure of intense fear and suspiction on account of his association with AIDS. Ellis Hanson, commenting on the frequent absence of homosexual members of the household from the iconic representational site of the family photo, bitterly observes that they feature in parental conversation chiefly as ‘a crisis in Christian family politics’.17 Referring to the exclusion of the homosexual in the public imagination from the concept of home and its connotations of security, he remarks that in the popular imagination, like the vampire or ghost, the ‘gay man does not live somewhere, he lurks somewhere. He has no home. He has a haunt’ (p. 336).

It is, of course, not only gay men who experience the concept of ‘home’ and its hetero-patriarchal cultural practices and connotations as oppressive. Women, heterosexual as well as lesbian, traditionally relegated to the private sphere and entrapped in the patriarchal ideology of domesticity, may also have this experience, as feminist theorists and fiction writers illustrate. This is pertinent to Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night, one of the texts reviewed here, since in queering the haunted house narrative and the motif of the Heimlich/unheimlich house relating to it, Mootoo interrelates feminist with queer perceptions.

The representation of the haunted house in the novels of Grimsley and Mootoo echoes in certain respects the treatment of the heimlich/unheimlich home in Leavitt’s While England Sleeps and Waters’s The Night Watch, discussed in chapter 2. Grimsley and Mootoo likewise tease out the problems that ‘home’, both as a concept and an actual domestic site, can pose the queer individual on account of its hetero-patriarchal ideology and traditions. However, unlike Leavitt and Waters who locate their fictions in London, Grimsley and Mootoo both focus on rural locations. Halberstam in In a Queer Time and Place complains that ‘In gay/lesbian and queer studies, there has been little attention paid to date to the specificities of rural queer lives’.18 Grimsley and Mootoo help remedy this omission,

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