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‘EVER LEARNING TO DWELL’: HABITABILITY IN
NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN
LITERATURE

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5/08 KIProj/Achres/CIRC/Daleouelndd

 

“EVER LEARNING TO DWELL”: HABITABILITY IN NINETEENTH AND
TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE

By

Christine Renee Wilson

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English
2008

ABSTRACT

“EVER LEARNING TO DWELL”: HABITABILITY IN NINETEENTH AND
TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE

By

Christine Renee Wilson
My dissertation begins with a concern in contemporary literature and scholarship that, as
we enter the twenty-ﬁrst century, a meaningful experience of space and place is doomed
to extinction. Critics such as Leo Marx and Roderick Nash have equated the centrality of
place with a uniquely “American” literature. American texts about place, however, are
increasingly anxious that the place in question is disappearing and that an emotional,
psychological, and historical connection to place is no longer possible. I argue that
literature — viewed through the lens of space theorists like Henri Lefebvre, Michel de
Certeau, Martin Heidegger, and Michel Foucault — offers a way to transform the
relationship between subjects and space by considering, accepting, revising, and resisting
gendered spaces and regulations. This relationship is thus made sustainable, livable and,
more importantly, “habitable.” My readings of literary texts (e. g. Sarah Orne Jewett’s
Deephaven, Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, Toni Morrison’s Paradise, and
contemporary haunted house narratives) illuminate how space theory oﬁen fails to
account for the importance of gender and the ways texts can resist and subvert spatialized
gender praxis. By taking a diverse historical, textual and theoretical approach to the
question of the relationship between the subject and space, “Ever Learning to Dwell”
counters much of the work in literary criticism that either gestures nostalgically towards a
lost “place attachment” or dismisses the importance of a subjective connection to space

altogether.

This dissertation is dedicated to
Madeleine Sue

Born January 24, 2007

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A special thank you to my director, Ellen McCallum, for her sustained support and
challenging critiques throughout this project. I also want to express my appreciation for
the thoughtful comments and insights from my committee members, Stephen Arch,
Edward Watts, and Judith Stoddart.

To my partner, David, and daughter Madeleine, I owe a great deal of
gratitude: without their compassion and patience I would not have been able to complete
this project.

My writing group’s comments and careful reading were invaluable. Thank you
Kelly Battles, Greg Nicholson, Lance Norman, and Greg Wright.
And, ﬁnally, thank you to my parents for sharing their love of reading and natural

world with me.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ............................................................................. 1

CHAPTER ONE

WRITING HOME: HABITABILITY IN CAROLINE KIRKLAND AND

WALLACE STEGNER ...................................................................... 28
Mary Clavers’s New Home ............................................................... 29
Lyman Ward’s Gendered Habitability .................................................. 46
Ethical Habitability ........................................................................ 60

CHAPTER TWO

DELINQUENT HOUSEKEEPING: TRANSFORMING REGULATIONS OF

KEEPING HOUSE ..................................................................................................... 65
Placeless Domesticity in Sarah Ome Jewett’s Deephaven .................................... 67
Marilynne Robinson’s Ungrounded Domesticity .................................................. 79
Rebuilding Habitability in Toni Morrison’s Paradise ........................................... 90
Un—habitable Habitability ....................................................................................... 102

CHAPTER THREE

THE BODY OF SPACE ............................................................................................. 108
The Desert-Woman ................................................................................................ 1 10
Save Yourself — Save Space ................................................................................. 126
Eating Space ........................................................................................................... 136
Healthy Relationships With Space ......................................................................... 146

CHAPTER F OUR

HAUNTED HABITABILITY: THE SUBJECT AND SPACE IN HAUNTED

HOUSE NARRATIVES ............................................................................................. 150
Some Houses are Born Bad ................................................................................... 154
Domestic Resistance .............................................................................................. 163
At Home in the Haunted House ............................................................................. 175
Haunted Habitability .............................................................................................. 182

CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................... 1 87

WORKS CITED ......................................................................................................... 197

INTRODUCTION

The seed of this dissertation is Martin Heidegger’s idea of dwelling explained in his 1951
essay “Building Dwelling Thinking.” Throughout the writing process, I found myself
returning to three Heideggerian principles: that dwelling is a crucial part of human life,
that dwelling necessitates a respect for space, and that humans are “ever learning to
dwell” (349, 352, 363). The ﬁrst premise afﬁrms that the desire to inhabit spaces
emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually is legitimate, and the second serves as a
reminder that inhabiting space should be an ethical process. Heidegger’s ﬁnal injunction
that mortals must “ever learn to dwell” alludes to the complications of occupying space
and emphasizes that dwelling is a process, not simply an endpoint. I turn to literature to
investigate “ever learning to dwell” because it allows me to examine the individual,
personal process of dwelling.

The texts I analyze foreground the literary nature of the experience of space and
suggest that reading, writing, and the imagination transform space so that it is habitable.
Like Heidegger’s dwelling, habitability is, at the core, about how the subject makes space
his or her own. Habitability is more speciﬁc than dwelling, though, because it
incorporates a speciﬁc method of changing and mutating space. Michel de Certeau, in
The Practices of Everyday Life, uses reading and writing as a model for “habitability,”
claiming that readers mutate the author’s text in order to make it “habitable” (xxi). I take
this idea a step further to argue that writers use their texts to mutate space and in so
doing, make space “habitable.” Habitability emerges in texts when space fulﬁlls the

subject’s psychological, emotional, and social needs. Initially, habitability sounds

utopian, but it is not necessarily an endpoint or objective because habitability is
constantly shifting based on the changing needs of the subject and space. Nor is it
indicative of an “ideal” relationship between the subject and space, since habitability
must continually negotiate the competing needs of multiple subjects, not to mention the
often conﬂicting interests of the subject and space (inasmuch as space can be said to have
interests).

Current thought on a healthy and ideal subject-space relationship emphasizes
harmony, balance, and respect between the subject and space. I share these ideals, but
the texts I look at show some of the limitations of searching for a perfect space or
subject-space relationship. They acknowledge the conﬂicts, tensions, and complications
of inhabiting space and create habitability even when balance, harmony, and mutual
respect are impossible. The characters approach habitability pragmatically; they make
unlivable space livable. Their habitability is makeshift, untidy, sometimes ethically
problematic, and sometimes refreshingly progressive. Each chapter offers a model (or
models) of habitability, but none of them show perfect subj ect-space relationships.

Each chapter begins with a different spatial crisis and then explores the ways
characters produce habitability by using writing to undo, live with, or transform damaged
home space. I focus on home spaces because they are the most likely sites of habitability. A
The ﬁrst chapter addresses wild space that refuses to conform to its inhabitant’s
(conventional) expectations. This chapter proves my argument that habitability can be
either ethically positive or negative. Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home — Who ’11 Follow?
(1839) read in conjunction with its sequel F ores! Life (1842) creates habitability based on

dismissing rigid gender roles and the traditional comforts of home such as stability and

domestic reﬁnement. The narrator of Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose (1971), on the
other hand, uses writing to create a habitability that reinforces the patriarchal control of
gender and gendered space. While Kirkland uses writing to negotiate the relinquishment
of the subject’s control over space, Stegner uses writing to dominate space. The second
chapter focuses on how the cultural construction of domestic space conﬂates space with
femininity and vice versa. This chapter maps out three different models of habitability
that resist and revise that conﬂation. Sarah Ome Jewett’s Deephaven introduces a model
of habitability based on ﬂexible domestic space, and Marilynne Robinson’s
Housekeeping and Toni Morrison’s Paradise, appropriate J ewett’s model of ﬂuid
domesticity to create habitability in very different situations. Together these texts show
that a new space is not needed for habitability, but that a revised subject-space
relationship is necessary. The third chapter tackles ecologically damaged space and
illustrates the way linking the body and space facilitates habitability and saves space at
the same time. Mary Austin’s Lost Borders explores the struggle between economic and
ecological needs, habitability within domestic and natural space, and an individual and
communal sense of place. Austin’s narrative gives space a body to realign spatial and
gender power dynamics. Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge: An Unfamiliar History of
Family and Place explores how a close body-space connection saves both the self and
space. Gretel Ehrlich’s Islands, the Universe, Home synthesizes Austin and William’s
approach to the body-space relationship. Finally, the fourth chapter brings together the
concerns of the former chapters — uncontrollable space, gendered space, and competitive

habitability — through the unexpected venue of contemporary haunted house narratives.

This chapter shows that habitability can emerge in even the most unlikely of situations

but that, sometimes, habitability is more destructive than unlivable space.

Theoretical Conversations
To situate my dissertation contextually and theoretically, I ask two central questions: 1)
What subject-space relationship creates sustainable habitability? and 2) What is the
relationship between literature and space?

To answer the first question, I bring space theory, domestic theory, ecocriticism,
and ecofeminism into dialogue with one another. My understanding of the different
kinds of space and possible relationships within space is heavily indebted to Henri
Lefebvre’s work in The Production of Space. Because I am discussing personal space, I
look to domesticity theorists to illuminate the link between personal space and identity.
Finally, for the examination of the ethics of habitability, ecocriticism and ecofeminism
are particularly useful. I share ecocriticism’s dedication to producing a sustainable
subject-space relationship, even as I depart from its emphasis on close, personal
connections with natural space. I build on ecofeminism’s consideration of natural space

and gender to explore the way habitability is often a process of re-writing the body.

I. Henri Lefebvre’s Spatial Triad and the Need for New Space
Lefebvre’s The Production of Space attempts to create a “unifying theory of space” and
argues that the common conception of space as simply an “empty container” is
misguided. Instead, space is produced by a variety of social forces. His spatial triad of

conceived space (representations of space), lived space (representational space), and

perceived space (spatial practice)l affords a speciﬁc vocabulary for talking about the
different kinds of space and, even more importantly, the different kinds of relationships
between the subject and space. Conceived space involves the abstractions and
verbalizations necessary for a cognitive approach to space. Within this kind of space, the
subject dominates space because the subject’s conceptions of space override the actual
space. Lived space is the space of everyday life, as well as the space of the imagination.
In this case, space is dominant over the subject’s experience. Finally, perceived space
relates to the sensory perception of space, and within perceived space, the subject-space
interaction is more balanced. The subject interacts with each kind of space, although at
different levels.

In addition to the spatial triad, I use two more Lefebvrian terms to describe how
the subject is relating to space —— domination and appropriation. Dominated space is
“transformed — and mediated — by technology, by practice.” The prevalence of
“slab[s] of concrete or a motorway” shows that domination is becoming the most
prevalent way of relating to space in the twentieth century. An appropriated space, on the
other hand, is a “natural space modiﬁed in order to serve the needs and possibilities of a
group.” Monuments, buildings, streets, and houses are all examples of appropriated
space (Lefebvre 165). Appropriating space implies an incorporation of all the elements
of spatial triad (Lefebvre 166).

The most reliable way to determine whether the subject dominates or appropriates
space is to examine the affective content of the relationship. Lefebvre’s description of

how to dominate space emphasizes the violent nature of this subject-space relationship:

 

1 To make things clearer, I will use the Iived/conceived/perceived space to refer to Lefebvre’s spatial triad,
rather than the corresponding representational/representations of/ spatial practice.

“In order to dominate space, technology introduces a new form into a pre-existing space
— generally a rectilinear or rectangular form such as a meshwork or a chequerwork. A
motorway brutalizes the countryside and the land, slicing through space like a great knife.
Dominated space is usually closed, sterilized, emptied out” (Lefebvre 164). In effect,
domination of space occurs when conceived space (that focused on geometrical division
into “rectangular forms”) takes over lived and perceived space. It is a space that is
abused, rather than used. Appropriated space, however, is a much more thoughtful and
even gentle use of space — space is still modiﬁed, but it is done in a way that allows the
existing space to retain some of its original qualities while still meeting the needs of
communities and individuals. Appropriating space suggests a harmony between the
subject and space and embodies a balance of lived, perceived, and conceived space.
Lefebvre does not argue that appropriation is preferable to domination, or vice versa.
Instead, he contends that the subject needs to be able to appropriate interior, domestic
spaces while dominating exterior, public spaces.

Lefebvre, along with numerous other space theorists, acknowledges the
importance of domestic, lived space and, furthermore, attempts to describe and analyze
the components of dwelling and spatial practice. It is easy, however, to get frustrated
with these texts because they rarely leave the domain of abstract thought. For example,
even though Lefebvre reiterates the importance of the body and space, as well as lived
space, few actual bodies enter his text at all. The reader is not taken into houses where
one might see lived space being enacted, nor does “home” or the house enter the
discussion in any substantial way (with the notable exception of Gaston Bachelard, of

course). By focusing exclusively on urban space, these analyses also largely ignore

spaces that have been gendered as feminine. My analysis seeks to remedy this by

exploring texts that enter the home and create habitable spaces.

11. Home is Where Identity Is
“Home” space entwines with the idea of “self” in each of these texts. Culture produces
the link between identity and self, and when the space in question is the home, issues of
gender emerge. In the nineteenth century, the “cult of domesticity” ﬁrsed gender identity
with spatial regulations. The appropriate performance of housekeeping duties collided
with the performance of gender. The everyday maintenance of a household — sweeping
the ﬂoor, dusting knickknacks — becomes imbued with signiﬁcance beyond simply
maintaining tidiness.

Scholars of domesticity offer two primary interpretations of domesticity and its
relationship to gender. For scholars like Nina Baym, Ann Romines, Nancy Woloch, and
Jane Tompkins domesticity is empowering rather than restrictive. It would not be
accurate to say that these critics attempt to recuperate domesticity, but they do try to
interrogate the complex social and cultural work of domesticity and the domestic novel
(primarily written by women for women in the nineteenth century). Nancy Woloch
argues, for example, that while the role of women in the domestic sphere may be
“enclosed, limited, [and] private space” it is still “an improvement over having no space
at all” (117). Jane Tompkins points to the cultural functions of domesticity and more
speciﬁcally the domestic novel. In her article, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Literary
History,” she explains that, “the popular domestic novel of the nineteenth century

represents a monumental effort to reorganize culture from a woman’s point of view; that

this body of work is remarkable for its intellectual complexity, ambition, and
resourcefulness” (503-4).2 This interpretation of domesticity reads it as nurturing, rather
than disempowering, for women but it does nothing to undermine the “separate spheres”
paradigm, nor does it question the spatial ramiﬁcations of domestication. A more
traditional understanding of domesticity suggests that women are prisoners of domestic
spatial regulations. Nancy Cott explains, “Deﬁning it [the domestic sphere] as her
province, the canon of domesticity made woman’s household occupation her vocation.
The very attempt to immobilize woman’s role in the home transformed her household
into a discrete, specialized, and objective work role” (74). The texts within this
dissertation maintain sympathy with the ﬁrst position, in that they affirm the importance
of domesticity for creating habitability, but they acknowledge the second position, too, by
rewriting domesticity and especially the link between gender and domestic space.

The twentieth-century texts I study conﬁrm that the management of gender
through the regulation of space is still salient well after the cult of domesticity hit its
peak. For the characters in both the nineteenth and twentieth century texts, habitability
necessitates the resistance of both spatial and gender regulations, and therefore the
characters who are able to create habitability most successfully dissociate personal
identity from spatial identity. In popular culture, the link between home and self has
become increasingly commonplace, and myriads of books are available on how to make

one’s house as “mirror” of the self. But, as a reading of Winifred Gallagher’s book,

 

2 Whether we agree with Tompkins’s speciﬁc claims about domesticity’s ability to “reorganize culture
from a woman’s point of view” (whatever that might mean) is less important than recognizing that
domesticity is being emphasized as an important and valuable cultural construction, and that furthermore,
women’s relationship to domesticity is interpreted as signiﬁcant Rather than dismissing domesticity
outright as a “prison” for women, Tompkins’s acknowledges the potentialities of domesticity for women.

House Thinking shows, the relationship between “home” and identity is actually far more
complex.

Central to the book’s multi-faceted and room-by-room exploration is the idea that
home space should provide the subject with a coherent identity. Gallagher explains,
“With some informed thought, however, we can ensure that although its shape shifts,
home helps knit up our changing selves into a coherent identity, connect our past to our
present and future, organize our days, and carry us forward on what Samuel Johnson
called ‘the smooth cru'rent of domestic joy’” (xix). Gallagher implicitly posits that
identity is both ﬂuid and fragmented by time and a chaotic world. Identity is broken, in
other words, and to become whole again, it needs domestic mending. She assumes that
the house functions as more than a shelter and bolsters and heals an incoherent self.
Domestic space, if properly “thought” can “knit” together the various pieces that
compose an identity and becomes an intimate part of the subject. The trope Gallagher
uses to describe the ideal home — a “womb with a view” — emphasizes the intimacy
between the subject and domestic space.

Meant to conjure images of the epitome of comfort, nurturing, and security, the
phrase “womb with a view” actually suggests a divided identity. A womb, intensely
interior, evokes an inevitable exteriority as well. It can only be occupied for a ﬁnite
amount of time before the inhabitant must enter the external world, and thus the time
within the womb, while formative, is temporary. The emphasis of the “view” in
Gallagher’s phrase further stresses the idea that a house is not hermetically sealed but
rather allows the inhabitant to be on the border between the internal and the external. The

allusive relationship to E. M. Forster’s Room with a View and Virginia Woolf’s “A Room

of One’s Own” reinforces the idea of an interior realm that works in tandem with external
forces and stimulation. .It is also implicitly on the edge of another border — between self
and other —— because the womb is simultaneously part of the self and at the same time
home to an other. Calling the home a “womb with a view” undermines the idea that the
home will necessarily stitch together a fragmented identity. Gallagher’s seemingly
simple metaphor establishes a complex relationship between subject and space that
involves a number of breached boundaries.

Gallagher’s phrase also ties the home to the physical feminine body, a trope that
appears again and again in the narratives examined. Her work suggests that the link
between home and identity is nurturing and leads to habitability (though, of course, she
does not use those terms), but the texts I examine come to the opposite conclusion. In
most of the narratives, the relationship between femininity and space is tautological —
women are associated with domestic space and domestic space is associated with women.
Control of one becomes control of the other; the attempt to control the feminine, within
these texts, is expressed through the regulation and domination of domestic space, and

vice versa.

111. Place Attachment
Domestic theorists link identity with home space in order to beneﬁt the subject.
Ecocriticism also argues that identity and place are intertwined, but they focus on how
this connection beneﬁts space. Ecocriticism is concerned with the study of literature and
the (loosely deﬁned) environment. In practice, this means that ecocritics investigate

everything from contemporary nature writing to birding guides from the nineteenth

10

century to the way the human-environment relationship is portrayed in canonical
literature. Whereas space theorists are often concerned with describing and analyzing
how subjects do interact with space, ecocritics are more interested in how subjects should
interact with space. The concepts “sense of place” and “place attachment” form the
implicit basis of how ecocritics think the subject should relate to her environment.
Lawrence Buell deﬁnes place attachment in his most book, Future of
Environmental Criticism. It is the bond that occurs between humans and places, real or
imagined and is based on both spatial and temporal aspects. He envisions place-
attachment as spatially oriented in a set of concentric circles, with the home place
occupying the center position, and other places (such as work and second homes) lying in
the outer circles (70). Temporally, place attachment is formed through an accumulation
of personal experience and knowledge of the history of a particular place (71). Finally,
place attachment is formed through “imaging” or imagining, and this is what allows one
to have an attachment to places that one has never even visited (70). But while place
attachment is personal, Buell also emphasizes that to be useful, place attachments have to
be socially recognized as well: “To that end, it can’t just be ‘my’ memory place, but also
‘ours’; shareable: an alchemical transformation of spaces all over the map into places of
lived experience worthy of care” (76). While social recognition may be important, sense
of place is still essentially formulated as an intensely individual phenomenon, with the
individual in question at the very center of the circle. It is the individual’s home, the
individual’s personal experience, and the individual’s imaginings that form the basis of

“place attachment.”

ll

Place attachment is crucial for ecocriticism. Lawrence Buell calls place “an
indispensable concept for environmental humanities” because of it is productively
indeterminate — it “opens up” and potentially offers a form of resistance to modern
tendencies to erase particularity (Future 62, 66). Ecocritics invoke sense of place and
place attachment in hopes of “bringing human communities back into a more responsible
set of relationships with the earth” (Preston xiv). Many ecocritics (implicitly or
explicitly) agree that a sense of place is vital for environmental reform, and they
emphasize and admire sense of place within literary works.3 In practice, this means that
ecocritics often approach literature about place as if it should provide positive models of
place attachment for readers to emulate. In nature writing, place attachment is equated
with security and safety, and even self-awareness. The logic is that a personal connection
to a particular place will inspire love, respect, and caretaking of that place. Even when
sense of place is critiqued (such as in much of Faulkner’s work, or in Jane Smiley’s A
Thousand Acres), the issues that are focused on are insularity (often embodied by incest)

or provincialism.4 The problem with current subject-space relationships, for ecocritics, is

 

3 The Ecocriticism Reader, for example, features articles that argue (broadly speaking) that a close
connection between humans and space and a keen attention to natural space is essential for environmental
health, such as Scott Russell Sanders’s “Speaking a Word for Nature,” Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Landscape,
History, and the Pueblo Imagination,” and Vera Norwood’s “Heroines of Nature: Four Women Respond to
the American Landscape.” Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination is trying to remedy a
problem that he sees in American literary history (that it has emphasized that the “representation of the
natural environment as a major theme while marginalizing the literature devoted most speciﬁcally to it”) by
reviving interest in “environmentally oriented work” (Environmental Imagination 9). Implicit in his
argument is that an attention to place and natural space matters, and that it is better to pay attention to these
issues than to ignore them. In creative works, ﬁgures like Gary Snyder, John Muir, Wendell Berry, and
Terry Tempest Williams are well known for their claims about the importance of subject-space
relationships.

4 Often the humans in these texts are “too close” because the space in question is metaphorically too small
and limited. Buell acknowledges this critique, saying that he is aware that “devotees of place-attachment
can easily fall into sentimental environmental determinism” (66), and that too much place attachment can
result in “maladaptive sedentariness, inordinate hankering to recover the world we have lost, xenophobic
stigmatization of outsiders and wanders” (68).

12

that subjects no longer have a connection to place, and therefore see no reason to respect
or protect the environment.
Wallace Stegner’s essay “A Sense of Place” suggests a clear formula for
cultivating place attachment (which he call sense of place). He explains:
Back to Wendell Berry, and his belief that if you don’t know where you
are you don’t know who you are. He is not talking about the kind of
location that can be determined by looking at a map or a street sign. He is
talking about the kind of knowing that involves the senses, the memory,
the history of a family or a tribe. He is talking about the knowledge of
place that comes from working in it in all weathers, making a living from
it, suffering from its catastrophes, loving its mornings or evenings or hot
noons, valuing it for the profound investment of labor and feeling that you,
your parents and grandparents, your all-but-unknown ancestors have put
into it. (205)
Stegner’s deﬁnition favors history, personal and communal, as a mechanism of attaining a
sense of place. It centers on a symbiotic interaction between humans and the environment
that occurs over time, preferably over generations of time. Although Stegner emphasizes
history and memory as a way to connect to place, individual affect is not unimportant.
The use of the terms “suffering,” “loving,” and “feeling” are individually based, affective
relationships with space. Like Buell, Stegner also favors a sense of place that is the result
of extensive lived and perceived experience of a place — it is clearly not an effect of

conceived space. The end result of all this suffering, loving, and feeling is that the subject

13

in question will incorporate the place into her own personal identity, presumably to the
beneﬁt of both self and place.

For Buell and Stegner, the problem with current subject-space relationships is that
subjects no longer have place attachments. Instead, people are ungrounded, wandering
through a world of what Linda McDowell calls non-places — those spaces that are
indistinguishable from each other and in which subjects are reduced to anonymous
numbers (6). Lefebvre would describe this disconnection as a conﬂict between conceived,
lived, and perceived space. His argument is that conceived space overshadows lived and
perceived space, to the extent that it damages the subject (Lefebvre 11). Space theorists
and ecocritics, then, locate the origin of damaged space similarly: an inappropriate
relation between the subject and space. Their solution to this problem is different, though.
Space theorists tend to look to a new space of some sort that will allow for a different
relationship between the subject and space, while ecocritics are apt to argue that subjects
need to return to the co-dependent relationship with space that existed when more people
made their living from working the land. My dissertation presents habitability as an

alternative to producing a new space or returning to a former way of relating to space.

IV. Ecofeminism & Ecological Thinking
If space theorists argue that subjects need a new space, and ecocritics advocate changing
the contemporary relationship to space, ecofeminists offer a re-conceived relationship to
space as the solution to the subject-space crisis. “Ecofeminism” (used loosely) refers to a

variety of different strains and movements that center around the question of the

14

gendering of environmental destruction.5 Ecofeminism contends that it is not possible to
understand and cope with environmental damage without accounting for the gendered
nature of this destruction and, furthermore, that feminism should take into account the
impact of environmental degradation on women. Mary Mellor explains:
Ecofeminism brings together the analysis of the ecological consequences
of human ‘progress’ from the green movement, and the feminist critique
of women’s disproportionate responsibility for the costs and consequences
of human embodiment, to show how relations of inequality within the
human community are reﬂected in destructive relations between humanity
and the nonhuman natural world. (viii)
The relationship between the body and space are central to ecofeminists. Affinity
ecofeminism argues that women are tied closely to nature through “blood, birth, and
sexuality” (Mellor 58), and that furthermore, that women are potentially empowered by

this link.6 Ecofeminists who view the relationship between women and nature as socially

 

5 The term itself emerged in the 19705 from French scholar Francious d’Eaubonne, and it was then used to
describe activist movements, a type of philosophy, and later a kind of literary criticism.

6 Too often affinity ecofeminism is considered representative of all ecofeminism, and as a result, it has
been neglected, ignored, or strategically avoided by a variety of scholars, even by those who are seemingly
doing work that is intimately related to ecofeminist concerns. Feminists, for example, have not welcomed
ecofeminist thought because of the complicated historical association of women and nature. The earth was
(is) identiﬁed as feminine, and simultaneously women were (are) identiﬁed as “closer” to the natural and
the bodily. Thus, a loop is created whereby women were denigrated for their alleged inability to move
beyond their bodies into the realm of rationality (since they are allegedly closer to nature), and in turn,
when nature was symbolically feminized, it donned the associated characteristics of availability and
passivity. (The reverse is also true - when women are characterized as “natural” they can also take on the
characteristics of property). Stacy Alaimo describes feminist reaction to think linking succinctly: “If
women’s perceived proximity to nature is responsible to nature is responsible for her oppression, then her
liberation, it would seem, is contingent on her distance from nature” (4). Thus, feminists have often
decried ecofeminism for allegedly endorsing this essentialist and dangerous link.

Yet, many of the objections made by feminists and other scholars have been responded to
admirably by ecofeminist scholars, and much, if not most, of the recent work on ecofeminism has revised
and moved away from afﬁnity ecofeminism. Alaimo’s Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as a
Feminist Space, for instance, presents a compelling and well-considered argument that shows how natural

15

constructed and not biologically determined still agree that environmental degradation
often affects women disproportionately because of the power relations and gender roles
that often dictate women’s interactions with natural space (Warren 2; Mellor 58).

Given ecofeminism’s focus on the link between the body and space, it is surprising
that when ecofeminists offer solutions to subject-space problems, they concentrate on
changing conceived space (instead of lived and perceived space). For example, Carolyn
Merchant argues that nature “died” when the philosophy of mechanism (otherwise known
as the Scientiﬁc Revolution) began to dominate thought in the mid-17’h century (192).
Within this philosophy of nature and natural space, nature was transformed from an
organic, living being to a machine, and this “mechanism could function as a subtle
sanction for the exploitation and manipulation of nature and its resources” (Merchant
102). That very exploitation and manipulation of nature, according to Merchant, went
hand-in-hand with an increased exploitation and manipulation of women too. Val
Plumwood also argues that philosophy is at the root of the question, but she contends that

the philosophy of dualisms (such as nature/culture, man/women, mind/body) “structure

 

space and feminism are not opposed by exploring how the boundaries between culture and nature are
permeable and ﬂuid. Noel Sturgeon, in Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political
Action, directly counters accusations of essentialism in ecofeminism. She shows that essentialist
connections between women and nature have been invoked at strategic historical and political moments
(11), and that an understanding of strategic essentialism is critical for both ecofeminism and feminism (10).
Furthennore, she argues that it is much more productive to understand why essentialism arises and further
to understand the potentials promised by ecofeminism, rather than dismissing ecofeminism for its alleged
essentialism (Sturgeon 18).

In other words, ecofeminism as a whole is not concerned or invested in positing an essential
“connection” between women and natural space, and in fact, many ecofeminists are dedicated to
undermining that alleged connection. Nor are most ecofeminists interested in articulating “women’s”
perspective of the natural world or arguing that women an environmentally better relationship with the
natural world that is based on care-giving and nurturing. Issues of gender are becoming more intertwined,
in fact, with questions of domination as a whole. Many ecofeminists now argue that all systems of
domination are linked, and that it is not possible to fully understand the mechanisms and processes of
domination without carefully considering these links. Sturgeon explains, “Primary among ecofeminism’s
strengths is a political theory that attempts to deploy at once a number of radical analyses of injustice and
exploitation focused on racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, imperialism, specieism, and environmental
degradation” (18). Karen Warren’s ﬁve-part ecofeminist philosophy echoes Sturgeon’s position by
focusing on the links between various forms of domination — not just women and nature (43).

16

otherwise different categories of oppression” (3). Plumwood’s argument is clearly not
identical to Merchant’s, but both assert that changing the subject’s conceptions of space
can effectively change the way the subject lives and acts within and toward space.

Lorraine Code’s model of “ecological thinking” offers a potentially more ethical
way of thinking about the subject’s relations to space. Whereas place attachment
describes a very particular, individual relationship with space, ecological thinking offers
a general theory of how the subject can relate to space. She explains that ecological
thinking does not simply mean thinking about ecology or the environment but is rather a
transformation of traditional Western epistemological practices (5). Ecological thinking
“proposes a way of engaging — if not all at once — with the implications of patterns,
places, and the interconnections of lives and events in and across the human and
nonhuman world” (Code 4). Particularity is essential for ecological thinking, whether in
the sense of a particular geographical location or a particular person or a particular
animal. Whereas Western scientiﬁc epistemology often tries to eliminate experiential
evidence in favor of general, replicable data, ecological thinking combines the subjective,
particular modes of knowing in conjunction with quantiﬁable evidence. Signiﬁcantly,
ecological thinking underscores the importance of location as “constitutive” of
knowledge and subjectivity (19).

Place and space matter to this kind of knowing, and they matter in a way that is
not dependent on the kind of place in question; ecological thinking is just as applicable to
(sub)urban environments as natural ones, domestic spaces as natural ones. Furthermore,
being an ecological thinker does not require a stasis or stability but instead acknowledges

that situation and context affects what and how one knows. At the same time, it demands

l7

a commitment to responsible knowledge and interaction with space. An ecologically
drinking subject is “self-critically cognizant of being part of and speciﬁcally located
within a social physical world that constrains and enables human practices, where
knowing and acting always generate consequences” (Code 5). As with habitability,
ecological thinking is not necessarily ethical or unethical. Code acknowledges that
ecosystems are concurrently “as cruel as they are kind” and that “ecological thinking is as
available for feeding self-serving romantic fantasies as for inspiring socially responsible
transformations” (16). In reaction to this acknowledge she suggests the need for “vigilant
monitoring,” especially self-monitoring. If ecological thinking lives up to its potential, it
is “about imagining, crafting, articulating, endeavoring to enact principles of ideal
cohabitation” (24). At its best, habitability is a result of character’s self aware
commitment to ecological thinking. But even when characters are dedicated to thinking
ecologically, rarely do their actual attempts to create habitability conform exactly to this
model.

In terms more familiar to my work, ecological thinking involves a relationship
between the subject and space that balances the spatial triad. As I understand it,
ecological thinking is a synthesis of conceived, lived, and perceived space. It is a kind of
conceived space because it is a careﬁrlly thought out space dependent at least partially on
mental and intellectual contemplations of space, but particular, concrete bodily
relationships dictate these mental maps of space. Lived space, if considered in terms of
the imagination and even sacred uses of space, implicitly is associated with ecological
thinking because in order to think ecologically, one has to live and imagine space, or least

seriously consider how space is lived and imagined.

l8

Literarily Experiencing Space
Space theory, particularly Lefebvre, and ecocriticism address the question of literature’s
relation to space most explicitly. Both are suspicious of literature and the relation it has
to space, and therefore my approach to literature as constitutive of a personal experience
of space represents a marked departure from these theories.

The ecocritical view of literature cannot be understood without ﬁrst understanding
the premises and assumptions behind the movement. The first assumption is that
literature and space are two completely different, if not fundamentally incompatible,
entities. Cheryll Glotfelty’s description of the ﬁeld in her introduction to The
Ecocriticism Reader7 says, “Ecocriticism takes as its subject the interconnections
between nature and culture, speciﬁcally the cultural artifacts of language and literature.
As a critical stance, it has one foot in literature and the other on land; as a theoretical
discourse, it negotiates between the human and nonhuman” (xix). The image of a ﬁgure
straddling the gap between literature and “the land” suggests that these two things are
inherently divided, as does the repetition of familiar binaries of nature/culture and
human/nonhuman. The precept that ecocritics are trying to bridge this gap further
emphasizes that there is a division between the two, and furthermore, that literature and
space may work oppositionally. When ecocritics talk about the relationship between
literature and space, it is almost always in terms of literature’s relationship to “real”
space, as opposed to imagined or textual space.

Ecocriticism’s second premise is that literature, and literary criticism, should help

solve the current spatial crisis, whether we describe that crisis in terms of environmental

 

7 Glotfelty’s introduction is widely acknowledged as providing one of the ﬁrst cohesive introductions to the
then-emerging ﬁeld of ecocriticism.

l9

degradation or the subject’s detachment from place. Again, I turn to Glotfelty.
Following the assertion that we have “reached the age of environmental limits,” Glotfelty
explains:
Many of us in colleges and universities worldwide ﬁnd ourselves in a
dilemma. Our temperaments and talents have deposited us in literature
departments, but, as environmental problems compound, work as usual
seems unconscionably frivolous... How then can we contribute to
environmental restoration, not just in our spare time, but from within our
capacity as professors of literature? (xxi)
Underlying this description of literary criticism is the premise that literature should also
preserve and protect (natural) space. In practice, this has frequently meant that ecocritics
critique literary works based on their division from real space or their troubling
ecological ethics.

Just as ecocritics privilege “real” space, they also emphasize the “real” readers of
literature. Ecocritics tend to view literature’s purpose regarding space in the following
ways: 1) As a re-presentation of the tangible world, 2) As the creation of a vicarious
experience of space, 3) As a model for how the subject should relate to space, and 4) As
inﬂuencing the subject’s relation to space via rhetorical devices. In each case, the
reaction of the reader is paramount. In the ﬁrst and second case, space is portrayed in a
way that allows the reader to have an accurate or vivid experience of space. In the third
model, the reader learns how to relate properly to space by reading about exemplary
subject-space relationships. (This closely links to Buell and Stegner’s ideas of the use-

value of place attachment in literature.) In the ﬁnal model, literature persuades the reader

20

to change the way he or she relates to space. The clearest example of this is Rachel
Carson’s Silent Spring. Released ﬁrst in serial form in the New Yorker and then as a
book through Houghton-Mifﬂin, Silent Spring topped the New York Times bestseller list
by November in 1962. Silent Spring mapped the effects of the (mis)use of pesticides and
herbicides, arguing that the environment was being damaged, and that furthermore, these
chemicals were infecting humans as well. Carson’s book persuaded readers that
chemical abuse was a problem and provoked a ﬂurry of responses from citizens,
government ofﬁcials, and chemical companies. Carson is now credited with prompting
the ban of DDT, the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency, and even with
writing one of the most important books in the twentieth century (Murphy 183). Again,
the focus here is on the effects literature has on the readers and subsequently on the ways
that readers relate to space.

Lefebvre and ecocritics converge around the assumption that literature can be
dangerously abstract and that therefore it can be damaging to lived space (or what
ecocritics call “the world”). Lefebvre argues that literature resides within conceived
space and therefore plays a part in dominating lived and perceived space. On one level,
Lefebvre’s assertion makes sense because reading and writing generally fall into the
realm of thinking and conceiving, and therefore would be part of conceived space.
Lefebvre (often) equates verbal signs with abstraction, and argues that capitalist culture’s
overemphasis on the “written text” results in “awesome reductionistic force vis-a-vis
‘lived’ experience” (52). He makes an exception to this objection for literature that

simply “describe[s]” claiming that this kind of text resides within lived space (39).

21

Within the paradigm of ecocriticism, Lefebvre would approve only of strictly
representional literature.

Ecocriticism establishes a precedent for studying issues of space in literature and
suggests that literature has an important role in that study. Furthermore, ecocritics have
provided a much-needed analysis of how literature can affect actions and attitudes outside
of the text. But, what both ecocritics and Lefebvre overlook is that textuality does not
have to be interpreted as dichotomous to space. My work suggests that space and
textuality are not so distant from one another, and that, in fact, the subject brings the two
together by using literature to transform space. Part of the problem with limiting
literature to discussions of non-textual space and readers is that it forecloses the
examination of the role imagination plays in negotiating and transforming space. It
cleans up the messiness of literature, at the expense of wiping away potentially
productive complexities.

I deﬁne literature broadly to include the actual written text itself, its reader, as
well as the acts of imagining, writing, and reading that take place within the text. When I
talk about the transformation of space through literature, I almost always focus on the
way literature works for characters within the text. That is, characters in the novels I
examine overtly use reading and writing to transform their own spaces, and in turn,
produce new spaces through this writing. Occasionally, I also address the readers of
novels and their sense of “habitability” when reading. My focus on characters’s creation
of habitability is not meant to suggest that subjects outside the text should use these
characters as “models” for how to create habitability. Rather, the relationship between

subjects, space, and literature within these novels addresses some of the gaps within

22

ecocriticism and space theory, such as the creation of a practical, but imperfect,

habitability and the role of the literature as a transformative agent.

Texts
I structure my chapters according to theoretical concerns, which accounts for the
tendency for each chapter to traverse time and space. All four chapters address a
different spatial crisis, and in the process, tease out different aspects of habitability. I
chose primary texts based on how their characters use the literary to interact with space.
My objective is to allow these texts to take part in a transhistorical conversation that
illuminates the central concerns of my project.

For example, Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home — Who’ll Follow? and Forest Life
are the foundation for my argument, not because they mark the chronological beginning
of the texts I examine, but because they lay the groundwork for my argument that writing
can be used to transform space so that it is habitable. I pair Kirkland with Wallace
Stegner because Lyman Ward, of Stegner’s Angle of Repose, uses a process of creating
habitability that is very similar to Kirkland’s, but the habitability he creates produces a
very different kind of space. This chapter thereby yields two interrelated claims: that
characters can use writing to negotiate damaged space and that habitability is not utopian.

Mary Clavers, the narrator of Kirkland’s A New Home and Forest Life, migrates
ﬁ'om New York to Michigan in the 18303 and faces a space that she ﬁnds un-habitable in
virtually every way. (Her view of what is un-habitable is highly subjective — she objects
to Michigan space and inhabitants because she views them as unsettled, wild, and

undomesticated. Clavers, in other words, views Michigan as a space that should be

23

colonized.) One of the ways she negotiates this un-habitability is to write about her
experiences, and in the process of recasting her life in Michigan, she transforms her own
conceived space to the extent that she eventually ﬁnds her lived and perceived space
habitable. The result of Clavers’ habitability is an appropriated space where the
boundaries between the natural and domestic, and the masculine and feminine break
down and become ﬂuid. Her spatial habitability anticipates the models proposed by
twentieth-century writers Marilynne Robinson and Toni Morrison.

Stegner’s Lyman Ward is a wheelchair-bound historian who, like Clavers, ﬁnds
his space un-habitable. Also like Clavers, he negotiates this un-habitability by writing.
But instead of focusing on his own experiences, he rewrites the life of his grandparents,
Susan and Oliver Ward, who settled in the West in the nineteenth century. His interest is
speciﬁcally in his grandmother, Susan Ward, and the reader gets to know her through the
inclusion of her letters and Lyman’s interpretation and retelling of the events of her life.
This ﬁarned narrative is not used to transgress the boundaries between natural and
domestic space, nor is it meant to reconﬁgure gender roles. Instead, Lyman uses a
pioneer woman’s narrative to reconﬁrm his own assumptions about pioneering space, as
well as his own gender assumptions and desires. Through the process of rewriting their
lives, Lyman produces a habitable space for himself, but the kind of space he ﬁnds
habitable differs greatly from Clavers. Lyman creates dominated space and affirms the
u'aditional gendering of space and spatialization of gender. Rather than resisting
gendered spatial regulations through writing, as Clavers does, Lyman uses writing to

reinforce and bolster these regulations.

24

The second chapter deals more explicitly with the crisis of gendered space that
emerges implicitly in Kirkland’s and Stegner’s work. Sarah Ome Jewett’s Deephaven,
Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, and Toni Morrison’s Paradise use the common
ﬁgure of the ship and water to sabotage the very deﬁnitions of the domestic, and with
that, the deﬁnitions of gender and sexuality as well. The characters in each of these texts
begin their creation of habitability by resisting spatial regulations and regulators. In
Deephaven, the regulators and regulations are more implicit than explicit, and the
deﬁance is subtler as well, whereas in Housekeeping, the domestic regulators are clearly
embodied by the characters of Lucille, the interfering neighbors, and the sheriff. These
texts converge around their use of the trope of water and ships as spaces that defy
domestic and gender regulations. Like Robinson’s text, Morrison’s spatial regulators are
clear — the Morgan twins, and Reverend Pulliam, for example. These regulators have
far more power and jurisdiction than those in Deephaven or Housekeeping, however, and
they use this power to attempt to destroy the “monstrous” feminine and domestic space of
the Convent.

All three of these novels initially seem to embrace the relationship between
women, domesticity, and homemaking. Women dominate the texts, and the everyday
mundane life of “keeping house” accounts for most of the action. Read together,
however, these three texts create an ungrounded domesticity that undermines the link
between gender and home space. Furthermore, through the failure of the newly created
habitable spaces, these novels argue that habitability cannot be based on a particular
space or kind of space but must instead emerge from a particular subject-space

relationship.

25

If the ﬁrst two chapters focus primarily on the subject’s role in creating
habitability, the third and fourth chapters accentuate the role of space in the process of
creating habitability. Unscrupulous miners and gold-seekers damage space with their
ecological misdeeds in Mary Austin’s Lost Borders, and to counteract this damage,
Austin’s unnamed narrator shifts the emphasis from the subject to space. Lost Borders
takes the notion of focusing more on space a step further and makes space into character
— a powerful, evocative “desert woman.” Austin is often read as endorsing an ideal
ecological ethic, but her texts do not reﬂect balance and harmony. Instead, they expose
the competitive nature of habitability and the conﬂicts involved in the act of producing
habitability. The subject’s need for habitability sometimes contradicts the needs of space.
Sometimes subjects have to compete with each other for habitability, and one subject’s
habitability forecloses the possibility of another’s habitability. Terry Tempest Williams
uses a similar trope to save space, too, but she approaches the subject-space connection as
cooperative, rather than competitive. Protecting space becomes synonymous with
protecting the subject. Austin and Williams’s perspectives merge in Gretel Ehrlich’s
Islands, the Universe, Home when she ties together the body and space while still
acknowledging the competitive aspects of the subject-space relationship.

The ﬁnal chapter turns to contemporary haunted house narratives because these
texts pull together many of the issues addressed in the ﬁrst three chapters such as
gendered space, the boundary between natural and domestic space, and competing
habitabilities. Haunted houses resist the subject’s attempts to create habitability, and
when subjects do manage to make these houses into homes, they reproduce and reinforce

the violence implicit within the framework of the haunted house. Though habitability is

26

impossible in The Amityville Horror, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, and Anne
River Siddons’s The House Next Door, together these texts expose many of the dominant
cultural assumptions about the nature of domestic space. In Stephen King’s The Diary of
Ellen Rimbauer and Rose Red, as well as Robert Marasco’s Burnt Oﬂerings, habitability
is achieved through a mystical merging between the subject and house. This individual
habitability, however, undermines communal habitability. This chapter explores the
darker side of habitability and some of the destructiveness that can result from creating a

home.

27

CHAPTER ONE

Writing Home: Habitability in Caroline Kirkland and Wallace Stegner

Separated by time, geography, gender, and history, Mary Clavers and Lyman Ward could
hardly seem more different. Clavers is the narrator of Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home
— Who ’11 Follow? (hereafter A New Home) and Forest Life. She writes about her
experiences as a “woman pioneer” in the West of Michigan in the 18303. In contrast,
Lyman, the narrator of Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, lives in California and writes
in the late 19703. He, too, writes about the experience of pioneering when he creates a
novel based on his grandmother’s reminiscences about her life in Idaho, Mexico,
Colorado, and California in the late nineteenth century. The commonality of pioneering,
however, is less important than the way these two disparate ﬁgures foreground writing as
a method of home—making.8 Each text begins with characters trapped in an un-habitable
situation because their conceptions of space clash with their actual living space. Clavers
and Lyman, despite their differences, approach this problem similarly by writing a new
space.

Exploring texts and characters that are so unalike offers the opportunity to
demonstrate how writing can be used to solve a spatial crisis and create habitability in
diverse situations. Because the habitable spaces produced are so distinct, even
contradictory, it is also possible to show the varied nature of habitability. Habitable
spaces are those that meet the psychological, emotional, and spiritual needs of subjects.

But, as an analysis of Kirkland and Stegner show, habitability is far from utopian. While

 

8 For analyses of the pioneering aspects of Kirkland’s work, see Janet Floyd, Annette Kolodny, and Brigitte
Georgi-Findlay. For Stegner, see Janet Occhino and Rachel Borup.

28

it can be created through appropriation and an ethical subject-space relationship, it can be
produced just as well through domination and an ethically questionable subject-space

relation.

Mary Clavers’s New Home

A New Home is Kirkland’s narrative of settling and living in the West, in a place now
known as Pinckney, Michigan. Told from the perspective of Mary Clavers, this
collection of tales and sketches is full of sage advice for those out East who might be
considering moving westward. It was wildly popular when it was written, so much so
that even the Michiganders Kirkland describes read the text, much to Kirkland’s chagrin.
Not surprisingly, her neighbors did not enjoy being the victims of Kirkland’s much
admired satire and wit, and many critics and biographers have pointed out that Kirkland’s
life in Michigan after she published her book was the “reverse of agreeable.”9 Just three
years after the publication of A New Home, Kirkland published a two-volume
“continuation,” Forest Life. The latter sold relatively well when it was published
(Kolodny, Land Before Her 154), but critics have largely ignored it since then.

A New Home and Forest Life introduce the reader to a self-proclaimed pioneer
woman in the awkward position of a “homemaker in transit” (Floyd, Writing 5). This
kind of homemaker must navigate between fond memories of former Eastern homes and

the (often harsh realities) of new Western homes. Clavers makes it clear that the

 

9 Kirkland believed that if she changed the name of Pinckney to Montacute and altered the names of major
characters, no one would recognize the sources of her inspiration. She also thought it was unlikely that the
residents of Pinckney would buy her book. Her assumptions were incorrect, and even when her neighbors
did not read the book itself, they heard about it. This was often even worse (Osborne 45). The publication
of A New Home offended Kirkland’s neighbors to the point that their ire inﬂuenced the Kirklands’s
decision to leave Michigan (Osborne 51). See also Kolodny’s The Land Before Her and Sandra Zagarell’s
introduction to A New Home.

29

restricted material conditions of the West make it nearly impossible to establish an
acceptable domestic environment, something that must have been especially
disappointing given the cultural emphasis on the proper creation of the ideal home (Cott
63). She laments, “Comforts do not seem to abound in proportion to landed increase, but
often on the contrary, are really diminished for the sake of it: and the habit of selling out
so ﬁequently makes that home-feeling, which is so large an ingredient in happiness
elsewhere, almost a nonentity in Michigan” (ANH 25).

For Clavers, habitability depends upon the presence of home-feeling, and the
stakes of this term are at the center of much of the Kirkland scholarship. While Clavers’s
desire for the emotional comfort of home is innocent enough on the surface, critics are
quick to point out that this impulse has larger, and darker, implications. Annette Kolodny
interprets Kirkland’s narrative as providing an alternative to masculine pioneer narratives
of settlement, but scholars such as Lori Merish, Brigitte Georgi-Findlay, Janet Floyd
(Writing the Pioneer Woman), Laura Smith, and Edward Watts point out the various
ways that Kirkland’s text(s) enact domestication in the name of “civilizing” the space and
inhabitants of Michigan. The consensus is that Kirkland’s classist assumptions and
desire for Michigan to conform to the standards of Eastern domesticity overpower any
innocence her longing for home-feeling might contain. But, a close reading of the term
“home” in A New Home and Forest Life reveals a shifting deﬁnition of home and
domesticity that challenges these interpretations. Literary quotes, embedded narratives,
and embedded narrators counter Clavers’s deﬁnition of home. Habitability emerges

through these alternative deﬁnitions of home.

30

The parallels between Kirkland and Clavers lead most scholars to read A New
Home and Forest Life as autobiographical. Kirkland moved to Michigan in 1835 to teach
at the Detroit Female Seminary, and in 1836, she and her family went to Pinckney,
Michigan. Because Clavers’s narrative traces the same path, for most critics, the
distinction between Caroline Kirkland and Mary Clavers collapses. I, however, tend to
agree with Caroline Gebhard’s divergent interpretation of the relationship between
Kirkland and Clavers. Gebhard argues that Clavers is a “self consciously constructed
literary persona” and that it is more accurate to classify A New Home as ﬁction rather
than autobiography (164). Gebhard contends that Kirkland uses Clavers to help cope
with the trauma Kirkland experienced in the forests of Michigan (163). The trauma
Gebhard refers to is the death of two of Kirkland’s children — Sara(h),lo who fell out of a
window in Detroit, and Charles, who was born in Pinckney and died when he was only a
few months old (Gebhard 161). Clavers barely mentions her children at all. In fact, the
reader does not even know that she has children until almost halfway through the text.
Never is it mentioned anywhere in the text that Clavers loses any of these children; the
book remains consistently light humored. From these discrepancies, Gebhard concludes
that A New Home is not meant to be an autobiography, and I agree. The more interesting
part of Gebhard’s argument, for my purposes, is that she suggests that Kirkland provides
a “new home” for herself by writing away her grief (174). That is, Kirkland uses her text
as a psychological and emotional coping mechanism.

My argument about habitability operates on the same principle, but on the level of

characters instead of the author. I claim that Clavers ﬁnds her space unsatisfactory and

 

'0 The spelling of Sara’s name is disputed. Gebhard spells it without an “It,” while Erica Kroger spells it
with one. This discrepancy is indicative of a larger uncertainty about the details of Kirkland’s life
(Gebhard I60). '

31

uses writing to modify and transform that space. It stands to reason that Kirkland may
have been negotiating not only her grief but also her dissatisfaction with Michigan space.
It is also possible, then, that Kirkland’s views of home and gender differ ﬁ'om Clavers’s
and that, furthermore, Kirkland chose to counter her narrator’s voice with other
perspectives on the site and gendering of “home.” These matters of intentionality are
speculation on my part, and so, while I ﬁnd the congruence between Kirkland’s and
Clavers’s scenes of writing intriguing, I restrict my argument to textual analysis.

Throughout A New Home and Forest Life, Clavers highlights her role as a writer,
reminding her reader at every turn that the events included are a work of literature. In her
ﬁrst chapter alone, she addresses her reader directly or explains her authorial choices no
fewer than nine times. In A New Home, Clavers’s objective for emphasizing her authorial
status seems to be an attempt to distinguish herself from other “Western” writers like
Charles Hoffman and to insist on her status as a “woman writer” (Zagarell,
“Introduction” xvii), but in Forest Life, Clavers introduces another function of writing —
the creation of a communal space between reader and writer. She explains, “People write
because they cannot help it The heart longs for sympathy, and when it cannot be found
close at hand, will seek it the world over” (FL 1: 9-10). Writing functions as a method of
connecting different spaces, “of seeking the world over” because it forms a link of shared
experience (in this case of Michigan space) between the writer and reader. As much as a
shared community is something the lonely Clavers sought, it is not the most signiﬁcant
way writing creates habitability in these texts.

Before embarking on an exploration of how writing produces habitability, it is

helpful to establish Clavers’s dominant view of home and her objection to homes in

32

Michigan. Clavers’s deﬁnition of home is contingent upon the enforcement of domestic
regulations and relies on spatialized gender roles.ll Her views of home emerge when she
explains why women are the “grumblers in Michigan” (ANH 126).
Woman’s little world is overclouded for the lack of the old familiar means
and appliances. The husband goes to his work with the same axe and hoe
which ﬁtted his hand in his old woods and ﬁelds, he tills the same soil, or
perhaps a far richer and more hopeful one — he gazes on the same book of
nature which he has read from his infancy, and sees only a fresher and
more glowing page, and he returns to his home with the sun, strong in
heart and full of self-gratulation on the favourable change in his lot. But
he ﬁnds his homebird drooping and disconsolate. She has been looking in
vain for the reﬂection of any of the cherished features of her own dear
ﬁreside. She has found a thousand deﬁciencies which her rougher mate
can scarce be taught to feel as evils. (146-7)
The presence or absence of home-feeling is clearly gendered. While the natural space of
Michigan “ﬁts” men, as their axes and hoes ﬁt them, there is no such affinity between
women and the domestic space of Michigan. For men, the new space of Michigan offers
nothing but hope and comfort, which is starkly contrasted with women who long for what

is familiar (and by implication, what is Eastern). Clavers’s reliance on both gendered

 

n Gender relates to space in two primary ways - gendered space and spatialized gender roles. By
“gendered space,” I mean the way that certain spaces are considered masculine or feminine. Henry
Lefebvre adheres to Western notions of gendered space and maintains that feminine space centers around
the “household” (148). Similarly, Doreen Massey notes that the local is coded as feminine and,
accordingly, is “deprioritized and denigrated” (10). Conversely, masculine spaces include those outside the
home, such as the workplace. Though in everyday life, these spaces are and were inhabited regularly by
men and women, these spaces are still associated with gendered stereotypes. Spatialized gender roles, on
the other hand, refer to the way space dictates gender roles. For example, when women are regarded as
domestic beings, their successful performance of gender roles often are determined by how well they
occupy and regulate the domestic sphere (i.e. housekeeping and decorating the home).

33

space and spatialized gendered roles exhibits itself through her assumption that women
are necessarily part of the “little world” by the ﬁreside, while men are part of the outside
world of ﬁelds, soil, and sun. Men are at home in natural space, and women are at home
in domestic space.12 The problem is that domestic space in Michigan is woefully
inadequate. As Watts points out, this deﬁciency is not due to the unfamiliarity of the
space, or the fact that it is disconnected from the loved ones back East (170, 174); rather,
Michigan space is unsatisfactory because it lacks the modern conveniences of an orderly
household — the “time honoured cupboard” is merely “a few oak boards lying on pegs”
and the oven has been replaced by a “tin reﬂector” (146). The spatial crisis in Michigan,
for Clavers, is speciﬁcally a feminine one — it is feminine space that is imperfect. The
origin of the crisis is the mismatch between conceived space and lived and perceived
space.

What I have just shown coincides with the dominant interpretations of Kirkland’s
work. Clavers’s ideal solution for the feminine spatial crisis is that those living in the
West will transform space so that it more closely resembles that in the East. Part of
Clavers’s (and probably Kirkland’s) purpose in writing A New Home and, arguably,
Forest Life is to convince readers that the current spatial and cultural arrangements in
Michigan were inadequate and should be remedied by way of making them resemble
Eastern “civilization” (Smith 175, 177). Writing, then, could create habitability for
Clavers through its ability to persuade readers to change their views and daily habits.

But, writing functions much more subtly than that in these texts, too, because it is also

 

‘2 The gender difference is not put just in terms of space but also in terms of reﬁnement. Merish points out
that Kirkland suggests that women “naturally” want more than men do, and that this distinction
“represent[s] the struggle between men and women as a struggle to deﬁne and control the domestic
landscape” (50). David Leverenz explains the differences between men and women in Kirkland’s text
similarly (163).

34

through writing that Clavers introduces her readers to deﬁnitions of “home” that blur the
boundaries between domestic and natural space and dismantle rigid spatialized gender
roles.

The ﬁrst time that Clavers introduces the idea that the natural and domestic sphere
may not be entirely distinct and that, furthermore, feminine and masculine views of space
might not be completely different is when she includes two lengthy quoted passages in
her work. I include these two passages together so that it is clearer how they work
together to create an alternative version of home. First, in a gesture toward “fairness,”
Clavers includes a quote from Nathaniel Willis, who she calls “a brilliant writer of our
own.” From Willis: “1 think we have an instinct, dulled by civilization, which is like the
caged eaglet’s, or the antelope’s that is reared in the Arab’s tent; an instinct of nature that
scoms boundary and chain; that yearns to the ﬁee desert” (AN H 148). A page later, a
related quotation from William Hazlitt appears: “We are always at home with Nature...
Thus Nature is a sort of universal home, and every object it presents to us an old
acquaintance, with unaltered looks; for there is that constant and mutual harmony among
her works” (AN H 149). Both of these passages serve as a counterpoint to sentiments that
Clavers has expressed throughout her text. First, Willis and Hazlitt appeal to an inherent
and universal feeling in human beings, something unspeciﬁc to gender. This contradicts
Clavers’s earlier insistence that men and women experience space, particularly natural
space, differently. Furthermore, the reason these authors praise nature and natural space
is that it allows for a sense of freedom that civilization tries to infringe upon. This marks
another point of contradiction, since Clavers spends a great deal of time extolling the

virtues of civilization (and good housekeeping skills) and lamenting the lack of it in

35

Michigan.

Even more important, though, is the way these passages relocate “home” from
domestic to natural space. Home-feeling, which heretofore has been associated with
domestic niceties, collides with natural space. Hazlitt’s conﬂation of the “familiar” and
“old” with nature solidiﬁes this link. (One will remember that Clavers’s earlier‘passage
connects natural space with “new” hopefulness and domestic space with a longing for
“old” familiarity.) In relocating home to “Nature,” gender loses its spatialization, as both
home and nature are equally masculine and feminine concerns. Though Clavers says that
she is just including these passages to be fair in her assessment of Michigan life, what is
really at stake in this section is the attempt (albeit unintentional) to allow the reader to
consider an alternative location, and thus alternative deﬁnition of, home feeling.

The idea of “nature as home” is not unique, but Clavers is doing something
unusual with her move toward natural space. Ecofeminists like Lorraine Anderson and
Vera Norwood note the tendency for women’s texts about nature to center on spaces of
home, literally by studying backyards or gardens, or metaphorically by making the woods
or the sea “home” (Anderson 5; Norwood xviii). The reasoning behind claims like these
is that, historically, women did not have the same access to wilderness spaces as their
male counterparts did, so that women instead turned toward more local and close-to-
home spaces. Stacy Alaimo interprets the relationship between women and natural space
differently, arguing that women writers often appealed to nature “as a space apart from
the domestic” that can function as a “model for female insurgency” (l 6). Clavers’s
linkage of natural space and home is different from both of the above instances. Clavers

does not transfer “home” from domestic to natural space because it is something her

36

female characters are more familiar with or have better access to, nor does she suggest
that natural space offers respite from the constraints of domestic life. Rather, she
recognizes the blatant inadequacies of Michigan domestic space (at least in her eyes),
ﬁnds it unlikely that the home-feeling she so craves can be located there, and thus resorts
to a different sort of space as the site of home. Though Clavers says that “one soon
learns to think nature no step-mother” (ANH 148), I suspect that a necessary but
unwanted replacement is exactly the role natural space plays in this text. In other words,
Clavers’s linkage of home and nature is not ideological but rather a practical, strategic
attempt to produce habitability.

Clavers’s inclusion of the Willis and Hazlitt quotes lays the groundwork for
Clavers’s suggestion that characters will achieve habitability if they can accept and
embrace the connection between home and natural space. The tale of Cora and Everard
Hastings, in A New Home, develops this idea more ﬁrlly because they are simultaneously
some of the “happiest people” Clavers knows (169) and proponents of the idea that the
forest is their “home.”'3 Cora and Everard are young lovers who elope with each other
and, unbeknownst to their families, move to Michigan to “carve out for themselves a
home in the wilderness” (158). Once in Michigan, they look for the perfect spot for their
new home: “’Ere long he found a spot, so wild and mountainous and woody, as to be
considered entirely impracticable by any common-sense settlers; so that it seemed just the
very place for a forest home for a pair who set out to live on other people’s thoughts”

(161). Cora and Everard, happily oblivious to common sense, settle in to their “forest

 

‘3 Kolodny interprets the story of the Hastings as Kirkland’s search for the ideal “American Adam and
Eve.” Unlike the originary couple, the American version has to fall before being able to enter the relatively
paradisiacal life in a “frontier garden” (Land Before Her 141). To a degree, this reading seems accurate,
given that the Hastings have to undergo many trials before they are allowed to achieve habitability.

37

sanctuary,” a term which suggests a blending of domestic space (since “sanctuary” is a
term that was continually associated with domesticity in the nineteenth century (Woloch
131)) and natural space. As Clavers’s narrative double (Leverenz 161), it is particularly
signiﬁcant that Cora’s ideal home must be literally located in the midst of natural space
because it suggests that Clavers’s search for home feeling within domestic space is
misplaced.

The Hastings’s enthusiasm for their “natural” home vacillates, to be sure. Cora
initially regrets the lack of amenities in her home. A long walk in the woods quickly
consoles her though. A more serious threat to her happiness is the illness of her husband
and baby, which is intensiﬁed by her (geographical and emotional) estrangement from
her family. Moreover, Clavers clearly disapproves of the Hastings’ lack of practicality
— she bemoans their choice of volumes of poetry over Lydia Maria Child’s The Frugal
Housewife (ANH 160), and she gently mocks their affection for wild spaces. Yet, at the
end of their narrative, Clavers has to admit that even though the two had some
difﬁculties, they are happy in the “wildemess,” despite its dangers and inconveniences
(ANH I69). Clavers’s acknowledgement of their affective satisfaction is akin to
admitting that they have found habitability — they have made their space
psychologically, emotionally, and socially satisfying. And they have done so by
redeﬁning “home.”

A similar redeﬁnition of home occurs in Forest Life through the story of F lorella
Sibthorpe, Clavers’s second double. A number of factors make the Sibthorpe narrative
signiﬁcant. First, Clavers unabashedly praises the Sibthorpes, whereas she scolded the

naughty Hastings. Also, Clavers includes the Sibthorpes’s letters in her narrative, so that

38

she is not telling their story and the readers can access the Sibthorpes’s experience
without the mediating effect of Clavers. This imparts the Sibthorpe narrative with an
authority that is absent for the Hastings. Finally, the Sibthorpes redeﬁne both the space
of home and spatialized gender roles. Of all the characters investigated, Florella
Sibthorpe offers the clearest illustration of ﬁnding home-feeling. She is happy and
content in Michigan, and her “home” is a blend of domestic and natural space.
Furthermore, she and her husband adopt gender roles loosely, countering Clavers’s
insistence on rigidly spatialized gender distinctions.

From the very beginning of the Sibthorpes’s introduction, the reader is cognizant
of the fact that this couple will destabilize the spatialized gender roles that prevail in the
rest of the text. Florella enters the text when Mr. Sibthorpe gives Clavers a series of
letters explaining why he and his wife settled in Michigan. From these epistles, it is
apparent that the Sibthorpes are not the traditional pioneering couple. Mr. Sibthorpe,
though vaguely appreciative of natural space, was not reared with the same “book of
nature” as the pioneer men Clavers discusses in A New Home. Instead, he is more
concerned with domestic matters. He spends a good deal of time describing the various
mishaps that take place in their attempt to establish a home in Michigan, complaining that
it is impossible to ﬁnd acceptable domestic help or competent laborers (FL 2: 72, 85).
When he describes a visit ﬁ'om a city friends, his concerns are constructed as feminine.
He describes his “awkward consciousness of the narrowness of our present
accommodations” and admits that they are living in a “half-savage state” (FL 2: 101).
His feminization is completed by his apologizes for his “already femininely long” letter

and later for his “lady-like letter” (FL 2: 72, 125). His style of writing establishes Mr.

39

Sibthorpe as crossing the boundary between the masculine and the feminine. He
unsettles spatialized gender roles because he subverts the assumption that gender is
inextricable from the space one occupies.

Unlike her husband, Florella Sibthorpe ﬁnds home-feeling in natural space, and
she is given the freedom to be fully sentimental and unreserved about her connection to
this space. F lorella does not, and does not need to, apologize for her untraditional
behavior (unlike Cora Hastings, for example, who must atone for her “silly”
romanticism). She begins her ﬁrst letter with a profuse apology for not writing sooner,
citing her enjoying of the natural world:

But as to writing, this wild seclusion has so many charms for me, this
delicious summer weather so many seductions, that my days glide away
imperceptibly, leaving scarcely a trace of anything accomplished during
their ﬂight. . . Nothing before me but huge trees, between whose ancient
mossy trunks no ray of any but soft green light can reach the moist sward
below. . .as if we were, along in the august presence of Nature, with
nothing to limit the ﬂights of fancy, and with an unbounded leisure which
seems to promise time for everything. (FL 2: 74-5)
This lengthy passage indulges in the kind of sentimentalism that Clavers is unable, or
unwilling, to reveal earlier in the text, and it matches Clavers’s penchant for vivid
description. It diverges from Clavers’s tendency to follow picturesque descriptions with
tales of (minor) disaster — for Mrs. Sibthorpe, there is no serpent in this paradise.
Florella has both the home-feeling and habitability. Her space meets her needs,

emotionally, physically, and psychologically.

40

F lorella reveals an alternative model of habitability and home-feeling that
ultimately critiques Clavers’s view of the cultural project of domesticating Michigan
space. Clavers depends upon changing space in one way or another to create home-
feeling, but Florella presents a model of habitation that involves not changing space and
not enforcing rigid spatialized gender regulations. Though Clavers may not ﬁnd
Florella’s habitability or deﬁnition of home-feeling something that she can participate in,
by dint of her inclusion of the letters, she recognizes Florella Sibthorpe’s success at
creating a habitable Michigan space.

For all of Florella’s accomplishments, however, her model of habitability is far
from utopian, especially from an ecological standpoint. Her home-feeling relies on the
pastoral, a mode of writing (and conceiving of) space that is ecologically suspect. Leo
Marx deﬁnes the pastoral as a “variation upon the contrast between two worlds, one
identiﬁed with rural peace and simplicity, the other with urban power and sophistication”
(19). He explains that the American pastoral idealizes the “middle state” between natural
and urban space (Marx 88). Carolyn Merchant illuminates the problem with the pastoral
notion of natural space, explaining:

The pastoral mode, although it viewed nature as benevolent, was a model
created as an antidote to the pressures of urbanization and mechanization.
It represented a fulﬁllment of human needs for nurture, but by conceiving
of nature as passive, it nevertheless allowed for the possibility of its use
and manipulation. Unlike the dialectical image of nature as the active
unity of opposites in tension, the Arcadian image rendered nature passive

and manageable. (9)

41

Merchant argues that the pastoral is a method of “conceiving” of space in a particular
way. The pastoral assumes that natural space is open to manipulation, without concern
for nonhuman nature. Though F lorella regards natural space affectionately, she, like
Clavers, domesticates it in order to make it manageable. Her attitude toward the
appropriate relationship between the subject and space is thus not that different from
Clavers’s, despite their divergences in terms of spatial boundaries and spatialized gender.
Writing Michigan as pastoral makes her space habitable.

At this point, we have explored how Clavers uses writing to explore alternative
deﬁnitions of home (and habitability) through her use of literary quotes and literary
doubles. She documents how other characters can gain habitability by adopting ﬂexible
spatial practices and ﬂuid deﬁnitions of home. Clavers herself also goes through a
similar shift, adapting to the altered domestic space of Michigan and accepting, even
praising, some of its limitations. Part of the changes between Clavers’s persona in A New
Home and Forest Life can be accounted for by noting that Kirkland was lambasted for her
depictions of her neighbors and thus softened her tone, as well as the fact that Clavers
becomes a self-proclaimed insider rather than a “foreign tourist” (FL 1:4). As an insider,
Clavers begins writing regionalism rather than local color.‘4

The difference between writing local color and writing regionalism is not purely
academic because it is indicative of an attitudinal transformation that allows Clavers to
attain a provisional habitability. Judith F etterley and Marjorie Pryse note that regionalist
works, like those of local color narratives, are almost always told from the perspective of

an outsider. The difference is that regionalist narrators are simultaneously insiders and

 

'4 Osborne notes the regionalist character of Forest Life (56), but he does not carry this analysis much
further. He does not, for example, compare regionalism to local color, nor does he examine the theoretical
signiﬁcance of this generic shift.

42

this “confer[s] value on and establish[es] empathy with the regionalist subject by writing
as if looking from the inside out rather than the outside in” (107). Regionalist writers, in
other words, are outsiders who are also insiders, who listen with an empathetic car. They
do not make scathing (albeit amusing) observations about their subjects.ls

Analogous situations in A New Home and Forest Life illustrate the difference
between local color and regionalism, especially insofar as regionalism leads to an
increased likelihood of habitability. In A New Home, on their way to their own Michigan
cabin, the Claverses stop for the night at the Ketchums (one of their neighbors). Clavers
explains, “I do not remember experiencing, at any time in my life, a sense of more
complete uncomfortableness than was my lot.” At the root of her unease is that space is
not partitioned appropriately. Natural space, for example, invades domestic space. The
beds looks as if they “by no very violent freak of nature, have grown into their present
form” since they are still covered partially by bark. The windows are uncovered, and the
outside air is free to parade into the interior of the cabin. Even the roof provides an
incomplete barrier, since Clavers can see the twinkling stars above her head. These
spatial incursions, Clavers reasons, are apt to bring “death on its dewy wings.”
Claustrophobia also pervades the scene — there are three beds, two chests, a spinning
wheel, and a host of other sleepers crammed into the very small space of the cabin. The
sensation of suffocation is intensiﬁed when a quilt is hung to enclose a sleeping room for

Clavers, and once again, death is posited as a likely effect (“it is wonderful that so few

 

'5 F etterley and Pryse suggest that there is something inherent within the form of the sketch that allows the
writer to be “free to say” things that she could not within a more traditional form, like a novel or short
story. The sketch, they reason, is ﬁ'eer from “public scrutiny,” and furthermore does not necessitate a plot
that is prescribed by gender (170, 172). While I do not disagree with their argument, it is important to note
that the sketch, as a genre, has been gendered (even by Fetterley and Pryse) and thus does not necessarily
escape the conﬁnes of gender expectations. Furthermore, local color depends on the form of the sketch just
as much as regionalism does, and thus this genre should not be viewed as a panacea.

43

houses are burnt down in this country”) (AN H 37). A variety of spaces collide in this
scene. Domestic and natural space merge, public and private space become one and the
same, and even personal, bodily space is violated. Clavers’s description suggests that
space should be neatly and cleanly divided, so that natural space remains outside of the
house, the living space is distinct from sleeping space, and individual space is free from
the invasion of other “sleepers.” In order for Clavers to attain any sort of home-feeling,
these sorts of unruly domestic spaces must be controlled, at least on the page, if not in
practice.

When the Clavers esare conﬁ'onted with a similar scene in Forest Life, Clavers
reacts very differently. The Claverses are in their buggy when a thunderstorm hits, and
they are forced to take refuge in the Gastons’s nearby cabin. The space of this cabin is
also described carefully, but to different ends. Gone is the dismay that domestic
guidelines are not being adhered to; Clavers almost admires the way the same object and
space is used for multiple purposes. She explains, with pride, that the same poles in front
of the ﬁre are used to dry everything ﬁom wet clothes to pumpkins for pie to apples for
decoration (FL 1: 89). When another party arrives (the Margolds), also seeking shelter,
we see the true shift that Clavers has undergone. When Miss Margold asks, “Why, papa,
is this a house?” Clavers disapproves of Miss Margold’s rudeness and accounts for the
domestic scene by explaining that the cabin belongs to a rather impoverished family (FL
I: 96).

The sleeping situation is even more crowded than the one experienced in A New
Home, but the tone of Clavers’s description has changed remarkably. She explains,

rather than judges, the situation, noting that there are a large number of people with only

two beds and that the conversation about the situation contained “not a few remarks
calculated rather to wound the feelings of our civil entertainers.” When they reach the
conclusion that the two beds should be pushed together for the women and the children,
and that the men can sleep in chairs and on the ﬂoor, Clavers is perfectly content with the
arrangement of space.

Her description reveals that her own sense of the domestic space of Michigan has
changed dramatically. She is no longer concerned that the boundaries of spatial propriety
are breached. Not surprisingly, Miss Margold is not so tolerant, but when she complains,
Clavers allows the Gastons a voice to defend themselves. In A New Home, the
inhabitants of Michigan are not given a chance to speak, let alone stand up for
themselves. That Mr. Gaston is given the opportunity within Clavers’s text to tell Miss
Margold exactly what he thinks shows that Clavers’s mode of writing has shifted —— she
is no longer invested in critiquing Michigan and trying to make it ﬁt into her own
conceptions of space; she is now interested in letting Michigan, and its inhabitants, speak
for themselves.

In A New Home and Forest Life, Mary Clavers self-consciously uses writing to
explore various deﬁnitions of home, and through this investigation realizes that
habitability and home-feeling emerge from adapting to, rather than changing, new spatial
conditions. Habitability is produced by an acceptance of the interrelated nature of
domestic and natural space, as well as the accompanying ﬂexible spatialized gender roles.
Cora, F lorella, and eventually Clavers reconcile conceived space with lived and
perceived space, and by doing so, they are able to settle in Michigan. Their creation of

habitability is not without fault, nor is it entirely sustainable. It is makeshift and

45

provisional. But, on the spectrum of Lefebvre’s domination or appropriation, it moves
habitability toward a subject-space relationship based on appropriation. Wallace
Stegner’s character Lyman’s model of habitability, also produced through writing, does

the opposite —-— it generates habitability by dominating of space.

Lyman Ward’s Gendered Habitability
Stegner’s Angle of Repose won a Pulitzer Prize in 1971, but since then it has received
relatively little critical attention. The novel is told from the perspective of Lyman Ward,
a ﬁrst-person frame narrator. Lyman is writing a novel about his grandparents’s lives and
experiences of settling in the West, and most of Angle of Repose takes place in the past.
Lyman bases his novel on the pictures, letters, and written reminiscences of his
grandmother, Susan Ward. In their own ways, Lyman’s grandparents are both writers
too. Susan is primarily an illustrator, but she also writes local color pieces about life in
the West for Eastern magazines. Oliver Ward is an engineer and spends a great deal of
time making maps. All three writers in this novel use their craft to address spatial
inadequacies. They use writing to try to control unnrly lived and perceived and
reestablish the dominance of conceived space. The habitable space that emerges from
this text is, not surprisingly, ethically problematic.

As with Kirkland’s A New Home and Forest Life, the context surrounding
Stegner’s novel mirrors the writing situation within the novel. In what now is a well-
known incident of “borrowing,” Stegner used Mary Hallock F oote’s letters and personal
papers as a basis for the creation of his character, Susan. Likewise, Lyman uses Susan’s

papers to recreate her life. In both instances, the process of (re)writing more closely

46

resembles overwriting. The end products — Angle of Repose and Lyman’s novel —
reveal more about Stegner and Lyman than they do about Foote or Susan. The reading
and scholarly public scrutinized the former particularly harshly.

Critics identify two key problems with Stegner’s use of F oote: he fails to cite his
source (except for a brief note at the beginning of the text), and he makes signiﬁcant
changes without indicating what is fact and what is ﬁction. Stegner quotes directly from
Foote’s letters (without letting the reader know that he is quoting), and much of the
direction and geography of his novel are taken directly from her work. Consequently,
critics accused Stegner of everything from outright plagiarism (Walsh) to at least
unethical conduct. While the ﬁrst critique arises from Stegner sticking too closely to
Foote’s letters and life, the second condemns him for diverging from Foote’s biography.
Stegner changes the ending of F oote/W ard’s life by suggesting that her adulterous
relationship with her husband’s assistant leads to her daughter’s early death. F oote’s
youngest daughter did die prematurely, but it was at seventeen from appendicitis.
Moreover, there is little evidence to support the claim that she had an affair. As Linda
Karel] points out, the average reader (if she even knows that Mary Hallock F cote is the
basis for the character Susan Ward) believes that if the ﬁrst part of the novel is based on

Foote then the second part is too (81).'6

 

'6 To understand the claim that Foote was misrepresented, it is necessary to know the circumstances under
which Stegner received and used the Foote materials. Originally, Stegner accessed the F oote materials
through his student, George McMurray. McMurray had gotten Foote’s personal papers and letters ﬁom her
family, and he planned to do his doctoral dissertation on Foote’s life. The family agreed to give McMurray
Foote’s papers as long as he would provide them with transcripts of his ﬁnal product (Benson 352).
McMurray told Stegler about his lucky ﬁnd, and when it became apparent that McMurray was not going to
complete his dissertation, Stegner, with permission from the family, took the papers and letters. Janet, one
of two sisters in possession of the materials (and Foote’s granddaughter), told Stegner that he could use the
papers in any way he wished. Janet’s sister, Evelyn, however, thought that Stegner was going to write an
Irving Stone-like noveVbiography, where the conversations and interior monologues are ﬁctionalized, but

47

The bigger problem with Stegner’s use of Foote echoes the problem with Lyman’s
use of Susan —— they both exhibit a disturbing tendency to dismiss the feminine as
insigniﬁcant and inferior. Karell articulates the question that seems to underlie most of
the concerns regarding gender and Stegner: “Would Stegner have felt as entitled to
borrow the work of a male writer, albeit an unknown one?” (79). It is impossible to
answer this question with any certainty, but it is clear that Stegner did not respect Foote’s
work. He claims that she was not signiﬁcant enough to merit a biography, for example
(Hepworth 69). As we will later see, Lyman makes similar claims about Susan. While it
is, unfortunately, outside the scope of this chapter to trace the changes Stegner made to
Foote’s narrative, it is nevertheless important to note the similarities between Stegner and
Lyman’s writing circumstances. '7

Lyman ﬁnds his lived and perceived space un-habitable because he suffers from a
degenerative bone disease that results in the amputation of one of his legs and conﬁnes
him to a wheelchair. Depicted vividly in the text, Lyman’s lived space is unlivable. His
body is so altered that he ﬁnds it impossible to be at home in his body, his house, or his
community. More important than his actual disability, though, is the way that it realigns
the power dynamics with the people around him. That is, because of his disease, Lyman
ﬁnds himself feminized and, accordingly, deprived of the power he is accustomed to

having based on his gender. (It is worth noting that Lyman’s perception of a loss of

power is highly subjective and largely constructed by his own misogyny and

gynophobia.)

 

the main details remain the same (Benson 353). The issue for Evelyn, and other members of the family,
was that they felt Stegner’s tawdry ending of the novel impugned their ancestor’s name and reputation.

’7 The argument could be made that Stegner exhibits a misogyny and gynophoby similar to Lyman’s, for
example.

48

The clearest evidence that suggests Lyman feels that his illness feminizes and
infantilizes him is his obsessive tendency to call himself a “baby.” Being a “baby” is not
related directly to gender, but it is connected to power —— he has to depend on others to
take care of him. His feminization emerges through his conviction that losing his leg is a
metaphorical castration. He claims, for example, that he would be ﬁne if his ex-wife had
left him ‘Vvhen I was still a man” (144). Furthermore, Lyman is conﬁned (mostly) to his
home, a space he identiﬁes as feminine. His restricted spatial access, for him, completes
his (un)gendering.

What makes his feminization so debilitating, though, is his mistrust and suspicion
of the female body. Again, of his ex-wife, Lyman quips: “Perhaps the menopause
frightened her, perhaps it unsettled her. They can write on my tombstone that I was
undone by female bodily chemistry” (442). Ostensibly, Lyman is joking, but beneath his
humor lies the belief that the mysteries of the female body caused his wife to leave him.
Lyman’s relationship with his assistant, Shelley Rasmussen, is also telling in this regard.
Lyman complains that Shelley wears pants (267), lets her hair hang loosely down her
back (45), and “sprawl[s]” around (267). Shelley, in other words, is at ease with her
body, and this comfort unnerves and even angers Lyman. He associates female sexuality
with a refusal to respect his (male) authority. He notes, for example, that Shelley’s
“boldness” allows her to resist being “put in any subordinate position” (48). The problem
for Lyman, then, is that his spatial conditions prevent him from performing his gender
role in a way that he feels is acceptable.

To counter his present life, Lyman writes, believing that it will provide him with a

home and habitability. On one level, writing functions as an escape from his current life.

49

He says, “I’d like to live in their [his grandparents] clothes for awhile, if only so I don’t
have to live in my own. Actually, as I look down my nose to where my leg bends and my
right leg actually stops, I realize that it isn’t backwde want to go, but downward. I
want to touch once more the ground I have been maimed away from” (17). Writing is his
way of “living in the clothes” of his grandparents, and he uses writing to literalize the
idea of gaining a new body by being able to put on “new clothes” and “touch the
ground.” He conﬂates writing with living, so that writing about something is equivalent
to actually doing that something. Lyman again collapses the distinction between reading,
writing, and living when he claims that he is “going back to Grandmother’s nineteenth
century, where the problems and the people are less messy” (170).18 Clearly, his
grandparents’s lives are more habitable for Lyman than his own, and the way he accesses
those lives is through writing.

It is more appropriate to say that Lyman ﬁnds habitability within the act of
writing. He alludes to this when he explains, “As I detach myself and turn, I can see the
study door and the windows in line with it, the pines stirring beyond the window, the
desk waiting, and its piles of books and folders and papers and photographs —— home of a
kind, life of a kind, purpose of a kind” (201). His desk, books, folders, papers, and
photographs stand in metonymically for the act and product of writing itself. Lyman is
not, in fact, seeking the space of his grandparents, but rather the “space” created by
writing about his grandparents. Or, more aptly, the space of writing about his
grandmother’s writing. The question thus becomes: what does writing offer Lyman that

he ﬁnds so habitable? The short answer to that question is that writing gives Lyman

 

'8 Lyman’s turn to his grandparents’ lives is also an investigation of his own connection the past, which
seems particularly pertinent given his inherited bone disease.

50

power and control. How he uses that power and control demands a lengthier explanation.
To begin with, Lyman constructs writing as gendered and as an activity that is
most appropriately engaged in by an objective male. As a male writer, then, Lyman
perceives himself as occupying a position of power. When he explains how he makes his
authorial decisions about what to include and exclude from his grandmother’s reminisces,
he says:
A historian scans a thousand documents to ﬁnd on fact that he can use. If
he is working with correspondence, as I am, and with the correspondence
of a woman to boot, he will wade toward his little islands of information
through a dismal swamp of recipes, housekeeping details, children’s
diseases, insigniﬁcant visitors, inconclusive conversations with people
unknown to the historian, and recitations of what the writer did yesterday.
(3 79)
Women writers, in other words, do not know how to distinguish between what is
important and unimportant. They are apt to create “dismal swamp[s]” and myriads of
other unpleasant terrains that the unfortunate (male) historian. Out of this murk, the
historian hopes to ﬁnd just one “fact” that he can use. Lyman’s denigration of female
writing allows him, as the historian, to take the position of the objective (and thus
privileged) knower. Unlike his daily life, in which he is subject to the maladies of the
body, in writing, his intellectual power reigns supreme.
Lyman’s depiction of writing has spatial consequences as well. Part of what
Lyman is dismissing is everyday, lived space. To Lyman, it is inconceivable that

“domestic” concerns might actually be as important, or maybe even more valuable, than

51

facts. F avoring conceived (over lived and perceived) space in writing also allows Lyman
to escape from what he views as unlivable lived and perceived space. Through his efforts
as a historian, Lyman can rid the narrative almost entirely of lived space, thereby
simultaneously removing the threatening presence of women and “women’s” space.
Space and gender are inextricable ﬁ'om one another for Lyman; lived space belongs to
women, and conceived space belongs to men. His dismissal of a particular space is
linked, then, to the rejection of the gender he associates with that space, and vice versa.

Given his disdain for all that is feminine, his fear of his own femininity, and the
supposed difﬁculty of dealing with female writing, it is at ﬁrst surprising that Lyman
chooses to take on a woman’s point of view in his novel. If Lyman were hoping to
escape from his current feminization through writing, it would make much more sense for
him to tell the story from his grandfather’s perspective. This is especially true because
Oliver Ward is an adventuring engineer — a capable, competent westerner who Lyman
clearly admires. But Lyman chooses Susan. Doing so allows him to exhibit control over
the feminine. That is, by choosing Susan as his narrator, he can literally control
everything that she says and does, a feat that he clearly fails to accomplish in his real life.
Her body, her thoughts, and her art are all within his domain, and he can create her in the
image of his ideal woman.

Lyman creates Susan with special care, ensuring that she embodies his idea of
Victorian femininity. She is concerned with housekeeping, and she willingly submits to
Oliver’s authority, even on matters that she is clearly more knowledgeable. For example,
when she is ﬁrst solicited to submit a literary sketch for publication, she quickly writes a

short piece and hands it to Oliver. He is skeptical and tells her that she should “take out

52

that stuff about Olympian mountains and the Stygian caverns of the mine. That’s about
used up, I should say.” Until this point, Lyman has made it clear that Oliver is not
literary; he does not read for entertainment, he does not write, and he is uncomfortable
with talking and language in general. Yet, when he voices his critique, Susan responds,
“meekly, astonished at herself” and quickly rewrites the sketch (127). Since Oliver is not
a writer, literary critic, or even a reader, his authority on these matters seems to be solely
based on his gender. As a male, he is apparently inherently able to recognize “poor”
female writing. Lyman’s (supposed) ability to assess writing mirrors Oliver’s judgment.

Lyman concentrates especially hard on writing Susan as a modest, Victorian
woman. In fact, he displays a nearly obsessive interest in his grandmother’s sexual purity
and reticence. He refuses to write about Susan and Oliver’s wedding night because he
insists that he respects his grandmother’s privacy and modesty (68). Later, he describes
his grandmother as embarrassed and uneasy when her husband looks at her with desire:
“. . .her skin was prickly with the touch of his eyes as she walked the baby up and down,
she felt the pliancy of the uncorseted body under her nightgown, she fully understood the
sensuousness of her barefoot walk” (181). Susan, according to Lyman, is uncomfortable
with her own body and the idea of sexuality. She is Lyman’s remedy for Shelley
Rasmussen.

His ability to control Susan, and more importantly “the feminine,” is exactly what
makes writing a habitable space for Lyman. When he writes Susan and Oliver as
traditional female and male, he reinstates the conventional gender power dynamics
(where the masculine dominates the feminine) that have been upended in his own life. A

comparison of Lyman’s depiction of Susan and Susan’s depiction of herself in her letters

53

exposes the extent of Lyman’s overwriting. For example, Susan writes to her dearest
friend, Augusta:
Your note came this afternoon just after Bessie and I had been getting
your room ready and making your bed — our bed where I thought I
should lie tonight with my dear girl’s arm under my head. . . I only want
you to love me... So I hurried after supper and changed my dress and
pulled my rufﬂe down low in the front to please my girl (what,
Grandmother?) and rush into the garden for a bunch of roses — your June
roses, blooming late just for you (we have been hoarding them and
begging buds to wait a few days longer for your coming) —— and then
down to the night boat. (57)
Lyman’s shocked interjection shows his disapproval, but the voice of Susan is even
stronger here, and what the reader sees is not the timid, modest, Victorian lady that
Lyman tries to reify in his re-interpretation of her life. One can hardly imagine this
woman as self-conscious about “the uncorseted body.” In fact, Susan’s gesture of pulling
down her dress emphasizes her immodesty, not to mention her deﬁance of normative
sexuality. Yet, for the most part, Lyman ignores the evidence that suggests that Susan is
not as demure as he would like to imagine. '9
An examination of Susan and Oliver’s scene of writing illustrates how Lyman’s
rigid spatialized gender roles manifest themselves spatially. It also reinforces his idea
that writing can be used to control unruly spaces and experiences. Like Lyman, Susan

uses writing to cordon off that which she ﬁnds unpleasant. Also like Lyman, what she

 

'9 Even when faced with evidence that Susan likely committed some form of adultery, Lyman disavows it,
saying that he “cannot imagine such a complete breakdown in my grandmother” (508). He prefers to
believe, instead, that the affair was unconsummated.

54

ﬁnds unpleasant are the harsh realities of lived and perceived space. For example, when
Oliver decides to go to Deadwood, she “polished phrases that would make his four-day
stage ride and his leaky tent and his job for George Hearst seem an adventure. And in the
process of ﬂaming the West and her husband in words, she began to leave them behind”
(195). The term “polishing” emphasizes that Susan’s writing is part of her feminine
gender role; she is engaging in an act of metaphorical housekeeping when she cleans up
her husband’s experiences. She makes Oliver’s life more habitable for herself and for her
readers. Even more than that, though, her writing creates boundaries and a sense of
containment when she “frames” Oliver and the West. Through this process of enclosure,
Susan effectively positions herself outside of the frame and is thereby disconnected from
both Oliver and the Western space that she is only too happy to leave. The “frame” of
words divorces her from the West. Her spatialization further fortiﬁess Lyman’s idea that
the Victorian lady should be “protect ” from the West.

Lyman’s retelling of Susan’s visit to Oliver’s mine more fully expresses how
Lyman creates Susan as the paragon of Victorian womanhood and how writing functions
to dominate lived and perceived space. Susan’s mine visit is one of the few times that
she leaves the (feminine) space of the home for any extended period of time and enters
the (masculine) space of the urine. Lived and perceived space are allowed to intrude
upon Susan’s psyche. Susan is invited into the mine because it will provide her with
“something interesting for [her] sketch” (130). Though the intention is to give her
material to draw, it is clear that while she is actually in the mine, she should use words as
her medium of representation. Virtually every sight is subject to the inquiry of what kind

of “picture” it might make, or how Susan might add it to her “sketch.” The sketches,

55

verbal or visual, are vastly different from her usual material. Sensory perception and
bodies are ﬁ'agmented by the dirt of the mine, as well as by the continual downward
movement: “The bold had already squeezed shut, wiping him out from the head
downward. Smudged face, white eyes, yellow pocket of light, obscure body and legs and
ore cart, were gone. . . It was as if a shutter had opened and a wild face had looked in for
an awful moment and then been shut back into its darkness” (139). This brief “sketch”
creates a vivid picture that show how the mine (or the viewer) divorces the human from
the body — the person who is seen is not so much a human being as a collection of body
parts that is glimpsed only for a moment before disappearing into the background again.

As Susan encounters lived and perceived space directly, she increasingly becomes
disoriented and overwhelmed, until she is “half convinced that the sound she had heard
there was phantasmal, that this lonely boy with his loaded car was all there was, that her
vision of busy little men swarming through the dark was a product of her overheated
imagination.” A vivid version of lived and perceived space emerges from this section
because Stegner bombards the reader with sensory information. The rock changes from
“yellowish” to “greenish black.” The air continually becomes more stiﬂing and ﬁlled
with the lingering odor of creosote (139).

The narration of this incident contends that Susan’s disorientation is a function of
her gendered reaction to the space of the mine. The men around her are unaffected by the
horrors of the mine, carrying on their conversations and business without noticing the
terror the mine induces in Susan. Susan’s sympathies for the miners are interpreted and
dismissed as womanly sentimentalism. She is portrayed as allowing her body to overtake

her rational mind, and at the end of her experience, she is described as “shaken,

56

dependent, nearly abject” (141). In other words, Susan is constructed to reafﬁrm the
traditional concept of the feminine — overly emotional, overly bodily, and unsuited for
anything but the sheltered life of domesticity.20 This suits Lyman’s purposes because it
validates his idea that women should be spatially restricted and afﬁrms that Susan is,
indeed, an ideal Victorian lady.
Susan is relieved of her anxiety only when she converts lived and perceived space
into conceived space. She uses writing to subdue the sensory information around her.
This transformation is embodied by the transition ﬁom the sense of smell and touch to
vision. When Susan looks instead of feels, she is no longer overwhelmed by
Claustrophobia, the sensation of water drops on her arms, or the fumes of creosote. When
she looks instead of feels, she can frame the miners just as she framed Oliver:
How living the faces were, and how eloquent the postures. .. What things
the vagrant inadequate light did to a brown check, a mustache, the
whiteness of teeth, the shine of eyes looking downward out their comers at
her. It was like nothing she had ever drawn. . .yet this scene, lurid and
dimly fearful, spoke to her. . .they might be buried but they were ﬁercely
alive. She stood memorizing them, hoping to draw them later. (142)

The result of her return to conceived space is indicated by the fragmentation that ensues.

Rather than pictures of whole men, she describes the various pieces that make them up.

Individuality is erased when the men are treated as a collection of parts —— white teeth,

 

20 It is signiﬁcant, too, that the space that is so anxiety-inducing is a mine. A mine is the embodiment of
dominated space because it is literally a space that has been “sliced” open (to use Lefebvre’s terminology),
and it has been altered beyond recognition through technology. Carolyn Merchant traces the gendered
implications of mining to Pliny, suggesting that mining is a form of invading “Mother Nature’s womb” (30)
and, furthermore, equivalent to “mining the female ﬂesh for pleasure” (39). A mine, then, is already a
space laden with violent connotations, particularly in relation to the power dynamics of gender. Susan is
brought into a space that has, historically and symbolically, been associated with violence against and the
domination of women, which also may play a part in Susan’s reaction.

57

brown cheeks, shining eyes — and primitivism tinges the scene. Lefebvre illuminates the
dangers of focusing solely on vision when he says, “That which is merely seen (and
merely visible) is hard to see — but it is spoken of more and more eloquently and written
of more and more copiously” (286).

It is not surprising, then, that Susan sums up her “impressions” verbosely:

How can I say? There are wonderful pictures, if one had the skill. I’m
aﬁaid they’re beyond me... Oh, those men with candlelight shining off
their eyeballs, and that awful cavern of a place where they work, and that
tapping through the rock as if men buried alive were trying to make others
hear! I suppose I shouldn’t ﬁnd it so picturesque. It’s awful, really --
isn’t it? They seem so like prisoners. (144)
Susan successfully transforms the “living” and “lurid” men of the mine into “pictures.”
Even worse, she turns them into the picturesque, suggesting a pleasing vision of
something unusual meant for the consumption of detached viewers. Susan’s use of
writing to dominate space and its inhabitants mirrors Lyman’s own writing of
habitability.

Oliver Ward shares Lyman and Susan’s penchant for using writing to produce
habitability. After seeing Susan’s visit to the mine, it becomes clear that Oliver’s daily
spatial life is un-habitable. Susan notes that Oliver spends anywhere from ﬁfteen to
twenty-four hours in the mine on a regular basis. What allows him to spend so much
time in these cold, dark, and conﬁned places for such extended periods of time is map-
writing. Oliver is able to cope with this space only by focusing on the representations of

space that he is creating, rather than the lived and perceived space he is experiencing.

58

Transforming the lived space of the mine into visual representations allows Oliver to
ward off any of the potentially ill effects of this space. It stands to reason, then, that
Oliver’s reactions to the mine may not be that different ﬁ'om Susan’s, but he has managed
to control these reactions by focusing on the conceived space of maps.

Oliver’s mapmaking is an untraditional form of writing, but writing nonetheless.
Oliver’s chosen genre matches his gender, just as Susan’s choice of local color matches
hers. Oliver is like a historian, of sorts. He takes all of the information around him and
converts it into “facts.” Maps, rightly or wrongly, are perceived of as objective, not
subjective. As a mapmaker, he is ﬁrmly situated within a conventionally masculine form
of writing. Lyman’s gender paradigms are once again substantiated by his construction
of Oliver’s writing situation.

The abstraction of Oliver’s maps can be dangerous, as geographer J .B. Harley
points out. Harley notes that this threat may be inherent in the maps themselves: “In
other words, the lack of qualitative differentiation in maps structured by the scientiﬁc
episteme serves to dehumanize the landscape. . .Space becomes more important than
place: if places look alike they can be treated alike. Thus, with the progress of scientiﬁc
mapping, space became all too easily a socially empty commodity, a geometrical
landscape of cold, nonhuman facts” (99). A few of the things that are lost in Oliver’s
maps are the “wild face[s]” of the miners, the dirt and grime, and the “tak tak” sounds of
“Tommyknockers” (Stegner 140). Like Susan, Oliver loses the human element and the
human impacts of the mines. These things fall outside the ﬂame of his maps, and as he
draws boundaries and delimits spaces, he brings lived and perceived space into

submission. The evidence of the map’s domestication of space is apparent when Susan

59

hangs up some of his surveys for “decoration” (247). The maps have domesticated space
and thus the maps are now suitable for domesticity.

Habitability, as Lyman sees it (and demonstrates through his own writing as well
as Susan and Oliver’s), can emerge only when the wild and unruly elements of lived and
perceived space have been brought under control. Lyman bases his version of
habitability on ideology more than practicality, and hence his gender prejudices strongly
inﬂuence his writerly transformation of space. Lyman’s model of habitability is not
important because it shows the dangers of habitability “gone wrong”; it is important
because it shows that, fundamentally, habitability is not (necessarily) utopian, ideal, or

even admirable.

Ethical Habitability
For both Kirkland and Stegner, habitability is inextricable from spatial control. For
Clavers, writing offers her the ability to relinquish some of her desire to force Michigan
space to mold to her expectations. Her willingness to explore alternative sites of home
and the accompanying ﬂuid gender roles is not based on an ideological acceptance of the
merits of natural space, or untraditional gender roles for that matter. Her approach is
more pragmatic. Clavers believes in the doctrine of separate spheres (as much as she
complicates that very notion), but she also sees clear evidence that domestic space in
Michigan is unsatisfactory and is unlikely to improve in the immediate future. Thus,
women are stuck with an un-habitable space. To combat the inadequacies of domesticity,
Clavers turns to the space Michigan has in abundance and makes it accessible for females

and males alike. The resulting new home may not be available to Clavers, but it is for

60

some of her characters; and, it allows Clavers to move toward appropriating rather than
dominating space. If we were to provide a snapshot of Clavers’s shift, it would be most
accurate to say that she moves from an ideological standpoint to a pragmatic one.
Clavers’s habitability is not ideal — it is not always even sufﬁcient to keep her characters
in Michigan — nor is it without other, more serious, problems. Clavers’s version of
habitability undeniably favors the middle-class inhabitants of Michigan who are able to
appreciate natural space both because of their educational background and the presence
of hired help to take care of day-to-day tasks. She relies on a domesticated version of
nature, suggesting that she may be adapting to the existing spatial conditions less than it
may initially appear.

Lyman’s habitability is even more troubling, however. He maintains his focus on
his ideology of space and, in particular, the gender regulations and power dynamics that
accompany his preconceptions of the best space. Lyman’s spatial tactics are not
necessarily more selﬁsh than Clavers’s: they both want to create habitability for
themselves. But, Lyman’s transformation of space is much more domineering. In fact,
what makes the space he creates habitable for him is that it allows him to realign gender
roles in a way that places him (as a masculine “historian) in a role of power and authority.
A substantial part of his struggle is that his lived spatial experience feminizes him, and
the way he solves that problem is to subjugate the feminine through his writing, which
reestablishes his masculinity. Lyman’s logic is based on the assumption that the
domestic is feminine, that feminine is inferior, and that therefore the domestic is also
inferior. Of course, the terms can be reversed for Lyman, too: the feminine is domestic,

domestic is inferior, and therefore the feminine is inferior. When Lyman constructs

61

himself as outside of the domestic, he is (by his own logic) powerful and therefore
appropriately masculine.

Despite their differences, together, Kirkland and Stegner’s texts make it clear that
the control of space is integral to habitability. This trait manifests itself differently in
these texts, though. Clavers is obviously concerned with domesticating (which, of
course, is an expression of control) Michigan space, but through writing, she begins to
play with the idea that “home” can be deﬁned differently from what she initially
assumed. Writing alternative deﬁnitions of home allows her to relinquish control over
space. As she releases her domination over domestic space, spatialized gender
regulations also begin to disappear. Lyman, on the other hand, uses writing to establish
and solidify his control over space. When he cannot manage or handle his lived and
perceived space, he turns to writing to provide him with the power necessary for his
psychological well-being. He turns writing into a space that he can inhabit, and he exerts
control over his grandparent’s space to compensate for his lack of authority in his own
life.

The need to control space in order to achieve habitability links directly to the
(perceived) imbalance of the spatial triad of lived, perceived, and conceived space. Lived
and perceived space dominate conceived space dominate the lives of Clavers and Lyman,
and though Henri Lefebvre implies that kind of imbalance will lead to more livable
space, for Clavers and Lyman, it makes space un-habitable. The real culprit, though, is
still conceived space. That is, the problem for Clavers and Lyman is that their
conceptions of space prevent them ﬁ'om being able to accept their lived conditions.

Clavers believes that domestic space should be gentile and compartmentalized -— when it

62

is not, she is discomﬁted. Lyman believes that women should occupy domestic space
and act as subordinates to men; when he ﬁnds himself trapped at home and in a
subordinate position, his space becomes unlivable. That is to say that there is nothing
inherently wrong with Clavers’s or Lyman’s space, except that it does not meet their
spatial expectations. The spatial triad needs to be tipped in the appropriate direction for
habitability to emerge. For Clavers, this means that she has to learn that lived and
perceived space are acceptable; for Lyman, this means that he has to further emphasize
conceived space. Habitability can be achieved by altering any part of the spatial triad,
and it is clear from both of the spaces produced that the spatial triad does not need to be
balanced. This opposes Lefebvre’s notion of the ideal subject-space relationship in
which the spatial triad is balanced between lived, perceived, and conceived space. In a
related vein, Clavers and Lyman show that habitability can emerge from either the
domination or appropriation of space. Although the former is less palatable, it is equally
effective.

Reading Kirkland and Stegner together reveals that gender’s role in habitability is
directly linked to the ability to control space. That is, they both argue that gender dictates
spatial power, and they then re-write space in order to distribute that power in a way that
is favorable to their own gender. Because of the different gender positions they occupy,
their revisions look substantially different, but the principle behind them remains the
same. The authorial gender can make it tempting to hypothesize that women writers
create different habitabilities than do men, but this comparison cannot be made fairly
using these texts, since these two authors are separated by far more than gender (such as

culture and history). Moreover, Clavers’s and Lyman’s habitability originates from the

63

same premise (that of separate spheres). Looking at these two texts shows that a
relationship between habitability and gender exists, but that relationship manifests in
multiple and diverse ways.

Habitability, as constructed in these texts, is makeshift, pragmatic, and variable.
It is highly individualized, to the point that the production of one character’s habitability
negatively impacts other characters as well as space. The objectives of this chapter were
to show how characters can use writing to create habitability and how that production can
produce variable spaces. The task of the next three chapters is to explore how writing

can (or cannot) produce an ethical habitability.

CHAPTER TWO

Delinquent Housekeeping: Transforming the Regulations of Keeping House

Michel Foucault invokes the ship as a “heterotopia par excellence,” in his essay
“Different Spaces,” explaining that the ship is “a piece of ﬂoating space, a placeless
place, that lives by its own devices, that is self-enclosed and, at the same time, delivered
over to the boundless expanse of the ocean.” Furthermore, it is “the greatest reservoir of
imagination” (Foucault 184-5). The ship, by Foucault’s reckoning, is a unique space
because it traverses the boundaries between ﬂuidity and stability, interior and exterior,
place and placelessness. He endows the space of the ship with subversive possibility, if
only in the realm of imagination and fantasy.

Sarah Ome Jewett’s Deephaven (1877), Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping
(1980), and Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1998) imagine domestic space as “ﬂoating” and a
“placeless place.” Their imaginings offer ground-breaking visions of home and
habitability. Gendered space underpins the spatial crisis in these novels, and Robinson
and Morrison use ideas from J ewett to negotiate this crisis and create a progressive
habitability. J ewett links ﬂexible spatial practices with ﬂuid gender roles, and she lays
the groundwork to redeﬁne domestic space and home as ﬂuid and changing (as ship-like).
Robinson uses J ewett’s idea of ﬂuid domestic space (embodied by the imaginative ﬁgure
of the ship) to sabotage the very deﬁnition and regulations of the domestic, creating an
ungrounded domesticity. Morrison’s novel also explores the possibilities of a ﬂexible
approach to domesticity, but the actual ﬁgure of the ship does not play nearly as large of

a role as it does in J ewett and Robinson. When it does enter the text, it is not a

65

subversive space of possibility but rather as a way to remind the reader of the limits of a
purely imaginary habitability.

Separated by time, geography, race, and class, these novels initially seem more
dissimilar than similar. They converge, however, around representing models of
habitability that use spatial transformation to resist and redeﬁne domesticity, and in the
process of renovating spatial assumptions, they also question and critique the
accompanying spatialized gender regulations. Above all, these novels suggest that
habitability is not tied to a particular kind of space or location but rather a particular kind
of relationship between the subject and space. That they each approach domesticity from
distinct historical and cultural contexts makes discussing the texts together even more
valuable because, collectively, they challenge the foundations of domesticity and its
relation to habitability. My analysis does not privilege one of these models but rather
attempts to bring all three into a dialogue that provides mutual illumination on traditional
domesticity’s role in creating habitability.

The potential for authors of different historical periods to be discussed together
often focuses on issues of inﬂuence, whether in a literal sense or with an attention to
Bloom’s anxiety of inﬂuence. In the case of the three writers in this chapter, this
relationship has already been explored (to various degrees). The links between Robinson
and nineteenth century American literature, for example, are well documented. In
interviews, Robinson speaks of her interest in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David
Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson (Schaub,
Boruch), and scholars have traced these connections in her work in more detail (Ravits,

Aldrich, Hedrick). Aside from Dickinson, though, Robinson has only infrequently been

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discussed in relation to nineteenth century women writers." Marilyn Sanders Mobley
explores the relationship between Jewett and Morrison in her book Folk Roots and
Mythic Wings in Sarah Orne Jewett and Toni Morrison: The Cultural Function of
Narrative, but my work departs ﬁ'om hers by exploring the spatial links between the two
authors’ work. As valuable as studies of inﬂuence are, they also often foreclose the
possibility of a transhistorical conversation either by limiting the inﬂuence to a forward
trajectory or by positioning the ﬁgures to be studied in a competitive model. My chapter
allows these texts to be read as an exchange of ideas about the ways spatial resistance can

be used to transform dominant paradigms of domesticity.

Placeless Domesticity in Sarah Ome Jewett’s Deephaven
Sarah Ome J ewett’s ﬁrst novel is situated ﬁrmly in the genre of literary regionalism, but
rather than celebrating a personal, affective connection to a particular locale, J ewett just
as often critiques this sense of place. Deephaven details Kate Lancaster and Helen
Denis’s (the narrator) summer visit to the Maine village of Deephaven. There, they
“keep the house” of Kate’s grand-aunt Mrs. Brandon, and the bulk of the novel consists
of sketches of the local sights and inhabitants of Deephaven. The primary spatial crisis in
J ewett’s text is the tension between a “rooted” sense of place and what I call an
ungrounded place attachment (to return to Lawrence Buell’s term). In more abstract
terms, the novel is about permanence and transience, and rather than privileging
permanence, J ewett, through the ﬁgure of the ship, suggests that a more ﬂexible approach

to occupying space produces a more sustainable habitability.

 

2] An exception is Joan Kirkby, who notes that Robinson’s work bears some similarity to Jewett’s because
both create “a mythic world of women without men.” Kirkby quickly follows this comparison with the
argument that Robinson “does not remain long in this dimension” (99).

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The tale of Miss Chauncey acts as a warning against clinging too tightly to a
limited and stable domesticity. Helen and Kate meet Miss Chauncey in the village of
East Parish, a place even “duller than Deephaven itself” (125). Deephaven is full of tales
of people who have lived better days and whose lives are at least a bit tragic, but what
makes Miss Chauncey notable is her intense attachment to her house. After her father
loses his fortune, her brother commits suicide, and her other brother goes insane, Miss
Chauncey herself “los[es] her reason” and is institutionalized at a nearby hospital. She
regains her sanity, momentarily at least, and returns to her beloved house, where she
discovers that another family member has sold all of her family’s belongings to pay for
bills. At the sight of her empty house, Miss Chauncey again descends into a mild form of
insanity, but this time she refuses to leave her house. Miss Chauncey insists on keeping
her house by living there alone even if the house falls down around her: “She had been
alone many years, and no one can persuade her to leave the old house, where she seems
to be contented, and does not realize her troubles; though she lives mostly in the past, and
has little idea of the present, except in her house affairs...” (127). Her resolve is so
strong that the only act that is able to ground her in the present is performing daily tasks
of housekeeping.

Miss Chauncey’s loyalty to her house could be read as admirable, as the act of the
most dedicated “housekeeper.” Critic Catriona Sandilands, for example, interprets Miss
Chauncey as an exemplary character who embodies the positive (feminine) traditions of
Deephaven combined with the newer ideas of resistance to (masculine) normative
conventions (69). Though it is not Sandilands’s intention to reinforce the conventional

equation of the feminine with the house, her argument exposes the gendering of Miss

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Chauncey’s story. She is attached to her house because it is linked to her personal
identity. It is integral to her identity because the distinction between gender, space, and
self has collided. Jewett’s presentation of the story, however, suggests that she is not
privileging Miss Chauncey’s place-attachment. Implicitly, she cautions her reader
against allowing identity to become too intertwined with a single (gendered) space. Her
critique is clearest when Miss Chauncey’s emotional attachment to her house leads to her
death. As her house grows more and more dilapidated, a neighbor ﬁnally insists that
Miss Chauncey come live with her for the winter. However:
...her [Miss Chauncey’s] fondness for her home was too strong, and one
day she stole away from the people who took care of her, and crept in
through the cellar, where she had to wade through half-frozen water, and
then went upstairs, where she seated herself at a front window and called
joyfully to the people who went by, asking them to come in to see her, as
she had got home again. (133)
Miss Chauncey’s return home is more pathetic than triumphant. Her joyful waving is
contrasted with her method of getting home — she “stole” away, “crept” up the stairs and
“had to wade” through icy water. More criminal than lady-like, Miss Chauncey’s.
reduced circumstances are even more apparent in this scene than they were when Kate
and Helen visited her. The image of the waving Miss Chauncey is tinged with sadness
because the reader knows that she is delusional and can only be disappointed that the
reclamation of her younger and more prosperous life as a gentile lady is impossible. As a

result of her misadventures, Miss Chauncey grows very ill and, in delirium, once again

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returns to her house. She dies shortly afterwards. Miss Chauncey’s death is a direct
result of her single-minded attachment to a particular place, a particular home.

Authors and scholars who advocate the importance of a sense of place would
probably respect Miss Chauncey’s fierce and stubborn attachment to her home.22 The
theory behind sense of place, or place attachment, is that a lack of a stable place to live,
or a lack of connection to a particular locale, will leave one without any sense of “home.”
J ewett suggests however, through the tale of Miss Chauncey, that ﬁrmly grounded
domesticity is a problem because individual and communal changes are inevitable.
Without the ability to ﬁnd habitability elsewhere, (metaphorical) insanity and death
result. Finding habitability through domesticity is not untenable, but domesticity and
domestic space must be ﬂexible. J ewett provides a model of this kind of ﬂexible
domesticity in Deephaven by combining the ship and the house, and the habitability
produced is more sustainable. Furthermore, it is the kind of domesticity and habitability
that Robinson and Morrison employ to rewrite twentieth-century gendered spaces.

At ﬁrst glance, the ship does not seem like a promising location for ﬂexible
habitability. To begin with, J ewett consistently associates ships with death and tragedy.
For a space of supposed possibility and potential, the sea simultaneously forecloses that
very potential. Hardly a mention of ships goes by without note of the ships that did not
make it back to harbor. When Kate and Helen explore the local cemetery, they pay
especial attention to the “many stones which were sacred to the memory of men who had
been lost as sea” (36). Of the “points of interest” they visit, the ones they mention

speciﬁcally are those linked to shipwrecks (105-6). Many of the women of Deephaven

 

22 See, for example, Wendell Berry, Wallace Stegner. and Gary Snyder.

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grieve because of shipping mishaps — Kate’s single aunt is single (perhaps) because her
lover died at sea, the older women of Deephaven gaze at the sea and think of their
drowned husbands and brothers, and Miss Chauncey’s family tragedy and deaths are
indirectly caused by shipping. Even when ships are not the cause of death and tragedy,
they are still a space that is largely inaccessible and relegated to the past. Deephaven is
no longer a bustling shipping town; what is left of that way of life is the memories of the
sailors and their families.23

Not only are ships associated with death, literal access to this world is unavailable
to women, which undermines the idea that the ship is potentially a habitable space for
women. Deephavenites embody the tradition Margaret Creighton and Lisa Norling call
“iron men, wooden women,” in which women are those who wait at home while their
men are bravely at sea (vii). Women are the bystanders to men’s attachment to the sea-
faring life. Thus, Helen and Kate wonder if the old women look out at the sea and think
about their brothers and husbands who have drowned (43). As much as Kate and Helen
embody ambivalent gender roles, as a pair of women, they too are excluded from the
mystique surrounding ship-life. This is represented by their segregation from the
company of the ancient mariners who sit at the docks trading reminisces about their past
adventures. Helen wants to tell her reader about the ancient mariners, and she and Kate
want to join their company. But, Helen explains, “We found that the appearance of an

outsider caused a disapproving silence, and that the meeting was evidently not to be

 

23 Jefferson’s Embargo of 1807-1809 affects the residents of Deephaven deeply, even though years have
passed since its inception and completion. The embargo was enacted in response to Britain’s repeated
interception of (neutral) American ships during its war with France. In December of 1807, entering foreign
ports was forbidden for US. ships, as was accepting foreign cargo. The objective of the embargo was to
prevent ﬁirther damage to American property and to punish the British economically. Britain did not
change its policy regarding American ships, but the embargo negatively changed America’s shipping
industry (Irwin 632-3).

71

interfered with” (49). Helen’s positioning of herself and Kate as “outsiders” can be taken
at face-value, as they are clearly outsiders in terms of locale — they are from Boston, not
Deephaven, and the position of regionalist narrators as outsiders is a much discussed and
well-known aspect of regionalist writers.24 Thus, one could assume that they are
excluded simply because they are not part of Deephaven or its culture. This exclusion,
however, points to multiple issues of “outsideness,” especially gender, class, and sexual
orientation, not just spatial difference. Kate and Helen cannot enter the conversation
because they are marked by their gender difference, suggesting that the world of shipping
is not particularly ﬂuid regarding gender roles. The ﬁgure of the ship and shipping not
only solidiﬁes boundaries between “male” and “female” but does so on the basis of
spatial access. Because J ewett tends to present gender roles as fairly ﬂuid, it is
sometimes (too) easy to forget the cultural context in which she is writing. Her
depictions of shipping remind her reader of the power dynamics surrounding space and
gender.

Imaginatively the ship functions very differently from the way it works literally,
though. J ewett blends the ship with the domestic, creating a ﬂexible home. Helen, for
example, locates her own ability to “feel at home anywhere” within her past as a child of
a naval ofﬁcer (24). Instead of stability providing her with a sense of place, her unsettled
life allows her to have a sense of connection to multiple places: ﬂuidity takes the place
of stability. But it is important to note that ﬂuidity and stability, transience and

domesticity, are not presented as mutually exclusive categories; instead they are mutually

 

24 See in particular the work of Judith F etterley, Marjorie Pryse, Sandra Zagarell, and June Howard.

72

constitutive. J ewett presents the ship and sea as a site of a potential improvement and a
complement to traditional domesticity.

In Deephaven, the “outside world” of commerce (represented by the ship) is not
opposed to the house; instead, it serves as a reinforcement of the ﬂuidity seen in the land—
based housekeeping. From the beginning of the teXt, the domestic scene merges with the
sea. Kate describes her aunt’s house as ﬁlled with ﬁrmishings brought home from sea
voyages (8). In other texts, J ewett argues that the sea provides an antidote to the
potentially overwhelming interiority of village life. For example, in “The Queen’s
Twin,” she points out that “More than this one cannot give to a young State for its
enlightenment; the sea captains and the captain’s wives of Maine knew something of the
wide world, and never mistook their native parishes for the whole instead of a part
thereof...” (“Queen’s Twin” 493). It is precisely the complementary relationship of
stability and ﬂuidity that make the space of Deephaven habitable. This habitability is
rooted in the resistance and subversion of traditional spatial practices.

Not surprisingly, Kate and Helen view the matter of housekeeping as temporary
as well, leading some scholars to argue that J ewett engages in “literary tourism.”25

During their visit, one of their “chief pleasures” is the “housekeeping” that they

undertake (84). Kate explains that “We shall have such jolly housekeeping” (10), and

 

25 See especially Richard Brodhead in Cultures of Letters. Jewett’s work is the (perhaps unexpected) site
of vigorous debate about the ethics of regionalism, the role of class and race in the nineteenth century, the
politics of nationalism, and the aesthetics of sentimentality. In many ways, the dialogue about Jewett
hinges on questions of whether or not her writing exploits those she is writing about and how power
dynamics inﬂuence her seemingly benign novels and stories. Kilcup and Edwards provide a particularly
strong synthesis of Jewett scholarship in their introduction to Jewett, Her Contemporaries, and Her Critics,
noting the presence of four distinct movements. The ﬁrst stage involved primarily biographical criticism,
and the second stage, led by feminists, treated Jewett as a “utopian” female writer writing about women.
The third movement sought to correct this overly positive viewpoint by pointing out how limited Jewett’s
texts are in terms of their representations of class and race. The fourth movement, and the one that I hope
my work falls under, tries to reconcile the second and third (2-3).

73

later as they buying supplies for their visit, Helen exclaims, “This was being
housekeepers in earnest” (lO). Servants complete almost all of the mundane tasks, so that
Kate and Helen only do the jobs that are more pleasurable (13). And yet, they are almost
obsessively interested in the tasks of “housekeeping” that they do perform, and so the
reader follows the pair as they ﬁsh for dinner and procure items from the market. 26

Kate and Helen’s obvious pleasure in their version of housekeeping is (arguably)
endearing, but, at the same time, it is indicative of this text’s tendency to overlook the
class privileges that make their habitability possible. When scholars talk about class in
Jewett, they usually focus on the way that the “outsider” in the text (in this case Kate and
Helen) relates to the other people in the text, particularly those who are native inhabitants
of the region.27 What gets elided in this approach is that many of the aspects of the text
that critics ﬁnd productive depend on a certain amount of economic opportunity and the
accompanying perspectival advantages. For example, Sandilands points to J ewett’s text
as ecofeminist because it allows women to “choose to maintain, especially in their lives
together, the kinds of rural morality and ecological wisdom that she [J ewett] sees in the
lives and stories of her Deephaven residents” (64). Her examples include Kate, Helen,
Miss Chancey, and Mrs. Bonny. What she neglects to account for is the fact that the
ability to “choose” reﬂects privilege. Many of the women’s lives in the text are dictated

more by pragmatism than idealism.

 

26 It is worth mentioning that virtually all of their “housekeeping” is associated with consumption, which
Sandra Zagarell reads as indicative of “the postbellum transition to a commodity culture in which
consumption was attaining importance as an activity separate from possession” (653).

See Allison Easton’s “ ‘How Clearly the Gradations Were Deﬁned’: Negotiating Class in Sarah Ome
Jewett” and Sarah Way Sherman’s “Party Out of Bounds: Gender and Class in Jewett’s ‘The Best China
Saucer.’”

74

J ewett’s model of habitability, as I articulate it, also rests on the opportunity
afforded to those who are wealthy enough not to have to depend upon day-to-day
housekeeping. Kate and Helen, for example, can choose to complete the mundane tasks
of taking care of their house. But, unlike many of their female counterparts in
Deephaven, if they choose not to, they do not suffer; their servants simply do their tasks.
Part of the merit of Kate and Helen’s habitability is that it is ﬂexible and can move to
other places, but it is clear at various points in the text that many Deephavenites do not
have this luxury. Miss Chauncey is only one example — Mrs. Kew and Mrs. Patton are
other cases (12; 26). None of these women have the economic or social power to leave
Deephaven, even if they wanted to do so. The ability to make space habitable, then, is at
least partially dependent on class.

Kate and Helen demonstrate awareness (and even guilt) that their economic status
privileges them and allows them to have a home, but their response to the reduced
circumstances of others is, in many ways, inadequate. When faced with truly divergent
economic circumstances, J ewett invokes Christianity as the solution. The most extreme
case of poverty the girls encounter is the small family they ﬁnd in the woods near
Deephaven. The children are skinny and clearly hungry, and the father tells them all
about their economic hardships. When they return to visit the family again, Kate and
Helen discover that the mother and father have both died, leaving the children orphans.
Kate’s awareness of class discrepancies becomes clear when she says, “I wonder how we
can help being conscious, in the midst of our comforts and pleasures, of the lives which
are being starved to death in more ways than one” (121). This musing is an opportunity

for deeper reﬂection on how the ability to have a home depends on economic security,

75

but instead Kate turns to platitudes about how life is meaningless if it is not a “Christian
life.” The stakes of Christianity only become clear at the end of the chapter, though,
when Helen invokes heaven as just across the boundary of death (123). The evocation of
heaven assuages their guilt because (presumably) it is a place where money no longer
matters and where everyone enters on equal footing. They are relieved of an obligation
to concretely address class differences because heaven does the work for them.

Despite its clear limitations, though, Kate and Helen make Deephaven a home,
and they create habitability for themselves. Helen tells Kate that the house “now belongs
to you, and if 1 were ever to come back without you I should ﬁnd you here” (137). This
note of seriousness shows that Kate and Helen are not simply exploiting the space, but
that they are instead engaging with it on a more personal and signiﬁcant level. They may
be merely visitors and only superﬁcial housekeepers, but they interact with and mutate
space in order to make it their own. Kate and Helen’s approach to domesticity is an
alternative to Miss Chauncey’s, and it is one that enables them to produce a habitability
that is simultaneously grounded and ungrounded. Clearly they are invested in the
particular site in question — Mrs. Brandon’s house and Deephaven — but it is equally
clear that the habitability they have found there can be found elsewhere-too. Even if their
occupation of this place will not last forever, they still ﬁnd it worthwhile to engage in the
process of creating a home for themselves there. This process of creating a home through
housekeeping can then be transferred to another domestic scene if necessary.

The spatial ﬂexibility endgendered by the combination of the sea and domestic
life offers the possibility of gender ﬂexibility as well. J ewett’s progressive work with

issues of gender are well noted. Marjorie Pryse, for example, argues that for J ewett

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gender is not a binary construction: “Rather, J ewett’s characters inhabit the ‘third’ space
of possibility in which gender is a category many of them resist” (“Sex, Class” 533).
Alaimo makes a similar argument, focusing more explicitly on space: “When sexual
division becomes indistinguishable from spatial division, the transgression of spatial
boundaries becomes a means for contesting the very nature of sexual difference” (5 8).
By showcasing ﬂuid spatial practices through her description of housekeeping, J ewett
implicitly argues for a more ﬂuid View of gender and sexual difference as well.

For instance, the ﬁgure of the (sinking) ship allows women to subvert the dictate
of marriage acceptably. Kate has an aunt who has always remained single, despite the
fact that she “had chances enough. . .and had been rich and handsome and ﬁnely
educated.” It is speculated that perhaps she had a “sailor lover. . .and perhaps he had been
lost at sea” (19). Whether Kate’s aunt actually had a drowned lover is irrelevant. The
ship functions as a ﬁgure of the imagination that provides a socially acceptable
alternative to marriage. Ships in this situation literally and metaphorically permit a
certain amount of ﬂexibility.

The trope of spatial ﬂexibility produced by the combination of the ship and the
house generates a habitability that extends beyond the literal presence of the ship, and so
similar ﬂexibility is present even when the literal ship is not. Furthermore, Jewett links
ﬂuid spatial practices with ﬂexible gender role appropriation, which is a trope that
becomes especially important in Morrison’s work. Mrs. Bonny, a Deephaven local, is
known as a bad housekeeper and resists traditional gender roles not only through her lack
of concern for appropriate domestic management but also through her mode of dress,

which includes male and female attire — she wears “a man’s coat, cut off so that it made

77

an odd short jacket, and a pair of men’s boots much worse for wear” as well as “some
short skirts” and “three aprons” (107, 108). As Alaimo points out, Miss Bonny’s spatial
practices incorporate the conventionally opposed spaces of the domestic and the natural
with equal enthusiasm. While Alaimo contends that Mrs. Bonny is an object of ridicule
who “evokes anxiety about the loss of a domestic ideal even while proclaiming women’s
freedom from the domestic” (45), I read her role in the text as more of a model of spatial
ﬂexibility and alternative to the doomed Miss Chauncey. The townspeople may mock
Mrs. Bonny and treat her homemade goods as suspect, but Kate and Helen do not partake
in this derision (Deephaven 107). Admittedly, they ﬁnd Mrs. Bonny’s quirks amusing,
but they do not dismiss or judge her harshly.

J ewett uses the ﬁgure of the ship and the sea to introduce the idea of ﬂuidity and
ﬂexibility to the domestic sphere, so that domesticity can combine elements that are
traditionally disparate. The natural and the domestic merge, stability and transience
become complementary rather than contradictory, and the categorization of men and
women becomes less dichotomous. All of this works to make home space habitable. In a
manner that anticipates Foucault’s heterotopic ship as a “placeless place,” the domestic
becomes a process of inhabiting that is simultaneously located within the house itself but
also within the subject. That is, the subject can inhabit a particular domestic space and
create habitability there, but that habitability is transferable to other domestic or natural
spaces as well. J ewett thus creates a placeless habitability. Habitability is transferable
because it is based on the subject’s ability to relate to space, not on the space itself.

Unlike Foucault, however, J ewett transfers the heterotopic properties of the ship to the

78

domestic. The introduction of the space of the ship to the domestic makes the domestic
an environment characterized by ﬂuidity.

Jewett builds a foundation for a spatial resistance based on ﬂuidity and ﬂexibility.
She does not explicitly oppose spatial regulations but instead subtly incorporates and
rewrites these regulations for the beneﬁts of the inhabitants of domestic space. To explore
the full signiﬁcance of this model of spatial resistance and the ﬁll] ramiﬁcations of a
placeless habitability, we must turn to Robinson’s Housekeeping and Morrison’s

Paradise.

Marilynne Robinson’s Ungrounded Domesticity

If Jewett’s texts look backwards to the ship, Marilynne’s Robinson’s Housekeeping
embraces a future-oriented turn to the house-ship. While J ewett’s ﬂuid spaces are
generated by the historical reality of shipping, Robinson’s use of spatial ﬂuidity and the
ﬁgure of the ship are connected more to the symbolic and imaginative properties of
water. Robinson’s novel also creates a habitable hybrid domesticity.

Housekeeping vacillates between an ambivalent series of tensions and offers no
easy solutions.28 This text attempts to create a habitable space within the conﬁnes of a
patriarchal history of domesticity and housekeeping, and Robinson employs the ﬁgure of

the ship to negotiate the tensions surrounding domesticity and to embrace a domesticity

 

28 Scholars often interpret Housekeeping based on a series of binaries: stable/transient, housed/vagrant,
traditional/subversive, domesticated/liberated, and these binaries are embodied in the ﬁgure of the house
and the train. Some scholars interpret the novel as favoring transience, which in its dismissal of traditional
patriarchal structures such as feminine domesticity, subverts patriarchy. Paula Geyh, for example, argues
that Housekeeping creates a “transient subjectivity which is located in a place outside all patriarchal
structure” (104). Similarly, Maggie Galehouse writes that this novel “portrays driﬁing as a kind of
liberation, an unencumbering, a casting-off of unnecessary object and social responsibilities” (119). Other
scholars view Housekeeping as more problematic. Karen Kaivola interprets the alternatives presented in
the novel (whether they pertain to subjectivity or domesticity) as “equally undesirable” (688).

79

akin to J ewett’s. The space of the ship, though ultimately unrealizable in this text, shows
that women do not necessarily have to make a choice between being domesticated or
being liberated, between traditional spatial roles within the home or unconventional
vagrancy and instability. Instead, Robinson offers her characters an imaginative
ungrounded domesticity that is habitable.29 J ewett incorporates the (imagined) ﬂuidity of
ships by creating ﬂexible relationships between the subject and home; Robinson
substitutes a ship for the traditional home-space of the house.

Housekeeping is narrated by the young Ruth, who, along with her sister Lucille,
has been abandoned by her mother (who drives off a cliff) in Fingerbone, Idaho. The
girls are taken care of by a series of maternal ﬁgures: ﬁrst, their grandmother, who dies
and is replaced brieﬂy by their great-aunts Lily and Nona, and ﬁnally by their mother’s
sister Sylvie. Sylvie is an unconventional caretaker, and eventually, Lucille leaves her
remaining family in favor of her more domestically—capable home economics teacher.
After the ladies of the town and the sheriff threaten to remove Ruth from Sylvie’s
custody, Sylvie and Ruth leave the house for a life of transience. Robinson’s novel
builds on Jewett’s work with ﬂuid domesticity, and she uses the ﬁgure of the ship to
provide an alternative to the choice between having a home (represented by the house)
and being transient (exempliﬁed by the train).

Ruth says that her Aunt Sylvie in a house is “more or less like a mermaid in a
ship’s cabin. She preferred it [the house] sunk in the very element it was meant to

exclude” (Robinson 99). Comparing Sylvie to a mermaid on a ship links living in

 

29 The term “ungrounded domesticity” sounds similar to Stacy Alaimo’s “undomesticated ground,” but
they mean something quite different. Alaimo’s term refers to the tendency of women writers to turn to
natural space as a realm free from domestic regulations —— natural space becomes “undomesticated
ground.” The term “ungrounded domesticity,” on the other hand, refers to a kind of domesticity not
situated in one particular location or site.

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domestic space with displacement and exploitation, since the trope of the mermaid
evokes a number of cultural myths. Mermaids do not belong in ships at all, but rather in
the sea, and when taken onto a ship, the mermaid becomes a ﬁgure of exotic and erotic
entertainment for men. In her proper place (the sea), the mermaid possesses supernatural
power and allure, but this strength dissipates the moment that she is removed from the
sea. Not only is the mermaid on a ship exploited, she is also displaced. Mermaids are
structurally incapable of living on a ship or on land; they are designed for an entirely
different sort of life and medium (represented literally by her ﬁn rather than legs).
Likewise, one can infer, Sylvie is not designed to keep a house, at least not in the sense
that one commonly understands that phrase. In fact, when Sylvie is in a house, it is as if
she is being kept rather than the one doing the keeping. Brought to its logical inferences,
the mermaid metaphor implies that domesticity is also based on patriarchal exploitation.
Though Robinson is careful to avoid didacticism, the novel nevertheless (albeit
inadvertently) suggests that patriarchy and its power to regulate the way women interact
with space is what keeps Sylvie within the house. The male sheriff and the masculinized
power of the law, for example, is ultimately the ﬁgure that enforces the townswomen’s
desire to remove Ruth from Sylvie’s custody. The problem with Sylvie’s care of Ruth is
explicitly spatial. She does not keep house appropriately, and even worse, she allows
Ruth to occupy the unsuitable space of the train (177). Because Sylvie threatens
domestic regulations and, even more importantly what those regulations are meant to
enforce, she is deemed an unsuitable guardian. Of course, Ruth is not in danger simply
because Sylvie is not very tidy; she is in jeopardy because Sylvie’s housekeeping

inadequacy suggests that domesticity and the home itself are unstable and ungrounded.

81

Men, the townswomen imply, would provide the proper “order.” “‘Do you hear anything
from their father?...Or Mr. F isher?...Your husband, dear’.” When Sylvie answers in the
negative, the ladies from town reveal what they hope the girls father or Sylvie’s husband
might provide. “ ‘Some people — some of us — feel that Ruthie should have — that a

9”

young girl needs an orderly life (185). If Sylvie were tempered by an upstanding
masculine presence, it is implied, the house would not be full of leaves and animals, and
Ruth would not be exposed to the threat of vagrancy embodied by the freight train.
Though men do not appear much in the novel, they haunt it as the ﬁgures who are the
regulators of domesticity and the process of creating a sense of home.

Despite Sylvie’s domestic shortcomings, Ruth observes that “Sylvie talked a great
deal about housekeeping” (Robinson 85). Her attempts, however, are plagued by a
number of fundamental misunderstandings about what it traditionally means to keep
house. The element of confusion is crucial because it suggests that Sylvie resists
domesticity inadvertently, not because she sees it as a source of oppression. Robinson
thereby prevents Sylvie from becoming a feminist hero of resistance to patriarchy. One
of the ways Sylvie subverts (intentionally or not) this exploitation is to redeﬁne
housekeeping so that it maintains permeable, rather than stable, boundaries. So she
allows the house to ﬁll with leaves and crickets and cats, and instead of settling in to the
house, she refuses to unpack. Ruth says, “It seemed to me that if she could remain
transient here, she would not have to leave” (Robinson 103). In other words, if Sylvie

could resist and transform traditional notions of domesticity (which imply stability and

settling), she could ﬁnd a habitable space within the house.

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The accidental nature of Sylvie’s resistant housekeeping further manifests itself in
her misconception of literal “keeping” as method of housekeeping. When the women of
the town visit Ruth and Sylvie toward the end of the novel, they are dismayed to ﬁnd
stacks of old tin cans, newspapers, and magazines ﬁlling the house. Ruth explains that,
“Sylvie only kept them, I think, because she considered accumulation to be the essence of
housekeeping, and because she considered the boarding of worthless things to be proof of
a particularly scrupulous thriﬁ” (180). Sylvie does not knowingly or intentionally rebuke
the standards of housekeeping. In fact, as Ruth points out, it is as if Sylvie is heeding an
extreme version of “scrupulous thrift.” She seems to be, trying to embrace Lydia Maria
Child’s well known advice that opens The American Frugal Housewife: “The true
economy of housekeeping is simply the art of gathering up all the fragments, so that
nothing be lost. I mean fragments of time, as well as materials” (5). The aspect of
household economy that Sylvie does not understand is that one must have some sort of
use for the fragments that are kept; the act of keeping itself is not the objective.
Therefore, Sylvie’s resistance cannot be interpreted as an attempt to subvert patriarchy,
domesticity, or spatial regulations, per se. Rather she tries, and fails, to conform to
patriarchal and spatialized gender prescriptions.

If Sylvie were intentionally resisting domestic regulations and regulators, she
would react by defending herself and her lifestyle; instead, she responds to the critiques
of the townspeople at ﬁrst with bewilderment and then with a resolve to do a better job at
meeting their spatial regulations and expectations. She cleans out the parlor, forces Ruth
' to return to school, and fries chicken. She washes dishes and adds artiﬁcial ﬂowers to

their decor. She vows to “explain it all to them” (189). In short, she tries to become a

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more traditional female in an attempt to maintain her current living arrangements with
Ruth, even if it means meeting the strictures of a domesticity that we have to imagine she
ﬁnds suffocating. Her attempts are futile, as both Ruth and the reader know; Sylvie is
incapable of negotiating her displacement in a socially acceptable manner.

Robinson responds to Sylvie’s quest for a habitable domestic space by offering an
alternative space of domesticity — the ship and the ark. At ﬁrst, the ship’s role is just as
ambivalent as it is in Jewett’s work. The current house is continually compared to a
failed and faulty ship. Robinson, however, does not dismiss the ship or its potential
space. Instead, the ship enters as the ark. Housekeeping draws heavily on Biblical
narratives and tropes, and thus the ark and references to the great ﬂood (in various guises)
permeate the text from the beginning. In a (ﬁgurative) Foucauldian inspired moment
near the end of the novel, Robinson offers the ark as an improved house, a space that
resists and transforms traditional domestic strictures and spatialized gender roles. - Shortly
after the ladies from Fingerbone visit Sylvie and Ruth (described above), Ruth
contemplates an alternative kind of house:

Imagine that Noah knocked his house apart and used the planks to build an
ark, while his neighbors looked on, full of doubt. A house, he must have
told them, should be daubed with pitch and built to ﬂoat cloud high, if
need be. A lettuce patch was of no use at all, and a good foundation was
worse than useless. A house should have a compass and a keel. The
neighbors would have put their hands in their pockets and chewed their
lips and strolled home to houses they now found wanting in ways they

could not understand. (184)

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The invocation of Noah’s building of the ark suggests the possibility of rebuilding
domesticity and functions as a logical conclusion to Sylvie’s unconventional, boundary-
breaking housekeeping. Ruth’s reverie proposes a transformation of domestic space, but
signiﬁcantly not an annihilation of it. Noah uses the pieces from his house to build his
new living space; he does not begin completely anew. The alternative domestic space is
governed by its ability to adapt to changing circumstances. It is “built to ﬂoat cloud high,
if need be” (emphasis added); it is moveable and mutable. The ark allows Robinson to
maintain the idea of a living space that is both a refuge and a home without negating the
need for freedorrr, movement, and ﬂexibility. The emphasis is on the changes that a
house (not an ark) should undergo — a house should be daubed with pitch, a house
should have a compass and a keel. The ship is not a substitution for the house; this
metaphor (in a move evocative of Jewett) transfers the properties of ﬂexibility and
adaptability of a ship to the house.30

Only when we consider the ark-house’s ability to negotiate shiﬁing terrain (and
thus to be a model of a habitable domesticity) are we able to reconcile this depiction of
the ship with the earlier uses of the same image to emphasize the failure of domesticity.
When Lucille “ﬂoods” their small kitchen with light, exposing its decay and disorder,
Ruth explains that it is all “the clutter of ordinary life on the deck of a drowned ship”
(102). Sylvie’s substantial attempts at domesticity are equated with a failed, dying ship,
illuminated by a metaphorical inﬂux of water. Similarly, their domestic situation
ﬁguratively places Lucille in the position of a sinking boat. “I was content with Sylvie,

so it was a surprise to me when I realized that Lucille had begun to regard other people

 

30 The necessity of altering the existing domestic space and making it more ship-like is foreshadowed when
Ruthnoticesdrechangesthathavetakenplaceatdrehouseandsaysthat“And itseemedthatifthehouse
were not to founder, it must soon begin to ﬂoat” ( 124).

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with the calm, horizontal look of settled purpose with which, from a slowly sinking boat,
she might have regarded a not-too-distant shore” (92). Once again, the text likens
Sylvie’s domesticity to a ﬂoundering boat.31 The salvation, for Lucille, is not a
transformation of the deﬁnition and practices of domesticity at all, but rather other people
(such as her home economics teacher) who presumably practice a more traditional form
of housekeeping.

The invocation of Noah’s ark, however, transforms not only domesticity but the
image of the ship as well, particularly if we examine the consequences of a house that can
negotiate water in the context of this novel. At the risk of stating the obvious, water
pervades the novel, not only in terms of the geographical landscape and mindset of
Fingerbone, but also symbolically. More than anything water, intra- and extra-textually,
represents ﬂux (this is true in Foucault as well), a combination of constant displacement
and indeterminacy. Domesticity, as Ruth sees it, is only deceptively stable, but through
this deception is particularly unsuited for negotiating ﬂuidity of all sorts, “. . .for the
appearance of a relative solidity in my grandmother’s house was deceptive. It was an
impression created by the piano, and the scrolled couch, and the bookcases full of
almanacs and Kipling and Defoe. For all the appearance those things gave of substance
and solidity, they might better be considered a dangerous weight on a frail structure”
(159). Rather than refusing to admit the inherent instability of the house, and more
largely the instability of the possibility of home and refuge in a stable environment,

Robinson offers a transformed domesticity that can negotiate instability with ease.

 

3' Terms related to ships and the sea, such as ﬂoods and “sailing” enter the text as well in more tangential,
but nevertheless signiﬁcant, ways. For example, when Ruth and Lucille’s mother drives off of the cliff, she
does not plummet or fall, she “sail[s] off the edge of the cliff’ (23), reafﬁnning the association of ships
with death and tragedy.

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Robinson’s ark-house combats the tragic sense of place of people like Mrs. Chauncey and
allows her protagonists liberation and habitability.

Implicit within Ruth’s imagining and retelling of Noah’s building process is a
critique of her own neighbor’s inability or unwillingness to see that she and Sylvie are
not dangerous, and that, in fact, they are (trying) to create a domestic space that is more
habitable than the existing one. If we extend the metaphor we see that, like Noah, Sylvie
and Ruth are in the position of the faithﬁrl and, more importantly, saved people. They
resist conventional domesticity in a way that will rescue them from the imminent ﬂood.
Some readers may be troubled by Ruth’s willingness to identify with one of the patriarchs
of the Bible, especially given the patriarchal construction of domesticity. Ruth’s ability
to appropriate Noah, however, is a reﬂection of the gender ﬂuidity enabled by a newly
transformed domesticity. F ruthermore, Ruth is also just as able to appropriate the role of
Noah’s wife. When she stands outside the house shortly before she and Sylvie try to burn
it to the ground, she contemplates the experience of being Noah’s wife, saying, “Like
Noah’s wife on the tenth or ﬁfteenth night of rain, she would stand in the window and
realize that the world was really lost” (204). Though a house with a compass and a keel
may be preferable to a house with a lettuce patch and a good foundation, it is still a space
replete with loss and grief.

In the most troubling ambiguity of the novel Robinson, like Jewett, leaves ships
and their space as unrealized and relegated primarily to the imagination. When their
house is imaged as a ship, it becomes un-habitable to point that Ruth cannot even enter
the door: “The house stood out beyond the orchard with every one of its windows lighted.

It looked large, and foreign, and contained, like a moored ship — a fantastic thing to ﬁnd

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in a garden. I could not imagine going into it” (203). The continued stability of the ship
prevents it from being accessible and habitable. It is, signiﬁcantly, still a “moored” ship.
It is bound to the garden, to the ground, to the spatial regulations that dictate dwelling.
The house cannot become an ark, and thus it cannot become habitable, no matter how
untraditional or resistant Sylvie and Ruth’s housekeeping methods.

In the context of this novel, Sylvie and Ruth do not, cannot, choose the ship
instead of the house; instead, they must choose the train. Like a ship, a train is a vehicle
of travel and movement. The train, however, is more closely bounded, literally and
ﬁguratively, with a set path — if a train leaves its tracks, as this text is well-aware,
disaster and tragedy ensue. It is also an implicitly masculine space, at least partly
responsible for and symbolic of the mastery and settlement of the land. The train, as a
space, is just as dictated by patriarchy as the house was. (This is not to say that on a
literal level ships are not also vehicles of settlement and domestication, but that within
these texts, they are imagined not to be.) While Robinson may force her characters to
choose between the space of the house or the train, readers are able to see a potential
alternative to these spaces — the ship, a site of ungrounded domesticity.

I am not suggesting that Robinson (or J ewett for that matter) proposes that we
begin living on ships instead of in houses or apartments. Rather, I argue that Jewett
creates ﬂuid spaces within her work and that Robinson uses a similar spatial logic to
show the necessity of a new kind of space that will allow for an ungrounded domesticity.
Neither author is invested in recommending that all aspects of domesticity should be
dismissed, but they are interested in exploring the possibilities opened up by less rigidly

deﬁned spatialized gender roles, and they use the ship as a ﬁgure to explore this prospect.

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As a site of habitability, the ship becomes a privileged source of knowledge.
Foucault’s heterotopian ship in “Different Spaces” should not be divorced from his other,
better known Ship of Fools that he introduces in Madness and Civilization. Like
Foucault’s use of the Ship of Fools, Robinson invokes Biblical myth to reconﬁgure
dominant cultural ideals. The Ship of Fools conveyed the “mad” and the “lunatics” from
town-to-town, and the tree of knowledge formed the mast (says Foucault):

Another symbol of knowledge, the tree (the forbidden tree, the tree of
promised immortality and of sin), once planted in the heart of the earthly
paradise, has been uprooted and now forms the mast of the Ship of Fools,
as seen in the engraving that illustrates Josse Bade’s Stultifarea naviculae;
it is this tree, without a doubt, that sways over Bosch’s Ship of Fools.
(Madness 22)
Foucault’s impulse to transplant the tree of knowledge from the Garden of Eden to the
Ship of Fools suggests a parallel between the Biblical paradise and the space of this ship.
Foucault says, “The Ship of Fools sails through a landscape of delights, where all is
offered to desire, a sort of renewed paradise, since here man no longer knows either
suffering or need; and yet he had not recovered his innocence” (Madness 22). Foucault
reverses the process of the Fall, banishing the mad to paradise rather than from it. The
mad may be separated from mainstream society, but this separation fosters their
immunity from suffering and need. Furthermore, Foucault links the mad with the
possibility of immortality. He conﬂates the two trees in the story of Genesis into a single
tree that combines knowledge and immortality. Adam and Eve are banished from Eden

because the god(s) fear they will eat from the tree of life (of immortality), since they have

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already eaten ﬁ'om the tree of knowledge (Genesis 3:22). Foucault’s conﬂation of these
two distinct trees conﬁrms the importance he placed on associating madness with both
knowledge and eternal life.

Foucault links the Ship of Fools to the Garden of Eden to critique dominant
concepts of madness, while Robinson associates the house with the ark of Noah’s ﬂood
to revise domesticity. Also like Foucault, Robinson’s metaphor suggests that Sylvie and
Ruth are chosen by God, blessed with a special knowledge that will allow them to survive
as the rest of the world perishes. They know, it seems, the true nature of habitability and
domesticity, just as the occupants of the Ship of Fools know the true nature of sanity and
madness. And both imply that there is something utopian, or at the very least
paradisiacal, about their ships. These are ideas of habitable space that Morrison’s

Paradise challenges.

Re-building Habitability in Toni Morrison’s Paradise
Toni Morrison’s Paradise, like Deephaven and Housekeeping, spends a great deal of time
depicting the daily tasks of housekeeping in an all-female community, but the model of
habitability this text offers differs substantially. Morrison suggests that a transformation
of domestic space is premature and that ﬁrst bodily space must be rewritten. She uses the
trope of water so prevalent in J ewett and Robinson to shift the focus to bodily, rather than
domestic, space. When the ship does enter Morrison’s text, it functions as a reminder
that any home that is based on utopian isolation is untenable. Most importantly, reading

Morrison through the lens of Jewett and Robinson (and vice versa) shifts the focus from

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the construction of habitability to the necessary destruction and rebuilding of
habitability.”

Paradise tracks the development and ultimate destruction of two (pseudo) utopian
communities during the Civil Rights era —— the all-black town of Ruby, Oklahoma, and
the all-female Convent just outside of Ruby. One of the key tensions in this text is
between the culture and customs of Ruby (which are overwhelmingly dictated by
patriarchy) and the Convent (which are dictated by matriarchy). Morrison uses a collage-
like narrative structure that offers the reader the perspectives of many characters, from
the ruling twins of Ruby (Steward and Deck Morgan) to the runaway girls of the Convent
to the women of Ruby. The time ﬂame of the novel is similarly ﬁagmented, opening
with some of the men of Ruby, led by the Morgan twins, entering the Convent and
shooting (some of) the women living there, and moving back and forth over time to
explain how this moment culminates.

In Paradise, the connection between domesticity and patriarchy is much more
overt and aggressive than it is in either Jewett’s or Robinson’s texts. The task of
surveying, dictating, and controlling housekeeping falls into the hands of the men of this
novel, not the women. The men in Ruby are in charge of “cleaning up” anything that
threatens Ruby with contamination, which the text emphasizes through the cleaning

metaphors in the opening scene: “And at last they will see the cellar and expose its ﬁlth

 

32 Other scholars read Paradise as a search for “home” as well. Patricia McKee notes that Morrison
branches off from many race theorists by emphasizing interiors as opposed to “open space and open
movement.” Furthermore, Morrison investigates not just the site of home but the “psyche of home” (204).
It is this exploration of the “psyche” of home that makes Paradise so important in my examination of
habitability. My analysis of Morrison’s text departs from most scholars, in that I emphasize gender and
space more than race, although race is also considered. For excellent analyses of race in this text, see
Richard Schur’s “Locating Paradise in the Post—Civil Rights Era: Toni Morrison and Critical Race
Theory,” ”Patricia McKee’s “Geographies of Paradise,” and Katrine Dalsgard’s “The One All-Black Town
Worth the Pain: (Aﬁican) American Exceptionalisnr, Historical Narration, and the Critique of Nationhood
in Toni Morrison’s Paradise.”

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to the light that is soon to scour the Oklahoma sky” (3). The choice of the term “ﬁlth”
and “scour” expresses the desire to “clean” the Convent, and the mundane, household
task of cleaning collapses with the larger moral imperative to protect Ruby from the
alleged immorality of the girls in the Convent. That Deck and Steward view themselves
as master-housekeepers in this sense becomes even clearer when they say, “But the
target, after all, is detritus: throwaway people that sometimes blow back into the room
after being swept out the door” (4). These metaphors simultaneously lend an air of
innocence to the clearly reprehensible actions of Deek, Steward, and their cohorts (after
all, they are just tidying up, not killing innocent women) and, at the same time, give
housekeeping a much darker connotation. Housekeeping becomes sinister when removed
from the context of the daily maintenance of a living space; domesticity is tied to control,
and in this context, the masculine control of femininity.

It is ﬁtting, then, that Deek is also the judge of how households should be run and
gains an inordinate amount of satisfaction in the knowledge that women are managing
their houses appropriately: “As Deck drove north on Central, it and the side streets
seemed to him as satisfactory as ever. Quiet white and yellow houses full of industry;
and in them were elegant black women at useful tasks; orderly cupboards minus surfeit or
miserliness; linen laundered and ironed to perfection; good meat seasoned and ready for
roasting” (111). Deek’s focus may seem innocuous, but his attention to mundane details
is, in fact, an attention to managing the daily lives of the women in Ruby. It is no
wonder, then, that the women of Ruby ﬁnd their lives, which are restricted to the

domestic, unlivable.

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The Ruby men may put their concerns in the terms of domesticity and
housekeeping, but what they are really interested in ruling is the female body.
Controlling the sexual actions and desires of women is particularly important and
revealed when Deck calls the women of the Convent “bodacious black Eves unredeemed
by Mary” (18), emphasizing that the women in question are sexually deviant, among
other things. Billie Delia recognizes that what Deck and Steward want is obedience:
“But to Billie Delia the real battle was not about infant life or a bride’s reputation but
about disobedience, which meant, of course, the stallions were ﬁghting about who
controlled the mares and their foals” (150). By positing that the true stakes of the
wedding ceremony are about obedience, Billie Delia betrays the near—obsession the men
have with women’s sexuality. Patricia Best puts this obsession in terms of purity, but not
only sexual purity. The men of Ruby are just as concerned (if not more so) with
maintaining racial purity, and the only way to ensure this is to make certain that women
of “impure” racial quality are not brought into the community and that women who are
racially pure are not impregnated with men who are not. Pat explains, “Unadulterated
and unadulteried 8-rock blood held its magic as long as it resided in Ruby. That was their
recipe. That was their deal. . .everything that worries them must come from women”
(217).

The motif of water counters the controlling impulses of patriarchy because it is
associated with the feminine control of their own bodies. Compared to Jewett and
Robinson, the ship hardly appears in Morrison’s novel, and water becomes a much more

prominent focus.33 The ﬁrst signiﬁcant body of water the text mentions is associated

 

33 It is worth at least noting that there are signiﬁcant geographical explanations for the lack of water
references in this text. While Deephaven takes place in a coastal Maine town that was once dependent on

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with sexuality. Gigi is looking for a rock formation in the desert that purportedly looks
like “a man and woman fucking forever” (62), and when unable to ﬁnd it, she settles for
ﬁnding “a lake in the middle of a wheat ﬁeld” that is beside “two trees [that] grew into
each other’s arms. And if you squeezed between them in just the right way, well, you
would feel an ecstasy no human could invent or duplicate” located in Ruby, Oklahoma
(66). KB. reinforces the connection between water and sexuality when he associates his
sexual excitement and desire for Gigi with an image of the “sparkly water” of a
swimming pool he once saw when he was a child (57). Even when water is not linked
strictly to sexuality, the text maintains the connection and focus on the body. For
example, Seneca describes her experience with water as follows: “She had opened her
lips a tiny bit to say two words, and no black water seeped in. The cold still shook her
bones, but the dark water had receded. For now. At night, of course, it would return and
she would be back in it — trying not to think about what swam below her neck” (163).
Her relationship with water prompts fear and revulsion rather than desire, but it is based
on the way the water constructs and dictates her body —— her lips, her bones, her neck.
The emphasis of the body is signiﬁcant in this text because it becomes clear that the
control of domestic space is a means of controlling the space of the female body.
Habitability is competitive in this text, and it enters at two different sites: the
town of Ruby and the Convent. Deck and Steward conceive of Ruby as a habitable, even

utopian, racial space but this habitability is deﬁned almost solely in terms of safety,

 

the sea for its livelihood and Housekeeping is located on a large lake in Idaho, Paradise is ﬁrmly placed in
Oklahoma, a region more notable for its plains than lakes. This is not to say that Oklahoma is a desert
region — there are 200 small artiﬁcial lakes and 100 natural lakes in Oklahoma, as well as two major rivers
— but rather to point out that the natural landscapes of these three texts differ substantially.

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security, and an intense sense of interiority.34 The Morgan twins equate safety and
security speciﬁcally with the protection of the women of Ruby. The “people” of Ruby,
when in the conﬁnes of this space, are “free and protected. A sleepless woman could
always rise from her bed, wrap a shawl around her shoulders and sit on the steps in
moonlight. . .a hiss—crackle from the side of the road would never scare her because
whatever it was that made the sound, it wasn’t something creeping up on her. Nothing
for ninety miles around thought she was prey” (8). The textual shift from the “people” of
Ruby to “woman” reveals that the concern for the security of Ruby is inextricable ﬁ'om
the apprehensions about women and also the control of women’s bodies discussed earlier.
Implicit within this description is the idea that women are being protected from assault,
but, perhaps even more importantly, sexual assault. Though this impulse to protect
women, through spatial isolation and spatial regulation, is not itself entirely problematic,
the preoccupation with maintaining racial purity imparts this desire with a more sinister
tinge. In other words, women are not being protected because of concern for their well-
being as much as they are being isolated to prevent them from even inadvertently
breaking the “blood rule.” Women are “free and protected” but only within the conﬁnes
of Ruby.

What makes this ﬁeedom and protection possible is the ability of the town to

detach itself from other spaces — to become a space unto itself, an ability that is reliant

 

3'4 Understanding the history of the people of Ruby is necessary to comprehend their overwhelming
concern with safety and security. Ruby is an all-black town formed by a fairly small group of people who
were rejected by whites and blacks alike in other places. The basis of rejection in both cases is skin color;
the founding families of Ruby are described as a “blue-black people” (193). To survive and prosper, the
group moves from Haven (their ﬁrst town) and forms Ruby in an unsettled area in Oklahoma. Ruby’s
geographical separation enables the preservation of an interiority, in every sense, that would not be possible
otherwise. The secure space of Ruby is thus viewed as the foundation of all their successes and future
successes, and therefore maintaining and defending the boundaries of this space is paramount to (some of)
the citizens of Ruby.

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upon the possibility of demarcating “inside” from “outside” in absolute terms. Spatially,
Ruby functions much like a literal ship. The threats to Ruby’s habitability are perpetually
believed to come from the “outside” (a notion which Morrison is, of course, critiquing),
and more to the point, from outside women. If enclosed space is protected and secure,
then there is little that is more threatening than unbounded space: “Ten generations had
known what lay Out There: space, once beckoning and free, became unmonitorcd and
seething” (16). The quintessentially American pioneer’s faith in the possibility of
unsettled, unknown space is juxtaposed with an equally quintessential (White) American
fear of space that is uncontrolled (because monitoring is a means of control) and wild
(seething with the unknown and dangerous). The fear of unbounded space is entangled
with the fear of unbounded female bodies, and both of those fears collide in the Convent.
Lone DuPres expresses these entangled fears succinctly: “So. . .the fangs and the tail are
somewhere else. Out yonder all slithery in a house full of women. Not women locked
safely away from men; but worse, women who chose themselves for company, which is
to say not a convent but a coven” (276).

The Convent, as an amalgam of the fears discussed above is threatening enough,
but the women of the Convent even more explicitly resist the spatial regulations of the 8-
rock males. To begin with, the women residing at the Convent are outsiders who wander
into Ruby from various parts of the country, but even more importantly, they defy the
stricttues of appropriate female bodily behavior. They dance wildly at parties, gyrating
and jiggling (157); they get into ﬁghts on the side of the road, intertwining with and
marring each other’s bodies (169); some of them even try to tempt Ruby men into

forbidden sexual interludes in the depths of the Convent (237). Perhaps the most

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condemning thing of all is that the Convent women refuse to respect the unseeable, but
ever-present, boundaries of Ruby and seduce both female and male citizens into engaging
in “unlawful” behaviors. Ruby women go to the Convent when they need a place to have
an illegitimate baby, an abortion, or a temporary sanctuary from their families. Men go
there (albeit infrequently) to have illicit affairs with the Convent women. This breach of
boundaries allows Deck and Steward to justify their invasion of the Convent not as an
offensive gesture but rather as a defensive attempt simply to protect their town (5).

The willingness and ability of the Convent-women to ﬂout bodily conventions is
less dangerous, though, than their creation of a feminine space of habitability, which the
text positions as opposed and resistant to the habitability of Ruby. At ﬁrst, the text
suggests that part of what creates habitability is a result of the “blessed malelessness” of
the Convent. But, the relationship between habitability and gender is not quite that
simple. Habitability is competitive spatially (Ruby versus the Convent), and habitability
in these spaces is linked to gender. For the men of Ruby, as I have shown, habitability is
inextricable from the control of the female body. That is not the only factor at work,
though; racial boundaries and ideological unity must be maintained. In the Convent, the
absence of literal masculinity is not enough, since the women are still overwhelmed by
their own traumas and conﬂicts. As the Convent is described in the beginning of the
novel, women may ﬁnd a sort of refuge there, but only temporarily and only because
there is no better place for them to be at that time. Their lives are punctuated more with
conﬂict (with each other and themselves) than with any sense of habitability. Yet, when
habitability does emerge at the Convent, Morrison depicts it as uniquely and exclusively

feminine.

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Habitability does not emerge until the women begin rewriting their bodies, and
this body-revision is the Convent-women’s most effective and subversive means of
resistance.35 Morrison’s equation of habitability with the transformation bodily space
rethinks J ewett and Robinson, who propose that domestic space can be signiﬁcantly
altered without changing the body ﬁrst.36 The reconﬁguration of bodily space emerges
as a literal (re)writing of the body when the Convent women lay naked on the cellar ﬂoor,
trace the outline of their ﬁgures, and then begin to “ﬁll in” their “template” bodies with
images drawn in chalk and paint. Seneca traces her scars in “robin’s egg blue,” Gigi
loops a heart around her neck, Pallas adds a baby to her stomach (265). Clearly, this is a
healing ritual, but it is also spatial. Drawing their own bodies and their bodily
experiences allows the women to re-envision their lives and their bodies, and moreover, it
offers them the opportunity to transform their own space through spatial ritual. They can
resist the way their bodies have been constructed by others, and thus they can resist the
spatial regulations of others. They regain control of their bodies and, in the process,
recover their ability to control their space too.

Morrison’s formulation of the link between the body and space exempliﬁes Henri
Lefebvre’s theories while simultaneously revising them. Lefebvre contends changing
social relations and changing space are enmeshed, so that one cannot be changed without
changing the other (59). Changing space, though, necessitates changing the body, since

(according to Lefebvre’s theory of space) the body produces space (405). The process of

 

35 This re—writing has been interpreted as a “mourning” ritual (Clewell 138), as well as an attempt to
“decolonize” their minds (Schur 290). However the ritual is described, critics agree that this textual
moment is crucial for the women’s understanding of their own identity.

36 Morrison’s consideration of the body’s impact on habitability is distinct from Jewett and Robinson, who

pay little attention to the literal body. This is probably due to the traumatic nature of the women’s lives
who ﬁnd (temporary) refuge at the Convent.

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bodily restoration that Lefebvre recommends emphasizes sensuality —— the voice,
hearing, and touch (363). As Morrison’s characters rewrite their bodies, they draw
attention to the way talking, listening, and feeling create communal habitability.
Lefebvre, however, posits the reestablishment of the body and its space as an endpoint,
while Morrison positions asjust one part of a longer process of rebuilding space.

The women’s generation of a communal sense of habitability challenges Jewett’s
and Robinson’s individualistic models. While they rewrite their bodies, the women
verbally share their experiences in what they call “loud dreaming.” Loud dreaming
allows the women to merge their experiences: “And it was never important to know who
said the dream or whether it had meaning. In spite of or because their bodies ache, they
step easily into each other’s tale” (264). The ability to empathize with each other
engenders a relationship with space that is also more communal, exempliﬁed by their
newly acquired ability to share the tasks of domesticity (285).37 The sense of communal
habitability even transcends racial boundaries (which is also clearly a threat to Ruby’s
“racial purity”). The reader knows that at least one of the Convent women is white, but it
is never clear and never that important to know the racial history of the inhabitants of the
Convent. The results of their loud dreaming are subtle, but perceptible. The women of
the Convent “unlike some people in Ruby. . .were no longer haunt ” (266). It is no
coincidence that it is only when the Convent women transform their space through
rewriting their bodies that they are conceived of as enough of a threat to warrant

destruction.

 

37 . , .
For more on the communal nature of Mormon s loud-dreaming, see McKee.

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The annihilation of this habitability (via the invasion of the Convent and massacre
of the women living there) is certainly a denunciation of patriarchy, but more
importantly, Morrison uses this destruction to prevent the Convent’s model of habitability
from suffering the same fate as Ruby. Unlike Lefebvre, Morrison suggests that creating a
particular space is not the ultimate goal. It is all too easy to see the Convent’s model of
habitability as preferable to Ruby’s model, but Morrison does not allow her reader this
comfort. The habitability of the Convent, while radical in that it rewrites the body in
order to rewrite space, also resembles the habitability of Ruby in many ways. Like Ruby,
the space of the Convent is literally interior space and constructed with defense and
protection in mind. The very structure of the Convent is imbued with a history and space
of violence — it is “shaped like a live cartridge. . .curved to a deadly point at the north
end. . .a veranda curved from the north around the bullet’s tip, continued along its wall
past the main entrance, and ended at the ﬂat end of the ammunition” (71). Its conversion
from an embezzler’s mansion to a Convent could have removed this sense of violence,
but instead the nuns of the Convent reenact the aggression by making it their mission to
“educate” all the “wicked, wayward Indian girls” they could ﬁnd (227).

Rather than trying to overcome difference (gender or otherwise), the Convent’s
habitability simply reverses the existing binary so that women dominate men. Like
Ruby, the Convent is exclusive, allowing only women to partake in the loud dreaming
that leads to habitability. When Billie Delia contemplates the prospect of the Convent
women still existing “out there” she imagines them as avengers: “When will they return?
When will they reappear, with blazing eyes, war paint, and huge hands to rip up and

stomp down this prison calling itself a town?...She hoped with all her heart that the

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women were out there, darkly burnished, biding their time, brass-metaling their nails,
ﬁling their incisors — but out there” (318). As rousing as these images and sentiments
may be, particularly for the women of Ruby who feel constricted and oppressed, it is
questionable whether this proposed violence is any more productive than the violence of
patriarchal power. F urtherrnorc, spatially speaking, the Convent is even more isolated
and potentially static (and stagnant) than Ruby, leaving this habitability vulnerable to the
overly grounded domesticity seen in J ewett’s Miss Chauncey and Robinson’s
townspeople.

Morrison does not end her novel with the attainment of feminine habitability,
though, and neither does she end it with the supposed deaths of the Convent women.38 In
fact, she ends her novel with an alluring indeterminacy emblenrized by the ﬁgure of the
ship:

When the ocean heaves sending rhythms of water ashore, Piedade looks to
see what has come. Another ship, perhaps, but different, heading to port,
crew and passengers, lost and saved, atrcmble, for they have been
disconsolate for some time. Now they will rest before shouldering the
endless work they were created to do down here in Paradise. (318)
This ﬁnal image brings the ship’s potential to fruition in a way that Jewett and
Robinson’s novels were unable to accomplish. Morrison acknowledges the limitations

and negative connotations of the ship (gesturing toward the slave ship), while at the same

 

38 The reception of Paradise is often based on the interpretation of the ending. Some critics ﬁnd it too
didactic and ultimately unsatisfying, since it refuses to actually show the “real-world possibilities for
women’s survival and resistance” (Bent 147; Sweeney 57). I tend to agree more with Fraile-Marcos’s
interpretation that, “This paradise is not a static condition already achieved, but something that must be
endlessly worked on.. .through the continuous the interplay of race, age, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class,
and whatever other categories are used in the construction of our hybrid individual and social identities”
(29).

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time recognizing its potential to bring about change. Signiﬁcantly, the ship is “different,”
and is heading for shore rather than leaving it. The ship, and habitability, is not a means
of escaping discrimination, whether based on class, gender, or race. It functions as a
means of encouraging the constant work of building and rebuilding habitability.

Instead of luring the reader into an all—too comfortable fantasy of victimless,
unproblematic resistance, Morrison’s text reminds readers that resistance, spatial and
otherwise, is sometimes necessarily aggressive. Admittedly, it is still uncertain what
“Paradise” will look like or even whether its creation is truly possible. Morrison’s text
mirrors the optimism of Foucault, J ewett, and Robinson, though, maintaining that

habitability is indeed possible, even if utopic habitability is not.

Uninhabitable Habitability?
These novels use the ﬁgure of the ship to transform domestic space into modiﬁed
Foucauldian heterotopias. As heterotopias, they challenge conventional idea(l)s of
domesticity and compel a complete redeﬁnition of the concept. Examining some of the
key characteristics of heterotopias in terms of these novels proves this point, and in
addition, serves as a synthesis of the redeﬁned domestic space. Foucault explains that
heterotopias “juxtapose in a single real place several emplacements that are incompatible
in themselves” (Different 181). Heterotopias, in other words, integrate contradictory
spaces. Each of the houses in these texts combines spaces that are generally conceived of
as contradictory — especially natural and domestic (or outside and inside) space. Mrs.
Bonny’s house is a notable example, as is Sylvie and Ruthie’s house that is ﬁlled with

leaves, crickets, and other small animals. The Convent literalizes this boundary crossing

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by painting what is inside the individual body onto the outside space of the basement
ﬂoor. Even within interior space, private and public space collides. For example, the
parlor in Robinson becomes a place for the storage of cans and papers not because this is
what parlors are for but rather because that is what worked for Ruth and Sylvie. “The
visitors glanced at the cans and papers as if they thought Sylvie must consider such things
appropriate to a parlor. That was ridiculous. We had simply ceased to consider that
room a parlor, since, until we had attracted the attention of these ladies, no one ever came
to call” (Robinson 180). Domesticity, as redeﬁned, is not one kind of space that can be
inhabited in only one way. Function supercedes regulation, which is part of the reason
that these spaces become habitable. The needs of the inhabitants come before the desires
of those living outside of the space.

Temporal boundaries are also ﬂexible within heterotopias, and so it should be no
surprise that Deephaven is a community where the past is just as present as the present.
Similarly, multiple generations have inhabited the house in Housekeeping. The second
sentence of the novel emphasizes the notion of temporal and spatial continuation:
“through all these generations of elders we lived in one house” (Robinson 3). The
Convent’s rich history (ranging from criminals to nuns) constantly affects the everyday
lives of the women living there because physical remnants of each time period remain. In
fact, each of the houses could serve as a sort of museum, a space that Foucault invokes to
explain the fourth principle of heterotopias. Part of the task for the characters that try to
make these spaces habitable in the present is to exorcise the past that haunts their present
and to create a less permeable boundary between the different time periods. Furthermore,

they must break down the stability and stasis implied by multiple generations residing in

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one place. Kate and Helen do this in Deephaven by virtue of being visitors, while the
characters in Housekeeping and Paradise have to destroy or remodel the space in
question in order to resist this aspect of a heterotopia.

Finally, Foucault explains that heterotopias have a purpose within other spaces:
“Either the heterotopias have the role of creating a space of illusion that denounces all
real spaces, all real emplacements within which human life is partitioned off, as being
even more illusory... Or, on the contrary, creating a different space, a different real space
as perfect, as meticulous, as well-arranged as ours is disorganized, badly arranged, and
muddled” (Diﬂerent 184). Brothels are an example the former and colonies the latter.
The way these novels reconﬁgure domestic space suggests that they are meant to be the
latter — that is, as a sort of perfectly habitable space. Within the domestic space of
J ewett, Robinson, and Morrison, things are admittedly not well-arranged in the traditional
sense, but they are peculiarly well-arranged for living. To put it another way, their
houses are not tidy but this very disorderliness is what allows these spaces to be
habitable. Traditional domestic space is oppressive and limited, while heterotopian
domestic space challenges and resists compartrnentalization and spatial regulation.

As perfect as heterotopian domesticity may seem, the novels depart from
Foucault’s heterotopia because, ultimately, these spaces fail. All of these novels end with
what seems like a failure of habitability. Shipping is no longer a viable industry at the
end of Deephaven, and the space and possibility opened up by ships seems untenable.
Furthermore, for all that Kate and Helen form a connection to Deephaven, in the end,
they pack up their belongings and admit that they probably will not ever return. Sylvie

and Ruth cannot change their house into a ship-like structure with a compass and a keel,

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\

and so they burn down the house and take to the train. As much as the train seems to
offer them a respite from the spatial regulators, the two are still haunted by images of
their former housekeeping and the possibilities it seemed to offer. Paradise’s destruction
of habitable space is even more dramatic; the Convent is destroyed and the inhabitants
scattered if not dead. Temporarily, domesticity and domestic space are successfully
transformed, spatialized gender is resisted, and habitability is achieved. But these
successes are remarkably short-lived. To sum it up, seemingly habitable spaces are
created only to be quickly destroyed.
Turning back to Foucault suggests that we interpret this seeming failure
differently. His full description of the ship as heterotopia is helpful:
Brothels and colonies were two extreme types of heterotopia, and if you
consider, for example, that the ship is a piece of ﬂoating space, a placeless
place, that lives by its own devices, that is self-enclosed and, at the same
time, delivered over to the boundless expanse of the ocean, and that goes
from port to port, from watch to watch, from brothel to brothel, all the way
to the colonies in search of the most precious treasures that lie waiting in
their gardens, you see why for our civilization, ﬁ'om the sixteenth century
up to our time, the ship has been at the same time not only the greatest
instrument of economic development, of course (I’m not talking about that
subject today), but the greatest reservoir of imagination. The sailing
vessel is the heterotopia par excellence. (185)
Foucault repeatedly emphasizes the ship’s movement — it “goes” and moves from place

to place. In fact, its ability to move is the primary reason that it is a heterotopia. It is the

105

ship’s power of locomotion that allows it to be a “placeless place,” and a “ﬂoating space”
that is able to access the “boundless expanse of the ocean” and reach both colonies and
brothels (which are themselves heterotopias). The ship can take people to “extreme types
of heterotopias” and with that power of conveyance, the ship itself becomes a
“heterotopia par excellence.” It is not so much the ship itself, then, as the ship’s ability to
move that makes it so special. On the other hand, the ship is a unique vehicle that is not
interchangeable with an airplane or a train. Within an imaginative ﬁamework, this is
because the ship is linked to the literal and metaphoric ﬂuidity of water.

Bringing the spaces of Jewett, Robinson, and Morrison together makes it clear
that the objective of habitability is not the creation of cozy, interior, female-centered
places. In fact, together these novels emphasize that the production of a habitable space
is not the goal at all. Instead, they show how transforming domesticity creates
transitional, even transportational, spaces. That is, we might view them as spaces that are
not so much themselves habitable as spaces that lead to habitability. The difference
between these two things is subtle. If we view the new heterotopian domestic space as
habitable, sustained habitability seems impossible within the scope of these novels, since
the spaces in question are quickly left or destroyed. They are necessary for refuge, or
reﬂection, but they are meant to be temporary. In other words, Deephaven,
Housekeeping, and Paradise’s transformation of space brings us to habitability; the
transformed space itself is not habitable. If, we think of these revised domestic spaces as
ships that bring its passengers to habitability, habitability is not destroyed at all at the end

of the novel but rather invigorated.

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The true spatial potential of these texts does not lie within the spaces they create,
however attractive, but rather in the way that they use the heterotopia to reconstruct the
relationship between the subject and space within the conﬁnes of domesticity.
Habitability depends upon revising the relationship between the subject and space. The
novels suggest that a more sustainable, appropriate, and habitable relationship to space is
achieved when the subject is ﬂexible about her attachment to space. Counter to Miss
Chauncey, Helen and Kate show that the ideal spatial dweller can connect with space and
create a home, but this connection and home-feeling (to use a term from Kirkland) does
not depend on a particular kind of space or locale. Sylvie and Ruth pick up on this
transitoriness and embrace a housekeeping that embraces the inherently unstable territory
of domesticity. The Convent women are forced to leave their home, but they reconvene
with the intention of learning to dwell again, somewhere else. The relationship to space
seen in these novels is ungrounded in the sense that it can be transferred to other spaces
and places as necessary. A constant movement between ﬂuidity and stability
characterizes it, so that the two become complementary rather than competitive.

When these novels revise and redeﬁne habitability, we need not mourn the loss of
habitable space, nor do we need to seek a new, better space. Together, Deephaven,
Housekeeping, and Paradise establish a habitability that is ungrounded and available in

multiple places and spaces.

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CHAPTER THREE

The Body of Space

If the ﬁrst two chapters were concerned about making space safe for the subject, this
chapter asks how to make the subject safe for space. When Martin Heidegger articulates
his theory of dwelling, he emphasizes two things: that building engenders dwelling and
that dwelling implies an obligation on the part of the subject to treat “the earth” with
respect and consideration: “Mortals dwell in that they save the earth — taking the word
in the old sense still known to Lessing. Saving does not only snatch something from
danger. To save properly means to set something free in its own essence... Saving the
earth does not master the earth and does not subjugate it, which is merely one step from
boundless spoliation” (3 52). Heidegger’s saving of the earth is not only a matter of
concrete actions but also a question of conceiving of the earth in a way that respects its
essence as space. Cooperation and interdependence replace competition; the subject is
not supposed to “master” or “subjugate” space. Instead, the subject is to see herself as
part of the “fourfold,” which is what Heidegger calls the integration of the earth, sky,
divinities, and mortals (351-2). Recognizing the “essential” connection between the
subject and natural space is an integral part of dwelling. Heidegger’s concept of saving
incorporates natural space into a theory otherwise dominated by the domestic.
Ecocritical and ecofeminist scholarship echoes Heidegger’s idea that humans are

ethically obligated to consider the environmental and spatial impact of living in space.39

 

39 There are, of course, important divergences between ecofeminism and ecocriticism. They originate from
almost entirely distinct sources, for one, and ecofeminism emphasizes gender differences far more than
does ecocriticsm. For a more detailed explanation of their differences, see Simon Estok’s “Bridging the
Great Divide: Ecocritical Theory and the Great Unwashed.”

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The need to heal human relations with the environment that is betrayed in Heidegger’s

H ‘6

repetition of the words “preserving, sparing,” and “saving” appears in ecocritic
William Rueckert’s assertion that “The problem now, as most ecologists agree, is to ﬁnd
ways of keeping the human community from destroying the natural community” (107).
Heidegger’s ideas reverberate again in SueEllen Campbell’s wor : “. . .If we can’t know
everything, if we can’t control the effects of our actions, if even the smallest human
interference can cause massive natural destruction, then the only way to keep something
important is to preserve it” (131, emphasis original). Like Heidegger, both Rueckert and
Campbell believe that “dwelling” is a problem insofar as humans are apt to destroy the
earth, or the fourfold, rather than spare it, and that this is a fate that should be avoided if
possible.

Like Heidegger, ecofeminists are concerned with the inherent power dynamics of
the subj ect-space relationship. Although ecofeminism is known most widely for its
synthesis of feminism and environmentalism, it also investigates the role of power and
domination broadly speaking. Judith Plant explains, “And ecofeminism, by speaking for
both the original others, seeks to understand the interconnected roots of all domination, as
well as ways to resist and change” (156). Also, as Heidegger’s fourfold underscores the
uniﬁcation of the subject and space, ecofeminists also highlight and explore the
“interconnections” between humans and nonhuman nature (Warren xiv). Ecofeminist
thought (as this chapter demonstrates) has the potential to enrich Heidegger’s idea of
dwelling through its attention to the more subjective and concrete aspects of dwelling.

Despite their substantial differences, Heidegger, ecocriticism, and ecofeminism unite

around their desire for the subject to consider her impact on space and act accordingly.

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Nature writers often share the ecocritical and ecofeminist preoccupation with a
non-violent and sustainable subject-space relationship. Nature writing texts, generally
speaking, try to transform the subject-space relationship so that it is “healthy.” Ideally,
this “health” transcends textual boundaries. For the nature writers I study, space does not
need to be changed in order for habitability for emerge; rather, the problem(s) lies with
the subject and the subject’s treatment of space. Therefore, they often focus on
producing habitability by rewriting the way the subject relates and forms a connection to
space, which may require a simultaneous transformation of space. Mary Austin, Terry
Tempest Williams, and Gretel Ehrlich save space by revising the subject-space
connection. More speciﬁcally, these three authors link the body to space, sometimes by
giving space a body, sometimes by allowing space to incorporate the human body, and
sometimes by incorporating space into the subject’s body.4O Austin gives space a body in
an attempt to transform it into a subject (thereby granting it value and ethical
consideration). Williams uses this metaphor to expose the integrated nature of the subject
and space and to protect both from harm. Ehrlich’s body-space connection bolsters the

struggling subject. All three share the concern of a healthy habitability.

The Desert-Woman
Ecocritics and ecofeminists view Mary Austin as a signiﬁcant ﬁgure who marks the

transition between nineteenth and twentieth century writing about the natural world.

 

40 Often scholars interpret the tendency of nature writers to tie space to the body as a speciﬁcally feminine
trait. Lorraine Anderson, for example, characterizes women’s nature writing as “a movement from seeing
nature as kin to seeing nature as self, from seeing earth as our mother to seeing earth as our body” (9).
Whether or not Anderson’s characterization of this trend as speciﬁcally feminine is helpful, or even
accurate, is highly contested. Furthermore, many critics question the ethics of identifying the female body
with natural space, given the historical use of this metaphor.

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Arguably, she joins natural space with the self, rather than seeing nature as something
outside the self (Anderson 8). Ecocritics discuss Austin because her work has clear
environmental undertones (Graulich xvi). Her collection of essays The Land of Little
Rain (1903) has garnered the most critical attention (both during her lifetime and in
contemporary scholarship), and some even call her a “key ﬁgure of American wilderness
writing” (Garrard 72). The stories in her collection Lost Borders were written years
before they were published in book form, and Austin placed many of the desert-stories
individually in periodicals to meet increasingly dire ﬁnancial needs (Fink 135). In 1909,
with a new publisher (Harper), Lost Borders ﬁnally appeared in book form. An unnamed
narrator (who strongly resembles Austin) gathers and tells the stories of the miners,
explorers, wives, and Native Americans who try to make the desert their home. Her
environmental ethic from The Land of Little Rain persists in Lost Borders, but it is not
until the latter text that Austin introduces the idea of linking the body and space in order
to save space. Feminist and ecofeminist scholars often ﬁnd this linkage particularly
appealing.4| Read from the perspective of gender alone, however, Austin is equal part
feminist and misogynist.

Austin links space and the body in Lost Borders by gynopomorphizing space.
Her purpose is dual: she wants to provide space with the status of an entity with agency

that deserves respect, and she wants to make femininity habitable. The desert-woman

 

4' See Stacy Alaimo, Marjorie Pryse’s introduction to Lost Borders, and Beverly Hume.

lll

ﬁrst appears at the end of the introduction to Lost Borders and then pervades the rest of
the narratives in the book: 42
If the desert were a woman, I know well what she would be: deep—
breasted, broad in the hips, tawny, with tawny hair, great masses of it
lying smooth along her perfect curves, full lipped like a sphinx, but not
heavy-lidded like one, eyes sane and steady as the polished jewel of her
skies, such a countenance as should make men serve without desiring her,
such a largeness to her mind as should make their sins of no account,
passionate, but not necessitous, patient — and you could not move her, no,
not if you had all the earth to give, so much as one tawny hair’s breath
beyond her own desires. If you cut very deeply into any soul that has the
mark of the land upon it, you ﬁnd such qualities as these — as I shall
presently prove to you. (LB 160)
The desert-woman is a compelling image of strength and independence. As a woman,
she is not weak-willed or subservient; instead, she is immoveable, even in the face of
man’s (and I use that term to indicate gender, not humankind) considerable sins. The
desert-woman is large, in all senses of the word — passionate, self-sufﬁcient, patient,
determined, strong. She may have the sexual allure of an emblem of fertility, but she
incites service not desire. Austin constructs the desert-woman to invoke sympathy and
admiration from the reader, and based on the dominant interpretations of this text, this

narrative strategy is wildly successful.

 

42 The desert-woman passage receives a great deal of attention in the scholarship on Austin’s work, and
whether scholars admire or decry Austin’s creation of the desert-woman, it is always a topic of
conversation. Thus, I begin my analysis on a well-trodden critical path.

112

This metaphor inverts both gender and spatial power dynamics. Men are
conventionally constructed as holding power over women, but when it comes to the
desert-woman, men are powerless: “Mind you, it is men who go mostly into the desert,
who love it past all reasonableness, slack their ambitions, cast off old usages, neglect
their families because of the pulse and beat of a life laid bare to its thews and sinews”
(LB 159). The desert-woman seduces men who become so obsessed that they lose
everything — their family, their fortune, their reason, and sometimes even their lives.
Virtually every story in the collection shows a character who has been “gotten” by the
desert-woman. More a femme fatale than a virgin, the desert turns men into devoted
servants instead of incipient destroyers. This, in turn, realigns the power dynamic
between the subject and space. Generally, the subject has free reign over space. In the
realm of this narrative, however, imagining the desert as an animate space enables it to
protect itself from encroachment. The animated space of the desert resists the colonizing
efforts of the characters (particularly the men) of the text by inspiring obsession and
devotion in those who would normally destroy space.43

Austin rewrites the cultural metaphor of land-as-woman, which had until this

point been destructive,44 so that it seemingly works in service of both women and space.

 

43 Kathryn Dezur notes that, while biographically Austin engaged in colonizing activity, she used writing
to attempt to resist imperialist structures and thinking (21). Austin’s degree of involvement in colonizing
activity is relatively minimal. Her husband, Wallace Austin, was involved in a variety of settling activities
throughout the course of his life. However, Austin was often separated from her husband, and much more
involved in her own writing career than in his efforts to get rich off the resources of the desert.

44 Annette Kolodny describes the dangers of the American fantasy of “a daily reality of harmony between
man and nature based on an experience of the land as essentially feminine — that is, not simply the land as
mother, but the land as woman, the total female principle of gratiﬁcation - enclosing the individual in an
environment of receptivity, repose, and painless and integral satisfaction” (Lay of the Land 4). The problem
with the land as mother/woman trope is that it enmeshes men in an anxiety-ridden incestuous relationship
with natural space. Incest occurs when the male relates to the earth as both mother and lover (Lay of the
Land 73). As if that were not enough to inspire anxiety, men must then face the realization that their own

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In some ways, this could be read as the epitome of using writing to create habitability,
especially if we consider Michel de Certeau’s original discussion of how the reader
makes a text “habitable.” When readers mutate a text, they make “the text habitable, like
a rented apartment” (xxi). What dc Certeau means by this is that readers change the text
they are reading -— he calls it the dominant text — by adding to it their own needs,
desires, and preferences, much like a renter ﬁlls an apartment with furniture, pictures, and
other keepsakes. The subject alters an existing text, or space, to ﬁt their turique needs.
This mutation inherently speaks to existing systems of power dynamics, evidenced most
clearly through de Certeau’s example of Spanish colonizers and the indigenous Indians.
Indians took the colonizer’s rituals, representations, and laws and “subverted them not by
rejecting or altering them, but by using them with respect to ends and references foreign
to the system they had no choice but to accept” (xiii). Austin’s metaphor of the desert-
woman works in a similar fashion. She takes a common link that is usually used to
justify the dominance of both women and the land (Merchant 8), and instead of rejecting
the connection, she uses the conﬂation to empower the desert and, by association,
women. Neither women nor natural space is powerless or victimized. Natural space,
after it undergoes this mutation, meets Austin’s social, psychological, and emotional
needs.

Part of the reason this space meets her needs is because it appeals to her concern
that mindless destruction is overtaking the desert. Equally important, though, is that her

transformation of natural space revises femininity and feminine space. Austin expresses

 

success in natural space depends upon the harvesting of that space’s resources — a metaphorical rape —
that not only destroys the space but also signiﬁes the betrayal of the pastoral fantasy (Lay of the Land 7).
See also Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature. For more recent critiques, see Stacy Alaimo’s
Undomesticated Ground and Karen Warren’s Ecofeminist Philosophy.

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her personal ambivalence about domesticity and its link to patriarchy in her
autobiography, Earth Horizon. She explains that home “shouldn ’t be the place of the
apotheosis of its male members,” and then bitterly documents how her brother dominated
the domestic scene (EH 129). She situates domestic duties as a force that inhibits
feminine self-realization, explaining that her mother “never liked, had genuinely revolted
against the routine of housework” but nevertheless had to complete her housekeeping
tasks before turning to her own work for her church and the Woman’s Christian
Temperance Union (EH 144). Austin’s awareness of the limitations of the cultural
association between women and domesticity plagues her biographically, and negotiating
this linkage acts as a dominant theme in much of her creative work. Stacy Alaimo notes
that constructing space as a strong woman allows Austin to subvert a constrictive
domesticity (66). Natural space becomes feminist space because, unlike domestic space,
it is not dominated by patriarchy and allows femininity to be redeﬁned (Alaimo 83).
Unlike Mary Clavers of Chapter One, Austin’s turn to natural space hinges on her need to
change gender roles; it is more ideological than practical. If, as Gillian Brown argues,
one objective of the cult of domesticity is to dissociate domesticity from women’s bodies
(80), Austin is doubly subversive because she not only rejects home-space but she does
so in a way that emphasizes the female body. But, Austin’s dismissal of domesticity
leads to other complications.

It is difﬁcult to reconcile Austin’s construction of habitability with her tendency
to let the desert-woman destroy men and women alike, especially if her work is
interpreted as feminist. Unless we read feminism as the province of only a particular

kind of woman (in this case, the nature-oriented woman), it is hard to see how Austin’s

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disdain for many women in her text can be interpreted as feminist.45 And Austin is
disdainful. “Did I say somewhere that women mostly hate the desert? Women, unless
they have very large and simple souls, need cover; clothes, you know, and furniture,
social Observances to screen them, conventions to get behind; life when it leaps upon
them, large and naked, shocks them into disorder” (LB 165). Austin’s focus on
domesticity as a form of much-needed protection for women replicates the dominant
culture’s assumption that women are weak and vulnerable and should be protected. Most
women, in other words, should stay inside, literally and metaphorically. Austin positions
domesticity — evoked via the various references to the need for shelter (“cover”; “screen
them”; “get behind”) and solidiﬁed by the necessity of clothes and furniture — as
essentially opposed to the strength of the desert-woman’s natural space. For most
women, the desert-woman is a rival, not a habitable space. This rivalry crosses racial
boundaries, too. The Indian women of her stories cannot understand “the effect of their
familiar clear space and desertness upon the white man adventuring in it” but the “vast
impersonal rivalry of desertness” affects them just as much as it does white women (LB
175). While Indian women may not need the “shelter” of conventional domesticity,
Austin illustrates through her stories of Tiawa and Turwhasé that the desert still beats
them in any competition for masculine affection. According to Austin, most women,

regardless of race, cannot handle the desert-woman any better than men can. Her

construction of habitability relies not on spatial, not sexual or racial, difference.

 

45 The idea that feminism is the province of only a limited group of women (namely white, middle to upper
class women) is one that troubles the feminist movement as a whole, and the “second wave” of feminism
tried to address this issue by grappling with the signiﬁcant differences between women instead of focusing
on a “universal woman.” Austin’s idea of difference between women is overtly spatial (as opposed to
being based on race, class, or sexual differences): women are different based on their identiﬁcation, or lack
thereof, with domesticity and domestic space.

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When Austin transforms space by giving it a body she uses this ﬁgure to
introduce the idea of competitive habitability. More speciﬁcally, the desert-woman
enables habitability within natural space and, in the process, forecloses the possibility of
habitability within domestic space. Austin exhibits a strong distrust of home throughout
her text. For example, the story “The Last Antelope,” suggests that the tragic death of the
last antelope is caused by a misplaced trust in home. The story begins with a description
of the reciprocal relationship between the shepherd, Little Pete, and the antelope; the two
share “companionship without speech” and “understand one another” (LB 191). They
bond over the course of years of living in the same territory, until their idyll is interrupted
by a homesteader who approaches the land and its inhabitants with “a love of mastery,
which for the most part moves men into new lands, whose creatures they conceive given
over into their hands” (LB 192). Predictably, the homesteader shoots the little antelope
without even the briefest moment of consideration or guilt. What is signiﬁcant about this
story is Austin’s description of the antelope’s demise: “In the mean time the last antelope
came lightly and securely by the gully, by the black rock and the lone juniper, into the
Ceriso. The friendliness of the antelope for Little Pete betrayed him. He came with some
sense of home, expecting the ﬂock and protection of man-presence” (LB 193).

“Sense of home” here leads to betrayal of trust, a false sense of security, violence,
and death. Grammatically, it is the “ﬁiendliness. . .for Little Pete” that betrays the
antelope, but the real problem is that the antelope fails to differentiate between friendly
humans and unﬁiendly ones. Austin combines her explicit critique of the homesteader

with an implicit critique of a trust in both “home” and the “protection of man-presence.”

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Neither of these things offers adequate protection, despite Little Pete’s good and noble
intentions.

Austin’s mistrust in home manifests in other stories as well. For example, “The
Readjustment” is about a woman’s ghost that haunts her old home, and “The House of
Offence” tells the (unfortunate) story of a brothel. The story ends with the relief that this
home burns to the ground. But it is in the story “The Return of Mr. Wills” that it
becomes clear that habitability in this narrative is competitive. As in “The House of
Offence,” “The Return of Mr. Wills” tells about the destruction of home space. This
story follows the narrative structure of many of the others in this collection: a man comes
to the desert, “loses” himself, and along the way destroys his family. Mr. Wills, the
narrator assures the reader, is not a bad person, or even a bad husband; the only “real
trouble” with him is that “he should never have moved West” (LB 181). But he does.
And he drags Mrs. Wills and the little Wills children after him. Once he gets out West,
he falls prey to the siren song of the desert/woman.

Austin’s presentation of the desert’s reaction to the Wills betrays her own
misogyny, and gynophoby, though, because the desert does not harm Mr. Wills but
instead targets Mrs. Wills and her children:

The only visible mark left by all this was on Mrs. Wills. . .It seemed as if
the desert had overshot him and struck at Mrs. Wills, and Richard Wills,
Esther Wills, Benjy Wills, and the youngest Wills, who was called
Mugsey. Desertness attacked the door-yard and the house; even the
cabinet organ had a weathered look. . .Mrs. Wills’ eyes were like the eyes

of trail-weary cattle; her hands grew to have that pitiful way of catching

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the front of her dress of the woman not so much slattem as hopeless. (LB

183)
The language of violence suggests a willful victimization that has only been alluded to
before. Desertness “attacks” the innocent Mrs. Wills and all of the individual Wills
children. Signiﬁcantly, the desert invades the space of the home — it creeps up the walk
into the “door-yard and the house.” It does not stop there, but rather continues into the
house, eroding everything including “even the cabinet organ.” Before this narrative, the
desert attacked women through their love of men who desired the desert. In this story,
the desert attacks women by destroying their space and introduces the idea that home, if
conceived of as related to domestic space, is opposed to the privileged natural space of
the desert. Furthermore, women who do not ally themselves with the desert will be
punished accordingly.

Austin’s presentation of Mrs. Wills’s actions after her husband leaves the house
challenges my interpretation, though, because once Mr. Wills departs, Mrs. Wills
renovates her ailing domestic space. Mrs. Wills’s ability to accomplish this through the
absence of her husband suggests that the lack of domestic satisfaction is not due to the
desert’s mischief at all, but rather the fault of the masculine presence:

This was about the time that she was able to have the sitting-room
repapered and put up the lace curtains. And the next spring the children
planted roses in the front yard... She was not pining for Mr. Wills; the
desert had him —— for whatever conceivable use, it was more than Mrs.

Wills could put him to — let the desert keep what it had got. (LB 185)

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The new wallpaper and lace curtains, along with the roses in the front yard are literal
manifestations of a restored habitability for the Willses. They can live comfortably and
safely in their home, free from the oppression of Mr. Wills’s foolishness or the desert-
woman’s disdain for household niceties. Remodeling represents a sort of rebirth; the
transformation of space is both cause and effect of a newfound contentment. Mrs.
Wills’s redecoration should not be considered merely superﬁcial or as an attempt to meet
domestic regulations. Instead, it bolsters Mrs. Wills and indicates her strength, literally
and spiritually. She loses her “trail-weary cattle” eyes and, “She ﬁlled out, grew
stronger, had a spring in her walk” (LB 184).

Unfortunately, the desert rematerializes in the form of Mr. Wills, and habitability
within the domestic sphere is once more eradicated. One might think that Mr. Wills’s
return is the problem, but Austin’s description suggests otherwise: “I saw Mrs. Wills
quiver, and her hand went up to her bosom as if some one had struck her. I have seen
horses start and check like that as they came over the Pass and the hot blast of the desert
took them fairly. It was the stroke of desolation” (LB 185). The simile of the horses in
the face of the “hot blast of the desert” locates the cause of Mrs. Wills’s horror ﬁrmly in
the desert. Later in the story, the narrator explains that Mrs. Wills simply did not have
the energy to ﬁght the desert that Mr. Wills had brought in “on his back.” Though Mrs.
Wills knows that the desert should be “dealt with as a woman and a wanton” (not a
“place on the map”), since the desert is not literally a woman, she cannot divorce her
husband (LB 186). The desert-woman reduces Mrs. Wills to an animal-like state, for the
second time. Again, we are reminded that the desert skips over Mr. Wills and takes

“Mrs. Wills in his room.” And to no good effect: “As the weeks went on you could see a

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sort of dinginess creeping up from her dress to her hair and her face, and it spread to the
house and the doorway” (LB 186). The desert-woman’s dirt and sand literally takes over
not only Mrs. Wills but Mrs. Wills’s hard-earned domestic space, tingeing all of it with
“dinginess.” In the ﬁnal irony of the story, Mr. Wills remains oblivious to his wife’s
afﬂiction. He, in fact, “enjoyed the improved condition of his home, though he missed
the point of it... He didn’t want any more of the desert. Not he. ‘There’s no place like
home,’ said Mr. Wills, or something to that effect” (LB 186). Once again, the invocation
of “home” is a betrayal of sorts because the reader knows that “home” is exactly what
this house is not for Mrs. Wills and her children. Mrs. Wills’s narrative shows that
although the desert may be a site of “feminist possibility” for some women, for others
clearly it is not.

Beverly Hume’s contention that “The Return of Mr. Wills” is a feminist story
actually supports my position instead of refuting it. She writes, “Mrs. Wills could do this
[become an independent woman], Austin implies, by aligning herself with the inhuman
but feminine ‘Powers’ of ‘desertness’ and against those cultural or gender ‘obligations’
that have previously constrained her” (407). The fact that Mrs. Wills can only become
“independent” by identifying herself with the desert is precisely the problem. Women are
doubly punished by Austin’s privileging of natural space in this instance: Mrs. Wills is
ﬁrst restricted by the patriarchal structuring of domesticity and then punished for this
restriction by the desert-woman. In many ways, Austin intemalizes the masculine
derision for domesticity and femininity, rather than challenging the very grounds of the

natural/domestic, masculine/feminine dichotomies.

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If, however, we read Austin’s narratives from a spatial perspective, the creation of
the desert-woman becomes less about gender and more about the creation of a healthier,
more sustainable subject-space relationship. Read spatially, the creation of the desert
woman is a method of writing to “save” space. Austin’s work in The Land of Little Rain
establishes a precedent for linking writing with protecting space. For the narrator of The
Land of Little Rain, ethical implications are inextricable from the process of writing about
space. She explains, “And I am in no mind to direct you to delectable places toward
which you will hold yourself less tenderly than I. So by this fashion of naming I keep
faith with the land and annex to my own estate a very great territory to which none has a
surer title” (LR 4). A twofold argument emerges from this statement: Writing about
space the wrong way could endanger that space, and writing about space the right way
“keep[s] faith with the land.” Her description of the desert could be dangerous if it
tempts the reader to visit the place she depicts, particularly if that visitor has less than
noble intentions, since visiting could easily lead to destroying. By refusing to disclose
the exact location, then, Austin prevents potential destruction. At the same time, she
feels compelled to describe the land as accurately as possible, suggesting that part of
saving space is recognizing and depicting it as it is, so to speak.

Writing, then, can protect and save space in two ways. First, it saves space by
protecting it from danger. The second way is more akin to Heidegger’s idea of saving
space because it appeals to the need to protect the “essence” of space. What seems like a
straightforward case of gynopomorphization is actually more complex. Austin does
gynopomorphize space, in the literal sense of the word: she gives a nonhuman entity a

(feminine) human form. But she does not do so in the pejorative sense. Often when the

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term appears in (ecocritical) criticism, it indicates a human arrogance toward nonhuman
nature and an inability (or unwillingness) to acknowledge that there is anything
signiﬁcant that is separate from the human. In Austin’s case, though, she gives space a
human form because she believes that (natural) space is an active, important entity. To
convey that conviction, she turns space into a. form that her readers will recognize as a
subject. Austin anticipates a dilemma that contemporary ecofeminists still face — how
can nature be represented as something “morally considerable,” as Karen Warren puts it,
without resorting to thinking of nature solely in terms of human beneﬁt? Warren
proposes that it requires “a willingness on our part to see nonhuman animals and nature
as subjects, as active participants in our worlds, as not mere things (mere resources,
properties, or commodities), as deserving of our care and attention” (76). Donna
Harraway’s observations seems particularly apt to Austin’s desert-woman, “Ecofeminists
have perhaps been most insistent on some version of the world as active subject...
Acknowledging the agency of the world in knowledge makes room for some unsettling
possibilities, including a sense of the world’s independent sense of humor” (593). The
difﬁculty comes in when these ideas are represented concretely. That is, what does space
look like when it takes the form of an “active participant in our worlds”? What does it
look like when it has “agency”? In Austin’s case, space as a subject with agency looks a
lot like a woman (who also happens to look a lot like Austin) (Pryse xxix).

Creating the desert-woman allows Austin to dictate the kind of subject-space
relationship that leads to habitability. Habitability emerges for characters who are able to
ally themselves with the powerful desert-woman and respect the strength of the desert

rather than resisting it. The Walking Woman, in “Walking Woman,” for example, walks

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all around the desert, in and out of herder’s camps, past potentially unsavory prospectors,
and “through all this she passed unarmed and unoffended” (LB 256). “Mrs. Walker” as
she is known, is exactly the kind of woman who does not hate the desert and who is not
looking for domestic habitability. She is not governed by the claustrophobic strictures of
domesticity, much like the desert-woman is not dominated by patriarchal structures.
“She was the Walking Woman. That was it. She walked off all sense of society-made
values, and, knowing the best when the best came to her, was able to take it” (LB 261).
She does not have to live according to the domestic spatial regulations that control many
of her unfortunate female counterparts. She does have to “keep” a house or tend to a
husband. She accepts the truth of the desert—woman — that there is no such thing as
stability or permanence (LB 261), and that the process of inhabiting space necessitates
living with discomfort, insecurity, and even death. She does not try to ﬁght the desert-
woman. Instead she walks into habitability.

Little Pete (of “The Last Antelope”) also ﬁnds habitability through allying himself
with the natural space around him. “He communed with the huddled hills, and held
intercourse with the stars. . .he looked a faun or some wood creature come out of pagan
times” (LB 188-9). Little Pete, like the Walking Woman, understands space properly.
The emphasis on conversation suggests that Little Pete views his relationship with the
space around him as reciprocal. He does not try to dominate space, but relates to it
instead as a humble dweller, to the point that he begins to become indistinguishable from
the space around him (LB 192). His respect and goodwill toward natural space does not
save him from grief; he is still bereft when the homesteader kills his friend the antelope.

But Little Pete understands this and accepts that, “In any conﬂict with the immutable

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forces the human is always the underdog, and when the struggle is sharp enough to be
dramatic, he wins death mostly; happiest if he gets out of it some dignity for himself and
some sweetness for his ﬁiends to remember” (LB 195). Thus he is able to live in
harmony and happiness without being victimized by the desert-woman.

Walking Woman and Little Pete are more mobile than stationary, and they have a
homeless habitability. Part of Austin’s goal is to separate the idea of home (which is
always associated with domesticity for her) from the idea of habitability (though she does
not use that term). She uses the desert-woman to show that habitability can emerge
through the dismissal of home. Reading Lost Borders spatially reveals that, in the
creation of habitability, gender matters less than the appropriate (as deemed by the
narrator/author) subject-space relationship. Subjects, regardless of gender, who are
willing to forgo dominating space or desiring domesticity are granted habitability.
Subjects who are not able to relinquish these things must suffer the consequences. Like
J ewett, Robinson, and Morrison, Austin privileges movement, ﬂexibility, and transience
over permanence and stability. But, unlike the authors discussed in the previous chapter,
Austin is incapable of divorcing home from domesticity, and domesticity remains
inextricable from and complicit with patriarchy and conventional gender roles. She
therefore cannot recuperate either term. Seeking home within domesticity collides with
the act of domestication, and the desert-woman punishes both with equal verve.

Austin shares ecocriticism’s, ecofeminism’s, and Heidegger’s fundamental
principle that habitability should be premised on saving space. Moreover, all three tend
to agree with Austin’s implicit argument that space is best saved by altering conceived

space. Yet, Austin’s habitability does not ﬁt easily into ecocritical, ecofeminist, or

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Heideggerian paradigms. Reading her from an ecocritical perspective obscures the
important work she is doing with gendered space; but she is not wholly ecofeminist
either, since she inverts binary oppositions instead of dismantling them. She diverges
from Heidegger because she dissociates building from saving. She also questions the
connection between building and dwelling, which is integral to Heidegger’s idea of
dwelling. She implies that building is entangled with domestication and domesticity
(which is at the root of the spatial crisis for Austin) and intentionally roots her
habitability in not building. Austin’s homeless habitability identiﬁes, and then revises,
Heidegger’s assumption that building is innocuous.

Austin afﬁrrns the importance of saving space while simultaneously altering the
dominant assumptions about how saving could and should occur. Terry Tempest
Williams takes the same metaphor — space as woman —— and uses it to save space, but in

a way that is quite distinct from Austin.

Save Yourself — Save Space
In terms of genre, Terry Tempest Williams also falls into the category of nature writing
and, like Austin’s Lost Borders, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place is
told from the perspective of a ﬁrst person narrator who is synonymous with the author.
In this mix of memoir and essay, Williams traces the loss of her mother to cancer and the
simultaneous loss of the Bird Refuge in Utah to the ever-rising Great Salt Lake. The
subject-space relationship that leads to ecological habitability in this text is not
remarkable — it is similar, more or less, to the subject-space relationship that leads to

ecological habitability in almost any nature writing text one picks up. But this very lack

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of remarkability is one of the reasons that I think it is important to discuss this text’s
construction of habitability; it provides a paradigmatic model of ecological habitability
that is created through linking the subject and space and a model of the ideal, “safe”
subject. As in Austin’s Lost Borders, subjects who are granted habitability are those who
respect and feel affection for space and are willing to embrace his or her innate
connection and bond with space.

Yet, Williams’s notion of the subject-space relationship conﬂicts with Austin’s in
many ways. The most signiﬁcant difference is how they use the (female) body-space
connection to produce habitability: Williams’s impulse to ﬁgure the desert as a woman is
pragmatic and designed to change the way the subject lives and acts toward space. She
attempts, in other words, to change the subject’s lived and perceived space. Austin, on
the other hand, creates the desert-woman to realign power dynamics; she tries to modify
conceived space. Williams wants the subject to feel space differently, and Austin wants
them to think about space differently. There are other important distinctions, too.
Williams transforms space so that it is inseparable from the subject, whereas Austin
makes it clear that often the subject is opposed to space and vice versa. While Austin’s
text hinges on competition and conﬂict, Williams’s essay collection emphasizes balance
and harmony. Austin critiques domesticity and home, while Williams presents natural
space as largely indistinct from home space.

9, ‘6 9, ‘6

Williams description of the desert as a site of “refuge, peace, serenity,” and

“grace” suggests that she views natural space as intertwined with domestic space.46

Historically (and rhetorically), these terms have been associated with the ideal home.

 

46 While Williams integrates natural and domestic space, Sarah McFarland aptly points out that Williams
privileges the former (45).

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Writing natural space as home allows Williams to erase the boundaries between the
domestic and the natural and to emphasize the interconnections between the subject,
space, and the nonhuman inhabitants of space. She explains, “There are other languages
being spoken by wind, water, and wings. There are other lives to consider: avocets,
stilts, and stones. Peace is the perspective found in patterns... We are no more and no
less than the life that surrounds us... My serenity surfaces in my solitude” (29). Giving
“wind, water, and wings” language removes the privilege humans are traditionally given
as conscious, verbal beings. In place of hierarchical relationships, “patterns” surface in
which “others” are intertwined with self. Through the promise of “peace” and “serenity,”
Williams privileges the subject who recognizes the mutuality of the subject-space
relationship.

Unlike Austin’s model of the subject-space relationship in which often the two are
opposed and competing, Williams presents the subject and space as intertwined. When
Williams invokes the desert-woman, the desert does not “get” its inhabitants; it saves
them. She gives space a body so that it can protect her own body:

And they [dunes] are female. Sensuous curves — the small of a woman’s
back. Breasts. Buttocks. Hips and pelvis. They are the natural shapes of
Earth. Let me lie naked and disappear. Crypsis.

The wind rolls over me. Particles of sand skitter across my skin,
ﬁll my ears and nose. I am aware only of breathing. The workings of my
lungs are ampliﬁed. The wind picks up. I hold my breath. It massages

me. A raven lands inches away. Iexhale. The raven ﬂies. (109)

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Visually, Willaims’s desert-woman is very similar to Austin’s image: the ﬁgures are
curvy and sensuous. Both authors highlight the femininity of the desert through the
emphasis of signs of fertility. The key difference in their use of a female desert lies
within the term “crypsis.” Crypsis, the method by which an animal blends into its habitat
either to avoid predators or to sneak up on prey, suggests a process that is meant to
facilitate survival. Imagining the desert as a female body functions in a similar practical
way. It creates a space in which the narrator can hide, a space where she can ﬁnd
(temporary) refuge and safety. When the rolling hills become breasts, hips, and buttocks,
they resemble her own curves, and are thus better able to camouﬂage her. This
transformation of space becomes a simultaneous transformation of self, literalized by the
shift from the subject viewing space to the subject becoming and being space. This brief
moment of union is also a type of habitability, if only a momentary one, because the
narrator imaginatively mutates the space so that it better meets her own psychological,
and especially emotional, needs.

Whereas Austin’s desert-woman animates space and demands that her characters
(and readers) think about space differently — as an active entity rather than an empty
container — Williams’s desert woman is designed to make characters and readers feel
differently about space. The shift between paragraphs embodies the transition from
thinking to feeling. In the ﬁrst, the narrator imagines and thinks the space into a woman,
and once this is accomplished, the second paragraph moves to the body. The mind is left
behind and the body becomes dominant — the ears, nose, the lungs, the subtle inhalation
and exhalation. Sensation replaces thought; the imaginative counters the concrete. Lived

and perceived space replaces conceived space.

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For Williams, emphasizing the way the subject feels space saves space because
affective connections to space lead to more appropriate, sustainable relations with space.
The narrator embodies this logic because her dedication to saving space originates from
her affective connection to the desert. As illustrated above, part of her connection to the
desert is a felt-connection. In a Stegnerian vein, another part of her attachment to the
desert is rooted in her familial history: “Genealogy is in our blood. As a people and as a
family, we have a sense of history. And our history is tied to land... Our attachment to
the land was our attachment to each other” (14-15). Here the link between the subject
and space emerges as both felt and thought, as part of the “blood” and as part of history.
Because the narrator feels this attachment, because she is so intimately related to the land,
she is also compelled to think about it in terms of mutual relationships rather than
hierarchical ones (which is where she diverges from Stegner).

The narrator presents “thinking” and “feeling and thinking” space as the
difference between environmental destruction and environmental protection. This
distinction emerges through two parallel passages about “blank spots” on the map. When
space is thought, “A blank spot on the map translates into empty space, space devoid of
people, a wasteland perfect for nerve gas, weteye bombs, and toxic waste. The army
believes that the Great Salt Lake Desert is an ideal place to experiment with biological
warfare” (241 ). Within conceived space, blankness equals opportunity, the potential to
“ﬁll” space. As geographer J. B. Harley points out, blank spots on “maps g[i]ve much
unwitting psychological support to the idea of boundless available land awaiting
occupation. The maps also foster[ed] the image of a dehumanized geometrical

space. . .whose places could be controlled by the coordinates of latitude and longitude”

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(187). The logic of this argument is that when space is experienced only through
thought, only through conceived space that is embodied in the form of the map, the
ethical ramiﬁcations of one’s actions in space are negligible, if not irrelevant. At the very
least, space is not saved in the sense that it is thought of as only an empty container that
can be (ab)used at will. Thinking space, without feeling it, distances the subject from
space. This (conceived) separation leads to policies like the United States government’s
decision to test nuclear weapons in the deserts of Nevada and Utah: “When the Atomic
Energy Commission described the country north of the Nevada Test Site as ‘virtually
uninhabited desert terrain,’ my family and the birds at Great Salt Lake were some of the
‘virtual uninhabitants’” (287). Williams’s embittered recollection of the sight of a
mushroom cloud on the horizon becomes all the more poignant when she, and the reader,
realizes the practical ramiﬁcations of an overemphasis on conceived space.

Williams, as a subject who feels and thinks space, approaches the exact same
phenomenon —— blank spots on the map — differently. She too views blank spots as
opportunities. But it is an opportunity for the subject to interact with space, not simply to
act upon it: “A blank spot on the map is an invitation to encounter the natural world,
where one’s character will be shaped by the landscape. To enter wilderness is to court
risk, and risk favors the senses, enabling one to live well” (244). By emphasizing that
this sort of experience “favors the senses,” Williams reminds her reader that blank spots
are best experienced through the body, not just through the mind. Feeling appropriately
about space, in other words, initiates thinking appropriately, which in turn, prompts

acting appropriately. Of course, what is appropriate is subjective. Within this narrative,

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however, what is appropriate is saving space through thinking and feeling that the
subject-space relationship is mutual.

Williams constructs the subj ect-space relationship in a way that fuses saving
space and saving the subject. That is, to save the subject, one ﬁrst has to save space. The
necessity of viewing the subject and space as entwined emerges through the narrative
thread of cancer. Williams’s text is about place attachment but it is also about her
mother’s bout with cancer. The way these two narrative strands intersect is through
Williams’s conviction that her mother’s (and her other female relatives’) cancer is caused
by environmental contamination (283). The “greed and hate and lust” of Austin’s
“hoodoo” embodies itself in the form of nuclear bombs in Williams’s narrative that leave
behind a residue of deadly contamination that inﬁltrates human and nonhuman
inhabitants of the desert. Far more dangerous than Austin’s hoodoo, nuclear radiation
presents a similarly intangible threat that is difficult to trace.

The immediacy and severity of the threat of nuclear radiation dictates Williams’s
approach to gender in this text, especially in terms of her use of the female body-space
connection. The relationship between the female body and space transcends metaphor in
Williams, and in this way, her work intersects with the more activist branch of
ecofeminism.47 Mary Mellor’s argument that the biological female body bears a
disproportionate burden for environmental degradation (viii) sheds light on the character
of Williams’s claims. Mellor’s contention is important because it draws attention to

sexual, rather than gender, differences. Mellor argues that women are more susceptible

 

47 Noél Sturgeon’s introduction to Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political
Action provides an excellent analysis of the interrelated character of theoretical and activist ecofenrinism.
She argues that despite the inherent connections between the two aspects of ecofeminism, American
ecofeminism is largely theoretical (7).

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— because of biological differences — to environmental pollution and contamination.
This vulnerability manifests itself in everything from miscarriages to contaminated breast
milk to breast cancer (Mellor 2). Williams’s approach to her family’s disproportionate
rate of breast cancer diagnosis follows similar logic: “Children growing up in the
American Southwest, drinking contaminated milk from contaminated cows, even from
the contaminated breasts of their mothers, my mother, members, years later, of the Clan
of the One-Breasted Women” (Williams 283). At a practical level, then, at least for
Williams, the safety of natural space affects women’s bodies more than it does men’s
bodies; hence, it becomes a women’s issue.

Williams takes the relationship between biological womanhood and
(contaminated) space and puts it in terms of gender in hopes of inspiring women to take
action. She explains, “The women couldn’t bear it any longer... A contract had been
made and broken between human beings and the land. A new contract was being drawn
by the women, who understood the fate of the earth as their own” (288). She closes her
text with the narrative of how these women enter the Nevada Test Site in protest of
nuclear testing; soldiers arrest them for trespassing and, as punishment, drop the women
off in the middle of the desert. Williams ends the text by invoking the desert as “home.”
“The ofﬁcials thought it was a cruel joke to leave us stranded in the desert with no way to
get home. What they didn’t realize was that we were home, soul-centered and strong,
women who recognized the sweet smell of sage as ﬁrel for our spirits” (290). The ﬁnal
image of women “at home” in the desert reinforces the bodily connection Williams
establishes between the subject and space. It reminds the reader that saving the self

entails saving space and vice versa. The image serves a practical purpose as well: it

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inspires women to take concrete environmentalist action. The desert is habitable for
Williams, and her fellow protestors, because she wants to save it in both literal and
ﬁgurative ways. In addition, it links Williams to de Certeau’s idea of habitability because
the women mutate their oppressor’s punishment so that it works to their beneﬁt.

Williams’s literary representation of the subject-space relationships leaves her
vulnerable to a certain amount of critique. First, Williams’s can be interpreted as arguing
that women are somehow inherently closer to nature, or that they are more
environmentally conscious than are men. In other words, Williams can be tied to affinity
ecofeminism, which is the most disparaged strain of ecofeminist thought (Slicer 49). Part
of the reason feminists and other scholars are so quick to dismiss afﬁnity ecofeminism is
based on the argument that it is essentialist. In the case of Refuge, though, Noel
Sturgeon’s argument about the role of essentialism in ecofeminism seems especially
pertinent. She contends that “strategic essentialism” can have “positive oppositional
ends,” and that, furthermore, is sometimes necessary to meet concrete political goals (10;
9).48 Williams uses the connection between femininity and space to inspire her readers to
feel space differently and to act on those feelings; she does not suggest that women have
an exclusive and privileged relationship with nature.

Williams’s work can also be criticized because it is “too personal.” Dana Phillips,
for example, characterizes contemporary nature writing’s interest in this kind of personal
relationship with space as “too selfish” (195, emphasis his), and in the sense that the

subject is given just as much, if not more, weight as space in this text, I would agree with

 

48 She premises her argument on the observation that the feminist critique of essentialism stems from a
concern about the “unequal power relations” that undergird some essentialist claims. Essentialism does not
always work this way, however, and therefore itself is not the problem. It should not be treated as “a sin
nor a permanent mark of unexamined prejudice nor an enduring implication in domination” (9).

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Phillips. But his accusation seems somewhat irrelevant in this case, since Williams
attempts to erase the distinction between the subject and space in the ﬁrst place. That is,
Williams argues that habitability is borne out of recognizing the reciprocal nature of the
subject-space relationship. Self is not necessarily distinct from space, so it is misleading
to think about an emphasis of self as being different from an emphasis of space, at least
within the framework of this text.

Williams’s text interprets saving space concretely; writing habitability means
inspiring subjects to take political action to change their living space. Williams does not
challenge the concept of dwelling; she uses an affective register to draw attention to some
of the subtle implications already present in Heidegger’s work. Heidegger, despite the
seemingly abstract nature of his writing, highlights the importance of concrete, everyday
life in space. Williams’s attempt to address the contamination of the Southwest through
the venue of writing is very much aligned with Heideggerian principles. She emphasizes
the body and affect in a way that Heidegger does not, but again, she does not signiﬁcantly
trouble his formulation of dwelling in the way that Austin does. Rather, she reminds her
reader — and Heidegger’s —— that the question of the subject’s relation to space needs to
be ﬁrmly grounded in the realities of everyday life.

For both Austin and Williams, a habitable relationship with space relies on the
subject being incorporated into space in some capacity. If we think about it in terms of
spatial transformation, Austin mutates space by making it into a strong woman,
impervious to environmental damage, and Williams transforms the desert into a maternal

reﬁrge that commands caretaking. In both cases, the authors write a body for space. The

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ﬁnal text I examine, Ehrlich’s Islands, the Universe, Home, takes a different approach —

space transforms into food, so that it can be taken into the body.

Eating Space
“Don’t go! I’ll eat you up I love you so!” — Monster to Max, Maurice
Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are
Gretel Ehrlich’s collection of essays, Islands, the Universe, Home, differs from Austin
and Williams’s nature writing texts because she interrogates “space” — what is is, how it
functions, and how it shapes the psyche and identity — instead of focusing on “nature.”
Geographically, Ehrlich moves from Wyoming to California to Japan, and this diversity
allows her to reﬂect on the inﬂuences and effects of space on her own life. Like Austin
and Williams, Ehrlich’s habitability hinges on the connection between the body and
space. But, Ehrlich neither thinks nor feels space. Instead, she combines the two when
she foregrounds how the imagination negotiates the relationship between the body and
space. Ehrlich’s habitability operates in the realm of lived space, which integrates
Austin’s emphasis of conceived space and Williams’s accentuation of perceived space.
In a manner reminiscent of Austin and Williams, Ehrlich locates the cause of
enviromnental destruction in an inappropriate relationship between the subject and space.
She focuses more on the violent character of the interaction though:
What shocks me so is the detachment with which we dispense destruction
— not just bombs, but blows to the head of the earth, to populations of

insects, plants, and animals, and to one another with senseless betrayal —

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and how the proposed solutions are always mechanistic, as if we could

fabricate the health of the planet the way we make a new car. (45)
Like most ecocritics (though Ehrlich herself is not an ecocritic per se), Ehrlich clearly
believes that if the subject has place attachment, she would not drop bombs so easily; the
lack of feeling for the earth is at the root of destruction. Instead of “feeling” space, the
detached subject tries to repair space without ever considering the true origin of the
problem. In Lefebvrian terms, conceived space dominates perceived space. Because of
the narrator’s clear investment in not destroying the earth, space cannot be habitable
under these conditions. As Williams ﬁnds the nuclear pollution of the desert
unacceptable, Ehrlich believes the mechanistic view of the subject-space relationship is
intolerable. So far, then, Ehrlich’s articulation of spatial crisis closely resembles
Williams’s — the subject does not perceive space, she conceives of it. But whereas
Williams textually transforms space so that it provokes an affective connection, Ehrlich
counters a mechanistic view of space by emphasizing an aesthetic, imagined experience
of space. By privileging taste as the medium of this experience, Ehrlich literalizes a
personal, biological, and organic version of the subj ect-space relationship.

Her aesthetic and biological experience of space emerges in a triad of “eating”

moments. In the ﬁrst, Ehrlich imagines eating the earth:

I stop to eat lunch. Emerson wrote: “The Gautama said that the ﬁrst men

ate the earth and found it sweet.” I eat bologna and cheese and think about

eating dirt. At this moment the mouth frames wonder, its width stands for

the generous palate of consciousness. I cleanse my taste buds with

miner’s lettuce and stream water and try to imagine what kinds of

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sweetness the earth provides: the taste of glacial ﬂour or the mineral taste

of basalt, the fresh and foul bouquets of rivers, the desiccated, stinging

ﬂavor of a snowﬂake. (29)
By internalizing the earth around her, Ehrlich creates an unusual intimacy with nature, a
literal and metaphorical convergence of subject and space. The passage begins with
hunger and the need to stop and eat a sandwich. The narrator’s body and its corporeal
needs frame this moment, even as the physiological effects of food are minimized in
favor of the bodily act of eating. This initially goes unnoticed, as readers are swept into
the literary language of the passage. She begins with the consumption of a sandwich,
draws our attention to her mouth, points out the palate, the taste buds, and the various
ﬂavors involved in literarily consuming the earth and its constituents. The sensual and
aesthetic aspects of eating concern her most.

Ehrlich mediates the uniﬁcation of the individual human body and the body of the
earth through imagination. Her emphasis of the literary underscores the role of the
imagination. A literary quote reminds the reader that this eating is a matter of the
intellect as well as of the body, and the imaginative nature of the experience is
emphasized by the use of both “think” in the third sentence, and “imagine” in the last
one. “Palate,” an apparatus of literal taste, is a “palate of consciousness” a far more
nebulous entity. Furthermore, despite her revelry in the tangible earth, she never actually
eats the dirt, or the even the miner’s lettuce for that matter. Her seemingly intimate
connection with the nature around her is largely imagined. She contemplates this eating
and almost unwittingly pairs images of sweetness (bouquets and snowﬂakes) with

descriptions of death and decay (“foul” and “desiccated”). And lest we forget the

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spiritual implications of eating the earth, she invokes Buddhism, via Emerson, and tells
us “at this moment the mouth frames wonder.” Ehrlich’s initial moment of consumption
sets the stage for understanding the subject-space relationship in terms of biological
needs, aesthetic experience, and spiritual merging.
The potentially mystical and religious implications of eating space are heightened
in the next eating passage, in which she inadvertently swallows a piece of ash from a
massive forest ﬁre:
Sitting cross-legged on my bed of rocks, I open my mouth: an ash alights
on my tongue. I swallow. . .. This is the body of. . ..What have I eaten? A
piece of tree, of ﬁre; a piece of this island universe, or just ash, that solid
residue of combustion? I no longer contemplate the sky; it kneels down on
me: smoke works the landscape into invisibility. (55)
What began as an imagined event (eating dirt) becomes literal when “an ash alights on
my tongue.” Once again, the reader is taken through the process of literal eating —the
opening mouth, the tongue’s action, and the process of swallowing. Her evocation of the
ritual of communion underscores the sacred and ceremonial components of eating,
countering the biological and organic necessity of food. Carolyn Korsmeyer explains
communion as a special kind of eating that is simultaneously about food and not about
food at all: “They [bread and wine] are tasted and swallowed, but not for
nourishment. . .The fact that the sacrament is actually taken into the body indicates the
most direct participation in the mystical reenactment of God’s sacriﬁce, one that the

exercise of any sense other than taste might not render so intimate” (139). Along the

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same lines, Ehrlich’s suggestion of communion strengthens her formulation of the most
habitable subj ect-space relationship as exceptionally intimate.

If nature is sacred (in the same way that bread and wine are sacred) however, it is
also unknown, something that cannot be understood through the intellect or through
literal interpretation. When she asks the rather shocked question “What have I eaten?”
the answer does not lie in any of the things she lists, or at least, that is not the whole of
the answer. In some ways, each of her answers is correct, or at any rate could be correct.
Rather than being a list of choices, as the “or” suggests, this sentence lets the readers
know that this singular piece of ash is all of the above, that the macrocosm is present in
this microcosm. This ash, then, serves as a synecdoche for “the world.” It is telling that
this ash is also part of the smoke that “works the landscape into invisibility.” Instead of
leading to an enlightenment, her consumption of the natural world precedes a blindness.
Blindness operates on two levels, both reinforcing Ehrlich’s preference for lived, over
conceived and perceived, space. First, blindness prevents Ehrlich from experiencing
space primarily through perceived space: she cannot rely solely on her senses to guide
her through space. Seeing, of course, also represents a way of knowing, and blindness
shifts Ehrlich’s epistemology from intellectual, rational knowing to intuitive knowing.

The ﬁnal moment of eating marks signiﬁcant shifts: she explicitly eats space, she
moves from the natural to the domestic, and eating becomes a psychological, rather than
spiritual, endeavor.

A blueprint should be a spiritual proposition: walls and windows become
a form of discipline, an obstruction that liberates space and spirit by giving

it form. Space is viscous and visceral. It can be held in the hand or in the

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mind; a body can curve around it, or a room. It starts right here at my lips.
I gulp it in, and it oxygenates my blood. I swallow space; I wedge it into
my psyche as a way of lifting the roof of the mind off the noise of thought,
so that in the intervening silence, any kind of willful spirit can express
itself. (158)
In the ﬁnal eating moment, she does not eat nature, or any part of it, but rather space.
This passage is unimpeded with negative connotations or doubt; she does not just
imagine eating, or accidentally eat, she “gulp[s]” in space, as if it were a much-needed
drink of water. Or more aptly, a much needed gasp of fresh air. Space, at this particular
moment, begins with ingestion — it “starts right here at my lips.” But this passage does
not make sense in the way that the other moments of eating make sense. In the ﬁrst, she
was eating lunch and contemplating eating more of the earth; this is not unnatural given
that food literally does come from the earth, from the soil. In the second passage, the
eating was unintentional. Only in the third passage does she knowingly, literally, and
willfully gobble up space. Space does not serve the same purpose as food though; it does
not provide nutrition for the body, in the biological sense in any case. Nor is it religious
as it was in the second passage.

The juxtaposition of “blueprint” and “spiritual proposition” highlights the tension
that undergirded the other two passages, as well as the subject-space relationship in
Austin and Williams. The distinction between an experience of space grounded in
conceived space versus one rooted in perceived space becomes explicit. Blueprints
embody conceived space, but Ehrlich hopes to dislodge this kind of thinking about space.

The consumption of space — the gulping, the swallowing, the wedging it in the psyche

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— is meant to be an antidote to the tension between lived and conceived space, a way to
facilitate the uniﬁcation of thinking about space and living in space. It is important to
note that Ehrlich does not propose an inversion of the traditional hierarchy that favors
conceived over perceived space. Habitability depends upon an understanding of space
that can be “held in the hand or the mind.”

Ehrlich’s virtually seamless transition between eating nature and natural space to
eating domestic space expresses the larger tendency in her text to present domestic space
as an integration of “home” space and natural space. When she discusses the house, she
explains that it is “a platform on which the transaction between nature and culture,
internal and external, form and formlessness occurs” (157). She does not conﬂate
domestic space with natural space — they are still different entities — but unlike Austin,
Ehrlich believes they are compatible, not opposed. A house, for Ehrlich, is “not a
defense against nature but a way of letting it in” (158). Ehrlich counters Austin’s
conviction that domesticity necessarily implies a domination of space that is incompatible
with habitability by favoring the body as the most important factor in the subject-space
relationship.49 Ehrlich’s version of habitability emerges when the subject experiences
space through the body and the imagination, regardless of actual location.

Read in conjunction, Ehrlich’s eating moments produce a place-attachment that is
dramatically different from the one posited by ecocritical scholars like Lawrence Buell
and Wallace Stegner (discussed in the introduction). It does not center on the home or
the house, instead favoring the body. It is intensely individualistic. Rather than

depending on history, familial or otherwise, Ehrlich’s sense of place—attachment is

 

49 Changing historical and cultural conditions allow both Williams and Ehrlich to respond differently from
Austin to domesticity. Though the peak of the cult of domesticity had passed by the time Austin was
writing, she (likely) still felt its negative effects far more than either Williams or Ehrlich.

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focused exclusively on the present moment of experiencing place. Most signiﬁcantly,
Ehrlich’s aesthetic attachment to place is not in the least site-speciﬁc. It can be
experienced anywhere, in virtually any kind of setting. It might more aptly be termed
space-attachment. In that way, Ehrlich’s version of habitability more closely resembles
the ungrounded domesticity seen in the second chapter.

It is initially a bit less clear how eating space saves it in the way that writing space
into a strong desert woman or the maternal body does. Ehrlich’s literalizes the inherent
connection between the body and space that Austin and Williams imply. Connecting the
subject and space so intimately is meant to engender an emotional and intellectual
attachment as well. Ehrlich’s explanation is helpful in this regard. “As I begin to walk
again, it occurs to me that this notion of eating the earth is not about gluttony but about
unconditional love, an acceptance of whatever taste comes across my tongue” (29).
Within the frame of this narrative, then, eating is an expression of affection, a willingness
to accept the essence of space and nature, no matter how distasteful. This sentiment is
certainly born out through the general exuberance the eating passages exude. Having this
kind of affection for space will, presumably, lead to a respect for space. In other words,
Ehrlich uses the logic of the epigraph at the beginning of this section —— “I’ll eat you up I
love you so!”

But the reason that line always gets a chuckle from children reading Sendak’s
book is because it is counterintuitive to eat someone, or something, you love. Even as
eating space fosters an intense and intimate attachment and expresses an “unconditional
love,” it also kills the thing that is being eaten. Korsmeyer explains: “Violence, after all,

is necessary if any organism is to ingest another. . .most of what we eat is treated with

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ﬁre; and chewing is designed remorselessly to ﬁnish what killing and cooking began.
People naturally prefer that none of this should happen to them” (194). No one and
nothing wants to be eaten, in other words, since being eaten means being destroyed.
Ehrlich’s emphasis of the physicality of eating supports the argument that by eating
space, she is actually (inadvertently) damaging space, not saving it.

Ehrlich’s model of habitability exposes the violence of subsuming space into the
subject, even if the violence is only on a theoretical level. Diana Fuss, in Identiﬁcation
Papers, says that, “Identiﬁcation operates for the subject as the primary means of gaining
control of the objects outside itself; identiﬁcation is a form of mastery modeled directly
on the nutritional instinct” (3 5). Speciﬁcally, oral ingestion can mediate identiﬁcation
(according to Freud), which means that eating something can be an attempt to identify
with that which is eaten. In this kind of identiﬁcation, the other is literally incorporated
into the subject, and in effect, mastery over the other is obtained because the other
essentially becomes part of the self and ceases to exist. According to Fuss, all
identiﬁcation, whether positive or negative, is essentially violent (3 5). If we think about
the environment as other than the physical body (and indeed some ecocritics have
broadly considered nature an “other Other”), identiﬁcation becomes a way that subjects
imagine their connection to space. By Fuss’s logic imagining that connection as
identiﬁcation (ala eating) creates a subject-space relationship based on violence. At the
very least, Ehrlich’s consumption of space refuses to acknowledge the space as
something other than the self, a refusal that arguably violates Heidegger’s second precept

of saving space.

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Dismissing Ehrlich’s subject-space relationship as violent, however, ignores the
strongly imaginative component of Ehrlich’s subject-space relationship. Furthermore, if
we deem Ehrlich’s attempt to create a healthy habitability a failure, we risk overlooking
that Ehrlich synthesizes Austin’s and Williams’s use of the body to save space. Austin
uses the desert-woman to realign the power dynamics of the land-as-woman metaphor,
while Williams uses a similar metaphor to emphasize the interconnections between the
subject and space. Ehrlich recognizes the violence within the subj ect-space relationship
but still asserts that the subject and space are intertwined and interdependent. She argues
that making space habitable may sometimes involve mutating space to the point of
destroying it, but that this destruction does not necessarily mean that the subject-space
relationship is inadequate or unhealthy. Ehrlich (as narrator) ﬁnds habitability within this
subject-space relationship, despite (or maybe even because of) the violence of eating
space.

Ehrlich’s concentration on the imagination’s role in the subject-space relationship
parallels Heidegger’s rethinking of his concept of dwelling in “. . .Poetically Man
Dwells. . .”. Heidegger uses the line “poetically man dwells” from Hiilderin to ponder
how the subject might dwell through the act of writing. After reﬂection about how poetry
seems inherently opposed to dwelling (a theme that ecocritics and Lefebvre both echo),
Heidegger concludes that poetry actually constitutes dwelling: “Rather, the phrase
‘poetically man dwells’ says: poetry ﬁrst causes dwelling to be dwelling. Poetry is what
really lets us dwell. But through what do we attain to a dwelling place? Through
building. Poetic creation, which lets us dwell, is a kind of building.” A few sentences

later, he says that poetry may be “even the — distinctive kind of building” (213, emphasis

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original). By poetry, Heidegger does not mean the genre of poetry; rather he means the
process of inventing and composing writing. Albert Hofstadter, Heidegger’s translator
explains: “Dicten — to write or compose poetry or other literature; to invent something
ﬁctional, make it up, imagine it. So it gets translated rather as poetry, or the writing of
poetry, and often, where the word ‘poetry’ appears, it is well to remember its sense as a
verb, as naming the act of composing and writing...” (xi).

Austin, Williams, and especially Ehrlich foreground the imagination as a means
of inhabiting space. Ehrlich makes space her own, in a de Certeauian sense, by
imagining it as food and taking it into her body. In Williams (and Austin to a degree),
thinking about space distances the subject from it and engenders destructive practices.
Ehrlich employs the imagination to revise the role of drinking in habitability. Imagining
is a special sort of thinking, and writing is a special sort of imagining. It is a kind of
imagining that, in Heidegger’s words, “. . .does not ﬂy above and surmount the earth in
order to escape it and hover over it. Poetry is what ﬁrst brings man onto the earth,

making him belong to it, and thus brings him into dwelling” (“Poetically” 216).

Healthy Relationships with Space
It is all too easy to ﬁnd fault with the habitabilities these texts imagine. Austin’s
habitability rests on a gynopocentric depiction of space. Williams conﬂates the maternal
body with natural space, reinscribing a metaphor that has been shown repeatedly to be
harmful and, moreover, is gynopocentric as well. Ehrlich metaphorically annihilates
space rather than saving it. If we were to try to synthesize what is wrong with the

subject-space relationships within these narratives, we might best say that they are all

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about the subject, and very little about the space. Even when the subject is consciously
transformed so that it is safe for space, the subject ends up dominating and superceding
space anyway. One solution to this problem is to continue the search for better texts that
provide models of subj ect-space relationships that are balanced and free ﬁom violence,
coercion, and arrogance. The other solution is to use these texts to dislodge the current
understandings of what it means to have a healthy relationship with space.

One characteristic of a “safe” subject-space relationship is that it is close, and this
proximity is embodied by the body merging with space in one way or another. Usually
this union serves another, secondary purpose — it endows space with an importance it is
not normally given. This is most clearly illustrated by Austin’s desert-woman because
transforming the desert into a woman commands respect for space. The concept of home
is generally naturalized (literally) in this kind of relationship, or dismissed entirely.
Austin obviously takes the latter route, but Williams and Ehrlich choose instead to blur
the distinction between domestic and natural space, suggesting that the most habitable
home of all is a blend of the natural and the domestic. Most important to these
characters’s creation of habitability is that they believe they are saving space, rather than
whether they are actually doing it.

The last point helps distinguish between habitability and the similar concept of
dwelling. Habitability can be created even when saving space is undesired, impossible,
or unsuccessful. Heidegger’s dwelling, in contrast, requires that the subject save space.
As quoted earlier, Heidegger argues that humans dwell in that they save the earth (352),
and his phrasing suggests that one cannot truly dwell without also saving space. The

texts I examined in this chapter show that even when the production of habitability is

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undertaken with the objective of saving space, habitability can be achieved even when
space is not saved at all. Austin, Williams, and Ehrlich all try to protect space and
respect it as space, but none of them is ﬁllly able to do so. All these texts, nonetheless,
are successful at creating habitability. In fact, these narratives go so far as to suggest that
the creation of habitability very well may be contradictory to saving space, since
habitability inherently favors the subject and necessitates some sort of transformation of
space.

If we look to these texts to show the “right” kind of habitability, we are inevitably
going to be disappointed. None of the models of habitability produced by these authors is
ideal or even healthy, at least by the standards of (ecocritical) idealists. As I have
mentioned, none of them are fully successful at saving space by the standards of
Heidegger. All of this leads to the question of whether the deﬁnitions of “healthy” and
saving need to be reﬁned. These texts suggest, combined with the texts in the ﬁrst two
chapters, that it is more fruitful to gauge the health and ethics of habitability along a
spectrum, rather as simply healthy or unhealthy. For example, on a spectrum, Austin’s
production of habitability is healthier than Lyman Ward’s because it at least considers the
ethics of the subject-space relationship, rather than assuming that the subject has the
authority to act upon space without consideration of space’s needs. Similarly, these texts
point out that saving space should be deﬁned loosely, just as the “essence” of spacelis
ﬂuid and ever-shifting.

While some fear that accepting less than ideal standards for the subject-space
relationship means that unbridled domination will ensue, these texts argue against that

perspective. Rather, Austin, Williams, and Ehrlich’s texts indicate that even though it is

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impossible to remove power dynamics and violence completely from the subject-space
relationship, even when the subject has the best of intentions, it is still important to
consider the ethical implications of habitability. In the next chapter, I turn to an
explicitly violent form of inhabiting — contemporary haunted house narratives — to
explore the questions of power, control, and violence within the subject-space

relationship that these narratives bring to light.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Haunted Habitability: The Subject and Space in Haunted House Narratives

The ﬁnal chapter of this project turns to an unexpected site to complete the discussion of
habitability — haunted houses. If horror narratives can be read as expressions of social
anxieties about everything from race to gender to class relations,50 haunted house texts
have the capacity to expose spatial anxieties. We can read haunted houses solely as
symbols and manifestations of gender, race, and class, but it is a mistake to ignore the
fact that houses are, above all, a space and often the most intimate human space, aside
from the body. Most obviously, haunted house narratives are haunted by (im)possibility
of meeting the American dream of having a home. What is more surprising is that
haunted house narratives also express an anxiety about something seemingly quite
different — the complications generated by creating habitability within wilderness
spaces.

Haunted houses narratives ﬁgure houses as wilderness spaces that undermine their
inhabitants’s ability to ﬁnd safety, security, and comfort. Instead of gaining the “home-
feeling” Caroline Kirkland seeks in Michigan, characters living in haunted houses are
liable to become feral themselves, sinking into unmitigated violence and promiscuity. As

wilderness narratives, these texts articulate not only the profound ambivalence that

 

50 Carol Clover, in Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, for example,
interrogates how horror ﬁlms critique and expose cultural expectations and assumptions about gender.
Joan Hawkins analyzes how horror (and other “trashy”) ﬁlms expose assumptions about taste, and hence
about class. Dale Bailey argues that haunted house narratives provide a place in which gender, class, and
race can be complicated and critiqued. As members (arguably) of a gothic tradition, it makes sense that
haunted house narratives would be read this way, since gotlric texts are also generally read as either
subversive or symptomatic (Botting 7, 19). If they are treated as subversive, critics claim that the Gothic is
a genre that critiques both conventional social structures and dominant literary paradigms. If they are
treated as symptomatic, one reads them with an eye toward the anxieties these texts manifest, usually
regarding conventional social structures and dominant literary paradigms.

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characterizes the American relationship to natural space (Nash 55) but, more speciﬁc to
this project, they explore the dangers of habitability that have only been alluded to in the
ﬁrst three chapters. In previous chapters, domesticating space has been an essential
ingredient of producing habitability, but in haunted houses, domestic activities sabotage
habitability. To create habitability within the haunted house, the occupant must foster a
relationship very similar to the one discussed in the third chapter; they must accept and
respect space as it is, become personally connected with it, and eventually align the self
with space in order to gain some of space’s power. The consequence of this habitability,
however, is violence and the destruction of other characters. In all of the previous
chapters, habitability has been a goal, and even though sometimes the space produced by
habitability was problematic, habitable space seemed preferable to un-habitable space.
Haunted house narratives suggest, however, that sometimes unlivable space is preferable
to habitable space.

I focus on houses that are not so much haunted as they are animated. In the words
of critic Dale Bailey, the haunted houses I am concentrating on are “sentient and malign”
(5). Biology tells us houses are not alive; they are objects. Physics lays down clear rules
of space; the measurements of the outside of a house, for example, cannot be smaller than
the inside of a house. The haunted houses I discuss in this chapter thwart the laws of
both biology and physics. In truth, it is more apt to call the houses under question
animated rather than haunted, but since they are widely known as “haunted houses” I
retain the term in my analysis. My choice of haunted house texts was based on two
fundamental characteristics: ﬁrst, the haunted house had to be depicted as alive and,

furthermore, the strange events that occurred could not be attributed to a past crime or

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wrongdoing. Secondly, since I am especially interested in how inhabitants convert
(haunted) houses from wild to domestic spaces — how they are settled and made
habitable — I looked for haunted houses in which the inhabitants intended to live. I
narrowed my focus to Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves,5 I Stuart Rosenberg’s The
Amityville Horror, Anne River Siddons’s The House Next Door, Stephen King’s
miniseries Rose Red and its companion text The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer,52 and Robert
Marasco’s Burnt Oﬂerings.

Literary scholarship, with the notable exception of Dale Bailey’s American
Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in Popular American Fiction, has largely
disregarded haunted houses as a distinct genre or trope in literature. Bailey argues that
haunted houses “present deeply subversive critiques of all that we hold to be true ——
about class, about race, about gender, about American history itself” (6). Individual
articles examining haunted texts have tended to favor texts that incorporate ghosts, such
as Toni Morrison’s Beloved or Henry J ames’s The Turn of the Screw. The Derridean
“hauntology” is prominent in the works of many literary scholars, but these discussions

are largely unrelated to my study of animated space because they tend to focus more on

 

51 This overtly “literary” text may seem jarring amongst the other “popular” texts I have chosen to analyze.
N. Katherine Hayle introduces House of Leaves by saying, “Camouﬂaged as a haunted house tale, House of
Leaves is a metaphysical inquiry worlds away from the like of The Amityville Horror” (779). House of
Leaves is “worlds away” from The Amityville Horror in terms of sophistication, breadth and depth
(linguistically, philosophically, and thematically), but it is a mistake to dismiss the haunted house
framework as mere “camouﬂage.” To do so ignores the larger implications of the space-subject
relationship posed by the novel. My analysis does not reject the interpretations of Danielewski’s work that
focuses on the metalinguistic aspects of the text, but I do emphasize the subject-space relationship
portrayed through the ﬁgure of the haunted house.

52 I focus primarily on The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer because it represents the attempt to live in Rose Red,
whereas the miniseries documents the experiences of a group of psychics led by a parapsychologist 4
investigating the paranormal activity in Rose Red during a weekend visit. The pseudo-diary, on the other
hand, charts the original construction of the house from the point of view of Ellen Rimbauer, the wife of
John Rimbauer.

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questions of history.53 While previous work talks about haunted houses as elaborate
metaphors, I depart from this work by exploring haunted houses as literal spaces that are
unlivable and can be made habitable.

Because I intertwine my analysis of these texts, rather than discussing each text
individually, it is helpful to begin with a brief plot summary of each text before turning to
textual interpretation. Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves is arguably the most atypical
haunted house narrative I am exploring.54 Shortly after Will Navidson, Karen Green, and
their two children Chad and Daisy move into the house, it begins to exhibit strange
spatial tendencies, namely that a large black closet (which later morphs into a gargantuan
ever-changing labyrinth) appears and the inside of the house measures larger than the
outside. Like Navidson and Green, the Lutzs, in The Amityville Horror, move to their
new house “High Hopes” intending to solidify the bonds of their family. As in House of
Leaves, though, the house itself quickly thwarts their desires by producing black tar and
ﬂies and, more importantly, slowly driving George Lutz into an insanely violent rage.

The House Next Door diverges from the ﬁrst two narratives because the narrator does not

 

53 History is not unrelated to my work, nor is it even possible (or desirable) to disassociate history from
space. Rather, it is a question of emphasis. Derrida’s concept of hauntology, and most subsequent work
with this concept, have focused on hauntology as an abstract concept linked to time, the gaps between
Being and non-being, and, of course, ontology. Derrida’s ﬁrst mention of the term “hauntology” appears in
Specters of Marx where he posits that hauntology is a “logic of haunting” that is a “staging for the end of
history” (10). Though the ﬁgure of the “haunted house” could certainly be productively analyzed within a
Derridean ﬁamework, my analysis emphasizes the animated, rather than the “haunted,” nature of the space
in haunted house narratives.

54 I call House of Leaves atypical because, rather than following the traditional haunted house formula, this
text is a frame narrative that claims to be discussing and analyzing what is called The Navidson Record
which is supposed to be Will Navidson’s documentary about his unusual house. The frame narrator Johnny
Truant compiles the narrative that is House of Leaves out of a series of notes and existing writing from the
dead, blind man, Zampano. The novel is complete with an impressive number of footnotes from real-life
scholars and critics (ranging from Jacques Derrida and Susan Sontag) along with ﬁctional scholars, all
analyzing The Navidson Record. As if this were not already enough, the text itself begins to ﬂuctuate
spatially midway through the novel, as form and content merge. Each of these elements is more than
worthy of its own analysis, but my own work focuses primarily on the haunted house portion of the text.

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live in the haunted house but rather observes family after family move into the house and
get destroyed in one manner or another. The mini-series Rose Red details a group of
psychics’s exploration of the infamous house Rose Red, built by John Rimbauer at the
turn of the century in Seattle. The house has a history of killing people or simply taking
them into its walls. The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer is a companion text to the mini-series,
supposedly penned by the original mistress of Rose Red, Ellen Rimbauer.55 In it, Ellen
details her growing relationship with her house. Finally, Burnt Offerings depicts the
Rolfe families’ summer vacation in a haunted house. These diverse narratives converge

around the subject’s desire and attempt to make a resistant space habitable.

Some Houses are Born Bad

Haunted houses are frightening because they are unnaturally natural. They defy the
boundaries between domestic and natural space, the wild and the domesticated, subject
and object, animate and inanimate, and conceived and perceived space. They are, as
Shirley Jackson says, “born” not made. These narratives ﬁgure haunted houses as natural
spaces, not as houses at all. In some cases, such as Siddon’s “house next door,” the
house in question seems to be an ideal spatial fusion that merges the natural with the
domestic.

This house was different. It commanded you, somehow, yet soothed you.

It grew out of the penciled earth like an elemental spirit that had lain,

locked and yearning for the light, through endless depths of time, waiting

to be released. It soared into the trees and along the deep-breasted slope

 

55 The text’s author is “Joyce Reardon,” a character from the mini-series. Rose Red fans still question the
true author’s identity, since Stephen King has resolutely denied his involvement in the text.

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of the ridge as though it had uncoiled, not as though it would be built,
layer by layer and stone by stone. I could hardly imagine the hands and
machinery that would form it. I thought of something that had started with
a seed, put down deep roots, grown in the sun and rains of many years into
the upper air. In the sketches, at least, the woods pressed untouched
around it like companions. The creek enfolded its mass and seemed to
nourish its roots. It looked — inevitable. (24)
This house does not just incorporate natural and domestic space, as a Frank Lloyd Wright
house might. Wright’s architecture is known for including a blend of natural features ——
streams, woods, stones — with more traditional domestic space. Haunted houses, on the
other hand, incorporate the domestic and the natural within the very character of their
being. As something that is (metaphorically) born rather than built, the house is
surprisingly organic. It grows; it is released and soars. It is even maternally nurtured by
the “deep-breasted slope.” It may be made from layers of stone, but from an intuitive and
emotional perspective, the domestic space of the house seems more akin to a tree or a
plant. In other words, the house becomes a biological, alive entity. Colquitt, the narrator,
claims that rather than “maintain[ing]” the house next door, it would need to be fed and
watered (34).
Colquitt’s metaphor is important because it is what defuses the possible horror
that is created by an inanimate object being rendered animate. Ernst J entsch (whom
Freud was responding to in his well-known essay on the uncanny) claims that one of the

primary sources of the uncanny is the animation of an object that we know is supposed to

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be inanimate, such as a doll.56

At this point in this haunted house narrative, though, the
house may be natural in the sense of “part of nature,” but it is more akin to a houseplant
than a baby (or any other animated creature, for that matter). By tapping into a
romanticized ethic that equates goodness and innocence with the natural, the potentially
harmful effects are diminished even more, and the hybrid of natural-domestic space
appears ideal. Like the pastoral myth that we see in the ﬁrst chapter, the characters in
this text think that the house next door’s domesticated nature is the ideal setting for
habitability.

The problem is, of course, that the house’s naturalness exceeds metaphor and,
within the world of the text, becomes literal. For Henri Lefebvre, houses are already on
the brink of the natural and the cultural, but haunted houses cross over that dividing
boundary and become natural to the point that they take on animation and biological
ﬁrnctions. Haunted houses are not entirely examples of personiﬁcation though; that is
what makes them so frightening. They are animated but wholly other at the same time;
they are not humans, plants, or animals, but something else. The something else that
supplants the domestic space of the house cannot be tamed, domesticated, or controlled

by humans. Though the “house next door” is described as a domesticated sort of nature,

it is not settled at all — it is a wilderness space. Like the wilderness spaces in Kirkland

 

56 Freud’s concept of the uncanny is nearly a perfect match for haunted houses. Freud himself says that

“As we have seen some languages in use to-day can only render the German expression ‘an unheimlich
house’ by ‘a haunted house.’ We might indeed have begun our investigation with this example, perhaps
the most striking of all, of something uncanny, but we refrained from doing so because the uncanny in it is
too much intermixed with what is purely gruesome and is in part overlaid by it” (222). For a speciﬁc
analysis of the uncanny in architecture (including haunted houses), see Anthony Vidler’s The Architectural
Uncanny and Nele Bemong’s article “Exploration #6: The Uncanny in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of
Leaves” in Image & Narrative (http://www.imageandnarrative.be/uncanny/nelebemong.htm).

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and Stegner’s narratives, haunted houses are positioned as dangerous to the subject
(literally and ﬁguratively) and in need of regulation.

The term wilderness is wildly problematic, as many scholars have noticed.
Roderick Nash suggests that wilderness can be considered as a “state of mind” but prefers
to think about the environment as a spectrum “ranging from the purely wild on the one
end to the purely civilized on the other — from the primeval to the paves.” The rural, or
pastoral, resides in the center of this spectrum (Nash 6). The terms of this spectrum may
be ﬂuid, but even so, houses do not fall on the wilderness end. Wilderness need not be
taken so literally as a thoroughly natural landscape untouched by humans, and the
deﬁnition of wilderness that I ﬁnd more useful in the case of haunted houses dates to
1340. This deﬁnition incorporates the space but also the human reaction to the space:
“Something ﬁgured as a region of a wild or desolate character, or in which one wanders
or loses one’s way; in religious use applied to the present world or life as contrasted with
heaven or the future life” (OED). Wilderness is still used to refer to a particular space or
region, but the important part of the deﬁnition is that it “ﬁgured” to be “wild or desolate.”

House of Leaves exempliﬁes the wilderness aspect of haunted houses because it
“ﬁgures” the space of the house as region that is a wilderness in which one does become
lost within. The ﬁguration of the house as non-domestic, wilderness space is revealed
when the exploration of the mysterious hallway is organized. The people summoned to
take part in the “expedition” are all literal wilderness explorers. The leader of the team,
Holloway Roberts is a “professional hunter and explorer” (Danielewski 80), and his two
companions Jed Leeder and Wax Hook are mountain climbers and guides (Danielewski

81). Will’s choice of companions reveals that the people most suited to explaining the

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inscrutable space of the house are those who are accustomed to exploring the great
outdoors, guiding people up Mount McKinley and through caves. They are experts on
wilderness, not domestic, spaces. Furthermore, the space of the hallway is consistently
compared to vast and unknowable natural spaces. For example, when Wax looks down
the staircase that appears in the hallway and says, “‘It’s so deep, man, it’s like it’s almost

9”

dream like, the narrator continues, “The last comment is actually not uncommon,
especially for individuals who ﬁnd themselves confronting vast tenebriﬁc spaces. Back
in the mid-60s, American cavers tacked the Sotano de las Golondrinas, an incredible
1,092 ft. hole in Mexico’s Sierra Madre Oriental” (Danielewski 85). The analogy of the
cave is apt because while a cave is a naturally occurring phenomenon, and a house a
culturally-occurring one, the space of the hallway is resolutely interior, and Holloway
despairs at his inability to ﬁnd any “indication of an outsideness to that place”
(Danielewski 119). The importance of this space’s inherent ﬂuidity and ﬂexibility should
not be underestimated though. Will’s impulse to treat the house as a wilderness space
emphasizes the mediation the space of the house continuously undergoes. It is
impossible for the reader (and the inhabitants for that matter) to ascertain the “true”
nature of the house because it is constantly being interpreted by Will, by the explorers,
and further by the frame narrator(s). This text continuously reminds the reader that space
is slippery and complex, and that in haunted houses, distinguishing between natural and
domestic space is nearly impossible.

Also indicative of their organic (and dangerous) state is the fact that these houses

seem to be endlessly hungry, in need of biological nourishment. The “House of Leaves”

eats virtually all objects within its midst. In the hallway, the explorers quickly discover

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that something is devouring their markers and food caches, and even their clothing and
gear start to disintegrate. Will says, “‘It looks like it’s impossible to leave a lasting trace

9”

here (162). The ingestion of objects within its walls is only a literal manifestation of
the more important process of “feeding.” The idea that haunted houses need to somehow
gain nourishment from humans is a theme that is constant within the narratives. In House
of Leaves, this tendency is explained in a footnote: “In his essay “Critical Condition”
published in Simple Themes (University of Washington Press, 1995) Brendan Beinhom
declared that Will’s house, when the explorers were within it, was in a state of severe
shock. ‘However, without them, it is completely dead. Humanity serves as its life blood.
Humanity’s end would mark the house’s end’” (134). The house even literally consumes
some people (Holloway and Will’s brother Tom). Humanity in general provides a
necessary sort of nourishment for the house to survive. Colquitt and Walter explain a
similar phenomena in The House Next Door. Like the description in House of Leaves,
the house next door relies on humanity providing it with “primal vitality.” Burnt
Oﬂerings works on the same principle, whereby the house feeds off the anger, pain, and
deaths of the inhabitants (aside from Marian). In Rose Red, too, the house feeds off its
inhabitants (which will be discussed in more detail shortly).

In Rose Red, The Amityville Horror, and Burnt Oﬂerings the tie between domestic
and wild space is less explicit but, nonetheless, there is a persistent conviction that these
houses are alive and capable of acting on their own free will. Rose Red, for example,
continues to expand long after Ellen Rimbauer and her carpenters have disappeared, as

illustrated by two slides of the house, in which the current photo shows a much larger

version of the sprawling Rose Red. The proverbial image of The Amityville Horror

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house is the one in which the house is seen from a distance, red “eyes” glowing
maliciously, as if the house itself is an animate being. Similarly, Burnt Offerings
constantly reminds the reader that the house is coming “back to life.” If haunted houses
are lively, wilderness spaces, the question becomes: What do these texts have to say
about the problem of wilderness? The answer to that question is highly ambiguous
because these narratives are simultaneously demonstrative of a profound distrust of
wilderness and an obsessive, even perverse, interest in its survival.

On the one hand, the hostility these texts portray toward wilderness spaces rivals
that felt by early American pioneers, who believed that wild spaces were liable to induce
immorality and wantonness in its inhabitants (Nash 24). The fear that the wildness of
haunted houses will provoke its inhabitants to act wildly is actualized in these narratives
when the characters eschew their emotional attachments in favor of physical violence and
promiscuity. This idea emerges most explicitly in The Amityville Horror and The House
Next Door, in which the characters are driven crazy by the house and undertake actions
they would not even dream of normally. For example, in The Amityville Horror (the ﬁlm
version),57 the largest threat to the Lutz family is not the house, but rather the house’s
inﬂuence on George. While Kathy puts contact paper in the cupboards and unpacks,
George falls prey to the malignant house. Through a series of real-life shots and dream
sequences of George chopping wood maniacally with his ax, then sharpening that very ax
obsessively, and ﬁnally standing over the bloody body of Amy, Kathy’s youngest

daughter, ax in hand, we see that the real menace involves the dangers and horrors of

 

57 Unless otherwise noted, from now on when I refer to The Amityville Horror, 1 will be referencing the
ﬁlm. The book by the same title, written by Jay Anson, is “nonﬁction” and therefore falls outside of the
scope of my analysis of literary (and ﬁctional) haunted houses because they treat haunted houses as
veriﬁable, “authentic” episodes of supernatural activity, rather than focusing on their cultural implications.
The ﬁlm, on the other hand, while based loosely on the written text, is widely accepted as a ﬁctional text.

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domestic violence. George, who is seemingly mild-mannered and caring before he
arrives at High Hopes, degenerates rapidly once the family moves in, snapping at the
children, and eventually slapping Kathy across the face when she asks him to think about
leaving. Of course, this argument could be reversed, and one could assert that the house
is not the source of the problem at all, but rather that the existing familial tensions are
simply projected onto the house, thus animating it.

Conﬂict between family members is a staple of haunted house narratives, and
frequently the move into the house is premised on the hope that a new place will settle
the prior problems. In House of Leaves, for example, Karen and Will are involved in a
long dispute over his dangerous job as a photojournalist, and Karen hopes that the new
move will help Will live a more regular life. In The Amityville Horror, the tensions are
more pronounced because the family in question is blended. (The children are a product
of Kathy’s ﬁrst marriage.) The idea seems to be that if they move into a new house as a
family they will soon bond and become a true family. Yet, this is clearly not what
happens, and it is no coincidence that when the ﬁssure occurs, it is between those who are
part of Kathy’s biological family and the one who is related only on paper. The haunting
of Amityville could therefore be read as an expression, even a fairly elaborate metaphor,
for the sometimes violently difﬁcult process of divorce, remarriage, and becoming a step-

parent/step-child.58

 

58 It is tempting to read the house in House of Leaves as another intricate psychological projection,
especially since it is argued that the “house’s mutations reﬂect the psychology of anyone who enters it”
(165). This point of view comes from the frame narrative and the response of “some critics.” The reader,
however, knows that while the house might very well be a reﬂection of the self, the house has a startling
material reality that kills and maims those who live within it. If it is a reﬂection of psychology, it is also
something else too — something outside of the human.

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The ﬁlm itself resists this interpretation, however. The house is animated
visually, as most sequences begin with an outside look at the house, the aforementioned
red eyes, or windows, glowing. Furthermore, like the characters, the viewers are
convinced that simply leaving the house will provide at least a partial resolution to the
problem. (The tagline for the ﬁlm is “For God’s Sake Get Out!”) The sense that things
will be different somewhere else might be false, but there is a conviction within the text
that this particular place is toxic, harmful, “haunted.” This narrative’s insistence that the
house itself is responsible for the subject’s problems reminds the viewer that though the
subject and space may be linked they are not reducible to one another.

The House Next Door demonstrates the risks of living in a wilderness more
overtly, since those who live in the house ﬁnd themselves acting out in a particularly
“wild” way. A series of examples will best illustrate this curious and revealing method of
haunting. The ﬁrst couple living in the house, Pie and Buddy Harralson, move out after
Buddy is caught in a naked embrace with his male boss at the couple’s housewarming
party. Pie’s father ﬁrst sees the two, and he collapses from a heart attack, presumably
induced by the shock of his son-in-law’s behavior. Before that night, there is no
indication that Buddy and his boss are not heterosexual. The second couple, the
Sheehans, leave after Anita Sheehan catches her husband Buck having sex with their
prim and proper neighbor, Virginia, once again in the house. Like Buddy, there is no
indication that Virginia is anything but happy with her husband of many years. Anita
descends into a catatonic state as a result of the shock. Even the narrator, Colquitt,
almost has sex with the architect, Kim Dougherty, in the house; they are stopped only by

the murderous rage of her previously kind, thoughtful, and calm husband. The ﬁnal

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couple’s interaction with the house is less explicitly sexual but the most overtly violent.
The Greenes give another ill-fated party where Norman Greene is humiliated when the
entire neighborhood witnesses his daughter losing control of her bowels in the middle of
the kitchen ﬂoor. The ﬁnal act that dooms the Greenes occurs when Norman plans
another party, this time for his university colleagues, and his wife Susan forgets to send
out the Tiffany-engraved invitations. As a result, no one shows up for the party, and
Norman is once again humiliated. That night, Susan shoots her husband, her daughter,
and herself with a shotgun. Susan, of course, has shown no signs of violence before
living in the house next door. The sexual nature of the house’s actions emphasizes the
link between the body and space, albeit hyperbolically, and more speciﬁcally, it shows
how bodily space overwhelms intellectual reasoning. In other words, it shows just how

much perceived space dominates conceived space within haunted houses.

Domestic Resistance
Each of these narratives revolves around the characters trying to create habitability, even
though their enviromnents are clearly un-habitable. For the most part, these efforts focus
on domesticating the house, in one form or another. Like the desert-woman in Mary
Austin’s Lost Borders, the space of the haunted house resists these attempts. The plight
of the inhabitant trying to create home and the ability of the house to resist the
domesticating impulse points to the contradiction in these narratives that I have
mentioned above — that readers and viewers want to see the inhabitants of the house
survive (either by subduing the house or by leaving) and, at the same time, want the

house to resist being dominated.

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In House of Leaves, Will’s response to the physics-defying space of the house is
to explore and then quantify it, but Karen responds by trying to change the energy of the
house using Feng Shui. Books on the subject appear, and she even purchases a number
of “Feng Shui objects guaranteed to change the energy of the home” (Danielewski 62).
F eng Shui attempts to change the energy created by space in order to make it more
livable, comfortable, and healthy for its inhabitants. Karen’s invocation of Feng Shui
attests to her interest in making the house habitable for her family (as opposed to
engaging in exploratory mystery-solving). Karen’s practice of F eng Shui is a kind of
Lefebvrian appropriation — she attempts to modify space to meet human needs, while
still allowing the space to retain many of its original properties.

The house, however, reads Karen’s attempt at appropriation as domination, and it
reacts accordingly. If the house were not haunted, the appropriate placement of F eng
Shui objects would constitute a sort of domestic ritual that, at the very least, would make
the domestic space seem more pleasant and, ideally, create a sort of habitability. But
because the house is haunted and animated, it does not have to respond like a blank page
and accept the attempts to alter its nature. Instead of submitting to Karen’s expectations
and exuding harmonious energy, the house literally eats the F eng Shui objects
(Danielewski 316). The literalization of the house’s resistance to human needs and
desires demonstrates its own status as an animate space that can “talk back.” This
example exposes the underlying assumption of domesticating space that space is an
empty container just waiting for acts of settlement.

Haunted house narratives are organized around gendered space and traditional

assumptions about spatial difference based on gender, so it is no coincidence that Karen

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tries to domesticate the unruly house, while Will organizes an exploratory expedition.
Men may explore and explain haunted houses, but women are ultimately responsible
(within the narrative framework) for making the house livable and safe for the family.
Karen’s Feng Shui is primarily designed to make space safe, not to express anything in
particular about herself or her culture (though, of course, it inevitably expresses cultural
assumptions). It appeals to the primary function of the house as a secure shelter. Her
response is to a speciﬁc spatial malady -— even though there has not yet been a tangible
threat ﬁom the inexplicably large closet, Karen recognizes the potentially menacing
space. At ﬁrst, though, she does not seem to perceive the danger as an actual threat to the
safety of her family. Instead, she perceives of it as a threat to the domestic rituals that she
hoped would help her family bond in their new house. The house effectively denies
Karen the possibilities of domesticity producing a safe haven, a true home. Karen cannot
meet spatial regulations for domesticity because the house is not a malleable space and
cannot be tamed. Moreover, she is unable to use domestic ritual or domesticity to settle
her house. Because Karen can do neither of these things, she is, in effect, punished by
domesticity. In previous chapters, domesticity emerges as a method by which the subject
can create a personal connection with space, but haunted houses show that this method of
connection is ineffective if the space is not blank and open to appropriation.

Like Karen Green, Kathy of The Amityville Horror is presented with an
impossible domestic situation. She is the ﬁrst one to notice the unusual characteristics of
the house. She comforts her son when his hand is caught in a window that mysteriously
slams shut and just as mysteriously refuses to open. She tries (unsuccessfully) to cleanse

the toilet of its inexplicable black tar, and she holds the children after George’s temper

165

frightens them. Ultimately, though, Kathy is uninﬂuenced by the house’s powers except
in the way that the house inﬂuences George, which in turn inﬂuences her. Agency and
the possibility of resisting the domestic powers of this house on any level are denied for
Kathy. George, on the other hand, seems to absorb the house’s malignant spirit, and at its
(implicit) behest, threatens to kill his entire family. Like Karen, then, Kathy is put in an
impossible position with regards to domesticity. Even if she were to successfully meet
all dictates of domestic spatial regulations, it would not be enough. The house simply
cannot be tamed and, regardless of how clean or well decorated it is, it would still try to
kill its inhabitants. Like Karen Green, Kathy is presented with a domestic space that
refuses to be inert or to mold itself to human needs.

The idea of domesticating space is especially appropriate for haunted houses, and
not just because of the importance of domesticity to these narratives. These seemingly
mundane moving-in rituals expose the dual nature of haunted houses (as simultaneously
domesetic and natural space), but more importantly, they call into question the ethics of
creating habitability in wilderness spaces. When domestication refers to domestic space,
it indicates the process of making a home, but when it involves natural space,
domestication is rife with negative connotations. Scholars often associate it with
imperialism, colonialism, and environmental degradation.59 That is because when
natural, “wild” space is domesticated, it generally means that it undergoes drastic
transformation in the name of making it “safe” for those doing the domestication. This
act also involves creating a home, but it does so at the expense of the natural features of

the land, not to mention the human and nonhuman inhabitants. In the case of haunted

 

59 See Freida Knobloch’s The Culture of Wilderness and Donald Worster’s Nature '5 Economy.

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houses, both senses of domestication apply. The characters try to change the literal space
by applying contact paper to shelves and hanging up pictures (as in The Amityville
Horror) or by using F eng Shui. But the way the houses react — as “wild,” natural spaces
capable of protecting themselves — also gestures toward how the domestication of space
can be synonymous with the domination of space.

If Karen and Kathy misread haunted houses as domestic spaces that are simply in
need of a little home making (and are accordingly unsuccessful at producing habitability),
the attempt to settle the wild space of the house is no more successful at creating
habitability. Holloway responds to the conﬂation of house and wilderness by treating the
space as unknown territory that needs to be discovered and eventually conquered. He
sets out on their exploration by saying, “‘We’re taking pictures. We’re collecting
samples. We’re trying to reach the bottom of the stairs. Who knows, if we do that then
maybe we’ll even discover something before Navidson starts all the hoopla involved with
raising money and organizing large scale explorations’” (Danielewski 94). From this
quote we can glean not only Holloway’s intentions to settle the house, but also see the
similarity between his mindset and that of the pioneer discussed in the ﬁrst chapter. The
space itself sinks from view beneath Holloway’s own desires, expectations, and
ambitions. It transforms into conceived space before it even has a chance to be lived and
perceived space. As a ﬁctitious critic (Gavin Young) notes in the text, “‘Who could have
predicted that those two words ‘discover something’ would prove to seeds to such

unfortunate destruction?’” (Danielewski 95).6O Holloway’s destruction is more personal

 

60 The “unfortunate destruction” refers to the fact that once in the house, Holloway becomes so determined
to ﬁnd something that he loses his mind. He wanders off with a loaded gun, doggedly pursuing the
“monster” that growls and eats their supplies. Instead of ﬁnding a monster, though, he ends up accidentally

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and literal, but as I argued in the ﬁrst chapter, the pioneer mindset is inherently violent
and destructive.

In A House Next Door, the attempted domestication of the house is more
metaphorical than literal. Rather than trying to literally transform the space, the
inhabitants try to tame and control the house by incorporating it into the self. Pie
Harralson’s description of her house demonstrates this principle. She explains, “I said,
when my house is built, you’re going to see the real me, you’re going to see a side of
your baby you didn’t even know existed. And this house is me, but deﬁnitely” (Siddons
25). Her eerily cheerful prediction about her new modern house concisely shows that a
house can be more than just a house. Pie assumes that the house is a magical mirror that
reveals one’s “true” identity, showing the world what is really going on inside the
subject. She takes the idea of reﬂection one step further with her small italicized “is”
which conﬂates her sense of self with the house and ﬂuidly incorporates the house into
her own identity. It is not simply an expression of her taste, her newfound ﬁeedom, or
even her sizable economic power — the house is depicted as being Pie. It bolsters her
identity and makes it public in a way that she is unable to do on her own. The house is
domesticated via a warped anthropomorphism. Within the realm of the narrative, Pie’s
ability to subsume the house into her own identity is not a problem, nor is the idea that an
essential self can be revealed, given the right medium. The house, however, is haunted,
albeit in a peculiar way, and instead of passively accepting Pie’s incorporation, the house
reverses that relationship by inﬁltrating the subjects living within its walls and forcing

them to act against their wills.

 

shooting Wax. Holloway Roberts never emerges from the hallway again, disappearing into the bowels of
the house forever.

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Thus, the house begins to incorporate the humans rather than vice versa. The
second woman-of—the-house, Anita Sheehan, complicates the relationship of subject-
house identiﬁcation because unlike Pie, who tries to project her self onto the house and in
turn incorporate the house into her self, the house takes an identify from Anita without
giving anything in return. Anita tells the narrator, Colquitt, “I feel like it. . .needs me, sort
of, to be at its best. . .I give it something. . .Usually a house gives you something ———- status,
security, identity, or whatever. My house needs me to give it identity. It’s a ﬂattering
feeling” (Siddons 135). Anita is enthralled with a relationship that she perceives as
reciprocal. She thinks that she is able to identify with her house, and her house is able to
identify with her. Her language undermines this idea, though, because of her use of the
word “usually” which implies that her case is unusual, that in fact, she is not getting
“status, security, [or] identity.” The house’s animation manifests itself in its ability to
take from its inhabitants, even against their will, reversing the more traditional
relationship in which the inhabitant is able to take whatever she needs from space.
Furthermore, what the house needs is something that no mere object should ever need: an
identity. The allegedly passive space becomes an active, animated being capable of
identifying, rather than simply being identiﬁed with. In other words, the house cannot be
domesticated through ﬁgurative means any more than it can be literally tamed.

The link between house and self, and more particularly house and female self
emerges from Siddons’s description of her work in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre:

The haunted house has always spoken specially and directly to me as the
emblem of particular horror. Maybe it’s because, to a woman, her house

is so much more than that: it is kingdom, responsibility, comfort, total

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world to her. . .to most of us, anyway, whether or not we are aware of it. It
is an extension of ourselves; it tolls in answer to one of the most basic
chords mankind will ever hear. My shelter. My earth. My second skin.
Mine. So basic is it that the desecration of it, the corruption, as it were, by
something alien takes on a peculiar and bone-deep horror and disgust. It is
both frightening and. . .violating, like a sly, terrible burglar. A house
askew is one of the not-tightest things in the world, and is terrible out of
all proportion to its actual visitant. (305)
Siddons identiﬁes the horror of the haunted house in two particularly pertinent ways:
ﬁrst, haunted houses create an especially poignant horror for women, and second,
haunted houses create horror because of the collision of house with self and thwarted
ownership and control. Siddons asserts that the horror of haunted houses affects women
differently when she invokes the traditional construction of separate spheres, whereby a
woman is more attached to her home, literally and metaphorically, and therefore, when
that home is threatened, the woman of the home is more distressed than her male
counterpart. These narratives reafﬁrm Siddons’s idea that the haunted house frightens
women more than men, since women are the ones who are punished most severely for the
disrupted domesticity. Her staccato repetition of “my” and “mine” emphasizes what is
even more horriﬁc than the victimization of women is the prospect that one’s belongings
might turn against the properly dominant party. The ability to own, and therefore control,
a house, a space, is essential for well-being, according to Siddons. Siddons fuses “house”
with “shelter,” “earth,” and ﬁnally the body (“second skin”). In so doing, she repositions

the house from a “shelter” to the more intimate and corporal body; the house

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metaphorically becomes part of the very body and being of its inhabitant. When the
house becomes a “second skin,” it literally becomes an “extension of ourselves” because
it is materially attached to the body. While the body is certainly a problematic and
complicated phenomenon, it still serves as a site for subjectivity and selﬂlood. The
transformation from shelter to body is necessary because while one might argue that a
shelter is not really owned, and further that the earth certainly should not be considered
mere property, it is more difﬁcult to make the case that a person does not own her own
body or her own skin — and that it would indeed be disturbing if the body or skin turned
against her. By the same token, however, this metaphorical conﬂation of the house and
the self enacts a change that undermines the human ability to dominate and control the
house because the house shifts from an object to a subject (this shift, however, is purely
content based, as the grammatical structure remains stable throughout the passage).
Though Siddons reiterates her belief in the possession of this subject, by dint of being a
haunted house, we know that the house-self has eluded control and has become the
dominator. The horror caused by a haunted house is a dual horror of the subversion of
the owner-owned relationship as well as the self-body relationship.

The fact that all these characters are so wildly unsuccessful at their attempts to
conquer the house brings me to one of the pleasures of haunted house texts —— space
always wins. Space’s victory over the subject’s misguided or plain mean-spirited
attempts to control it is a welcome antidote to the too real fact that in daily life, space
almost never wins. Wetlands are replaced by strip mall shopping centers, and
McMansions spread with alarming speed. Forests fall, and national wildlife preserves are

threatened with oil drills. Even older suburbs are not safe from the “development” of

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new condominiums. In Lefebvrian terms, dominated space disproportionately
overwhelms appropriated space, and even within Lefebvre’s terms of analysis, there is no
longer a space for wilderness, no matter how we deﬁne it. Eventually, it seems inevitable
that all space will become dominated space. In the realm of haunted house narratives
space can defend itself, and it can prevent the subject from dominating it. Space acts, in
short, in much the same way as Austin’s desert-woman does.

Haunted house texts reverse Western industrialized society’s hierarchy of space
deplored by Lefebvre, and in some ways, the haunted house can thus be read as a
potential solution to the spatial problems Lefebvre describes. He spends a great deal of
time discussing how the spatial triad of lived, perceived, conceived space is imbalanced,
whereby conceived space continually dominates lived and perceived space. This
domination leads to increasing fragmentation as well as the fracturing of the human body.
Haunted houses turn the hierarchy upside down: lived and perceived space dominate
conceived space. The space of blueprints, logic, language, and abstraction has little
resonance here; it is subverted by perceived space. Conceived space is outwardly
thwarted as the house acts upon its own logic and impetus. Thus, a common theme that
echoes throughout haunted house narratives is that the inhabitants are “crazy” or
“delusional” because they simply cannot believe their house is acting against all
conceptions of how a house should act. Will of House of Leaves spends weeks and uses
countless resources to try to ascertain how the inside measurements of his house are
slightly larger than the outside ones. Conceived space will not coincide with lived and
perceived space; that is, the undeniable reality of perceived space overwhelms conceived

space, which is contrary to the way the spatial triad usually operates (Lefebvre 39).

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While Lefebvre implies that shifting the emphasis to lived and perceived space
will lead to a more livable space, in these narratives, the dominance of perceived space
forecloses the possibility of a livable lived space. Lived space is less tangible than
perceived space; it is not linked to the body nor is it entirely linked to the rational mind.
Like perceived space, it is a space of everyday life, but unlike perceived space it is
pervaded by the imagination, images, and symbols (although not verbal images and
symbols). In haunted houses, lived space is dangerous, psychologically and physically.
It is overtly hostile to those living within it. Lefebvre tells us that the solution to current
spatial dilemmas is not a simple reversal of the spatial triad’s hierarchy, and haunted
houses illustrate why this is so.

In House of Leaves, The Amityville Horror, and The House Next Door, the subject
reacts to this un-habitability by trying to resist or change the space of the house. This
resistance can take the form of seeking a logical explanation or trying to “exorcise” the
space via religion or particular decorating practices. When these attempts to dominate
the space back into subservience fail, eventually the house must be left (House of Leaves
and The Amityville Horror) or destroyed (The House Next Door). Even this ﬁnal moment
of resistance is impotent against the houses because, at the end of the narratives, the
menace of the house remains even though the families have successfully escaped, or died
destroying the house in the latter case. Readers of House of Leaves are told that the
house still exists, although in the frame of the narrative, it is empty and presumably
undisturbed. Still, the last image of the house is one in which everything looks normal,

except for the front door mysteriously opening and closing. In the case of The Amityville

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Horror, the last shot of the ﬁlm is of the house, intact and standing, red eyes ablaze.6|
While the “house next door” is presumably destroyed (killing Kim, Colquitt, and Walter
in the process), the epilogue introduces the reader to a young, hopeful couple studying the
blueprints of a young dead architect. The plans can only be Kim’s, and the reader knows
that the menace of the house next door is set to begin again.62 In short, resolution is
nearly impossible within the genre.63
Because these narratives foreclose the possibility of recuperation, or even
destruction, of the house in question, habitability does not seem possible either. Haunted
houses respond to their inhabitants’s settlement practices violently, but given the cultural
and historical implications of domestication, it is possible to interpret this violence as
reactionary and defensive. To put it another way, the violence of the haunted house
could be interpreted as a manifestation (and magniﬁcation) of the violence of habitability.
The distinction between domination and appropriation is blurry in the best of
circumstances, and haunted houses react similarly to both. They resist and reject change.
According to this logic, haunted houses can actually be read as a sort of spatial revenge.

They are spaces that are ﬁnally able to strike back and defend themselves against

incursions and domination. Arguably, humans have been using and abusing space of all

 

6' The “real-life” Amityville house still stands. Many other families have lived in it, without a trace of the
disturbances experienced by the Lutzs.

62 I have said little about the origins of the haunting in any of these texts, partly because it is not essential
to my analysis, and partly because each text provides an unconvincing and ambiguous explanation for the
haunting. While in the more common haunted house narrative solving the “mystery” of the haunting is
essential, in these narratives, the origins of the haunting are less important than the consequences. In the
case of The House Next Door, it is concluded that the “evilness” of the house originates in the blueprints of
Kim Dougherty, who is apparently a victim of a nameless, source-less curse that causes him to design
killer-houses. Thus, when we see the couple looking at blueprints, we know that the curse lives on.

63 The lack of resolution is in keeping with a similar tendency in horror genres. If the threat is not fully
vanquished, it allows the threat of further horror to be sustained, not to mention the possibility of sequels.

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kinds for quite some time, and these texts provide a venue in which space can actually
defend itself.

The idea of wilderness spaces needing protection is particularly salient given the
cultural ideas of wilderness surrounding the appearance of these texts. The kind of
haunted house narratives I examine are all produced post-World War II, and half of them
appear in the late 19703. It was about this time that wilderness preservation efforts
reached their zenith: preservation movements were increasingly effective at protecting
natural space in the United States, and the number of people visiting National Parks was
increasing. More important to haunted house narratives is the fact that a full-ﬂedged
“philosophy of the value of wilderness” had emerged by 1970 (Nash 317). Wilderness
spaces were conceived of as much-needed respites from restrictive cultural norms, and
they were protected accordingly. Haunted house narratives, if interpreted as enacting a
sort of spatial revenge, are manifestations of this very impulse to protect wilderness.

As such, these texts are also presciently aware of the dangers — to wilderness —
of trying to inhabit wilderness spaces. Wilderness haunted houses can be made habitable,
but this habitability is even more horrifying for both space and the subject than un-livable

space.

At Home in the Haunted House
My desire to read haunted houses as resisting the subject seems opposed to my desire to
see subjects attain habitability. Spaces in which the subject is resisted too heavily are un-
habitable for the subject, and subjects that resist space too much also ﬁnd themselves in

an un-habitable situation. Not all haunted house narratives depict a hostile relationship

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between the subject and space though. The subject-space relationship that facilitates
habitability resembles the ones seen in nature writing (discussed in the third chapter). To
make haunted houses habitable, the subject must become exceptionally close to her space
and accept, rather than resist, space. This sentiment echoes Austin’s, Williams’s, and
Ehrlich’s tendency to present the subject-space connection as intimate and bodily. As in
the texts examined in the previous chapter, an essential characteristic of achieving
habitability is an unmitigated respect, if not awe, for space. Unfortunately, in haunted
house narratives, habitability is available only to a few characters, and it depends on the
sacriﬁce of all other characters. The close connection with domestic space brings a
measure of comfort, security, and happiness to the protagonist, but along with that comes
horror and violence.

Stephen King’s Rose Red, its companion text The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer, and
Robert Marasco’s Burnt Oﬂerings show how animated space can provide some
characters with a sense of empowerment and strength, provided these characters do not
try to resist the space of the haunted house. Ellen Rimbauer (the original mistress of
Rose Red) does not exactly ﬁnd Rose Red habitable, even by the end of the text, but she
becomes an ally to Rose Red’s misdeeds. In this way, she is largely made safe from the
violence of Rose Red (an option that is not available for those living in House of Leaves,
High Hopes, or the “house next door”). Burnt Offerings takes collusion with the house a
step further and shows how this acceptance, if taken far enough, can lead to a perverse
habitability. The main character in Burnt Offerings reacts exactly as Lefebvre or any

ecocritic would want her to react — she is humble in the face of her space, she tries to

I76

read it on its own terms, and she respects and values the space around her. In return, she
gets the affective experience of space that she deserves — habitability.

Ellen Rimbauer’s reaction to Rose Red’s impressive string of violence (including
the disappearance of eighteen women and the death of ﬁve men) is atypical and
demonstrates a unique approach to trying to gain habitability within animated space.
Instead of objecting to the tendency of her house to eat her party guests and family
members, Ellen becomes “friends” with the house. In the process, she harnesses some of
its power. Early in the text, there is the suggestion that Ellen is more than willing to
become a part of the house itself. Of building and furnishing the house, she explains,
“Now, ﬁnally, the project can consume us both! I have become a part of that great house
that owns so much of my dear husband. I feel myself inside its walls. He enters me. He
resides in me” (Reardon 34). Ellen is consumed and her body merges with the house
itself. At ﬁrst she is just inside its walls, but then she quickly becomes the walls
themselves as her husband “enters” and “resides” in her. Initially she aligns herself with
the other women in the text who are permanently inside the house,64 but quickly she gains
a more powerful position by identifying even more closely with space. Explicit sexual
connotations aside, this passage reveals an early willingness to fuse her own body with
the “body” or structure of the house. As with previous narratives, Ellen’s connection to
Rose Red is intensely personal, so much so that the house becomes a part of Ellen’s sex
life with her husband. Rose Red takes over not just Ellen’s mind but her body too. In
numerous later passages, Ellen admits that she is beginning to “understand” Rose Red

and that she listens to what Rose Red is saying (Reardon 155). While the identiﬁcation

 

64 When Rose Red takes women, it is suggested that they are not dead but living out their lives
permanently enclosed in the houses walls.

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with Rose Red is not ever fully realized, the boundary between the house and Ellen is
increasingly blurred. For example, when Ellen describes Rose Red’s voice, she admits
that it is “A voice I heard utter from my own mouth” (Reardon 178). In return for Ellen’s
ﬁiendship, Rose Red occasionally eats women who are troublesome in one way or
another to Ellen. Women, for example, who are having affairs with Ellen’s husband,
John, are apt to disappear into Rose Red’s walls.

Instead of running away from Rose Red in horror, Ellen becomes part of the
house itself. This move is simultaneously empowering and disempowering. Ellen
willingly embraces the conﬂation of her body with the house, without understanding that
she is reinforcing her own exploitation and objectiﬁcation. Lefebvre notices the tendency
for the female body to become an “exchange value” or a “commodity” within abstract
space (310), and Ellen’s metaphorical conversion turns her into a literal piece of property
(a house) that is legally owned by her husband. Without being explicitly conscious of
this dynamic, she resists and resents Rose Red, but she too disappears into the walls in
1950, consummating the eternal bond with Rose Red. What is important about this
narrative is that it subverts the hostility between house and inhabitant present in most
haunted house narratives. Instead, the house’s wildness, seemingly, is used by and for
women, who are the victims (within the narrative) of an unjust system of oppression and
wrongdoing. Unfortunately, even though Ellen’s affective experience of Rose Red is
distinct from the characters in the previously analyzed haunted house texts, she is still
victimized by the animated haunted house.

In Burnt Oﬂering, a less conﬂicted (though no less problematic) habitability

emerges. Marian shows a healthier, less proprietary attitude toward the house from the

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moment that she begins exploring it. When she ﬁnds it ﬁlled with extraordinary antiques,
she muses, “To be able to live with something so beautiful —— not own, merely live with,
for a month, two months. God” (Marasco 35, italics original). While Dale Bailey makes
a compelling argument that it is a sort of domestic greed that makes Marian so
profoundly attached to the summer house (73), the above statement undermines that
contention because Marian is content to simply be around the house and its beauty. She
does not want to own or change the house; she just wants to appreciate and nurture it
back to “life.” Like the ideal spatial dweller, she values and respects the space. Quickly
she is granted the reward of an intense experience of peace and security. She discovers
the central room in the house, from which a mysterious hum emanates.6S It becomes her
“sanctuary” (214), her “grace” (190), and her access to complete “peace and isolation”
(150).66 Marian’s connection to the house, which is also intensely close, is clearly
spiritual, if not religious, in character.

Marian ﬁnds habitability because, for her, the house offers all that it promises -———
physical, emotional, and psychological safety and happiness. She is happy to merge with
the house. Echoing the sentiments seen in The House Next Door, the house is frequently
referred to as part of her, as an extension of herself, and as a “reﬂection of what she was
or could be inside, at her best” (77). The house, in other words, acts just as it should

according to Winifred Gallagher’s formulation of ideal domesticity. It enriches Marian’s

 

65 In the context of the novel, this central room is supposed to be where Old Mrs. Allardyce lives. Marian
and her family are able to afford to rent the lavish house for the summer because Marian agrees to provide
daily meals for Mrs. Allardyce who never, ever leaves her room. Though Marian brings her meals every
day, she never once sees or hears Mrs. Allardyce, although occasionally a small amount of food has been
eaten.

66 It is no coincidence that the room is in the center of the house, implicitly acting as the “heart” of the
structure. The fact that the house is itself an organic body is thus emphasized.

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life, and she is able to ﬁnd complete satisfaction in the daily domestic rituals of dusting
and cleaning and arranging it. Through Marian, the house literally comes to life and in
turn, through the house, Marian ﬁguratively comes to life. Before she came to this house
she was uncomfortable and unhappy, but in this house, she is at home, in every sense of
the word. It even works to help coalesce Marian’s shaky identity because once she is
living and caring for the house, she is able to realize her full potential, access her “true”
and “essential” self. Eventually, she becomes so integrated with it that she becomes. the
life force of the house itself. This feat is accomplished through a rather strange process
of Marian entering the room with the mysterious hum and seating herself in the chair
that’s waiting for her: “She clutched the arms of the chair and felt the force of the hum
not outside herself but in her, issuing forth and driving itself into the house and grounds,
all the way down to the smallest bits of crystal, the tenderest green shoot” (259).
Marian’s uniﬁcation with the house is not that distinct from the mystical sense that the
difference between self and (natural) space has dissolved that is so prominent in a certain
type of nature writing (Phillips 185).

Marian’s habitability is troubling, however. Up to this point, I have conceived of
habitability as an individual relationship to space, and I have assessed it at least partly
based on the affective content of character’s relationship to space. Thus, I have judged
Florella Sibthorpe as having habitability and Mary Clavers as not having it because
F lorella felt more of an affective connection with her space than did Clavers. Another
attribute I used to evaluate habitability was the individual character’s attempts to

dominate versus appropriate the space. All of Stegner’s characters use writing to try to

dominate space in some capacity, whereas Kirkland’s characters began to appropriate

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space, especially in Forest Life. Throughout my analysis, the subject’s misreading of
space hinders his ability to make space habitable. Hence, in House of Leaves, The
Amityville Horror, and The House Next Door, habitability is unavailable because the
subjects continue to misread space as inanimate, and when the space refuses to conform
to those conceptions, the characters respond by further trying to dominate the space.

Burnt Offerings exposes the dangers of considering habitability solely as an
individual phenomenon. Marian, as an individual, is able to attain habitability, according
to my above deﬁnition. She clearly has an affective connection with the house and feels
herself utterly at home in a way that transcends Clavers’s home-feeling. She reads the
space accurately, and she accepts the space rather than trying to dominate or appropriate
it. I ﬁnd this habitability disturbing though because this narrative is just as violent as all
of the other ones. Marian takes responsibility for the reinvigoration of the house,
continually saying, “[the house] was alive, all around her it was alive, and how else had it
come but through her?” (Marasco 214), but the actual source of “life” in the house is
much more sinister. It is true that the house is regenerating itself. The old shingles are
shed and shiny, new ones appear in their place, that the sidewalk by the pool heals its
cracks and ﬁssures, and that even the greenhouse ﬁlls itself with elaborate ﬂowers. The
source of the regeneration, the reader knows, is the misfortune, pain, and even death of
the other inhabitants of the house. For example, the sidewalks by the pool are
refurbished only after Marian’s husband, Ben, inexplicably almost drowns their young
son David in the pool in a session of roughhousing gone awry. The greenhouse explodes
into blossoms after Elizabeth, Ben’s healthy (albeit elderly) aunt, dies of unknown

causes. In other words, just like the other haunted houses, this one feeds off the pain and

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misery of the inhabitants. Malian knows all of this, but manages to deny it and its
implications nonetheless. Her ﬁnal fusing with the house is facilitated by the drowning
of her husband and son in the pool, which she watches impotently from inside the house.
Both Ellen and Marian have habitability at the end of these texts, but their narrative

shows that it is essential to consider the wider ramiﬁcations of individual habitability.

Haunted Habitability

Habitability, much to my own horror, is haunted by at least some metaphoric, if not
literal, violence. Granted, haunted houses provide an exaggerated version of this
violence, but they also reveal the complications involved in settling less supernatural
space. Humans living in a space cannot avoid changing that space and are constantly in
danger of not “saving” the space, to return to Heidegger’s term. Building, decorating,
remodeling, designing, even low impact camping, affect space and thus can be
interpreted as dominating space. On the other hand, affecting or changing space is not
necessarily violent, or at least there are degrees of the violence; it is only violent and
counter to habitability if the subject changes space in a way that is based on a
fundamental misreading of space. Even if the subject heeds Heidegger’s injunction to
save space, a reading of haunted house narratives and contemporary nature writing shows
that the most well-intentioned subject often is unable to prevent damaging space on some
level.

That said, responses to space cannot be entirely rid of violence and domination,
but some relationships to space certainly save space more than others. For example,

Holloway’s efforts to settle the house through exploration saves space less than Karen’s

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deployment of Feng Shui or Pie’s “house-as-me” theory. They all attempt to create a
livable, habitable space, but Karen and Pie are less intent upon gaining control and
dominance over space. Karen and Pie try to domesticate the house, and we can read that
as a metaphorically violent act, in that it attempts to change and alter a space, but
Holloway’s pioneering ways are much more destructive.

The temptation to read Holloway’s exploitation more critically than Karen’s
domestication reveals assumptions about how the reader recognizes and assesses
violence. Literal domestic space (as opposed to the ideological domestic space), outside
the world of literature and ﬁlm, is inanimate, and as inanimate, is not harmed by a person
hanging pictures on the wall or dusting or painting. Even the most vehement
housekeeper does not actually hurt the house, though the inhabitants of the house may be
a different story. The possibility of habitability may be endangered by too much attention
to the conceived space of spatial regulations, but again, the space itself is not threatened.
This is not the case with natural space. Though it is controversial to claim that natural
space is itself animated, it is ﬁlled with live beings, animate and inanimate. The attempts
to dominate natural space are harmful on a number of levels, most immediately to the
natural beings occupying the space in question and more largely to the ecosystem as a
whole. Judging an action as violent is premised on the idea that something or someone is
harmed by the act in question; if this is not the case, the action cannot be deemed violent.
Haunted house narratives show that it is essential not to think about violence solely based
on the issue of harm to space, but rather to think about the violence involved in

misreading space.

183

The violence in the subject-space relationship haunted house narratives exposes a
number of assumptions about a “healthy” relationship between the subject and space,
particularly for the subject and natural space. Haunted houses undermine many of these
assumptions, and that is why it is so disturbing to ﬁnd that the subjects in haunted house
narratives who ﬁnd habitability do so by using the same methods as those who are
looking for habitability in nature writing texts (for example, fostering an intense personal
and spiritual connection with space). Exploring place attachment in light of what we
have learned through our analysis of haunted house narratives shows that place
attachment cannot remain a privileged term that indicates a healthy and productive
relationship between the subject and space. At the same time, it is important to
remember that nature writers only imagine that they merge with space, whereas
characters in haunted house narratives literalize this connection. The harm done by the
former is likewise imaginary, and therefore not nearly as problematic.

Given the potential violence of producing habitability, I ﬁnd myself facing the
unfortunate realization that sometimes it is ethically preferable not to create habitability.
I read haunted house narratives as commentaries on the problems of inhabiting
wilderness spaces, and if we learn anything from these narratives, it is that humans
should leave these spaces alone. Granted, characters leave haunted houses (and readers
and viewers cheer) to save themselves, but at another level, readers and viewers also
cheer because the haunted house is not fully vanquished. Though haunted house
narratives may not set out to save space, often this is an unintended consequence. At the
end of these texts, the characters have no choice but to accept space as it is —— dangerous

and unknown — and treat it accordingly. The reality of unlivable space is a bit

184

distressing, but the production of a habitability that literally destroys other people is even
more problematic.

The tension between individual and communal habitability resonates throughout
each chapter, and whether individual habitability forecloses the possibility of communal
habitability at least partially dictates how I evaluate different models of habitability. For
example, in Stegner’s Angle of Repose, Lyman’s habitability produces strictly gendered,
oppressive space, and thus is un-habitable for his female counterparts. In Morrison’s
Paradise, the racially-oriented habitability undermines the possibility of habitability for
women. Austin’s Lost Borders once again foregrounds the competitive nature of
habitability and shows how one kind of habitability excludes other types. Haunted house
narratives take this tension to the extreme, pitting characters against space and each other
in the quest for habitability. Haunted house narratives compel the conclusion that un-
livable space is preferable to habitable space in some situations.

Habitability, at its best, is replete with emotional warmth. The idea that the
subject can have an intimate, healthy, non-violent relationship to space is appealing.
Habitability, as revised by haunted house narratives, is much less comforting but
ultimately a much more productive and realistic way of relating to space. At the
beginning of this project, I, like a number of other scholars working in the broad ﬁeld of
place in literature, assumed that an individual, affective connection between the subject
and space would necessarily lead to habitability. Further, I assumed that it was both
desirable and possible to form a relationship between the subject and space that was not
violent or aggressive in any way; I thought that power dynamics could be removed from

the subject-space relationship if space were properly interpreted. I thought that

185

habitability would be, ultimately, the portrait of a healthy subject-space relationship. I
believed that the warm, comfortable connection between a subject and space was
indicative of habitability.

Haunted house narratives have forced me to revise habitability to include a
communal, as well as an individual, connection to space. Haunted houses help redeﬁne
the concept of habitability by showing that it is not possible to remove violence, power
dynamics, and aggressiveness from the subject-space relationship. An individual bond
with space is not enough to counter environmentally destructive habits, and it may even
contribute to the destruction of space. If the strength of habitability is its affective
warmth and its implication of a comforting subject-space relationship, then these
characteristics may be its weakness as well. Haunted house narratives articulate what the
previous chapters have suggested — that an ethical habitability sometimes requires the

sacriﬁce of the emotional and psychological comforts of home.

186

CONCLUSION

This project begins with an attempt to stage a conversation between three (seemingly)
related ﬁelds: ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and space theory. All three, after all, are
concerned generally, with the environment, and more particularly with how the subject
relates to the environment. Space theorists like Henri Lefebvre, Martin Heidegger,
Michel de Certeau, and Gaston Bachelard voice the anxiety that abstractions are
smothering everyday, lived space, and they attempt to ﬁnd ways that the mundane can be
(re)instated as valuable. Ecocritics express a similar fear when they worry that
abstraction and the need to master nature is leading to the destruction of the earth and its
resources. The novelists and essayists ecocritics favor (e. g. Annie Dillard, Edward
Abbey, and Henry David Thoreau) lend themselves to spatial analysis, since they clearly
ask the same questions as space theorists. How can the subject create sustainable
relationships to space? How should the subject negotiate space in the face of the massive
changes of the twentieth and twenty-ﬁrst centuries? What is the role of the personal, the
emotional, and the corporeal in the subject-space relationship? How can the subject
make a home in a time and place that seemed so plagued with spatial crisis and
dysﬁrnction?

Though the ﬁnal question was the most important to me at the beginning of my
analysis, I was reticient to even use the term “home” in critical analysis. Home was the
site of classist, gendered privilege. Home was retrograde, conservative, and nostalgic.
Like the critics that Susan F raiman speaks of, I thought that “houses — people inside

houses, practices sponsored by houses — [were] somehow inherently bourgeois and

187

suspect” (350). More accurately, I thought that I should think like those critics,
especially since I had internalized ecocritical assumptions about home and place
attachment that had clear limitations. Home, for ecocritics, means stability,
connectedness with a particular place, groundedness. Home does not necessarily entail a
house, but it necessitates a speciﬁc location. Implicitly, this meant that a certain amount
of privilege accompanied the concept, since staying in one place suggests economic
stability.

Despite my misgivings, texts that contemplated the formation of home continued
to be provocative. Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home— Who ’11 Follow? formed the key
departure point. Kirkland’s narrator Mary Clavers spent most of her time trying to ﬁnd
what she called the “home-feeling,” and in many ways, her deﬁnition of home conﬁrmed
my worst assumptions about the term. But Kirkland supplemented Clavers’s idea of
home with other, alternative deﬁnitions of home that subverted Clavers’s own ideology.
Writing home, it seemed, provided a means to re-evaluate, revise, and experiment with
space and the subject’s relation to space. Writing home could transform space in a way
that beneﬁted the subject psychologically, emotionally, and socially. Linking Kirkland
with Michel de Certeau produced the central term of my analysis: habitability.

Habitability allowed me to interrogate home, without using the troubling term
itself. Yet, in spite of my rather considerable efforts to avoid it, “home” guided my
analysis: most of my chapters revolved around examining how characters used that very
term. What these texts revealed, though, countered my apprehensions that home
necessarily meant middle-class domesticity and all that that entails. Wallace Stegner’s

Lyman Ward certainly reinforced the most restrictive ideas of home, using domestic

188

space to force female characters into his preconceived notions of gender, but Sarah Ome
J ewett, Marilynne Robinson, and Toni Morrison redeﬁned home by unmooring it. They
did not dismiss the desire for a place to call one’s own. They did not reject the idea of
refuge. But they did change the site and dominant paradigms for what refuge might
mean. They used metaphors to transform the home spaces given to them; they offered
new deﬁnitions of home than the ones I had previously considered. To a certain degree,
their ideas of home (especially J ewett’s) were still enmeshed in class privileges. These
novels, however, offered alternatives to making a choice between home and instability.
They offered me the freedom not to have to choose between being theoretically and
ideologically naive and nostalgic and ignoring my textual concerns because they
redeﬁned the terms of habitability.

As the project proceeded, the texts I read challenged my ecocritical and
ecofeminist frameworks. Ecocriticism and ecofeminism assume that a healthy subject-
space relationship is both desirable and possible. As mentioned in the third chapter,
health means that the subject respects space, and appropriates (not dominates) space. The
ideal subject-space relationship minimizes violence and power struggles; the subject does
not try to control space. Inter-relatedness replaces hierarchies in the ideal subject-space
relationship. I thought that since ﬂuid gender roles were in keeping with ecofeminism,
habitability would emerge as a result of ﬂexible gender roles. In short, I confused
habitability with the ideal subject-space relationship, collapsing the two to the point that I
believed that habitability would only appear for subjects who related to space in the way

that I viewed as ethically appropriate.

189

The problems with my conﬂation of habitability with a utopian subject-space
relationship came to light in my third chapter when I started studying nature writing. If
this ideal habitability appeared anywhere, it would be in texts dedicated to the production
of healthy subj ect-space relationships. Frustration ensued shortly after beginning this
chapter because I realized that none of the texts I analyzed could meet my expectations. I
found myself repeating phrases like “Habitability is impossible,” “She almost creates
habitability but...” and “Sustainable habitability is still unachieved.” Those phrases
peppered my earlier chapters, too. I resisted the obvious conclusion about this dilemma
for an excruciatingly long time, writing page after page on different novels and essay
collections — Edward Abbey, Mary Oliver, Linda Hogan, Margaret Atwood, Sue
Hubbell, Barry Lopez, Nathaniel Hawthorne. None of them achieved habitability as I
saw it.

Rereading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring I realized that habitability was practical,
not ideal. My analysis of Kirkland, Stegner, J ewett, Morrison, Robinson, Austin,
Williams, and Ehrlich, and the haunted house narratives makes it clear that pragmatism,
rather than ideology (usually) dictates habitability. Livability, not perfection, is the
objective of the characters in these texts. Even when the characters intend to engage in
an idealistic relationship with space, as in chapter three, the resulting subject-space
relationship is still problematic in many ways. Each character modiﬁes space to make it
habitable. The demands of everyday life often subvert ideals. The strength of reading
literature to explore how characters makes space their own is that exposes the messiness
of the process. The struggle to create habitability is unﬂinchingly personal, problematic,

and individualized.

190

Carson’s work embraces a similar philosophy. She illustrates the practical aspects
of revising the subject’s actions toward space by appealing to a wide variety of uses of
nature. She does not try to get the subject not to be anthropocentric or to question the
idea that human interests are inherently more valuable than nonhuman nature’s interests.
Instead, she focuses on making her appeals relevant to the widest possible audience. She
frames her plea for a change in the way the United States approaches the widespread use
of chemicals in terms of safety and rights, two values designed to convince the average
reader that natural space should be protected:

We have subjected enormous numbers of people to contact with these
poisons, without their consent and often without their knowledge. If the
Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against
lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or public ofﬁcials, it
is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom
and foresight, could conceive of no such problem. (12)
Carson neglects to mention that nonhuman nature suffers from the spread of poisons.
She underscores the effects of chemicals on humans. Referring to the founding fathers
allows Carson to imply that the use of chemicals is somehow unpatriotic as well as
dangerous. The idea that pollution violates the integrity of the body, thus encroaching
upon the self as an individual, emerges again when she argues that every citizen should
know about pesticides because we are “eating and drinking them, taking them into the
very marrow of our bones” (17). Carson’s contention converges perversely with Gretel
Ehrlich’s idea of eating space. Both observe the inherent closeness of human and

nonhuman nature. But Ehrlich emphasizes this connection as a way of bolstering a

191

(broken) subject, whereas Carson invokes this relationship to instill fear in her reader
insofar as space itself has become poisonous. The relation to Williams is also apparent
since saving self necessitates ﬁrst saving space.

Even when Carson discusses the effects of pollution on nonhuman nature, she
puts her observations in the context of how natural space serves as a site for recreation.
She often appeals, for example, to duck hunters and backyard bird watchers (45),
ﬁsherman and gardeners and explorers. Carson reminds her reader that we have a
“legitimate right” to the “pleasure” nature affords (86). Her argument is most convincing
when she asks:

Does Indiana still raise any boys who roam through woods or ﬁelds and
might even explore the margins of a river? If so, who guarded the
poisoned area to keep out any who might wander in, in misguided search
for unspoiled nature? Who kept vigilant watch to tell the innocent stroller
that the ﬁeld he was about to enter were deadly -— all their vegetation
covered with a lethal ﬁlm? (Carson 127)
Childhood (boyhood particularly) Carson tells her reader, should be a time of innocence
and freedom. The playful exploration of natural space embodies those very values, and
the contamination of that natural space not only deprives children of their innocence but
potentially threatens more basic rights like health and safety. Under this formulation,
natural space becomes an object that is only valuable insofar as it serves humans.

Carson uses nonhuman nature and natural space in this manner because she

knows that it will work. It will achieve her purpose, which is to convince the public that

something must be done about the unbridled use of chemicals. Carson does not need to

192

 

change people’s general conceptions about nature as much as she needs to convince them
that if something does not change, their lives will be negatively impacted. She appeals to
lived and perceived, not conceived, space. Judging by the reception of her book, this
appeal was successful and enough people were convinced that chemicals were being used
irresponsibility to take concrete action. Carson’s clear emphasis on practical, rhetorical
approaches to a spatial crisis echoes the models of habitability that emerge in each
chapter. Carson offers more than a rhetorically savvy approach to environmental
problems, though. She reminds us that even imperfect models of habitability cannot
create sustainable subject-space relationships.

Carson, along with the texts that constituted each chapter, helped me redeﬁne
habitability so that it was no longer a goal or an endpoint. This conclusion displaces
space theorists, especially Henri Lefebvre, because he contends that a new space is
needed to solve current problems. These texts suggest that instead, a new subject-space
relationship will lead to improved spatial and social conditions. The revised approach to
the subject-space relationship focuses less on stability and permanence and more on
ﬂexibility and adaptation. Some of the emotional, psychological, and physical comforts
of home are rejected in favor of continual revision and rebuilding.

The realization that habitability did not require social, emotional, and ecological
perfection did not negate my concern about the ethical implications of the subject’s
relationship with space. As a critical reader, I found myself evaluating the models of
habitability produced in each chapter. The comparison of Kirkland and Stegner forces us
to consider the moments when the desire for habitability might override someone else’s

potential for habitable space. For example, Lyman’s desire for power causes him to

193

denigrate the feminine to the point that women would ﬁnd his habitable space very un-
habitable. Jewett, Morrison, and Robinson trouble the ideals of home and point out that
these ideas are embedded in power relations. Likewise, Austin, Williams, and Ehrlich’s
nature writing forces the reader to remember how space is impacted by the process of
creating habitability. Finally, the fourth chapter shows how unlivability is sometimes
preferable to habitability, particularly when the violence enacted by habitability is greater
than the discomfort caused by un-habitable space. Though part of me wished to take on
the persona of an objective describer, an impassive observer, and therefore to simply
describe habitability as it appears in a series of texts, I felt disingenuous when I distanced
myself too much from the text and the kinds of habitabilities that they generated.

At stake in my divided persona is the larger question of the role of the literary
critic and scholar. Carson’s work again proves helpﬁrl because she counters ecocritics’s
and Lefebvre’s concern that literature opposes lived space by showing how literature
interacts with and resides within lived space (and not merely in the descriptive way that
Lefebvre describes). Heidegger highlights this idea when he talks about the poet’s
relation to dwelling in “. . .Poetically Man Dwells. . .”: “Does not all dwelling remain
incompatible with the poetic?” he asks. “It is the way of poets to shut their eyes to
actuality. Instead of acting, they dream. What they make is merely imagined. The
things of imagination are merely made” (211; 212). The unspoken part of Heidegger’s
argument is the common assumption that dwelling, which deals with space, is not
“merely made” or “imagined” and that space has a reality, a physical and tangible
existence, that imagining does not. Of course, Heidegger dismantles this dichotomy and

concludes that dwelling is not opposed to poetry but poetry instantiates dwelling.

194

This tension reappears again and again, long after Heidegger’s conclusion. It
turns up in Lefebvre’s work, in ecocriticism, in ecofeminism, and even in the texts that I
study in this project. They all ask: How does reading and writing about space change the
way the subject inhabits it? Ecocriticism, and to a certain degree ecofeminism, takes this
a step ﬁrrther and suggests that literary scholars are ethically obligated to use their
academic work to help save (natural) space and counter environmental destruction.
Given the relationship between the literary and habitability that emerges in this study,
however, what role should literary scholars play in saving space? At stake in this
question are the ethics of scholarship, academia, and being a critical reader for a living.

Carson’s work, textually and extra-textually, collapses the distinction between
concrete action and reading. On the one hand, Silent Spring illustrates the most
predictable idea of how a book might work to save space: it informs and persuades the
reader, and then the reader takes concrete action. Carson acts as a “mobilizing
messenger” who gives readers the necessary information allowing them to “demand
greater responsibility, more information, new legislation, enforcement, or other voluntary
controls, from those in government or industry, not to mention modifying their own
behavior” (Murphy 32). But the idea of concrete action gets complicated by the fact that
reading merges with “doing.” While direct action did sometimes result from reading
Carson’s text, more frequently “action” meant passing the book or article to another
person so that she could act (Murphy 175). Taking action meant reading, and vice versa.
Reading and passing along reading material collapsed with more direct forms of action.
Carson offers a model of how reading, writing, and acting are complementary, not

competitive or opposed.

195

As academics, critics, scholars, and readers, we need to follow Carson’s lead and
quit thinking about our work, which is inherently reading-dependent, as distinct from
spatial action and consequences. This suggestion is aimed especially at ecocriticism.
(Recall the image from Glotfelty’s introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader of the
ecocritical scholar straddling the presumed abyss between literature and the earth.) The
way Kirkland, Jewett, Robinson, Morrison, Austin, Williams, and Ehrlich produce
habitability presents a model for an interdependent, complementary relationship between
the literary and space. The characters in all of these texts use writing to question space,
to revise it, and to experiment with diverse spatial conﬁgurations. Stegner, Austin,
Morrison, and haunted house narratives use writing to realign spatialized power
dynamics; Kirkland, J ewett, and Robinson use it to redeﬁne the site and deﬁnition of
home. The characters in these works use writing to shift the balance of the spatial triad in
a way that meets the needs of its inhabitants. As critics, we can use our own writing to

do the same thing.

196

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