Dream House as American Gothic
A narrative needs two things to be a gothic romance. The first, “woman plus habitation.” “Horror,” film theorist Mary Ann Doane writes, “which should by rights be external to domesticity, infiltrates the home.” The house is not essential for domestic abuse, but hell, it helps: a private space where private dramas are enacted behind, as the cliché goes, closed doors; but also windows sealed against the sound, drawn curtains, silent phones. A house is never apolitical. It is conceived, constructed, occupied, and policed by people with power, needs, and fears. Windex is political. So is the incense you burn to hide the smell of sex, or a fight.
The second necessary element: “marrying a stranger.” Strangers, feminist film theorist Diane Waldman points out, because during the 1940s—the heyday of gothic romance films like Rebecca and Dragonwyck and Suspicion—men were returning from war, no longer familiar to the people they’d left behind. “The rash of hasty pre-war marriages (and the subsequent all-time high divorce rate of 1946), the increase in early marriages in the 40s,” Waldman writes, “and the process of wartime separation and reunion [gave the] motif of the Gothics a specific historical resonance.” “The Gothic heroine,” film scholar Tania Modleski says, “tries to convince herself that her suspicions are unfounded, that, since she loves him, he must be trustworthy and that she will have failed as a woman if she does not implicitly believe in him.”
There is, of course, a major problem with the gothic: it is by nature heteronormative. A notable exception is Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, with its powerful queer undertones between the innocent protagonist and the sinister, titular vampire. (“You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish,” Carmilla tells Laura. “How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me and still come with me, and hating me through death and after.”)
We were not married; she was not a dark and brooding man. It was hardly a crumbling ancestral manor; just a single-family home, built at the beginning of the Great Depression. No moors, just a golf course. But it was “woman plus habitation,” and she was a stranger. That is probably the truest and most gothic part; not because of war or because we’d only met with chaperones before marriage; rather because I didn’t know her, not really, until I did. She was a stranger because something essential was shielded, released in tiny bursts until it became a flood—a flood of what I realized I did not know (19). Afterward, I would mourn her as if she’d died, because something had: someone we had created together.
19. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type T11, Falling in love with person never seen
In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
Lady Dimitrescu statue is stunning
