The Mirror House: Writing the Uncanny into the Australian Suburban Home K.L. Munnery A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts School of Media and Communication RMIT University May 2012 Declaration I certify that except where due acknowledgement has been made, the work is that of the author alone; the work has not been submitted previously, in whole or in part, to qualify for any other academic award; the content of the thesis is the result of work which has been carried out since the official commencement date of the approved research program; any editorial work, paid or unpaid, carried out by a third party is acknowledged; and, ethics procedures and guidelines have been followed. ______________________ Kerry L Munnery Date: -ii- Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisors, Professor Catherine Cole and Dr. Francesca Rendle-Short, for their assistance and advice. Thank you to Bronwyn Lay for reading and commenting on a draft of the novel. Special thanks to Laila Fanebust for her support and encouragement and for her careful reading of a final draft. Finally, thanks to Michael, for his care, patience, and constant faith in my capabilities, and to Mia and Zoe, my sources of energy, inspiration and delight. This Masters was completed with the generous assistance of an Australian Postgraduate Award. -iii- Table of Contents Abstract………………………………………………………………..1 Volume 1………………………………………………………………3 Volume 2……………………………………………………………..52 -iv- Abstract This thesis explores the role of the uncanny as a means of situating a gothic haunted house story in a contemporary Australian suburban home. In Volume One, the exegesis, I discuss the way Freud’s concept of the uncanny can work within a haunted house text, both as a means of transcending conventional clichés and as a way of ensuring contemporary relevance. I examine the uncanny with reference to ‘haunted’ structures, beginning with the original gothic castles. I then discuss the literary representation of the uncanny house in the Australian post-colonial context, using Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth as an example. Moving from direct colonial references into contemporary time and space, I argue that modern suburbs are uncanny places, and thus a natural site for a modern ‘haunted’ story. The uncanny, then, can be seen as a point of nexus between genre, history, place and individual through which my novel was created. The second volume of the thesis comprises this novel, The Mirror House . 1 2 Volume 1: Writing the Uncanny Into the Australian Suburban Home 3 4 Writing the uncanny into the Australian suburban home Contents: 1. Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 7 2. Exploring the castle: the uncanny and the gothic haunted house ...................................................... 10 3. Raising/razing the homestead: postcolonial gothic and Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth ....... 19 4. Rendering the brick veneer: uncanny suburbia ................................................................................. 31 5. Constructing The Mirror House : reflections and refractions ............................................................ 41 6. Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................ 46 Works Cited .......................................................................................................................................... 48 5 6 1. Introduction …in each moment of the history of the representation of the uncanny…the buildings and spaces that have acted as the sites for uncanny experiences have been invested with recognisable characteristics. These almost typical and eventually commonplace qualities – the attributes of haunted houses in Gothic romances are the most well known – while evidently not essentially uncanny in themselves, nevertheless have been seen as emblematic of the uncanny, as the cultural signs of estrangement for particular periods (Vidler 11) . A novel is not a house, but it needs to be constructed. A story is not a ghost, but without a structure it is amorphous, and in danger of dissolving. My novel The Mirror House is set in a new outer- suburban Australian home, but placed within the literary tradition of the gothic haunted house. This concept for a novel raises questions of how to work within an established set of conventions and expectations, but to render them relevant for a contemporary audience; and how a tradition so closely bound with the historical can be repositioned in a setting defined by its lack of history. The challenge inherent in the juxtaposition can be simply framed: how can the ‘new’ be haunted? This thesis will discuss the extent to which the concepts discussed in Freud’s 1919 essay ‘The Uncanny,’ and expounded in critical discourse, can provide an answer - a means of evoking unease and uncertainty beyond the strictures of conventional genre, as well as situating my work within a larger context. I will examine the way the uncanny resonates within ‘emblematic’ haunted structures and make a case for the suburban house as the locus of the uncanny in the present day. My novel then attempts to create such an unhomely home. While creative works described as gothic - film as well as text - generally attempt to startle, evoke fear, or horrify, it is the sense of the uncanny that can enable contemporary relevance for ‘haunted’ stories. The uncanny suggests a pervading and unresolvable sense of unease, a resignation to intellectual uncertainty. Critical discussion on the topic concerns the refusal of history to be 7 repressed, and a rejection of simple binaries such as inside and outside, past and present, alive and dead. It permeates not only the haunted house, but modernity, suburbia, and the act of writing itself. The uncanny encompasses the double, an uneasy copy of ourselves that brings into question our own identity and mortality. These aspects of ambiguity and duplicity not only refuse an easy resolution but can provide a means of transcending clichéd conventions of genre. Critical discussion on gothic literature, the uncanny, genre studies, and the built environment are vast areas of discourse, and this exegesis makes no claim to a comprehensive examination of these extensive fields. Rather, I examine the way they come together in the haunted structure as a means of providing a literary and historical context for my novel The Mirror House, and to signal how the uncanny, in particular the idea of the double, may work within the text. The development of this novel provides a focus for the convergence of genre, place and individual, or as I will expound, the gothic haunted house; Australia as a settler nation; the uncanny nature of the suburbs; and the idea of the writer. I will make a case that the outer-suburban home can be seen as the ‘emblematic’ site for the representation of the uncanny in this millennium. My novel can then take its place chronologically in the haunted house tradition, reimagining it in the ‘new’ whilst referring back to its literary history. The modern suburban home does not seem an immediately likely site for the traditional haunted house. The classic gothic haunted house of the imagination is inextricably bound with history, age and decay, along with the declining families of ancient lineages who have inhabited them for generations; as in Edgar Allan Poe’s House of Usher, it is a ‘repository of centuries of memory and tradition, embodied in its walls and objects’ (Vidler 18). In Chapter Two I will examine these origins of the gothic haunted house, and the doubled representations of the castle/home/castle present in the very first ‘gothic’ novels. I will discuss how Freudian analysis of the uncanny is bound with the idea of the ‘unhomely,’ and how this reflects both backwards and forwards through the genre. In Chapter Three I bring the discussion closer to ‘home.’ I examine Australian postcolonial gothic and the way reproducing a distant idea of the homely in an alien landscape created an uncanny nation. Postcolonial gothic has a strong emphasis on the borderless power of the landscape and the uneasy siting of European settlement within it. The nation itself in this discussion often 8 metaphorically takes the place of the ‘home,’ but I will argue for the particular role of the house itself as a representative structure within the landscape. A text which engages directly with contemporary Australia and the postcolonial gothic haunted house genre is Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth (2005) and I will examine this novel with reference to the house at its centre. While The White Earth is firmly grounded in the lived history of postcolonial settlement, Chapter Four moves beyond this direct colonial link to an examination of the uncanny in a site more immediately relevant to the majority of contemporary Australians – the suburbs. I will argue for the notion of contemporary suburbs as unsettled, liminal spaces, blurred in definition, uncanny in themselves, and the possibility this raises of envisioning suburban settlement as a wider metaphor for Australian history. In Chapter Five I discuss the way the uncanny resonates through the act of writing, its connection with the inspiration for my creative piece, The Mirror House, and how it provided a solution to some of the challenges of working within a genre. My novel The Mirror House is presented at the end