THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO HOUSING, CHARACTER, AND ARTIFCIAL LIFE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE BY AMANDA LEIGH DAVIS CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JUNE 2018 TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS ....................................................................................................... II LIST OF FIGURES ................................................................................................................ III ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................................................................................... VI ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................... VII INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER ONE, HAUNTED HOUSING FROM HOUSE OF LEAVES TO “HOUSE OF FICTION .......................................................................................................................... 30 CHAPTER TWO, REANIMATED WOMEN AND GOTHIC MAGNETISM IN THE HOUSES OF BUNDREN, PYNCHEON, AND USHER ................................................... 76 CHAPTER THREE: LOCKED WOMBS AND POROUS ROOMS IN ROSEMARY’S BABY AND “THE YELLOW WALLPAPER” .................................................................... 126 CHAPTER FOUR: DESIRING MACHINES IN AUTOMATED HOUSING IN SPIELBERG’S A.I. (2001) ..................................................................................................... 177 CODA: NEEDY HOUSES AND BROKEN INDIVIDUALS: FIXER UPPERS AND THE WORK OF DOMESTICATION .......................................................................................... 258 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................. 285 ii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Louis Sullivan, Carson, Pirie, Scott Building, 1899 and 1903-04, Chicago………………..31 Figure 2. “This is where I grew up."………………………………… …………………………..125 Figure 3. “We all share blame for Balloon Boy.”…………………………………………………133 Figure 4. “Be Balloon Boy for Halloween”. ……………………………………………………...134 Figure 5. “Without God?” ………………………………………………………………………139 Figure 6. “What have you done to its eyes?” …………………………………………………….146 Figure 7. Interfacial intimacy. ……………………………………………………………………147 Figure 8. Architectural halo of intimacy………………………………………………………….148 Figure 9. Digital intimacy………………………………………………………………………...150 Figure 10 Separated thresholds for mourning.… ………………………………………………...151 Figure 11. Rosemary isolated.…………………………………………………………… ……...152 Figure 12. Intimacy occluded…………………………………………………………………….153 Figure 13. Hallowed out…………………………………………………………………………154 Figure 14. “If you could lock in freshness.”………………………………………………… …..158 Figure 15. Materially separate spheres……………………………………………………………163 Figure 16. Hexed boundary crossing …………………………………………………………….163 Figure 17. Yellow wallpaper, impure woman…………………………………………………….164 Figure 18. Ordinary ritual.………………………………………………………………………..170 Figure 19. Housing purity………………………………………………………………………..175 Figure 20. Evil, killer David and queer, loving David.… ……………………………………… 183 Figure 21. Running from the nonhuman in Spielberg.… ………………………………………...185 Figure 22. Darlene in silhouette………………………………………………………………….189 iii Figure 23. Imperfect mirror……………………………………………………………………...190 Figure 24. Duplicate selves………………………………………………………………………192 Figure 25. Self as mask…………………………………………………………………………...194 Figure 26. The artificial subject who would be object …………………………………………....196 Figure 27. Romantic and childlike embrace eternally suspended…………………………………198 Figure 28. Martin's translucent motives…………………………………………………………..199 Figure 29. “This is my son” ……………………………………………………………………...200 Figure 30. Threatened with a “knife”…………………………………………………………….201 Figure 31. David’s translucent closet …………………………………………………………….203 Figure 32. Let's see what you can't pee with……………………………………………………...204 Figure 33. My baby! ……………………………………………………………………………..205 Figure 34. Watery deathtrap for children in beautiful suburbia…………………………………..206 Figure 35. Queering their programming………………………………………………………….209 Figure 36. The future is midcentury modern……………………………………………………..214 Figure 37. The unacknowledged closet-anus……………………………………………………..216 Figure 38. Low-tech kitchen, plus robot…………………………………………………………217 Figure 39. Smith and Farber's 1937 Mechanical designs for the “Coffee Robot.”………………..219 Figure 40. 1938 hangtag from a Farberware electric percolater.…………………………………..220 Figure 41. The passion of the image……………………………………………………………..222 Figure 42. “Lowe's Presents: how to install a new washing machine with one finger.”…………..231 Figure 43. Robot means slave……………………………………………………………………236 Figure 44. Salvaging across gender and vocational lines………………………………………….237 Figure 45. Crucified laborer……………………………………………………………………...239 iv Figure 46. Robot slave lynching…………………………………………………………… ……240 Figure 47. Masculinity defamiliarized ……… …………………………………………………...247 Figure 48. “You'll never want a real man again”………… ……………………………………...249 Figure 49. Mechanical lover has the characteristics of “polite society.”…………………………...251 Figure 50. Baring the device of animation………………………………………………………..255 Figure 51. Are you ready to see your fixer upper? ……………………………………………….267 Figure 52. Buster and Buster in front of falling houses…………………………………………...270 Figure 53. Screaming with laughter…………………………………………………………….....277 Figure 54. The fall of the house of Bluth………………………………………………………....282 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS As with all dissertations, I am indebted to the many people who made this one a reality. My committee, Bill Brown, Lauren Berlant, and Adrienne Brown each offered invaluable hours advising and encouraging me and engaging in what I can only call idea jam sessions. I also owe gratitude to those who participated in the Gender and Sexuality Studies Working Group, the Object Cultures Project at 3CT, the TAPS Workshop, and the American Cultures Workshop, where I presented portions of the dissertation at various stages and received enthusiastic and knowledgeable feedback from students and faculty. I must also thank the undergraduates at both the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute who have called me instructor during this process—discussing the works both in and adjacent to my project with these sharp young minds has challenged and sharpened my sense of what literary criticism is and can be. On top of collegial and professional support, I have also been uplifted by collaborators and friends from many different parts of my life. My writing group—Female Trouble—generously and repeatedly undertook the laborious task of slogging through my meandering prose to help me make sense of it all. There are also the roommates, near-roommates, intimate friends, and lovers who have lived and loved with me through these years, providing human contact, compassion, and food in ample measure. A special thank you to my ex, who acted as my research assistant and editor for several years before we parted ways, and who unwaveringly believed I could even when I was most convinced I couldn’t. And a thank you to my current partner, who came up with rewards to help motivate me through some difficult times. vi ABSTRACT Portrait of a Lady, Henry James claims in his preface to the New York edition of the novel, originated in a “slight ‘personality,’ the mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl.” James marvels at “how absolutely, how inordinately, the Isabel Archers, and even much smaller female fry, insist on mattering.” James makes the girl matter through a process of “logical accretion” that begins with a “square and spacious house” that “had to be put up round my young woman while she stood there in perfect isolation [my emphasis].”1 The author writes that he sought to “append” to Isabel the “high attributes of a Subject” by building up layers of material support: including her domestic house, a network of characters, her structural position as a “smaller female fry” in a cultural field that conventionally reserves such lofty attributes for masculine figures, and her hefty “ado” of a novel, the form of which James famously describes as a large house with many windows. Though James is well known for complex portraits of interior consciousness, this dissertation expands on his more superficial and Gothic impulses, his wonder at the “mystic conversion” that moves a “slim shade” of a character into sustained and artificial liveliness. James identifies “detail, of the minutest” as his material for both channeling readerly interest and for accumulating Isabel’s character “brick by brick.” Although James begins with a sense of Isabel’s character, it is through inhabiting a body contained in a house embedded in a character network within a novel that her liveliness unfolds. These intersecting levels of what I am calling imaginative housing move her character to a life that James confesses exceeds his understanding. By attending to the aesthetics of imaginative housing, or dynamic forms of inanimate containers, this dissertation delves into ongoing negotiations of what gets to count as human and as 1 James, Henry, The Selected Novels and Tales of Henry James, 24 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906 – 8, p. 171. vii animate. I track this concept across a historically broad array of American fiction and film from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The