Domesticity Under Siege: Threatened Spaces of the Modern Home 9781350166127, 135016612X

Citation preview

Domesticity Under Siege

ii

Domesticity Under Siege Threatened Spaces of the Modern Home Edited by Mark Taylor, Georgina Downey and Terry Meade

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 © Editorial content and introductions, Mark Taylor, Georgina Downey and Terry Meade, 2023 © Individual chapters, their authors, 2023 Mark Taylor, Georgina Downey and Terry Meade have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. Cover design by Louise Dugdale Cover Image © Michael Nash-AP Photo/ANSA Michael Nash. A photographer uses his own backdrop to mask Poland’s World War II ruins while shooting a portrait of a woman in Warsaw, in November of 1946. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-6611-0 ePDF: 978-1-3501-6613-4 eBook: 978-1-3501-6612-7 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of figures List of biographies Introduction: Domesticity under siege Mark Taylor, Georgina Downey, Terry Meade

Section 1  Microbes animals and insects 1



2



Miasmatical fears Annmarie Adams Domesticity and fear: Insects and creepy crawlies Mark Taylor

Section 2  Human agents – Burrowing, hoarding, concealing, undermining 3



4



The domestic screen Terry Meade Hoarding disorder, Schwitters’s Merzbau and its conflict with domesticity Judit Pusztaszeri

Section 3  Wars and d­ isasters as agents 5



6



Under siege: The wartime home in British art of the London Blitz Georgina Downey Searching for (A) home in the rubble: The Heimkehrer-Flâneur in Wolfgang Staudte’s Die Mörder Sind Unter Uns Kai-Uwe Werbeck

Section 4  Hauntings, eeriness and the uncanny 7



8



‘I have ended up like the house, pretending to be myself ’: Uncanny heritage house museums Hannah Lewi Suburban horror story James F. Kerestes

Index

vi vii

1 15

17 37

53

55 75 97

99

125 149

151 169 185

Figures 1.1 1.2 1.3 2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 6.1 6.2 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4

‘House with Every Sanitary Arrangement Faulty’ ‘New Terrace on a Former Dump’ ‘A Visit from the Sewer Rat’ John Leech, ‘A House Over-Run by Cockroaches’ Henry Worrall, ‘Grangers versus Hoppers’, Exterior View of the Mole Man’s House in Hackney, London Under the Fritzl Residence Esther Shalev-Gerz, Daedal(us), 2003, projection, detail © Atelier Shalev-Gerz Esther Shalev-Gerz, Daedal(us), 2003, projection, detail © Atelier Shalev-Gerz Alex Macpherson, The Alert Clifford Hall, ‘… But Damage was Slight and the Number of Casualties Very Small’ Ethel Gabain, Bombed Out Stella Bowen, The House Opposite Carel Weight, The Battle of Suburbia Hans and Susanne in Front of a Window Framing a Nocturnal Berlin Susanne Arriving at her Apartment Interior Drawing of Sir John Soane’s House Interior of the Smoking Room, Dennis Severs House Interior of the Green Drawing Room, Johnston House Reflection of Author at the Johnston House James Kerestes, ‘Abstract X-Ray Image of a Typical North American Bungalow Home Revealing the Underlying Poché within the Structure’ James Kerestes, ‘Analytical Drawing Illustrating the Unstructured Spaces Utilized By “Billy” in the Murder of Clare’ James Kerestes, ‘Analytical Drawing Illustrating the Juxtaposition between Nancy’s House and the Impossible Space Below the Bathtub’ James Kerestes, ‘Analytical Drawing Illustrating the Spatial and Volumetric Relationships between the Living Room and the Expansive Closet in Relic’, 2020

19 22 34 39 47 63 66 69 70 107 108 109 112 115 133 139 158 160 163 164 171 173 176

181

Biographies Editors Mark Taylor is Professor of Architecture and Course Director, Masters of Architecture at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. His primary research focus is the history and theory of the modern architectural interior with an emphasis on cultural and social issues. Mark has authored and edited several books, including Interior Design and Architecture: Critical and Primary Sources (Bloomsbury 2013) and Flow: Interiors, Landscapes and Architecture in the Era of Liquid Modernity (Bloomsbury 2018). Georgina Downey is Visiting Research Fellow in Art History at the University of Adelaide. She has published widely on the domestic interior in representation from the eighteenth century to the modern period. Recent books include: Domestic Interiors: Representing Home from the Victorians to the Moderns (2013), which won the Art Association of Australia and NZ Best Anthology Prize in 2014; and Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media (edited with Anca Lasc and Mark Taylor 2015), both published by Bloomsbury. She is also engaged in the promotion of the history and culture of the domestic interior, through writing, public speaking and running her own private programme of tours of significant twentieth-century interiors. Terry Meade is Principal Lecturer at the University of Brighton in the School of Architecture and Design. His background in architecture, fine art and engineering contribute to his research interests. Current research explores narratives that unfold in specific places, and how they may be used to negotiate specific spatial environments. Narrative is considered to be an inherited capability forming individual and communal histories particular to the experience of a place. Work carried out in Israel/Palestine, building houses with an Israeli peace group, has enabled issues of security (walls, barriers and borders) to inform this research through the contribution to particular narratives about domestic space.

Contributors Annmarie Adams, FRAIC, is jointly appointed in McGill University’s Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture and the Department of Social Studies of Medicine, where she serves as department chair. A native of London, Ontario, Adams graduated with Honours from McGill University in 1981. She then attended the University of California at Berkeley, where she received her professional Masters of Architecture in 1986 and PhD in 1992. She has taught at McGill University since 1990, serving as Director of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies and subsequently as Director of the School of Architecture. Adams’ research focuses on the relationship of medicine and architecture. She is the author of three monographs: Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870–1900 (McGillQueens University Press, 1996), Medicine by Design: The Architect and the Modern Hospital, 1893–1943 (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and co-author of Designing Women: Gender and the Architectural Profession (University of Toronto Press, 2000), with sociologist Peta Tancred. James F. Kerestes is Associate Professor of Architecture at Ball State University. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Syracuse University and a Post‐ Professional Master of Architecture degree from Pratt Institute. His current research focuses on identifying and exploring the latent potential within tools and building typologies to instigate novel architectural design inquiries. This emphasis explores methods for engaging tools as mediums where authorial exchanges lead to new opportunities in design communication, architectural storytelling, user interaction, digital fabrication, and construction. Hannah Lewi is Professor in Architecture in the Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne and Co-director of the research hub ACAHUCH. Her research interests span modern architecture history, new media and digital representation of history and heritage, and theoretical inquiries of heritage and conservation. She is the vice-chair of DOCOMOMO Australia, was a past president of SAHANZ and co-editor of Fabrications, and is currently an investigator on an ARC project on Building the Modern Australian Campus. Recent co-authored publications include Australia Modern: Architecture, Landscape and Design, Thames & Hudson, 2019, and forthcoming The Routledge International Handbook of New Digital Practices in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums and Heritage, co-eds. Lewi, Smith, Cooke, Vom Leon, 2019. Judit Pusztaszeri is a senior lecturer and early career researcher at the University of Brighton. Her previous research was interested in power in architecture, analysing architectural sites of memory in post-communist countries forming national and individual identities. Her mode of case study analysis was to challenge the conventional narratives associated with the histories of the chosen sites, arguing that urban

viii Biographies

design actively constitutes political reality. Her current research looks at domestic sites of memory and identity, the home understood through the eyes of the hoarder. Kai-Uwe Werbeck is Assistant Professor of German at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, with a PhD in German Literature from UNC Chapel Hill. His research interests include German post-war film and literature, global horror cinema and media studies. He has published on the multi-media aesthetics and hidden politics in the work of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, the transfers between rubble literature and film in the novels of Heinrich Böll, the limits of literary representation in Rainald Goetz’s Rave and German no-budget splatter in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. An essay on augmented reality games appeared in an edited volume in 2016. Kai-Uwe is one of the translators of Alexander Kluge’s Kong’s Finest Hour. Critical essays on John Carpenter’s The Thing and Dennis Gansel’s Wir sind die Nacht are forthcoming. He is currently working on a monograph on (West) German horror films after 1945.

Biographies ix

x

Introduction: Domesticity under siege MARK TAYLOR, GEORGINA DOWNEY, TERRY MEADE

While this book was being written, a new infectious respiratory disease named Covid-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) entered the world, creating a convulsive crisis that has changed all our lives. The virus spread rapidly, affecting our daily activity and business, and disrupting world trade and travel. To slow down the transmission of the disease, partial lockdowns were employed, and ‘home’ became a place of isolation, quarantine and confinement. As a first line of defence, during the height of the first and second coronavirus waves, government health authorities urged populations to stay at home, behind their own four walls and away from public space. Around the world, home rapidly became figured as a prime refuge from contagion. Being locked down with the monotony of the same rooms, the same walking routine and same daily isolation became the ‘new normal’. At the same time, and armed with new media platforms, the private domestic realm took on many additional functions. It became a kind of virtual public space through the adoption of cloud-based video conferencing technology; it became office space and gym/fitness space; and for parents, it became a schooling space. Covid, contrary to the undermining ‘agents’ we explore here, had the effect of expanding activities within the home, while revivifying some age-old meanings of ‘home’ as sanctuary. For this reason, the pandemic can’t be seen strictly speaking as ‘undermining’ the home except that it was the particular space, like a temporary prison, where most of our fatigue, fear and frustration were experienced. On a more general level, the pandemic filled populations with uncertainty and insecurity. Our world view or Weltanschauung changed as we reeled from that fact that never before had the lives of so many people around the world been affected at this scale or speed, nor had inequity been laid so ruthlessly bare. We never expected to produce this volume under such conditions. However, much like the novelist who had the outline of a pandemic novel in November 2019 or the geneticist who was working on mRNA vaccine technologies, we were ­working on a critical anthology about the besieged home. As the volume progressed, being confined to home was truly fortuitous. If nothing else, the radically altered conditions of normal life led to a weirdly sharpened lens on the metanarratives of domesticity. Without doubt, the Covid-19 global pandemic period shifted our focus, both personal and scholarly, towards the home and its conditions. Indeed, that the

idea of home as an actual refuge slipped so effortlessly into place encouraged us to consider opposite alternatives – the idea of home as a false refuge, as an ‘uncanny’ rather than canny (or Heimlich) space. Nineteenth-century ‘home as haven’ theories idealized home as a refuge and a place of positive and joyous experiences, equating home with comfort and security. It was argued as a place of repose for the family, a nurturing environment for children and a safe place for visitors (Tosh 1996). Under this conception, domestic space is positioned as nurturing and private, a refuge and place of retreat. This social and spatial conception of home offered ‘individual freedom, a place liberated from fear and anxiety, a place supposedly untouched by social, political and natural processes, a place enjoying an autonomous and independent existence: a home’ (Kaika 2004: 266). Additionally, this framing also enabled ‘historical geographical processes through which nature became scripted as the “other” to the private space of the bourgeois home in western societies’ (Kaika 2004: 266). The domestic realm was a refuge from outside agents. As the dominant narrative, it became clear that any new events proper to and supportive of it were privileged above others that did not fit. The ‘home as haven’ theory was culturally reinforced and accepted as normal. The outcome of this socialized idea was to reinforce a collective way of thinking, often over-shadowing any subjective experience, except within those genres such as Gothic horror, which deliberately reversed its tropes to produce pleasurable or instructive forms of terror. Twentieth-century challenges to this notion focused on domestic environments that exist in a world of tension and conflict, with feminist theorists exposing the home as a ‘potential site of struggle and conflict’ (Brickell 2012). Second wave feminist reflections on home and family and particularly between home, gender and identity situate home as a place of patriarchal oppression, tyranny and domination of women. It is a position that views home as a private female realm focused on reproductive rather than productive work. The home therefore is rendered conditional and subject to various situations that expose its vulnerability, and as these chapters demonstrate, the relationship between nurturing domesticity and siege is one of inhabitation and agency. All chapters have engendered a new awareness of the besieged home’s vulnerability when a person(s), object(s), animal(s) or microbe(s) exerts power and threatens existing states or conditions. We can also think about how siege facilitates alternate identification(s), materially and psychically. Generally, the term ‘siege’ is equated with military operations that surround a town and force surrender by cutting supplies. Siege also enables us to understand our vulnerability outside this context. Terry Meade argues that siege, by its very definition, pushes boundaries back and forth, noting that sieges are ‘laid’ by an outside agent with the aim of broaching the domestic boundary. Moreover, this boundary is not simply a ‘mere wall’, a defensive line impenetrable to outside forces, but is a permeable or porous screen. While the notion of home as ‘refuge’ is compelling, it is seen here to rest not only on nostalgia and longing but also on fear, since what passes through the domestic screen is vital to the life of a home

2 Domesticity Under Siege

(water, power, connectivity of all kinds). Alternatively, this porous domestic screen is also a conduit for those agents that are utterly undermining of comfort and security – viruses, insects, super-powered airborne military ordnance and, perhaps most eternally confounding of all, disturbances arising from the human psyche, such as violence, obsession and haunting. Our critical examination of the role played by an object (wall) opens space for the exploration of both spatial and psychological disturbance of the domestic; disturbance that is figured here as a set of forces that flow from both within and without. This book comes at a time of political and social change, in which actions or events under threat are variously described as being ‘under siege’, whether seemingly over-exaggerated or not. Ranging from the demise of democracy (Dowling 2021) or development schemes that force changes to the city (Towns under Siege), the siege metaphor permeates. The physical and psychological insecurity of living in a city facing frequent military attacks, fires and floods, or experiencing Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns, induces a siege mentality where ‘beliefs foster dire predictability by preparing society members for the worst in their life’ (Gold 2020: 144). Youth crime, including home invasions, thefts and assaults are reported in the media, with ensuing government reactions framing antisocial behaviour as a threat on city life (Melbourne under Siege). Animals are also included, particularly when large swarms gather and/or occupy parts of a town. Many articles and papers related to women’s experiences of violence include reference to women ‘being under siege’ from rape and male oppression. Reporting on the Capitol Hill riots, journalists described a state of siege and how rioters ‘breached’ the building. While much of the focus was on the building, CNN journalist Lauren Dezenski felt empathy for ‘every single person that was literally under siege in and around the building’ (Bouranova 2021). Here the emphasis shifts from the object to the subject. While understanding there is a breach of some form of containment (object), Dezenski suggests that larger social and political forces collide with or invade the individual (subject). It is against this background of global permacrisis that Domesticity under Siege interrogates the home as an unstable place and the site of traumatic encounter brought about by both inside and outside agents. It is a different angle to that taken by critical geographies of the home that address the ‘tensions between homes as exclusionary havens versus homes as idealized space’, through notions of injustice and dysfunction (Brickell 2012: 238). Yet in critical geographies of the home, ‘exclusion’ is usefully linked to notions of fear of difference, particularly of non-conforming bodies or activities. Critical geographies also situate home as the space of familial dysfunction, epitomized by physical violence and psychological assault, particularly against women and children. Although men generally encounter violence in the public sphere, in the United States women are ‘nine times more likely to be deliberately injured in their homes than on the streets’ (Tyner 2012: 35). For some people, the Covid-19 lockdown has meant being imprisoned with their abusers and distanced from sources of help, as coronavirus-related rises in domestic violence, depression and despair reveal. In many parts of the world Covid-19

Introduction: Domesticity under Siege 3

lockdowns made it harder for women to leave violent homes and escape intimate partner violence. Individual stories emerged alongside welfare concerns for children exposed to and subject of family violence (Edwards 2021). In Australia the statistics are alarming, with fleeing the home at best difficult, at worst, during a lockdown, impossible. For those caught in this ‘shadow pandemic’, isolation from family, school and welfare support makes the home an unsafe place that is bounded and isolated from outside influences. This conception of home as the site of violence towards women is a critical aspect of the domestic scene, and several instances are included in Terry Meade’s chapter, with its thoughtful exposition of incarceration and familial killing that occur within a building’s boundary. While acknowledging the difficulty of overcoming a fixed or controlled boundary, there is also the need to recognize the wall of the dwelling as not necessarily a clearcut dividing line. Penny Sparke has argued for a more seamless linkage between interiors and landscapes, writing that ‘in this scenario it is almost as if the buildings’ “boundaries” do not exist, or, even if they do, they act as a permeable or porous membrane that does not disrupt a sense of spatial continuity’ (Sparke 2018: xvii). But as Shelly Mallet notes, some researchers who reject the idealized version of home tend to ‘conflate home and dwelling, and thereby preserve a clear demarcation between inside and outside’ (Mallett 2004: 73). Such a position is not new but has received little attention, except perhaps by visual artists, who from the 1960s have highlighted such binary notions by entering, slicing into, cutting and breaking the family home, from Gordon Matta-Clark’s ‘Splitting’ house, circa 1974, to Ian Strange’s transformations of suburban houses through black-out paint and fire. What became clear when setting the theme for this volume is that scholarship on the home has a strong history of theorizing domesticity through cultural, social, psychological and material perspectives. For example, design historians have selected homes for examination relative to their period, and praised them for their material, spatial and decorative qualities. More recent social and cultural scholarship examines the lives of the occupants, and how identities are formed and informed by domestic space. Yet there is little on how the home is shaped or defined by outside undermining agents. Responding to this observation, we accepted a number of limitations in order to keep our discussion as focused as possible. This decision was made knowing that there is an overwhelming array of undermining agents that act upon the home, and as editors we had to accept that we could not give as broad a sweep to the full range of topics as we would have liked. As we planned the volume, with one of us in the northern hemisphere, and two in the global south, the evidence of climate change was right before us: floods to the north, and in Australia and the United States, the worst bushfires ever experienced. Flood and fire caused by increased global warming not only directly undermines the home, it creates droughts and famines that force communities out of their homes to become migrants or refugees. While inflecting our thinking in developing the four themes, we consider that the effects of climate change and global warming on the home to be such a dominant and present threat

4 Domesticity Under Siege

that it warrants a further volume of its own, the better not only to weave in current findings but to address the impellent need to develop new ones. Comparably, the relationship between the fragile, unstable, unsafe home and questions of gender deserves a fuller exegesis than we were able to provide. Even so, our engagement with contemporary discourse in women’s and gender studies is embedded not only in our gender balance of authors and content but also in our understanding of critical theories of the home as it is explicit in our explorations of the woman householder, commencing here with the ‘medicalized’ Victorian home, and following on with how women are disproportionally endangered by mutant forms of dwelling, how modern women artists depicted the bomb-damaged home, female agency in the German ‘rubble-film’ and the curatorial challenge of representing the gendered past occupants, via ‘the ghosts’, of contemporary house museums. Other disturbances that warrant examination include the repositioning of home through notions of care, such as the caring for another, or caring for the home. While these examples might be considered as an outside agent affecting the home, and affecting change, they are primarily social, cultural interventions performed through human-to-human agency. That is, many people’s lives and homes are affected by age, disability and other familial and non-familial forms of inhabitation, as well as the effect coercive occupations have on maintaining homemaking. Such theorizing is needed, and it recognizes the politics of domesticity rather than its material and phenomenological narratives. Indeed, the scholarship of care and respect offers alternative approaches to the domestic that includes decolonializing the home through a political framework and undermining the dominant ideology of home as portrayed through Western literature. However, the focus on this volume is also engaged in this struggle, since it seeks to unpick narratives of home as a ‘safe’ place. To this extent it highlights the interwoven-ness between human and non-human agents in the creation of fear, discomfort and undermining that affects the modern home. One final thread we examined but omitted is the role of new technologies and the ‘smart home’ as an agent of change, destabilizing the traditional home. Under this conception, home lies somewhere between the digital and physical worlds, between the infinite extension of data worlds and the decreasing experience of personal space. Data collected through smart apps and sensors capable of monitoring our activities can invade the home through targeted marketing on our devices. At the same time, ‘smart home’ data connects real-time information to the Internet of Things, and can be used to control, for example, internal lighting relative to occupation and time, shifts in household energy use to optimize efficiency, and promote reciprocal relationships between the digital and the analogue. Certainly, the introduction of ubiquitous computing, smart phones and personal devices has altered habitable practices, such that work and leisure are not necessarily confined to rooms but occur throughout the domestic setting. Accepting the above limitations, we recognize the volume is by no means comprehensive or complete, but rather focuses deeply on four themes that have played an important role in undermining the modern home. Therefore, the eight chapters are

Introduction: Domesticity under Siege 5

organized around four thematic sections: (1) Microbes, Animals and Insects, (2) Human Agents – Burrowing, Hoarding, Concealing, Undermining, (3) Wars and Disasters as Agents and (4) Hauntings, Eeriness and the Uncanny. Each section has two chapters that are twinned or paired, wherein which the authors engage with not only theoretical formulations but also lived, performed and representational experiences. The range of approaches to the home includes a variety of examples and case studies that are broad but challenge notions of ‘home as haven’. The volume is limited and recognizes that relative to the actions of the world around an inhabited domain, there are many occasions when unforeseeable forces act upon the home and threaten aspects of safety and comfort, including, ruination, violence, mortality and infestation.

Section one: Microbes, animals and insects The first section, ‘Microbes, Animals and Insects’, examines the home under threat from visible and invisible organisms. It brings together fears of invisible vapours transmitted through the air, penetrating the home and affecting health with the fear of bugs and infestations invading the home and the body. Chapter 1, Annmarie Adams’ ‘Miasmatical Fears’, examines how the late-­ Victorian home was reshaped spatially and technically to accommodate sickness, a process led by women in league with medical advisors. The outcome being that the Victorian home became a medical technology in itself within a discourse of housing as form of ‘preventative medicine’. Adams reveals how doctors, through writings and diagrams, demonstrated to nineteenth-century female householders how toxic or noxious air entered their houses, in order to assist in the combat of pestilence and airborne disease. Where the medical profession provided theory and practical advice, the middle-class wife and mother was expected to follow their advice in the re-purification of the home. Adams commences her argument with an exposition of the home as refuge and haven, following this notion back to one of its most compelling proponents, John Ruskin, who proposed that unless a home was completely ‘impenetrable by outer life’, it was merely a house, a bare structure. However, the late-Victorian house, Adams argues, was, as a consequence of the proliferation of diseases such as typhoid and cholera, a space of fear and thus fell far short of the Ruskin ideal. She reconsiders a key but overlooked interior space of the period – the sick room – an ordinary room set aside in this era for the isolation of unwell family members and relatives. Typically, in terms of its spatial disposition, it was placed away from adjacent bedrooms and doorways to prevent aerial transmission of disease, a design factor being brought back into practice in Covid facilities, in light of the super-­transmissible mutant strains of the virus. Adams notes how sites of nursing treatment shifted from home sick rooms to hospitals but coronavirus transmission now makes us fear public forms of medical space as sites of potential contamination.

6 Domesticity Under Siege

Adams steps the reader methodically through the nineteenth century’s conflation of the ‘healthy house’ with the healthy body. This notion relied on an essentially modern concept of disease as a communal, rather than an individual problem. Such an expanded notion of contagion required new forms of advice, planning and practices. Thence she links the evolution of germ theory with modern reliance on science, rationality and systems. She notes how new concerns about how infections’ spread led to new science-related job roles in the community, such as ‘sanitary inspector’, a role that served an emerging notion of public health. She shows how each step forward required a conceptual linkage between body and house, in the mind of the concerned public. Chapter 2, Mark Taylor’s ‘Domesticity and Fear: Insects, and Creepy Crawlies’, offers a spatial and critical theoretical approach to show how insects can cause a breach of both the home and the body. This is demonstrated relative to the way the home is undermined by non-companion animals – pests, swarmers and colonizers – creatures that bring up tensions around fear and control because of their marked physical differences to us, and their monstrous qualities and capacity to gather together in huge numbers. The chapter traces fear of insects back through film, folk tales and the imagery to reveal how deeply terrifying ‘the swarm’ is in the popular imagination. Alongside this is an exploration of the history and language around insect besiegement and how swarms invoke notions of ‘a constant battle’, raising the point that human fear itself is often the besiegement agent or factor. Through a wide range of cultural productions in different media ranging from eighteenth-century nursery rhymes, to novels, to twentieth-century cinema, our deep fears about insect infestations in the home are revealed. Additionally, Taylor exposes how insects manage to transgress both real and symbolic boundaries, including, most disturbingly, those of the human body itself, when it’s penetrated by bedbugs, ticks and lice. Imagined fears are also depicted through insect horror films, where environmental disasters (leaking nuclear materials, toxins and poisons) generate mutant aggressive insects that attack homes while occupants shelter therein for safety. The chapter concludes by arguing that insects, as exemplified by grasshoppers, lie outside prescribed domestic and spatial orders, in ways that discomfort and disturb us.

Section Two: Human agents – Burrowing, hoarding, concealing, undermining The second theme, titled ‘Human Agents  – Burrowing, Hoarding, Concealing, Undermining’, examines threats to the home from psychical disorders. Tunnelling, burrowing or hoarding by the inhabitants undermines the home and signifies efforts to create distance between perceived fear and reality. Chapter 3 is Terry Meade’s ‘The Domestic Screen’, which examines how the ‘domestic screen’ veils human violence; yet he shows how this screen is also far more permeable, labile and manipulable than a mere border.

Introduction: Domesticity under Siege 7

The primary focus is on the underlying, hidden aspects of domesticity in which, as Freud proposes, we find the unheimlich, – a parallel characteristic of home that is suffused with secrecy, uncertainty and fear. Quoting Michel Serres, Meade opposes his notion that the home is beyond siege, since it is ‘just multiple variations on the box – enlarging, layering, it with membranes from hard to soft on the way inwards’ in ways that contain and protect us reliably and permanently. In contrast, Meade’s case studies explore what he terms mutant forms of dwelling  – violence and imprisonment  – that rely on the operation of the domestic screen’s function as a ‘veil’ to avoid detection. His first example of ‘screen as veil’ is that of Shafilea Ahmed, who was murdered by her parents in 2003. Meade explores Jacqueline Rose’s writing on this appalling case, particularly the ceaseless press reproduction of the façade of Shafilea’s family home, a seemingly ordinary suburban 1930s brick semi in Warrington, Cheshire. ‘Normal’ and safe, and its uncanny, violent opposite are here conjured simultaneously by the ordinariness of the façade of the house. Meade then ponders how the screen acts to conceal ‘intimate’ familial violence. Siege, he argues, by its very definition, pushes boundaries back and forth and is ‘laid’ by an outside agent with the aim of broaching a boundary. That boundary is conceptualized as a screen – the modern wall in Western domestic architecture is in fact spatially misleading as it is usually two walls and a cavity – a layer of ‘open’ but not empty space that is neither inside nor outside, and thus a kind of metaphor for a complex in- and ex-filtration point between private and public realms. Exploring how the domestic screen expands upon the simplistic notion of a public-private divide, Meade draws upon Hannah Arendt’s notion that, domestically speaking, there are things that need to be hidden, and things that need to be displayed publicly ‘if they are to exist at all’. Through Arendt, Meade argues that the proper location of human affairs is distorted when one realm is excessively privileged over the other; and in the Ahmed case it was excessive familial privacy and the siblings being sworn to secrecy for years that baffled and frustrated the investigation. The Ahmed case and Meade’s subsequent interrogation of the ‘Fritzl’ and ‘Priklopil’ cases in Austria, including the abduction and hiding of victims in cellars and basements, reveal extreme instances of how domesticity has a protective screen ‘flung over it’ even, and maybe especially, when that violence is initiated from within. He concludes by arguing that the domestic screen mediates our connections to community, linking areas visually, therefore reiterating Arendt and the balanced cohabitation between private and public space – the implication being of course that seeing and being seen is a form of safety the domestic screen can at times protectively occlude. Chapter 4, ‘Hoarding Disorder, Schwitters’s Merzbau and its Conflict with Domesticity’, examines domestic hoarding as a complex system or temporary archive of unstructured data where memories, short and long term, are organized, prioritized, confused and buried under further piles of coalesced information. Following

8 Domesticity Under Siege

on from Terry Meade, Judit Pusztaszeri explores Hoarding Disorder (HD) as a mutant or deviant form of occupation that bears some similarity to collecting, but is far more undermining of the home than the latter. She shows how the reconfiguration of the domestic environment in response to menace undermines causal relationships between functional space and informal, unanticipated or non-programmable activities. Ontologically speaking, hoarding undermines the home by narrowing its function to that of a mere storehouse, and Hoarding, as Pusztaszeri explains, is the only specifically spatial disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM–5). In other words, diagnosis of the disorder requires it to be particular to a certain category of space – the home. Pusztaszeri shows that while hoarding and collecting both involve a violation of social relationships, the living space of the collector remains functional. She takes this distinction into a careful exploration of whether early-twentieth-century Swiss Dada artist Kurt Schwitters’s Merz project could be seen to constitute hoarding, rather than collecting. Pusztaszeri traces documentary evidence about Schwitters’s Merzbau assem­blages, works he scavenged from scrap materials melded together with plaster and wood, and thence how his associated behaviour dramatically (and indeed structurally) undermined his home. Aligning with the diagnostic criteria in the DSM-5, the familial spaces of his home in Hanover became ‘substantially compromised in their intended use’ as the Merz spread through the Schwitters’s home in a viral fashion, even destabilizing the house physically. The work created much psychological strain for members of the Schwitters’s family as well as their tenants, the Boetels, since there was ‘debris, materials, construction and noise’ created by it both day and night. The Merz thus had a powerful effect on that ‘other space’ – the domestic, and Schwitters’s creation of it very much pushed the boundary between hoarding and collecting. He also engaged in ‘churning’, a psychiatric technical term where hoarded objects are continuously moved around with no final decision made about where the thing/s should be. In her final analysis, Pusztaszeri draws wider parallels between hoarding and modernity itself – noting the latter’s relation to fragmentation of memory required past experience to be more carefully conserved in and through objects. Essentially, however, Pusztaszeri is able to draw the fine line between the compulsivity of the act of hoarding, with Schwitters as her example, and the more controlled, programmatic activity of collecting.

Section three: Wars and disasters as agents Section Three in this volume, ‘Wars and Disasters as Agents’, focuses on the significance of representations of the home besieged by war and disaster. Chronologically it takes a mid-twentieth-century focus with attention particularly on painting, photography and filmic representations of the war-besieged, rubble-strewn home.

Introduction: Domesticity under Siege 9

Chapter 5 explores the bombed house in London’s Second World War era art and draws on the ‘house as body’ metaphor. In ‘Under Siege: The Wartime Home in British Art of the London Blitz’, Georgina Downey introduces JeanPaul Sartre’s famous quote ‘my body is everywhere: the bomb which destroys my house also destroys my body insofar as the house was already an indication of my body’. The involvement of the body in architecture is nothing new, going back to Vitruvius, but its focus is more typically on the intact house-body. For Downey, the home besieged by war and disaster is neither intact nor a refuge or haven. Theoretical framing is drawn from Linda Nochlin’s notion of an ‘embodied viewer’ in order to analyse a series of images in which damaged houses and the bodily presences of occupants and survivors are brought together in streetscape views. Downey speculates on a ‘neighbourly’ or community-oriented gaze that developed during the Blitz as a powerful visual trope evoking unity of social purpose on both a local and national level. She shows how the bomb-damaged images with their carefully placed human figures constitute a directive or indication about how we as viewers might read in and viscerally experience the unprecedented scale of damaged and destroyed dwellings in the rubble-strewn capital between 1940 and 1945. The neighbourly ‘eye view’ on the world, from home to street to borough and general locale carried over into the post-war reconstruction period to become the dominant unit of planning and decision-making into the 1950s, but its roots lay in the communal experiences of the Blitz. In Chapter 6, Kai-Uwe Werbeck explores Wolfgang Staudte’s 1946 rubble film Die Mörder sind unter uns (‘The Murderers are among us’) as noted in the chapter title, ‘Searching for (A) home in the rubble: The Heimkehrer-Flâneur in Wolfgang Staudte’s Die Mörder Sind Unter Uns’. In this first film to be released after Germany’s defeat, Werbeck reveals how Staudte addressed the problem of the unsafe post-Fascist ruined German home, and its implications for new ideas about heimat or homeland. In the film the two main characters, Hans and Susanne, attempt to reconstruct their lives, and to reclaim Susanne’s apartment, against the ghostly bomb-scape of Berlin. Werbeck explains how Staudte’s use of two contrasting cinematic styles, expressionism and post-war realism, function to convey something of the almost sublime terror of Berlin’s ruins (expressionism) while at the same time pointing to the gradual but necessary work of reconstruction (realism). Yet while in Chapter 5, Downey proposes a communitarian gaze that pointed towards the knitting together of individual to home to street to suburb in London in war art of the period, such a viewing position cannot be invited for contemporary German audiences, as their society was fragmented into ‘murderers’, ‘survivors’ and those that ‘did nothing’. Werbeck shows how Staudte made it clear that other tenants in the block were not trustworthy since some were profiteers or collaborators, and may still have remained indoctrinated or tied to Nazi ideology. As Werbeck shows, for Staudte and

10 Domesticity Under Siege

indeed the German people, the murderers were indeed amongst them. Most significantly the film lays out the moral and ethical questions around the processes of ­de-Nazification and reconstruction, while providing audiences with a ‘redemption through love’ narrative played out against the barely navigable rubble-strewn backdrop of the bomb-damaged home/Homeland.

Section four: Hauntings, eeriness and the uncanny The fourth and final section, ‘Hauntings, Eeriness and the Uncanny’, examines architectural haunting including its foundation in Gothic horror within the contemporary Hollywood horror film and as an alive, or sentient, presence, such that the physical parts and spaces themselves become the actors or agents of terror. In Chapter 7, ‘I Have Ended up Like the House, Pretending to be Myself: Uncanny Heritage House Museums’, Hannah Lewi’s specific domestic ‘repressed’ makes it clear that uncanny returns in the heritage house museum signal the ‘presence’ of original inhabitants. Lewi argues here that a heritage house museum is always ‘besieged’ by ghostly past occupants from different eras, which brings up the essential question of ‘What is the life of a house’? Or rather ‘which’ of its lives should be selected for curation and presentation? Lewi’s first case study is a recent Alan Bennett play, set in a historic house museum, in which the efforts on the part of the National Trust to ‘re-animate’ the museum by having the elderly female owner (moved to a nearby annex) ‘walk about’ in the rooms, thus to display the house’s collection of chamber pots, still filled with the urine of famous men. Exposing Bennett’s satirical vision of extreme attempts to re-animate the house, Lewi wonders, how should we ‘dress’ a house museum in a way that acknowledges these occupational ‘ghosts’? Curators need, she claims, to understand the ‘frame’ in a theatrical sense – alongside establishing a clear position with regard to the age-old cultural expectation for authenticity. Lewi then reveals how the famous ‘Severs house’ museum in London conjures life via imaginary characters using objects, smell, touch sight and suggestion regarding who lived there before. Here the dynamics of display explored as ‘choreographed presences’ are introduced, such as set tables, chronologically disruptive objects (a TV sitting casually in a nineteenth-century merchant’s sitting room), the smells of food cooking and the sound of voices and clacking weaver’s looms. She next considers how the Soane Museum from its very beginnings of life as a home was intentionally ‘animated’ by its own daring and playful spatial programme, and how Soane’s collections of objects are integrated into the architecture. In her last case study, the eccentric and exuberant ‘Johnston’ House Museum in Melbourne is examined for how the intentions and agency of its owner, William Johnston, are allowed to continue to ‘speak’ from beyond the grave. Here the ‘voicing’ of his past presence, rather than its repression, becomes effectively part of the visitor experience in a way that acknowledges the impossible logic of the house as museum.

Introduction: Domesticity under Siege 11

In Chapter 8, ‘Suburban Horror Story’, James Kerestes explores poché  – those diagrammed architectural spaces that are usually coloured black on building plans. In practice these poché spaces don’t necessarily have (much) occupational use, being either too small/or oddly shaped, and they are usually not meant to be seen  – at least not very often (attic, basement, wall cavity, closets, under stairs). However, in the house horror film, they are consistently reimagined as portals to where true terror lies. These unseen spaces are always by technical necessity, part of the modern domestic dwelling yet they are simultaneously strange and familiar. This chapter questions where and how we can find sanctuary when homes are invaded through these poché portals, via well-known mainstream horror films such as Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Hellraiser (1987) and The Amityville Horror (1977). Running through all these chapters is the question ‘what does domesticity rest on and how is undermining resisted?’ The answer seems to be a mixture of two characteristics of ‘home’, one inevitably giving way to the other. The first of these is ‘expectation’. Take for example the following extract from a letter to a new tenant who in 1936 was about to move into the Knowle West Estate in Bristol, UK: The Housing Committee realise that you have been living under very undesirable conditions, and that in worn out houses it is very difficult to get rid of vermin. But there will be no excuse in your new house. Do not buy second hand furniture, bedding or pictures unless you are quite sure that the articles are free from vermin. Insects do not like soap and hot water, and they also dislike dusters and polish. So, if in the new house you keep your windows open, and keep your bodies and clothing, floors and stairs, furniture and bedding clean; use the duster frequently on all skirting and ledges, you are not likely to be troubled again with vermin. This sounds a lot, but life isn’t going to be all work for the housewife. The new house will be easy to keep clean and it will be well worth looking after. (History of Council Housing 2008)

The letter is from the Corporation of Bristol Housing Estates and it contains directives on good housekeeping from the housing management. The letter provides two characteristics, firstly on ‘expectations’, as it is clear there will be no excuse for this home having vermin, particularly if the occupant follows the correct and proper way to live in, and maintain the home. The second characteristic, ‘faith’, is intimately allied with the expectation of a proper condition for home. Faith demands confidence in domesticity as an agent of deliverance: that a properly inhabited home will alleviate threats from the outside. To live in the correct way requires control over boundaries and the ability to connect or disconnect from the various systems and channels that flow into and out of the home. It also necessitates the exercise of authority over the purpose and definition of the intimate spaces of home. Faith in domesticity encompasses the dream of home as a locus of privacy, quietude and morality. Boundaries constructed around and within homes act as preventative medicine against the ills of the world. Authority in or over the home largely calls on these dual characteristics of expectation and faith, to mould our ways of living.

12 Domesticity Under Siege

Wherever authority is claimed there is always the possibility of its demise. A home under siege clearly shows loss of authority and loss of confidence. As the chapters in this book testify, failure to realize the formative characteristics of home can lay the groundwork for siege. When boundaries are infiltrated, intimate life exposed and morality questioned, the expectations of a safe, clean, intact, environment will unravel. Faith in the ideals of home will be undermined when something wild, in the sense of being untameable, has entered. Under siege, the rationality of dwelling lapses into a sort of formless chaotic inhabitation, and the effects on both home and inhabitants are unpredictable. Homes have vulnerable borders and secret spaces that harbour myths and fears; domesticity may be undermined through delving and burrowing in all directions; objects may open the home to unwanted connections, such as alien invasion and infestation; and phantasy connects bodies and houses in disturbing ways. Notable too in these chapters are instincts of seclusion, enclosure and isolation. As in Victorian times, the enclosure of fluids as well as the separation of clean from dirty water was important in combatting typhoid and cholera, today, enclosure and isolation can be read through the filter of the present pandemic. Domesticity under siege from air and from touch reveals both the startling intransigence of some threats and the fragility of home. Isolation in these circumstances is complicit in the rise of domestic abuse and the pervasiveness of irrational fears. The battle both for and against enclosure can thus be seen as a continuous encounter with siege from inside and outside. Is there ever a moment when the home isn’t under siege, when it is free from threat? The chapters in this volume all, in different ways, show that home is unequal to the task of being without some form of siege. Threat can manifest in unexpected ways, which test our understanding of domesticity as an ideal, to always be pursued.

References Bouranova, A. (2021), ‘What Does the Attack on Democracy Mean for Journalists?’ BU Today, 8 January. Available online: http://www.bu.edu/articles/2021/what-does-theattack-on-democracy-mean-for-journalists/ (accessed 8 April 2021). Brickell, K. (2012), ‘“Mapping” and “Doing” Critical Geographies of Home’, Progress in Human Geography, 36 (2): 225–44. Dowling, M-E. (2021), ‘Democracy under Siege: Foreign Interference in a Digital Era’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 75 (4): 383–7. Edwards, J. (2021), ‘Welfare Concerns for Children Exposed to More Family Violence during COVID-19 Lockdowns’, ABC News, 1 April. Available online: https://www.abc.net.au/ news/2021-04-01/escaping-family-violence-children-during-lockdown/100040326 (accessed April 2021). Gold, J. M. (2020), ‘Siege Mentality in the 2020 Pandemic: Building Family Resilience’, The Family Journal, 29 (2): 143–6.

Introduction: Domesticity under Siege 13

‘The History of Council Housing: Interwar Slum Clearance’ (2008), [Blog], Construction Web Site, University of West of England. Available online: https://fet.uwe.ac.uk/conweb/ house_ages/council_housing/print.htm (accessed March 2021). Kaika, M. (2004), ‘Interrogating the Geographies of the Familiar: Domesticating Nature and Constructing the Autonomy of the Modern Home’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 28 (2): 265–86. Mallett, S. (2004), ‘Understanding Home: A Critical Review of the Literature’, The Sociological Review, 52 (1): 62–89. Sparke, P. (2018), ‘Introduction’, in P. Sparke, P. Brown, P. Lara-Betancourt, G. Lee, and M. Taylor (eds), Flow: Interior, Landscape and Architecture in the Era of Liquid Modernity, 17–22, London and New York: Bloomsbury. Tosh, J. (1996), ‘New Men? The Bourgeois Cult of Home’, History Today, 46 (12): 9–13. Tyner, J. A. (2012), Space, Place, and Violence: Violence and the Embodied Geographies of Race, Sex, and Gender, New York and London: Routledge.

14 Domesticity Under Siege

Section 1  Microbes ­ animals and insects

16

1

Miasmatical fears



ANNMARIE ADAMS

Introduction Working at home during the Covid-19 pandemic has destabilized our long association of home as a safe space. During the recent lockdown, Victorian home designs have worked particularly well for families, as the distinctive arrangement of separate rooms and dedicated circulation has provided individuals with visual and acoustical privacy, while also keeping us safely at a distance from one another. In my own home, myself, my husband and two grown children have each found a spot in our 1904 house, near windows, to set up ad hoc work and study places. What hasn’t worked as well during lockdown is the open plan of many twentieth-century homes and apartments. Especially non-functional, during a ­ pandemic, is the ubiquitous multi-use kitchen-dining-living room, designed in the ­mid-twentieth century so that stay-at-home mothers could cook and watch children (who watched TV) all at once. In 2020, only those who live alone, it seems, can work all day in an open plan home on Zoom without disturbing others. Thirty years ago I wrote my PhD dissertation on the triad – house-body-woman – identifying domestic architecture and health reform as instruments of feminism, houses and bodies as targets of health reform, and doctors and women as agents of architectural reform. I argued that the close association of houses, bodies and women around 1870 was activated through a coincidence of social factors: the formulation of the germ theory, the availability of contraception, advances in women’s political status and education, changing attitudes towards motherhood, the rationalization of housework and the feminization of interior design. In addition to its direct impact on the middle-class conception of home, this house-body-woman triad also affected the ways medicine and architecture were practiced as professions. I showed, mostly through prescriptive sources, how the seemingly divergent paths of nineteenth-­ century architects, doctors and women actually converged in the middle-class home. Covid is only the most recent episode in a long series of situations where homes were seen as refuge. John Ruskin’s ideal home was a sacred refuge from ‘terror, doubt, and division’, assuming physical and emotional protection from the world outside as its primary objective. ‘So far as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate into it, and the inconsistently-minded, unknown, unloved, or hostile society of the outer

world is allowed by either husband or wife to cross the threshold, it ceases to be home’, he claimed, ‘it is then only a part of that outer world which you have roofed over, and lighted fire in’ (Ruskin 1902: 21–2). In much of my work, including the dissertation and subsequent book, I purposely made use of non-traditional sources in order to construct a view of the house from the inside, to illuminate the roles played by non-architects in the making of the Victorian built environment and to relate that information to the world outside. Evidence from this ‘inner world’ of the home demonstrates that many of Ruskin’s ‘anxieties of outer life’  – the spread of infection, the rationalization of knowledge, scientific theories of sex and gender, the emancipation of women – continually invaded the late-Victorian middle-class home and were managed there by women; in this respect both the house and the housewife were vital ‘parts of that outer world’, as Ruskin feared.

Doctors versus architects The audience gasped as the lecturer described in detail the horror he had felt as a young boy when his father lifted the dilapidated floorboards of their family home; below, in the pungent earth, was a foul drain. This was the reason, the father had explained to his son, that their beloved home was overrun with rats. On further investigation, the father and son had discovered that the scullery sink, at some distance from the house, ran directly into a drain, emitting an extremely foul smell. ‘Disconnection between the house and the drainage system’, Dr T. Pridgin Teale explained, ‘is the basis of domestic sanitation’. He pointed to a diagram (Figure 1.1) posted on the wall of the makeshift lecture room to illustrate this. Large, simple, line drawings showed two houses in section; they looked like the Sanitary and Insanitary Dwellings that stood just outside the door of the International Health Exhibition’s central gallery, where the lecture was being held. Brightly coloured arrows showed poisonous gases penetrating the floors and walls of the house. The audience was mesmerized and strained to catch every word of architectural advice offered by the celebrated physician. Francis Sharp Powell thanked Teale at the end of his lecture. ‘Tonight’s guest is held in high regard not only by his own colleagues in the medical profession’, explained Powell, ‘but well beyond that field. Dr Teale has added substantially to our understanding of the application of science to the domestic arrangements of a home.’ The crowd applauded enthusiastically, and many of those present approached the podium with questions for Teale concerning the situations in their own houses. Then, anxious to check their homes according to the ‘scientific principles’ of which Teale had just spoken, they left the central gallery and headed towards the main gate of the International Health Exhibition (‘Health Exhibition Lectures: Healthy Houses’ 1884: 10). The International Health Exhibition was held in London in 1884. The architecture and literature of the exhibition reveal basic assumptions made by Victorians about health and urbanism. The fair’s layout shows the different ways in which Victorians thought about healthy public and private space in 1884. While the fair promoted an

18 Domesticity Under Siege

Fig. 1.1  ‘House with Every Sanitary Arrangement Faulty’, from T. Pridgen Teale,  Dangers to Health: A Pictorial Guide to Domestic Sanitary Defects, London: J. & A. Churchill, 1878. Wellcome Collection.

image of public spaces as clean and pure, domestic space at the exhibition was seen as poisonous, dangerous and in need of medical attention. Middle-class control of the healthy house promised control of the body. T. Pridgin Teale’s authority in architectural matters was typical of the ­‘building-doctors’ of the Domestic Sanitation Movement. As a surgeon in Leeds he had expanded his medical practice to include the assessment of his patients’ houses, having first attempted to check the ‘health’ of his own house. These investigations of unhealthy architecture were illustrated in his book Dangers to Health (1878); a coloured plate showed what he believed to be the typical sanitary flaws in the construction of ordinary English houses (Teale 1878: 5). ‘Many of the medical men of this town’, Teale wrote in the introduction of his book, ‘have recently gone into

Miasmatical Fears 19

the question of the sanitation of their own houses… [becoming] more keenly alive to possible sources of illness among their patients’ (Teale 1878: 6). Teale’s conviction that more than one-third of all illness could be traced to defective house drainage convinced him of the merits of publishing a book ‘on a subject which at first sight may appear to be outside the lines of my strictly professional work’ (Teale 1878: 5). The assessment of the healthy house proved to be a battleground between doctors and architects within what came to be called the Domestic Sanitation Movement in Britain. There were serious professional implications of the Domestic Sanitation Movement as various doctors, with a range of positions and backgrounds, expanded the ‘lines’ of their work to encompass the middle-class house. The consequences for the architectural profession in England were devastating. A ‘systematic’ view of the house professed by the medical doctors was embraced by the middle class, with the result that there was a widespread wariness of building professionals. Design based on scientific principles boosted the confidence of physicians, and it also informed much material culture of the period. From the tiniest pipe fitting to master plans for entire cities, good design was described in terms of its adherence to ‘principles’ and ‘systems’. There were also implications for cities. Since sanitation was based on the notion of health as a public concern, nineteenth-century sanitary reform demanded the expansion of traditional conceptions of disease from the scale of the individual to that of the community. Lord Stanley explained this change of scale. He said that whereas sanitary science meant ‘that science which deals with the preservation of health and prevention of disease in reference to the entire community’, by contrast, ‘medical science in the ordinary acceptation of the term… deals with the case of each individual separately’ (Stanley 1858: 41). Thus, as sanitarians, physicians were concerned with how the spaces between bodies accommodated illness, rather than simply how the body acted as a setting for disease. They extended the scope of their investigation from the body to the room, the house, the street and the city – visible and observable spaces in which they could attempt to control the seemingly invisible paths of diseases through air, streets, walls, water, people and things. Sanitary science thus devastated public confidence in the specialized training of architects, making middle-class householders wary of many building professionals. Physicians active in the movement undermined the authority of Victorian architects through their seemingly ‘scientific’ approach to design. The doctors’ systematic view of the house, drawing from the burgeoning field of physiology, exposed the shoddy workmanship and lack of principles they perceived in the practice of architecture at the time. In applying their command of physiology to urban and domestic spaces, physicians defined a new form of expertise in building construction and architecture. Like Teale, many of those associated with the Domestic Sanitation Movement became, in a sense, ‘building-doctors’, called on to diagnose, treat and heal architecture, much as they might treat a patient. Many doctors even designed buildings. The homoeopathic physician John James Drysdale designed a suburban house in Liverpool in 1861; his medical colleague

20 Domesticity Under Siege

John Williams Hayward adapted Drysdale’s unique system of ventilation to an urban site in 1867. It was not unusual, in the 1870s and 1880s, for doctors to design model houses for the public to visit, or to prescribe the use of materials and the proper orientation for new buildings. Like Teale, many Victorian doctors lectured on the design of healthy houses. The physicians’ apparent expertise in assessing the delicate relationship of health to the environment, in the guise of a more ‘scientific approach’ to architecture, appealed to a middle-class population that was desperate for new solutions to seemingly insoluble health problems. In retrospect, it is easy to see how this medical ‘colonization’ of the middle-class house depended on a widespread acceptance of the notion that houses were sick. Architectural models at the health exhibition showed how diseases were believed to have entered middle-class houses, even as late as 1884. The germ theory, though, had postulated that spatial separation – what we might see as a form of ‘social distancing’ during the pandemic – should prevent the spread of disease. The germ theory was explained in popular literature in many different ways, some of which included disguised versions of the older theories of transmission (McClary 1979). The host of diseases still plaguing the late-Victorian city had therefore transgressed the boundaries that had been carefully constructed between spaces; according to the theory, these boundaries should have arrested the spread of contagious diseases. What were the implications for domestic interiors? Architectural boundaries were constructed around and within typical middle-class houses, acting as a form of spatial health insurance. Hedges and fences, front gardens and elaborate entry halls constituted impenetrable systems of filters and barriers between the interior of the house and the unpredictable nature of the street. The building-doctors demonstrated how these boundaries were nonetheless penetrated by invisible substances carrying deadly diseases. Many of them noted how infection ignored class lines, another situation echoed with Covid-19. The American sanitarian Harriette Plunkett explained: A man may live on the splendid ‘avenue,’ in a mansion plumbed in the latest and costliest style, but if, half a mile away, in range with his open window, there is a ‘slum,’ or even a neglected tenement-house, the zephyr will come along and pick up the diseasegerms and bear them onward, distributing them to whomsoever it meets, whether he be a millionaire or shillingaire, with a perfectly leveling and democratic impartiality. (Plunkett 1893: 203)

Teale’s magnificent picture-book, like the model dwellings at the International Health Exhibition, illustrated these processes. In the book, as in his lectures, he showed how poisonous substances penetrated the walls of a newly built row of terrace houses that had been erected on a former dump site. Even the published drawing (Figure 1.2) revealed Teale’s reservations about the capacity of architecture to protect its inhabitants. The light outline emphasized how the deadly gases rising from the former rubbish heap could easily penetrate the nearly transparent structure. Similarly, Teale’s ‘House with every sanitary arrangement faulty’ (see again Figure 1.1) illustrated how poisonous substances (perhaps germs) could penetrate the foundations

Miasmatical Fears 21

Fig. 1.2  ‘New Terrace on a Former Dump’, from T. Pridgen Teale,  Dangers to Health: A Pictorial Guide to Domestic Sanitary Defects, 1878. London: J. & A. Churchill, 1878. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain.

and roof of a house. The drains overflowed into a rainwater tank under the floor, while the soil pipe of the toilet on the upper floor ventilated into the water-closet cistern, which supplied the drinking water for the family. The drawing implied that the ample base and roof structures of the house did little to protect the spaces and people inside. Boundaries drawn between individual family members within a house were similarly transgressed by disease, explained the doctor. As noted above with regard to Covid-19 isolation, the Victorian house contained numerous specialized rooms, allowing family members to spend a considerable amount of time in isolation. A standard plan for houses of all classes had rooms leading off a single corridor and stairway, and consequently encounters with other family members were both predictable and controllable. This facilitated seclusion of the sick without any d ­ isruption of the family’s normal use of the house. But Teale and other doctors showed how a domestic drainage system effectively trumped the physical separation of rooms; corroded pipes inside the walls rendered the walls completely useless in fighting illness. Teale’s illustration showed how the circulation system in a house did not protect the bedrooms and other separate spaces when they were in fact connected through the drainage system (Teale 1878: plate 19). Adding to the fear aroused by the doctors’ warnings was the horrifying reality of the death rate. Despite the precautionary measures ‘built in’ to the middle-class urban landscape by 1870, many diseases were evidently still not under control. As the doctors showed, tuberculosis, typhoid and a host of other chronic or fatal illnesses were transported on the cool, fresh breezes of suburbia, where they

22 Domesticity Under Siege

penetrated the fences and hedges, and permeated the thick brick walls of middleclass villas. Without considering possible shortcomings in their own treatment of disease, many doctors blamed buildings and architects for Victorian medicine’s failure to cure. The medical critique of domestic architecture as preventive medicine was a complex process consisting of three main strategies. First, the physicians active in the  health movement discredited the authority of building professionals and workmen  – namely, architects and plumbers  – by exposing their supposedly ­ substandard work to the public. The Insanitary Dwelling at the International Health Exhibition was a perfect example of these techniques. Second, they openly criticized the general practice of architecture, blaming its lack of ‘scientific principles’ for the spread of disease in cities. As part of this step, the doctors themselves attempted to rationalize architecture, to systematize the house the way modern physiology had systematized the body, through their illustrations and descriptions of architecture as well as through demonstrations of their own ability in design. Finally, the physicians cemented their monopoly on the middle-class house by ‘negotiating cognitive exclusiveness’. Sociologist Magali Sarfatti Larson has identified this as a distinctive characteristic of nineteenth-century professionalism (Larson 1977: 15–8 and 30–1). This last stage of the doctors’ programme involved convincing the public of the exclusive ability of medical experts to perform sanitary house inspection. The long-lasting effect of these efforts was a significant shift in the ways ordinary people thought about architecture; the house became a form of preventive medicine only when regulated by its occupants under the watchful eye of medical experts. Nearly all the books written by doctors for householders included instructions for DIY testing using common household objects. Doctors explained the widespread ‘poor health’ of houses by stating that architectural practice (presumably, unlike their own field of medicine) lacked rational principles. ‘As a rule, in second-class, and, indeed, in many first-class houses’, observed physician George Vivian Poore in 1887, ‘the ventilation and illumination of the staircase never trouble the mind of the builder or his architect’ (Poore 1887: 2). Poore included in his book the plan of a house that featured what he considered to be healthy ventilation and lighting. ‘It is the principle only which I wish to illustrate. If the principle be sound, the method of carrying it out will certainly be improved by the experience and cunning of the trained architect’ (Poore 1887: 11–12). While doctors saw medicine as a model for architecture and engineering, architects and engineers saw medicine as complementary. ‘The professions of medicine and architecture are in no way rivals’, asserted engineer William Eassie, ‘both sciences are necessary to the realisation of a perfect piece of architecture, be it cottage, mansion, school house, theatre or hospital’. ‘It is due to the medical profession’, he added, ‘to state that its members have ever been foremost in pointing out the danger of mass practices that were unwittingly [produced] by their architectural brethren’ (Eassie 1874: 13).

Miasmatical Fears 23

Plumbers and plumbing became the subjects of intense public scrutiny when the Prince of Wales almost died of typhoid in 1871 (Muthesius 1982: 55; Penner 2014: 249–51; Tomes 1990: 530). He is said to have remarked, ‘If I were not a Prince, I would be a plumber’ (Hellyer 1893: 1). The medical journal the Lancet conducted a thorough investigation of the prince’s lodgings, paying particular attention to Londesborough Lodge in Scarborough, presuming a connection between its sanitary arrangements and the prince’s illness. Although the lodge had been inspected by a contractor before the prince’s visit, the Lancet Sanitary Commission uncovered several defects (‘Report of the Lancet Sanitary Commission on the State of Londesborough Lodge & Sandringham, in Relation to the Illness of H. R. H. the Prince of Wales’ 1871: 828–31). Ten years earlier, Albert, the prince’s father and Queen Victoria’s husband, had succumbed to typhoid, like his cousin the King of Portugal. Like Covid-19, typhoid was understood to pass through the atmosphere rather than through touch. Unlike Covid-19, however, it discriminated by class rather than age. It was described by physicians as being ‘far more fatal to sufferers of the upper class and of the middle period of life than to patients of the poorer kind’. These cases brought medicine and architecture together, in the public imagination. Albert’s death, like the near-death of his son a decade later, had prompted a ‘medical’ investigation of his royal residence, Windsor Castle (‘The Death of the Prince Consort’ 1861: 599). So desperate did the situation appear that by the 1880s a new profession had been sanctioned to police the work of builders and architects. ‘Sanitary inspectors’ were expected ‘to keep the country clean’ by checking the drainage systems and materials of all new buildings (‘The Sanitary Inspector’ 1893: 116). The training of these inspectors varied, but admission to the profession was granted only to those who had passed a test and gained a diploma of merit granted by the Sanitary Institute. ‘This functionary must have science behind his back’, stated a journalist in the Sanitary Record. ‘It has been too much the fashion, especially in smaller places, to take for granted that any quondam policeman, or active man of good character and fair business habits, was sufficiently qualified to enter on the duties of sanitary inspector’ (‘The Sanitary Inspector’ 1893: 115). Building professionals were not unaware of the power their medical colleagues had gained in architectural matters. Architects remarked, for example, that while the Prince of Wales had appointed four medical men as commissioners to the International Health Exhibition, the committee included no architects or engineers. In drawing attention to this situation, the architects openly acknowledged the unique qualifications of medical doctors in assessing the influence of buildings on health: It is a matter of regret that while there are no fewer than four medical men, there is no architect and no engineer on the Commission; but this omission may perhaps not prove so detrimental to the object we believe to be one of the most important of those which the exhibition contemplates – the demonstration of the influences which the architectural design of buildings exerts on those who occupy them, and the way in which every part of a building, and the structure as a whole, should be so framed as to promote their

24 Domesticity Under Siege

health. Physicians are quite as much alive to this as any other class of observers, perhaps more so, and they know better than many other people that such influences as these, though they have been too often overlooked or ignored, are of primary importance to individual and public health. (Smith 1884: 3)

At the same time, the architects defended their professional territory by insisting that too much ‘science’ was harmful to architecture. A journalist in the Architect explained: It is very much to be suspected, when we ask the apparently simple question – what a London house is, that some of those eminent scientists who are now so devoted to the study of its organisation may be fast approaching a condition of mind which must cause them before long to abjure the shelter of a roof altogether for fear of being poisoned underneath… Even our respect for science has its limits, and in all cases of philosophic enthusiasm we are bound to remember that the history of such endeavour is full of examples of the failure of the most excellent motives because of the most guileless mistakes. (‘What Is a London House’ 1880: 347)

The architects blamed general living conditions in London for the insanitary state of most houses. Bad weather was the most common reason given for the peculiarly English indoor lifestyle. ‘Even in transacting their business, men hasten from shelter to shelter, instead of assembling in the piazza or sauntering along the boulevard’, the architects maintained. Moreover, the burning of pit-coal for heat and gas for lighting in-side tightly concealed ‘boxes’ rendered the interiors of houses highly artificial. The architects also pointed to the increased demand for interior sanitary facilities as the reason for unhealthy houses. As during Covid-19, there was a real faith in the healthiness of exterior spaces. When water closets and pumps were located outside the house, they said, domestic architecture was much healthier. The demand made by ‘fine’ people for more sophisticated plumbing had given rise to the ‘science of the plumber’. The present unhealthy lifestyle of London’s middle class, they believed, resulted more from an unnecessary demand for luxury and comfort than from a lack of scientific understanding on the part of architects: A London house has become simply a highly artificial cage for a group of highly ­artificialised animals; and the worst of the matter is that, the more the inmates demand in the way of advanced artificiality, the more they themselves become a­ rtificialised. In plainer language, the more they ‘cosset’ themselves, the more cosseting they must have; the more comfort-able they are, the more delicate they grow. (‘What Is a London House’ 1880: 347)

The solution, according to the architects, was a return to a more natural, less scientific house. Houses would be healthier as a result of open windows, outdoor exercise and the prompt removal of ‘at least half of all that the plumber has brought into it’ (‘What Is a London House’ 1880: 347). The architects were also quick to underline the limits of the doctors’ authority in building: ‘In arrogating to themselves any

Miasmatical Fears 25

exclusive capacity to remedy the faults in dwellings, the medical officers of health are unwise, and the most strenuous opposition would come from some of their own body’ (‘Medical Officers of Health v. Sanitary Engineers and Architects’ 1888: 11). The intersections of medicine and architecture are everywhere apparent in printed sources of the period. Journals of the time featured parallel series on houses and bodies, referring to the illustrations of the body in explaining the house, and vice versa. In the popular family magazine Baby, for instance, a series in twelve parts called ‘Outlines of Physiology and Hygiene’ ran consecutively with a twelvepart series entitled ‘Health in Our Homes’. On the subject of ventilation, the author referred readers to the illustration of the lungs in a previous volume (‘Ventilation’ 1890: 175). The implication was that houses and bodies operated by the same principles. The medical profession’s colonization of the middle-class house was thus seen by the urban middle class as a heroic effort to predict, and hence to control, this seemingly uncontrollable movement of illness from house to house. It was also seen as an attempt to protect the public from the unacceptable standards set by the building professions. By assuming professional responsibility for the sanitary condition of the houses – particularly for drainage, ventilation and illumination – doctors presumed that such external conditions would necessarily determine the health, or the ‘sanitary condition’, of the inhabitants. This conceptual convergence of the body and the house was embraced by an anxious urban population as a conscious attempt to control disease. The distinctions between body and house became sufficiently blurred in the 1870s and 1880s that doctors also employed the reverse metaphor, explaining the body in terms of the house. The notion that the body was actually occupied or inhabited, like a building, was carried to an extreme by the American author-doctor Mary WoodAllen. In her book The Man Wonderful in the House Beautiful, she used the metaphor of the house-body to warn of the dangers of ‘guests’, such as alcoholic stimulants. And she began her popular textbook of physiology, The Marvels of Our Bodily Dwelling, by stating: ‘Let us study the body as a house in which we dwell here on earth, a house created by a divine Architect, fitted up with every comfort, divided into many rooms, each with its own appropriate furniture and adapted to its own especial use. It is a beautiful building, more exquisitely adorned than any structure of man’s creation’ (Wood-Allen 1899: 15). Wood-Allen pushed the body-house analogy to an extreme, describing, for instance, the stomach as a kitchen, the skin as sheathing and the brain as electrical equipment. She admitted that the analogy was not original; it was ‘as old as literature’. Her personal contribution to the idea, she said, was that she had ‘united metaphor with scientific facts’ (Wood-Allen 1899: 4).

Houses as medical technologies While most of us see our homes under Covid-19 as a healthy refuge, the Victorian house was seen as a fearful space of disease. Medical and feminist sources on domestic architecture reveal as much about what the English middle-class house in the

26 Domesticity Under Siege

final decades of the nineteenth century was not as they do about its real position in social change. For example, the house was not a safe, protective shelter, removed from a dangerous and unpredictable Victorian city. The house was a space of fear. Between 1870 and 1900, middle-class houses were considered much more poisonous and dangerous than public spaces or working-class neighbourhoods, the subject of earlier reforms. The continued spread of disease even after the development of the germ theory was conveniently blamed on both architecture and women as doctors expanded their professional territory. Public health was debated in the language and culture of architecture, explicitly in places such as the International Health Exhibition of 1884 (where the supposedly typical middle-class house was portrayed as a hodgepodge of sanitary errors) and implicitly in the reform and regulation of ordinary houses. Primary sources on the history of medicine and women show that improvements in domestic architecture were not the innovations of Victorian architects, who actually played fairly subordinate roles in the reform of houses based on health and women’s concerns; they were, rather, the achievements of medical experts and women. The house emerges from these cultural debates as a specialized and spatialized medical technology, illustrated by the materiality of the ‘technologically healthy’ house. Cleanliness in the home, to most sanitarians, came through the prescribed use of new materials and renovations. The sanitarians’ ‘prohibition against dust’, for example, discouraged the use of upholstered furniture and the elaborate decoration that was popular at mid-century. William Henry Corfield recommended the use of tiles throughout the house; Douglas Galton, an authority on hospital design, suggested metal or cement for interior walls to avoid the accumulation of dust. Most experts’ advice was less dramatic, such as the avoidance of heavy curtains and difficult-toclean furniture (Neiswander 1988: 107–9). In furniture history, health reform had its greatest impact on the design of beds, with the rise of metal beds, which had formerly been used only in institutions. Experts believed that metal, like tiles, harboured less dust and absorbed no humidity; it was thus intrinsically cleaner than wood. The leading manufacturer and distributor of beds in London, Heal and Son, exhibited an ideal small bedroom at the International Health Exhibition. Although the other three pieces of furniture in the room were wooden, the bed was metal. Physicians also advised different ‘environmental’ conditions for the treatment of various illnesses in the home. After about 1870, the authors of articles advising women how to nurse sick family members nearly always focused on the arrangement of the sickroom rather than on the therapeutic treatment of illnesses (‘Hints on Home Nursing’ 1892–1893: 415–16). Through the arrangement of the ‘architecture’, women were expected to prevent the spread of infection in the house. A fever, for example, required that the sickroom have either a small fire or none at all, thorough ventilation and minimal furniture. A completely different ‘architecture’ was recommended for the treatment of measles: closed windows and an open door (Chavasse 1886: 215–20). Victorian women thus

Miasmatical Fears 27

practised domesticity, as historian Regina Markell Morantz has noted, ‘not as a cult, but as a science’ (Morantz 1977: 493). Covid-19 has made me think a lot about the Victorian sickroom. The sickroom was an ordinary bedroom that was often set aside and especially furnished in anticipation of illness in the house. Catherine Gladstone described the benefits of such planning in the book she authored for the International Health Exhibition: As we must prepare, in every dwelling-house, for the contingency of illness, how desirable it would be for all houses, even of moderate size, to have some one corner suitable for a sick-room! If space admits of such a room being entirely isolated from the rest of the house, so much the better; but much may be done by at all events securing two rooms opening into each other, with windows, doors, and fireplaces where they should be, with hot and cold water supply within easy reach, and a closet properly placed. (Gladstone 1884: 124–5)

Many authors not only recommended the careful planning of special rooms for the sick but also advised that they be especially constructed with ‘double sashes and double wall’, for example, ‘to exclude the sound of the elements without’ (MSA & MRAS 1864: 38). Such architectural prescriptions show how design decisions around health were not all about contagion. Gladstone recommended the provision of two sickrooms, probably subscribing to the widespread belief that a ‘change of rooms’ improved a patient’s health. Children were often moved to a spare bedroom when they were ill, not only to prevent the infection spreading to other children but because it was feared the illness might infect the room itself. The ‘construction’ of a special room or suite of rooms for a family member within the home often involved considerable rearrangement of room uses, as many of us have done for Covid-19. Mrs Panton suggested choosing a room at the top of the house. In the case of a house that was being built to a family’s specifications, she advised that the sickroom be separate from the main building – an annex that could be reached by an interior passage and an exterior door. The door between the passage and the sickroom should be of plate glass so that a mother could observe her sick child without risk of infection. As additional protection, Panton suggested that a sheet soaked in carbolic acid should be hung on the door. The doctor would enter the sickroom from the exterior door. The decorations and furnishing should be extremely cheap, Panton advised, because they would be destroyed after every illness (Panton 1889). Most sickrooms were less elaborate than Panton’s version. Certainly, most families did not construct special annexes to their houses. They simply ‘emptied’ ordinary rooms of furnishings, clothing and any other contents as a way of securing separation of the sick from the healthy members of the family. The back of the house was better than the front, and upper levels were preferable to lower floors, experts said, because of the need for perfect quiet. Too much furniture was believed to ‘confuse’ sick people. ‘As a rule, in a severe illness’, warned Lady Barker, ‘sick people detest

28 Domesticity Under Siege

anything like a confusion or profusion of ornaments or furniture’. Like others, she associated successful nursing with the removal of ‘things’ from the room: I have known the greatest relief expressed by a patient, who seemed too ill to notice any such change, at the substitution of one single, simple classical vase for a whole shelffull of tawdry French china ornaments, and I date the recovery of another from the moment of the removal out of his sight of an exceedingly smart modern dressing-table, with many bows of ribbon and flounces of lace and muslin. I do not mean to say that the furniture of a sick-room need be ugly – only that it should be simple and not too much of it. (Barker 1878: 97–8)

An emptier room was also easier to clean, protecting the next occupant from ­infection.  Catherine J. Wood suggested that women should remove all carpets and curtains, retaining only a table and washstand in the sickroom (Wood 1887–1888:  179). While every family could not afford to destroy and replace the room’s contents, care was certainly taken to clean the sickroom and its contents thoroughly after an illness. Like the regular cleaning of the house, this was entirely the woman’s responsibility. As doctors convinced the public that houses and architects were to blame for the spread of disease, middle-class women became the physicians’ most trusted allies in the domestic health movement as the chief ‘inspectors’ of domestic architecture. This responsibility also meant that women were often blamed when sickness struck a family member.

Women at home ‘Woman’s sphere’, observed Harriette M. Plunkett, ‘has had a great many definitions’. To illustrate her idea of women’s place in sanitary reform, the author of Women, Plumbers, and Doctors; or Household Sanitation included in her book a sectional drawing of a standard middle-class house, labelled ‘A properly plumbed house  – Woman’s Sphere’ (Plunkett 1893: title page). Drawn in the manner of Teale and the other house-doctors, it showed the exterior connections of a building to the municipal sewer system, as well as its ventilation and water supply. Woman’s sphere ‘begins where the service-pipe for water and the house-drain enter the street-mains’, explained the American author, ‘and, as far as sanitary plumbing goes, it ends at the top of the highest ventilating-pipe above the roof ’ (Plunkett 1893: 94). Plunkett was not alone in designating domestic sanitary responsibilities to women. Ada Ballin, the editor of Baby magazine and the author of numerous books for women, also considered the examples set by women in the home to be significant contributions to public health: It is a glorious thing for us to think that health-science is mainly to be taught and practised by women; that women are now going about among the people as apostles of health, teaching them how to be well and happy, and that this movement is gaining

Miasmatical Fears 29

impetus every day. Oh, yes, my readers may say that is doubtless all very good and noble, but we cannot all frequent the shrines as missionaries of the goddess Hygeia. Certainly not; not every woman is suited, or can have the opportunity to do so; but yet, by attention to herself, her children and her home, she can work in the good cause. Let her make her own home a temple of the goddess, and she will have done her duty. (Ballin 1889: 3)

Sanitarians noted women’s supposedly innate interest in health and also their familiarity with the construction and arrangement of the house. ‘The men of the house come and go; know little of the ins and outs of anything domestic; are guided by what they are told, and are practically of no assistance whatever’, asserted the physician Benjamin Ward Richardson. ‘The women are conversant with every nook of the dwelling, from basement to roof, and on their knowledge, wisdom, and skill the physician rests his hopes’ (‘Domestic Economy’ 1877: 350). The association of middle-class women with health in general was not new in the Victorian period. As many historians have noted, before the rise of the modern profession of medicine, women of all classes had played significant roles as domestic healers in their homes. In the seventeenth century, Lady Anne Clifford described her mother as ‘a lover of the study of medicine and the practise of Alchemy’. It was said that ‘she prepared excellent medicines that did good to many’ (Bourdillon 1988: 17). Cooking, brewing and distilling – traditionally women’s work – were closely associated with healing (Hall 1988: 21). Sickness and dying were much more private conditions than today, and both were overseen by women within the home. The expectations of the nineteenth-century sanitarians stemmed from this long-standing belief that domestic health was an innately female concern; women were considered ‘natural’ healers and nurturers because they bore children. Victorian scientific theories of sexual difference also saw women as passive, intuitive and tender – qualities that were considered appropriate to caring for the sick. ‘Sicknursing’ was seen as a natural extension of domestic labour. As Jane Lewis has noted (1984: 83–92), it was not until 1891 that the census in England differentiated hospital nurses from household servants (Lewis 1984: 174). The emergence of modern nursing in the nineteenth century as a profession particularly suited to women is testament to all these beliefs. By then, too, it had often been stated that women were particularly adept at preventive rather than therapeutic or curative medicine. Their experience in raising a family supposedly endowed them with special abilities in maintaining good health in the household and preventing the spread of disease once it entered a home. Pioneering female physicians later in the century used the seemingly urgent need for preventive medicine to strengthen their campaign for more women doctors. ‘We should give to man cheerfully the curative department, and women the preventative’, proclaimed Dr Harriot Hunt in 1852 (Hunt cited in Morantz-Sanchez 1985: 63). This perception that women’s place in the profession of medicine was complementary to men’s roles eased the way for women to enter the male-dominated field.

30 Domesticity Under Siege

As in the profession of medicine, so it was in domestic sanitation. Women’s role in the reform of domestic architecture focused on preventing the spread of infection within the house – by inspecting and maintaining the sanitary aspects of the house, by caring for the sick according to modern ‘scientific’ principles and by keeping the house clean, especially free of dust. The responsibility for repairing or healing the already ‘sick’ building – like the restoration of sick bodies – was the charge of male physicians. The domestic sanitarians expected middle-class women to be amateur inspectors of their houses, maintaining minimal standards of healthy architecture by detecting architectural defects. Typical house inspection covered a wide range of tasks, including checking the connection of the house to the municipal sewer system, the orientation of the building and the materials used in the walls, as well as inspecting for water purity and measuring dampness and air movement in the interior of the house (‘Going Over the New House’ 1889: 129). A proliferation of books and articles appeared in the 1880s and 1890s instructing women on how to inspect the work of the ‘ignorant or indolent plumber’, builder or architect (Teale 1878: plate  5). The authors included tips on drainage, ventilation, lighting, furnishing and the arrangement of rooms, covering the architecture of the house thoroughly for their female readership. Attention to these sanitary matters, claimed one sanitarian, could decrease the death rate by half (Ballin 1889: 3). The inspection of the house was usually conducted in a series of tests, which were spelled out in detail and illustrated in the women’s advice literature. The ‘peppermint test’, to check the drainage system, consisted of running peppermint oil into a drain from the exterior of the building. If a minty smell was detected inside, the house was considered insanitary. The oil could also be mixed with a can of boiling water, as recommended by William Maguire in his popular plumbing manual, and then poured down the soil pipe from the roof. Maguire pointed out that this test was ‘troublesome’ and required ‘delicate handling’. The person pouring the peppermint oil into the pipes had to remain on the roof for a considerable time; otherwise, one might bring the peppermint smell into the house and ruin the test (Maguire 1901: 194–5). Special machines, resembling modern vacuum cleaners, were commercially available to assist householders in the diagnosis of their houses. Air quality in the house was also regulated by women. A simple test of holding a candle to the keyhole of an interior door would illustrate how the fire in a room could draw ‘drain-derived air’ from other sources (Teale 1878: plate 3). A candle test could also identify joints of soil pipes that had been soldered with ‘inferior material’ (Teale 1878: plate 3). Lead pipes often developed holes over time, explained Dr T. Pridgin Teale. His diagrams offered few clues of how householders could gain access to the drainage systems hidden within their floors and walls, but he nevertheless insisted that the candle test could give sure evidence that ‘sewer gas’ was leaking from faulty pipes. Other aspects of house inspection were far more sophisticated. Reinsch’s test, for example, to detect arsenic in wallpapers was a complicated procedure involving hydrochloric acid and copper foil (Ballin 1890: 269–71). The experts suggested that women conduct the test only if a chemist or public analyst could not

Miasmatical Fears 31

be employed to do so. In this procedure, pieces of the questionable wallpaper were placed in a test tube of hydrochloric acid and water. If a piece of copper foil dipped in the boiling liquid turned black, the wallpaper was arsenical. Other tests described in the press required less equipment or scientific knowledge. The titles of articles in popular ladies’ magazines in the final decades of the nineteenth century suggest that women may have participated in decisions regarding the health of houses long before any problems surfaced. The authors of ‘Where Shall My House Be?,’ ‘The Site of the House’, ‘Walls’ and ‘Drainage’ (Baby 3 1889–1890) provided middle-class women with comprehensive information on building design, including issues of health in the home. A similar series appeared in English Woman’s Journal (‘Modern House Building’ 1863: 399–404 and ‘House Building’ 1864: 27–30, 341–7). Domestic design was thus a form of preventive medicine regulated by women. ‘She may have something to do with the building of the house at some time’, observed an expert in 1899 (Gulick 1899–1900: 64). Again, this gendering of responsibility worked in two ways. If a wife and mother was solely responsible for major design decisions that were thought to affect the health of the family, it followed that any defects or illness that subsequently emerged could be her fault. In addition, it meant that a woman’s poor health was often regarded as a result of her own actions. By insisting that middle-class women’s health had declined rather than improved as the reform of domestic architecture presumably progressed, doctors implied that women’s faulty choice or regulation of sanitary systems were more to blame than their own inability to cure (Branca 1975: 66). Happily, we haven’t seen a return of this reasoning with Covid-19. Women learned about science in the public and commercial districts of cities. The Ladies’ Sanitary Association (LSA)  – which was originally called the Ladies’ Association for the Diffusion of Sanitary Knowledge – was formed in 1857 by a group of women who believed that most of the ‘debility, disease, and premature mortality in this country arose from the ignorance of the masses respecting the commonest laws of health’ (‘Ladies’ Sanitary Association’ 1882: 136–7). The LSA was an active force in British health reform until its disbanding in 1900. It offered courses in sanitation, sponsored lectures on various aspects of hygiene and distributed thousands of tracts aimed at instructing women on sanitary matters. Like the ‘healthy house’ literature, the LSA material emphasized that women were responsible for health in the home, particularly with regard to the importance of the building in preventing disease: The architect may allow for windows, but who is to open them at proper seasons? Or as regards medicine; the physician may prescribe and the apothecary may send in the dose, but who is to administer it at the stated hour and with the proper limitation of quantity? It is the house-mother who must do all these things, and we must teach her why and how to do them. We do not need only to persuade her to do this or that, we need to inspire her with a living horror of ill health, and to make her see that the bodily welfare of her husband and children chiefly depends on herself. (‘Ladies’ Sanitary Association’ 1859: 84)

32 Domesticity Under Siege

English novelists described women’s familiarity with plumbing as a mark of newfound confidence. In Pilgrimage, for example, Dorothy Richardson described a woman’s view of a Bloomsbury house in 1890: The large dusty house, the many downstairs rooms, the mysterious dark-roomed vault of the basement, all upright in her upright form; hurried smeary cleansings, swift straightening of grey-sheeted beds, the strange unfailing water-system, gurgling cisterns, gushing taps and lavatory flushes, the wonder of gaslight and bedroom candles, the daily meals magically appearing and disappearing; her knowledge of the various mysteriously arriving and vanishing people, all beginning and ending in her triumphant, reassuring smile that went forward outside beyond these things, with everybody. (Richardson [1916] 1967: 2:428)

Conclusion In the twentieth century, the hospital overtook the home as the main site of middleclass health care. During Covid, however, the hospital was deeply feared as a site contagion and death. Our ongoing fear of illness and death played out at home, as many of us even had to isolate from other family members. In this respect, Covid quarantine protocols suggested that the home was under siege. In the late nineteenth century, however, there are important moments when the typological boundaries between home and hospital are blurred by design. An example is Architect John McKean Brydon’s Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital of 1889–90. Too modest to merit the attention architectural historians have given to large urban institutions, this early hospital for women had a distinctly domestic appearance. Covered porches, bay windows and small rooms helped to mask the scientific processes that were enacted inside its brick walls and perhaps eased the general transition of women into the city. The building’s decidedly house-like appearance, too, in addition to its role as a celebration of women’s progress through its namesake (Anderson was the first woman physician in the UK) and programme, smoothed the gradual movement of medicine out of the home. Were early twentieth-century hospitals simply containers for medical technologies or were they themselves a medical technology, like the Victorian house? Changing perceptions of health have shaped domestic and hospital architecture since the nineteenth century. A powerful illustration of such forces (Figure 1.3) shows George Gordon Hoskins getting instructions from a sewer rat, who visits his drafting table while the architect works on house plans. The presence of the rat is a reminder of how medical beliefs are legible in architectural evidence. During the pandemic, Covid-19 has illuminated the hospital as a source of contagion, a place to avoid if we want to stay healthy, a new place to fear. It is thus a counterpoint to today’s home, which we see as a refuge during the current pandemic. Seeing home and hospital together in this way, fuelled by historical and contemporary medical debates, is a revealing way to situate the architectural histories of medicine.

Miasmatical Fears 33

Fig. 1.3  ‘A Visit from the Sewer Rat’, from G. G. Hoskins,  An Hour with a Sewer Rat, 1883 © Courtesy of Google Books and the Oxford Bodleian Libraries scanning project.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Fiona Kenney, Cigdem Talu and Katrin Zavgorodny-Freedman for assistance with this contribution. It draws heavily on my PhD dissertation from UC Berkeley, supervised by Dell Upton, and subsequent book, Architecture in the Family Way, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press.

References ‘The Death of the Prince Consort’, (1861), Lancet, 21 December: 599. ‘Domestic Economy’ (1877), The Englishwoman’s Review, 15 August: 347–55. ‘Going over the New House’ (1889), Baby: The Mother’s Magazine III, December: 129.

34 Domesticity Under Siege

‘Health Exhibition Lectures, Healthy Houses’ (1884), The Builder, 5 July: 10–11. https://archive. org/details/gri_33125007023274/page/n25/mode/2up (accessed 22 November 2020). ‘Hints on Home Nursing’ (1882–1893), Young Woman I, October–September: 415–16. ‘House Building’ (1864), The English Woman’s Journal 10, February: 27–30, 341–7. ‘Ladies “Sanitary Association”’ (1859), The English Woman’s Journal, 1 April: 73–85. ‘Ladies “Sanitary Association”’ (1882), The Englishwoman’s Review, 15 March: 136–7. ‘Medical Officers of Health v. Sanitary Engineers and Architects’ (1888), Sanitary Record, London: Sanitary Publishing Co., 16 July: 10–11, 11. ‘Modern House Building’ (1863), The English Woman’s Journal 10, February: 399–404. ‘Report of the Lancet Sanitary Commission on the State of Londesborough Lodge & Sandringham, in Relation to the Illness of H.R.H. the Prince of Wales’ (1871), The Lancet, 9 December: 828–31. ‘The Sanitary Inspector’ (1893), Sanitary Record, London: Sanitary Publishing Co., 2 September: 115–16, 116. ‘Ventilation’ (1890), Baby: The Mother’s Magazine III, October: 174–6, 175. ‘What Is a London House’, (1880), The Architect, 4 December: 347. Adams, A. (1996), Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870–1900, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Ballin, A. S. (1889), ‘Health in Our Homes’, Baby: The Mother’s Magazine III, December–November: 3. Ballin, A. S. (1890) ‘Ventilation, Lighting, Warming, Furnishing’, Baby: The Mother’s Magazine III, November: 269–71. Barker, Lady M. A. (1878), The Bedroom and Boudoir, London: Macmillan. Bourdillon, H. (1988), Women as Healers: A History of Women and Medicine, Cambridge and England: Cambridge University Press. Branca, P. (1975), Silent Sisterhood: Middle Class Women in the Victorian Home, London: Croom Helm. Chavasse, P. H. (1886), Advice to a Mother on the Management of Her Children: And on the Treatment on the Moment of Some of Their More Pressing Illnesses and Accidents, 14th edn, London: J. & A. Churchill. Eassie, W. (1874), Sanitary Arrangements for Dwellings, London: Smith, Elder. Gladstone, C. (1884), Healthy Nurseries and Bedrooms Including the Lying-in room, London: William Clowes and Sons. Gulick, Dr L. (1899–1900), ‘The Home Maker: What She Ought to Know’, Young Woman 8, October–September: 64. Hall, L. A. (1988), Hygieia’s Handmaids: Women, Health, and Healing, London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. Hellyer, S. S. (1893), The Plumber and Sanitary Houses: A Practical Treatise on the Principles of Internal Plumbing Work, or the Best Means for Effectually Excluding Noxious Gases from Our Houses, 5th edn, London: Batsford. Hoskins, G. G. (1883), An Hour with a Sewer Rat, London: Simpkins, Marshall. Larson, M. S. (1977), The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis, Berkeley: University of California Press. Lewis, J. (1984), Women in England, 1870–1950: Sexual Divisions and Social Change, Brighton, Sussex: Wheatsheaf Books. Maguire, W. R. (1901), Domestic Sanitary Drainage and Plumbing, 3rd edn, rev edn, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner.

Miasmatical Fears 35

McClary, A. (1979), Germs Are Everywhere: The Germ Threat as Seen in Magazine Articles, 1890–1920, East Lansing: Michigan State University. Morantz, R. M. (1977), ‘Making Women Modern: Middle Class Women and Health Reform in 19th Century America’, Journal of Social History (Print), 10 (4): 490–507. Morantz-Sanchez, R. (1985), ‘The Female Student Has Arrived: The Rise of the Women’s Medical Movement’, in R. J. Abram (ed.), ‘Send Us a Lady Physician’: Women Doctors in America, 1835–1920, 177–202, New York: Norton. MSA and MRAS (1864), The Grammar of House Planning, Edinburgh: Fullarton. Muthesius, S. (1982), The English Terraced House, New Haven: Yale University Press. Neiswander, J. A. (1988), Liberalism, Nationalism and the Evolution of Middle-Class Values: The Literature on Interior Decoration in England, 1875–914, PhD dissertation. University of London. Panton, J. E. F. (1889), Nooks and Corners: Being the Companion Volume to From Kitchen to Garret, 209–26, London: Ward & Downey. Penner, B. (2014), ‘The Prince’s Water Closet: Sewer Gas and the City’, The Journal of Architecture, 19 (2): 249–71. Plunkett, H. M. (1893), Women, Plumbers, and Doctors: Or, Household Sanitation, New York: D. Appleton. Poore, G. V. (1887), The Dwelling House, London: Longmans, Green. Richardson, Dorothy M. ([1916] 1967), Pilgrimage, New York: Knopf. Ruskin, J. (1902), Of Queens’ Gardens, London: George Allen. Smith, T. R. (1884), ‘A Public Health Exhibition’, Architect, 5 (January): 3. Stanley, Lord F. (1858), ‘Address on Public Health’, in Parker, J. W. (ed.), Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, 44–62, London: Savill and Edwards. Teale, T. P. (1878), Dangers to Health: A Pictorial Guide to Domestic Sanitary Defects, London: J. & A. Churchill. Tomes, N. (1990), ‘The Private Side of Public Health: Sanitary Science, Domestic Hygiene, and the Germ Theory, 1870–1900’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 64: 509–39. Wood, C. J. (1887–1888), ‘The Sick-Room and Its Appliances’, Baby: The Mother’s Magazine I, December–November: 179. Wood-Allen, M. (1899), The Marvels of Our Bodily Dwelling: Physiology Made Interesting, Ann Arbor, MI: Wood-Allen Publishing.

36 Domesticity Under Siege

2

Domesticity and fear: Insects and creepy crawlies



MARK TAYLOR

Introduction This chapter examines the fear from, and reality of, insects and other creepy crawlies as they invade or are encountered in the domestic setting. It addresses the occasions when the inhabitant and the home are under threat from non-companion animals. To contextualize this, a short discussion of entomological fear is used to frame both imagined and real fears affecting the home. Working through a selection of historical and contemporary texts, poems and films, imagined fears of encounters with both enlarged individual insects and swarms or infestation colonies are reflected in both psychological and physical terror. This fear, and sometimes wonder, is evident through tales and poems for both adults and children. Many late Victorian and early twentieth-century poems and stories focus on the transformative power of insects, and to some extent reflect the emergent interest in observing, identifying and cataloguing bugs through their various stages of metamorphosis. Children’s stories and poems reflect fear of individual species, while sometimes offering them human characteristics. This includes the ‘real’ fear of losing control, where the insect breaks out from its habitat and invades on a gigantic scale. Invasion literature that includes large-scale creatures overpowering the home, such as in Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915) as well as plague numbers in H. P. Lovecraft’s classic horror tale, The Rats in the Walls (1923), exposes the horror of such vermin overpowering domestic order. Both genres play upon people’s terror of the other, and while most invasion texts and films were aimed at repelling other nationalities, animals and insects held ground as both real events and metaphors of political change. Within the genre of Sci-fi movies this is manifest in notions of gigantic insects, often caused by chemical or atomic reactions. The very real problem of insects such as lice and bedbugs is examined against methods of control, and how issues of health and well-being affected the design and occupation of the home. Alongside these bloodsuckers are other insects such as locusts, termites, ants and other wood boring beetles that overwhelm or undermine the fabric of the home. Our relationship with insects and other so-called ‘pests’ has as much to do with their appearance as their ability to swarm or colonize in vast numbers. Both of these affect the home and inhabitation as they pose a threat to

domestic cleanliness and orderliness. This horror of non-individual groups such as the vast swarms of locusts in Kansas, United States, in 1874–5, shredded curtains and clothing, infiltrating all parts of the home, and offers an extreme example of insects in vast numbers. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the imagined and the real coalesce and are understood through a warfare perspective, or a culture of besiegement.

Fear and loathing Modern society generally does not hold insects and other creepy crawlies in high regard and positions them primarily as a nuisance, pest and a transmitter of disease. Their very presence often induces a fear reaction. Entomologist Barrett Klein illustrates this fear through a US study of Connecticut residents, in which the participants viewed invertebrates ‘with attitudes of fear, antipathy, and aversion’ (Klein 2012: 6). Klein quotes James Hillman’s position that ‘there is a long tradition of hating bugs’, while noting that in psychoanalysis insects are often associated with excrement and anality, plagues, death, evil and negative self-image. Images of homes overrun with cockroaches, flies and other ‘bugs’ such as spiders and centipedes are used to confirm an unhygienic environment, or one that has missed a good dose of spring cleaning. Indeed, advertising media contributes to this fear presenting many ways to keep out or kill insects in the crusade for creepy-crawly free homes. That is, the fear of scurrying cockroaches, ants and other ‘invaders’ is generally dealt with by eradication or removal. Whether the insect is harmful or not, a liberal use of insecticides will make everything better. However, such fear is not unfounded. It is widely recognized that cockroaches and flies ingest microorganisms that are then passed out onto various foods via their faeces. Indeed, body parts and some enzymes in faeces induce a reaction in some people (Burgess 2010). This fear occurs despite many species are found living amongst us, and through such lifeforms as lice and parasitic worms, on our bodies and even inside us. For modern urban dwellers who live in close proximity to each other, although not as tightly packed, or in such poverty as nineteenth-century slum dwellers, the fear and reality of insects is ever present. But, despite there being estimated over 30 million species of insects worldwide, this urbanite most often encounters primarily bedbugs, cockroaches, mosquitoes and houseflies. Many of these species are living off refuse, drainage ditches and other unsavoury aspects of urban life. Additionally, Burgess makes the point that since humans are very wasteful and somewhat untidy, some indoor species of cockroach ‘can multiply their populations far beyond those likely to occur in nature’ (Burgess 2010). This ability to multiply or live in vast colonies also generates fear. For example, many social insects such as ants have colonies with very large numbers while swarming locusts can reach plague proportions, with up to 1 billion individuals. Termites can reach enormous population levels in tropical climates, with vast aboveground constructions and underground passages generating up to 1000 individuals

38 Domesticity Under Siege

Fig. 2.1  John Leech, ‘A House Over-Run by Cockroaches’, c. nineteenth century © Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

per square meter (Eggleton et al. 1996). While such numbers are accommodated in the natural world, the ability to reproduce in large numbers defies our need for control, since it disturbs or harms our cultivated environment. Entomologist Jeffrey Lockwood proposes that ‘for many, fear feels like the core emotion of an aversive encounter with an insect  – or a few million insects’ (Lockwood 2013: 28). In an interview, Lockwood proposes that ‘the vast majority of our interactions with insects are negative in that they are the things that are invading our homes and our private spaces – our kitchens and bedrooms’ (Borel 2013). However, we do in fact engage with very few insects, and many are unaware of them in our daily activities. Generally we have a benign and peaceful coexistence, since many are prone to evade humans. We may well ask where this fear comes from, and why is it so pervasive in some people. To some extent, this fear is both a physical and psychological protective response against contamination. Additionally, insects often evoke fear because of their non-human attributes, including their erratic movements (scurrying cockroaches, wriggling maggots) or alien features (exoskeletons, multiple limbs, and antenna). Some of this fear or disgust, is linked to morbid associations, such as maggots on rotting flesh. It is therefore no surprise that they also enter our mind, and our dreams. Barrett Klein (2012) notes that human entomophobia occurs in three ‘fantasies’. These include firstly, through dreams of insect invasions indicating ‘psychotic dissociation, or loss of centralized control’. Secondly, they can indicate the ‘psyche’s capacity to conjure up inhuman monstrosities’, and thirdly they are outside our control and threaten us with competition and freedom (Klein 2020: 6). The scientific study of insects from a Darwinian evolutionary theory though to Henry Walter Bates proposals on insect mimicry began to see insects in a new manner, as did observations on the social organization of ants and bees (Clark 2009). For the curious, insects hold little fear and are seen as something to be collected

Domesticity and Fear 39

and catalogued. Canadian entomologist Greg Pohl argues that collecting insects is a vital part of most entomology research, ‘including taxonomic, diagnostic, biodiversity, and pest management work’ (Pohl 2009: 10). Although the process means many insects are killed, he argues this is minute compared to larger forms of destruction through agriculture and land clearance. Historically, insects were little studied until the nineteenth century, where in Britain they entered the world of science and nature. Within this context, newly discovered species were collected and displayed in middle class homes, alongside aquariums and terrariums. This fascination for nature and natural history was also an inspiration for contemporary dress. One of the most notable is the famous beetle wing dress designed by Alice Comyns Carr for actress Ellen Terry. Worn in an 1888 production of Macbeth, the dress was a combination of natural history awareness and fashion. Although made from the wings of dead beetles, fashionable taste also included the wearing of live beetles encrusted with jewels. Mary Haweis, a supporter of women’s rights and writer on dress and beauty, rallied against the idea of adorning the body with fauna, since ‘a corpse is never a really pleasant ornament’ (Haweis 1887: 336). The article noted that each year over 30 million birds were slaughtered for fashionable attire, and by raising the issue Haweis effected a shift in this practice that led to the protection of many endangered birds. At the same time the press and the satirical magazine Punch through the theme of ‘fashioned from nature’, characterized and ridiculed women and their attire through illustrations that aligned their fashion to insects and other animals.

Imagined fears Through our creative and imaginary efforts insects have entered the world of literature, art and film, and often have encounters with humans. Sometimes this is played out in a fairly benign manner; at other times the presence of insects in the domestic sphere is linked to terror and fear. One important text in this genre is Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915), which takes place in the home of protagonist Gregor Samsa. One morning he awakes to find himself transformed into a ‘horrible vermin’ lying on his back, waving painfully thin legs above a segmented body. Recognizing himself as a monstrous insect imprisoned in a shell, with difficulty he leaves his bed. His body is transformed, and despite several injuries and difficulty of turning around, he moves about ‘crawling up and down the room’, and much later ‘crawled over everything, walls, furniture, ceiling’. Although seemingly to be of normal height, but equipped with antennae, Gregor’s sister would refer to him with phrases such as ‘come on then, you old dung-beetle!’. Having the form of an insect-like creature, both his mother and father are repulsed by his being, and although he is left some food substances by his sister, Gregor slowly dies of starvation. This fear and repulsion are due to his transformation from human to insect, as much as his disturbing presence occupying a room in the home. A presence that is only removed by death.

40 Domesticity Under Siege

As terrifying as this might be, an earlier Victorian Gothic novel The Beetle: A Mystery (Marsh 1897) focuses on a supernatural being who prior to ‘physically and sexually attacking men and women, turned into a giant beetle’ (Lurati 2019). In a study of the social, sexual and racial undertones in the story, Minna Vuohelainen notes ‘the confusion over shifting social boundaries is focused upon the body and dwelling of the beetle-creature itself ’ (Vuohelainen 2006: 95). For example, the beetles gender identity is elusive and is sometimes referred to as ‘she’ and other times as ‘he’. When entering her squalid den, ‘an uncomfortable odour greeted our nostrils, which was suggestive of some evil-smelling animal’ (Marsh 1897). This depiction of the home as an animal den estranges the dwelling, shifting it into an uncomfortable place to be feared as indeed is the beetle-like occupant. Additionally, when the beetle’s abode is visited by the detective, he is spotted in the window somewhat resembling an old gent peering through the broken window. But, despite searching the room, he is not found inside. It is as if the ‘beetle’ has scurried away to hide. To some extent this nineteenth-century fiction is focused on the ‘animal within’, and explores how an amoral animality lies dormant within, until conditions prevail. Such encounters with giant insects and insect-like creatures are also seen in children’s literature, although not through a process of transformation but through encounters with crawling insects. In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871), Alice is confronted by a variety of ‘Looking-Glass insects’. Some, such as the elephant, was ‘bustling about among the flowers, poking its proboscis into them, “just as if it was a regular bee,” thought Alice’, and there was ‘a very large Gnat: “about the size of a chicken,” Alice thought’ (Carroll 1871: 21). Asked whether Alice likes insects, she replies to the Gnat, ‘I like them when they can talk’. When the Gnat enquires about whether Alice rejoices in insects she replies in the negative, explaining that it is ‘because I’m rather afraid of them – at least the large kinds’ (Carroll 1871: 21). This interchange confirms a fear of insects, but at the same time counters this fear by humanizing through features or abilities (such as talking or wearing human attire). This is something prevalent in a range of stories and animated films. That is, when insects are good they are anthropomorphized and given human characteristics, abilities and behaviour. Some, such as Jiminy Cricket in the film Pinocchio (dirs. Sharpsteen and Luske 1940), do not scuttle about on six legs but walk upright on two. His attire resembles a nineteenth- or early-twentieth-­ century gentleman complete with umbrella. His humanized face on an oversized head has reduced antennae, and is finished with a blue top hat. He is made much less threatening, and much less insect-like, therefore offering less to be feared. While this works for Jiminy Cricket, the Australian television advertisement for Mortein Insect Spray revolves around a humanized fly called Louie, who in the advertisement ‘Louie’s Big Band’ rhymes being a ‘pest’ with ‘your unwanted guest’ (Louie’s Big Band). The message is clear: bugs are unwanted. To reinforce this message Louie and his crawling friends are depicted negatively as dirty, messy and comfortable with germs. The product’s usefulness is emphasized by its ability to kill quickly, and therefore be effective against invasions.

Domesticity and Fear 41

The dangers of encounters with bugs are also captured in several children’s nursery rhymes and poems. The early-nineteenth-century English rhyme ‘Little Miss Muffet’ pictures Miss Muffet sitting outdoors eating when ‘there came a big spider / Who sat down beside her / And frightened Miss Muffet away’. Some versions state it was a small spider, but many illustrations (such as Arthur Rackham’s) show a remarkably large creature. Although this example is not within the house per se, it is central to many domestic garden scenes. In this example the arachnid disturbs the orderliness of the domestic setting, despite there being no poisonous or particularly dangerous spiders in England. By the late nineteenth century naturalist Reverend J. G. Wood acknowledged that the spider had ‘gained a reputation for causing irrational fear in humans: people find them repulsive’ (McKechnie 2012: 505). Wood describes the sense of horror felt by humans, and illustrates this via an anecdote around a spider taking ‘a promenade across the carpet’, to the shrieks of the household. Wood suggests that the spider belongs outside and that ‘within the domestic space, it is “out of place”’. Certainly Miss Muffet did not find the spider in its place, suggesting an inconsistency in ‘how the spider was perceived in popular culture… [and]… natural history literature throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century’ (McKechnie 2012: 505). In either case the use of the spider is central to disturbing the domestic setting, and to some extent problematized this relationship. The spider reveals an interest in transgression and anxiety over the domestic sphere, particularly its limits and boundaries. To this extent the spider represents the ‘transgression of boundaries between inside and outside… self and other, security and danger’ (McKechnie 2012: 507). Fear and danger from without is also complemented by the fear from within. The nonsense song ‘There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly’ is a cumulative song that escapes logic. In each verse the old lady swallows a slightly larger animal to catch the previous one, until the horse proves too much and she dies. Made famous by singer Burl Ives in a 1950s recording, the warning is that the accidental or deliberate ingestion of insects will affect one’s health. Outside literature, films also engage with the horror of insects and bugs and their ability to threaten not only our species but also our cities and homes. The 1954 ‘giant bug’ film Them! (dir Gordon Douglas) is a combination of both atomic and insect fear. This invasion film examines the aftereffects of an atomic bomb on one species of ants. Following reports of missing persons in the New Mexico desert, the FBI sends Special Agent Robert Graham (James Arness) to investigate. During his investigations a colony of gigantic irradiated ants is discovered, and since two young queen ants have escaped, they quickly become a national threat. Both are tracked down and the last is found nestled under the city, at which point the authorities issue martial law, impose a curfew and warn citizens to ‘stay in your homes’. The problem, of course, is that in many horror films the home is no haven, and usually becomes the location for various forms of attack on humans. In many of these films, the outcome is more favourable to humans, and repeats the tropes of good over evil, repelling the

42 Domesticity Under Siege

invader, and treating our homes as a safe refuge. In the closing scene of Them! when the ants are destroyed, myrmecologist Dr Harold Medford (Edmund Gwenn) warns that having opened the door to a new world ‘what we eventually find in that new world, nobody knows’. The 1977 science fiction horror film Empire of the Ants (dir. Bert I. Gordon) is loosely based on H. G. Wells’s 1905 story of the same name. This filmic adaption is not set in Wells original remote Brazilian upper Amazon but on an island beachfront, where shady land developer Marilyn Fryser (Joan Collins) is trying to sell beachfront property to a group of prospective buyers. During their tour they encounter a nest of giant ants that have mutated due to feeding off radioactive toxic waste, and are herded across the island. The apparent dangers of these large creatures are evident enough, but when the survivors stumble upon the local town, they discover that the ant queen is using her pheromones to control the population. Other horror films that followed this genre of supersized and/or swarming bugs include the 1993 direct-to-video Ticks (dir. Tony Randel), in which steroids cause ticks to mutate into gigantic creatures attacking and destroying people and homes. A similar scenario can be found in a range of ‘honey bee’ disaster films such as The Swarm (1978 dir. Irwin Allen). Additionally, the 2005 natural horror film Locusts: The 8th Plague (dir. Ian Gilmour) shifts to a breed of genetically engineered flesh-eating locusts that have escaped a laboratory and, after several human encounters, attack the fictional town of Prairie. New heights are achieved with Mimic (dir. Guillermo del Toroa), a 1997 science fiction horror film in which genetically engineered insects evolve at an accelerated rate One difference between these horror films and the poems and songs discussed earlier is the focus on the multiple above the single. In both Them! and Empire of the Ants the fear of being overpowered by a swarm of giant creatures is what frightens. And, in the latter, the fear of being controlled and subservient to insects threatens the human race, despite the fact that our uncontrolled pollutions caused the giant mutations. While both these films involve mutated ants, the 1977 horror film It Happened at Lakewood Manor (dir. Robert Scheerer) relies on millions of normal sized ants living in a closed section of the building. During reconstruction of the hotel the unusually aggressive and dangerous ants emerge and begin killing people trapped inside the hotel. The fear of being overpowered by multitudes of creatures is not confined to insects and bugs. Perhaps one of the most significant creature films is The Birds (dir. Alfred Hitchcock 1963), in which flocks of birds gather, injure and kill the village inhabitants. The film culminates with an attack by flocks of birds that nearly break through the boarded-up doors and windows of the Brenner farm. Another might be Grey Gardens (dir. Michael Sucsy 2009), a scary tale of living in a raccoon- and flea-­ infested, cat urine–filled house. The terrifying H. P. Lovecraft novel The Rats in the Walls (1924) concerns an infestation of rats beneath and in the walls of protagonist Delapore’s ancestral home. In the finale, Delapore becomes mad and ends up in an asylum, still hearing rats in the walls.

Domesticity and Fear 43

Real fears Real fears to the disruption of domestic living come from many areas, but one that is discussed in this volume is the effect of warfare as an outside agent. While this aspect of besiegement is conducted primarily through armaments, there is also a history of entomological warfare. Bees, scorpions and other insects have long been used as weapons, stuffed into jars and hurled at the enemy (Dembek 2006). Used against both armies and civilians, Lockwood confirms that during the Second World War, plague-infected fleas and cholera-coated flies were dropped on Chinese cities by Japanese military. It is thought they killed over 440,000 people (Lockwood 2013). Used this way insects could induce disease, and if used to attack crops, could lead to hunger. In Western Europe there was fear that Germany had stockpiled 30 million Colorado potato beetles aimed at Britain’s farms (Lockwood 2009). The use of lice and other insects as covert biological weapons against not only armies but also civilians, their homes and food sources was a tempting opportunity for any enemy. The threat of fleas, lice and other household bugs was, and still is, very real. The problem of bedbugs, for example, has plagued homes for centuries. At night this wingless insect crawls into a bed in order to feed on the sleeping occupant’s blood, and by morning has disappeared into the bed frame, wainscot or mattress. All this occurs in a place that we generally understand as being intimate and where we are vulnerable. Lockwood suggests that bedbugs are like an ‘insect version of the vampire tale’, a claim that folds the imagined and real together. Their invasion of intimate places, he suggests, ‘evoke[s] that sense of creepy psychosexual invasion’ (Borel 2013). Whatever interpretation is made, it is clear that the household needed to resist the insect invasion in order to function as a clean and safe environment. For the early Modern English, the scale of domestic infestation meant that watchfulness became the maxim, and all incoming laundry, baskets, clothes and so on needed careful inspection. By the eighteenth century, the problem was not confined to English lower classes but was pervading the homes of the wealthy. Social commentators such as Samuel Pepys mentioned vermin-infested beds in his diary (Sarasohn 2013). Sarasohn argues that the eighteenth-century English were besieged by bedbugs and determined to have the parasite removed. Not only did they bite the flesh and remove blood but when they were accidentally squashed in the night, their nauseating odour would penetrate the senses, and the whole bed and room will begin to smell. Although many associated bedbugs with the poorer classes, their invasion of affluent homes was not only physically irritating but also humiliating. The fear of bedbugs and their social consequences, suggests Sarasohn, ‘extended to the claim that the lower classes were weaponizing the insects’ (2013: 518). One early examination of this infestation problem and possible remedies was covered in John Southall’s A Treatise on Buggs (1730). This account was based on his experiences in the Caribbean where he learnt to mix a liquor that would draw out and kill bedbugs hiding in furniture. As a first precaution he recommended that ‘Beds especially… should be plain, and as free from wood-work as possible’

44 Domesticity Under Siege

(Southall  1730: 35). Additionally, they needed to be inspected regularly and not have places the bugs can hide. While he notes that upholsterers and washerwomen’s baskets harbour these insects, builders are also to blame. He asserts that they often reuse old doors and chimneypieces, passing them off as new, ‘thus the Houses in Hanover and Grosvenor-Squares, &c. were supplied before inhabited’ (Southall 1730: 37). Since bedbugs traversed the barriers between social classes, all pretentions to moral superiority and cleanliness were put at risk. Hence the need to go on the offensive. To address the problem bedsteads were painted with various compounds and liquors, including mercury, camphor, tobacco and lard. Nineteenth-century American advice writer Eliza Leslie proposed that walls could not be hung with paper because bedbugs would seek refuge in any lose areas, contriving to ‘effect a lodgement between the edges of the paper and the plastering’ (Leslie 1863: 105). Noting that they hid in cracks she suggests a number of remedies including solutions of tobacco or red peppers, and as a final resort, cracks should be ‘rubbed with quicksilver beaten up with white of egg’ (Leslie 1863: 105). In the 1940s bedbugs affected many London households, and became a ­community-wide problem. It was so severe that ‘bugs were seen crawling from house to house, escaping through exterior windows and doors and traveling along walls, pipes, and gutters’ (Potter 2011: 16). Much of the blame for this outbreak was directed at the poorer overcrowded slum areas and the belief that bedbugs helped to create slums by ‘attracting those who tolerated them and had acquired a degree of immunity’ (Potter 2011: 16). In a modern American context, Diane Biehler records that pest infestations in homes are also often associated with housing disrepair, low socio-economic environments and were more likely in single family homes than in multi- or shared accommodation (Biehler 2013). However, various pest registers document the occurrence and spread throughout the United States, with many reports indicating the difficulty of eradication, particularly in older shared accommodation. For example, one recent December 2020 report from New York City notes, ‘I had a bed bug infestation in April 2020 which was addressed and a exterminator came. Now we have another infestation 12/2020. The landlord has not responded to my request for a exterminator’ (Bed Bug Registry). Another report indicated that for them the problem would not be resolved until the tenant on the fourth floor would agree to be treated. What is clear is that even in a modern context occupation of the home is unbearable and reports indicate occupants move on to other bug-free locations. That is, the pervasiveness of the insect overpowers inhabitants and they are forced to move. These UK and US accounts evidence that these insects continue to invade the home and are probably replicated in data from other locations. They make domestic living uncomfortable and impede any sense of normality and comfort, particularly when inhabitants suffer nightly attacks where the skin is bitten, leaving rashes and itching. Since the skin is the threshold between the body and the outside world, when parasitical insects ‘invaded the interiority of the body they also destroyed its

Domesticity and Fear 45

integrity or wholeness’ (Sarasohn 2013: 515). Breaching the boundary of the body, and penetrating the nose, their agency seems to overturn the scala naturae, threatening to unravel the classification scheme for animals. While a bedbugs invasion is usually brought about by the introduction into the home of infected products such as beds, furniture, baskets and mattresses, other invaders such as ants, termites and cockroaches are self-introduced. For these insects the presence of stored food is an attractor, whereas for boring beetles and termites, it is the presence of edible timber. Many of these insects seek the home because it often acts as a large food store, or if not the home per se, then its surrounding natural and cultivated landscape. In the late eighteenth century, farming changed with the arrival of monocultural food production which unknowingly proved to be an excellent food supply for the propagation of insects. Such changes to agricultural practice combined with ideal weather conditions for insect reproduction, occasionally led to insects in plague proportions. At the end of the seventeenth century, for example, middle and eastern Germany experienced many migratory locusts but by the second half of the eighteenth century they were no longer present (Sprenger 2015). Stretching for hundreds of miles and devouring all vegetation, while polluting water with faeces and dead bodies, many settlers and farmers felt like the air was alive. Locust infestations were not confined to the outside and agricultural land, ‘they beat against the houses, swarm in at the windows, cover the passing trains’ (Locusts of the West 1874). In 1870s Dakota, plagues of locusts covered acres of land devouring all leaves and shoots, and even ‘ate holes in the family washings hanging in the open air and injured many of the tents in which newcomers had made their temporary homes’ (Briggs 1934: 53). Having devoured fields and trees, the locusts then invaded the farmhouses, searching for food sources in cupboards and sacks as well as clothing and curtains. It was reported that before bedtime blankets and sheets had to be shaken to remove the insects and occasionally required further shaking in the night. Protecting homes and crops with trenches, fire, smoke and loud noises did little to halt the onslaught. A period Kansas illustration depicts the grasshoppers as equivalent to human scale and, much like the imagined humanized creatures, are shown inhabiting the home, removing wheat, using modern instruments and physically threatening the farmer. But, these are not the benign Disneyesque characters; these creatures are driving the family out of their home. The scalar relationship is not unlike that seen in some of the creature invasion films, especially Mimic. In this film, the creatures mutate and grow in size, while learning to mimic humans. In one scene, Dr Susan Tyler (Mira Sorvino) encounters what appears to be a man in a trench coat, but which unfolds into a human-sized insect. However, this is not a harmless species imitating the warning signals of another as in the case of Batesian mimicry but takes on a much more sinister predatory role to disturb both humans and their abodes. Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about the 1874 plague in her fourth ‘Little House’ book titled On the Banks of Plum Creek. In this autobiographical children’s novel, she

46 Domesticity Under Siege

Fig. 2.2  Henry Worrall, ‘Grangers versus Hoppers’, 1874–5 © Kansas State Historical Society.

described family hardship during the locust plague as ‘grasshoppers beat down from the sky and swarmed thick over the ground’ as her mother ‘slamming the windows shut, all around the house’ (Wilder 1937). Life became intolerable; everyday activities such as milking the cows were affected as grasshoppers fell into the pail and mother ‘skimmed out the grasshoppers with a tin cup’ (Wilder 1937). As the family moved about grasshoppers attached themselves to their clothes. They went into the house, where ‘some jumped onto the hot stove where Mary was starting supper’ and food had to be covered until ‘they had chased and smashed every grasshopper’ (Wilder 1937). She adds: Towards the end of the autumn they laid millions of eggs in the soil. They hatched the following year. The hoppers emerged and ate all in sight, until one morning they all started walking west, which meant walking over everything in their way, including through the house and ‘over Carrie. They came pouring in the eastern window, side by side and end to end, across the window sill and down the wall and over the floor. (Wilder 1937)

Wilder observed the grasshoppers were as thick in number on the house walls as on the ground. They went up the wall and through the attic windows and ‘the house seemed full of them. Ma and Laura swept them up and threw them out the western window’. They walked west, over the house and across the ground without stopping. In August 1874, the New York Times reported that locusts had swarmed ‘all over the West, from Illinois to distant Oregon, and from Texas to Dakota’ (Insect Plague 1874). These millions of migratory grasshoppers eventually forced farmers to abandon their homes, either due to the loss of crops and/or foreclosure due to inability to repay loans (Briggs 1934). Many settlers who had invested all their savings into their

Domesticity and Fear 47

crops had to move on or face starvation and they ‘hastily packed up their household goods and may be seen here and there moving eastward, miserable, pitiable sights to behold’ (Locusts of the West 1874). Since the locusts far outnumbered humans, they were defenceless to repel their advance and destruction of both natural and cultivated vegetation. Consequently, they were unable to protect their homes.

Conclusion In this chapter, the relationship between insects, humans and their homes was framed through notions of fear, whether imagined or real. Much of this argument centres on whether insects and creepy crawlies are perceived to be threatening, or threaten the body. Although Miss Muffet was startled by an arachnid, and despite there being few poisonous spiders in Europe, Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis framed fear of being bitten by a spider as representing fear of punishment by one’s father. Whether or not this interpretation alters our reading of the poem, we still need to contend with the ever-present and seemingly irrational fear of bugs. The individual bug disturbs our ordered environment, but the swarm offers another issue to contend with. The problem with masses of insects, media theorist Jussi Parikka argues, is that Western literature and films often portray the horror of these non-individual groups, because ‘the power of swarms was a frightening one, emerging from the sheer size of the pack… as in the case of locusts’ (Parikka 2010: 50). Like the real locust events, the imaginary films reinforce the message that insects and other pests overwhelm our sense of individuality as they ‘invade our homes bodies and minds’ (Lockwood 2013: 38). This invasion could be considered as a transgression of a boundary between places of intimacy and places of enmity. Narratives around invasions and insect besiegement can be framed in several ways, one of which is through biblical tales. In the European context, a number of descriptions of darkened skies and enormous locust numbers recall biblical stories such as the Plagues of Egypt (Sprenger 2015). The 1874 Kansas, US infestation was described in a similar manner and claimed that ‘the plague of locusts in Egypt, as depicted in the Bible, is the only account that can graphically describe the grasshopper plague’ (Locusts of the West 1874). Additionally, an 1821 account from Maine, the United States recorded by Missouri entomologist Charles Riley noted that ‘they entered the house in swarms, reminding one of the locusts of Egypt’ (Riley 1877: 189). These descriptions of infestation reflected a religious culture that operated through biblical messages. For the religiously inclined writer, plagues and pestilence ‘reinforced the experiential authenticity of Exodus’ and was matched by the corresponding idea that ‘England was being punished for its collective sins’ (Cole 2016: 50). Another narrative is framed through warfare. Removing troublesome insects from houses in the nineteenth century was often the preserve of housewives or servants, and was enacted to notions of cleanliness. The language used reflects militaristic terminology such that cleanliness was achieved by ‘battling various unwelcome

48 Domesticity Under Siege

intruders into the family’s living space’ (Guynes 1996: 98). In this context, many of the ‘pest’ animals required a fight to control them. Locusts were also described as enemies and ‘authors frequently used comparisons to warfare’ (Sprenger 2015: 528). Locust swarms were pictured as ‘depredating armies that invaded entire regions, causing famine and death’ (Sprenger 2015: 528). During the Second World War, the North African campaign of 1941 was frustrated by plagues of locusts that spread across the southern Mediterranean, the Middle East and into Asia. In the course of discussions around how to control or eradicate them the French ambassador to Morocco, ‘highlighted commonalities between the locust and Axis threats: both roam across and invade territories, and both, if left unfettered, will destroy the wealth and order built by the French’ (Péloquin 2013: 108). Here order is not simply the orderliness or control of the domestic sphere but the political order of a colonizing empire. These vast numbers, like rivers of moving bodies, emerge and transcend any geographic or political boundary. Whether in hopper or adult stage, these grasshoppers are ‘at odds with the spatial reach of conventional management institutions’ (Péloquin 2013: 103). They lie outside a prescribed domestic and spatial order, making for an uncomfortable and disturbing relationship.

References ‘Bedbug Registry’. Available online: https://bedbugregistry.com/ (accessed 6 November 2020). ‘The Insect Plague’ (1874), The New York Times, 3 August. As retrieved from The New York Times Archive. ‘The Locusts of the West’ (1874), The New York Times, 17 August. As retrieved from The New York Times Archive. Louie’s Big Band. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P57qFKmzlZc (accessed 20 December 2020). ‘A Plague of Grasshoppers’ (1874), The New York Times, 22 June. As retrieved from The New York Times Archive. Biehler, D. (2013), Pests in the City: Flies, Bedbugs, Cockroaches, and Rats, Seattle: Washington Press. The Birds (1963), [Film] Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, USA: Universal Pictures. Borel, B. (2013), [Blog] ‘Why Do Humans Have a Fear of Insects? Author Dr. Jeffrey Lockwood Tries to Answer that Question’, Popular Science. Available online: https://www. popsci.com/blog-network/our-modern-plagues/get-thing-away-me-why-humans-hatebugs/ (accessed 6 November 2020). Briggs, H. E. (1934), ‘Grasshopper Plagues and Early Dakota Agriculture, 1864–1876’, Agricultural History, 8 (2): 51–63. Britton, W. (1927), ‘The Grasshopper Plague of 1866 in Kansas’, The Scientific Monthly, 25 (6): 540–5. Burgess, F. (2010), ‘Insects and Health’, Perspectives in Public Health, 130 (1): 12. Carroll, L. (1871), Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, London: Macmillan. Cole, L. (2016), Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Science of Life 1600–1740, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Domesticity and Fear 49

Dembek, Z. F. (2006), ‘The History and Threat of Biological Weapons and Bioterrorism’, in Joseph H. McIsaac, (ed.), Hospital Preparation for Bioterror: A Medical and Biomedical Systems Approach, 17–35, New York: Elsevier/Academic Press. Eggleton, P., D. E. Bignell, W. A. Sands, N. A. Mawdsley, J. H. Lawton, T. G. Wood and N. C. Bignell (1996), ‘The Diversity, Abundance and Biomass of Termites under Differing Levels of Disturbance in the Mbalmayo Forest Reserve, Southern Cameroon’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B-Biolgical Science, 351 (1335): 51–68. Gott, R. C. (2018), ‘The Sting of Defeat: A Brief History of Insects in Warfare’, Entomology Today, July 13: npn. Online: entomologytoday.org. Grey Gardens (2009), [Film] Dir. Michael Sucsy, USA: HBO Films. Guynes, D. (1996), ‘Managing Household Pests the Old-Fashioned Way: Defences against Pest Damage in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Material Culture Review, 44 (1): 97–111. Haweis, M. (1887), ‘Smashed Birds’, Belgravia: A London Magazine, 62 (May): 336–44. Hillman, J. (1998), ‘Going Bugs’, Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture, 0–72: 40–72. Klein, B. A. (2012), ‘The Curious Connection between Insects and Dreams’, Insects, 3 (1): 1–17. Leslie, E. (1863), Miss Leslie’s Lady’s House Book: A Manual of Domestic Economy, Philadelphia: Henry Cary Baird. Lockwood, J. (2009), Six Legged Soldiers, New York: Oxford University Press. Lockwood, J. (2013), The Infested Mind: Why Humans Fear, Loathe, and Love Insects, New York: Oxford University Press. Lurati, P. (2019), ‘Men Insects and Spiders’, in Patricia Lurati (ed.), Animalia Fashion, 131–6, Florence: Uffizi Galleries. Marsh, R. (1897), The Beetle: A Mystery. Project Guttenberg. Available online: http://www. gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5164/pg5164-images.html (accessed 6 November 2020). McDiarmid Clark, J. F. (2009), Bugs and the Victorians, New Haven: Yale University Press. McKechnie, C. C. (2012), ‘Spiders, Horror, and Animal Others in Late Victorian Empire Fiction’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 17 (4): 505–16. Parikka, J. (2010), Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Péloquin, C. (2013), ‘Locust Swarms and the Spatial Techno-Politics of the French Resistance in World War II’, Geoforum, 49: 103–13. Pinocchio (1940), [Film] Dirs. Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton Luske, USA: RKO Radio Pictures. Pohl, G. R. (2009), ‘Why We Kill Bugs – The Case for Collecting Insects’, Newsletter of the Biological Survey of Canada (Terrestrial Arthropods), 28 (1): 10–17. Potter, M. F. (2011), ‘The History of Bed Bug Management’, American Entomologist, 57 (1): 14–25. Riley, C. V. (1877), The Locust Plague in the United States: Being More Particularly a Treatise on the Rocky Mountain Locust, Chicago: Rand, McNally and Co. Sarasohn, L. T. (2013), ‘That Nauseous Venomous Insect: Bedbugs in Early Modern England’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 46 (4): 513–30. Southall, J. (1730), A Treatise of Buggs, London: J. Roberts.

50 Domesticity Under Siege

Sprenger, J. (2015), ‘An Ocean of Locusts–The Perception and Control of Insect Pests in Prussian Brandenburg (1700–1850)’, Environment and History, 21 (4): 513–86. Vuohelainen, M. (2006), ‘Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897): A Late-Victorian Popular Novel’, Working with English: Medieval and Modern Language, Literature and Drama, 2 (1): 89–100. Wilder, L. I. (1937), On the Banks of Plum Creek, New York: Harper & Brothers. Available online: https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/laura-ingalls-wilder/33883-on_the_banks_of_ plum_creek.html

Domesticity and Fear 51

52

Section 2  Human agents – Burrowing, hoarding, c­ oncealing, undermining

54

3

The domestic screen



TERRY MEADE

Writing about a gruesome so-called ‘Honour Killing’ of a young girl within a family home in the UK, Jacqueline Rose commented, ‘I lost count of the number of times that newspapers showed a picture of the (family) home, as if its front should have vouched for its safety. Instead, this case reminds us that it is under the veneer of normality that we should be looking for the most hideous crimes’ (Rose 2014: 142). The veneer of normality is taken on trust, confirmed by routine and habit. We know what goes on inside; we can imagine the routines of daily life framed, if not always limited or determined, by the family home. Normality, Rose suggests, is something we should always be suspicious of. Freud explored the history of unheimlich (the quality of not feeling at home), and he discovered that among the different shades of meaning of the word’s root is one which is identical with its opposite. ‘On the one hand, “heimlich” refers to what is familiar and agreeable and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight’ (Roven 2018: npn). Incompatibility between the customary view of domesticity and an underlying hidden aspect will be, for many people, difficult to comprehend even though according to Freud, these appear to be inseparable. It is as if home, the location of security and protection, engenders a parallel characteristic of secrecy and uncertainty. The term ‘honour killing’ entered the British legal system in 2003 (Rose 2014: 143). Sometimes referred to as shame killing, it signifies the murder of a relative, most often a girl or woman, who is perceived to have brought dishonour on the family. In her discussion of honour, Rose refers to James Brandon and Salam Hafez, who suggest that honour is damaged less by a person’s actions than by knowledge of that action becoming public (Rose 2014: 145). Even if the stories are untrue, rumour and gossip on the outside do their work and have their consequences in the home. The killing of the young girl was a brutal attempt to put an end to an unstoppable circulation of words. ‘Invested in women and policed to a large extent by men’, honour is responsible for marking out the boundary of the home and the terrain contained within its walls (2014: 153). Rose does much to unravel the complexity of ‘honour killing’, particularly in relation to gender and culture. She writes of the danger of this crime being solely assigned to non-Western cultures as if to render it an aberration, as if it did not belong to the many types of domestic violence situated in the privacy of the home. Rose states, ‘across England and Wales, with chilling

regularity, women are murdered by men (two women per week according to recent statistics). Not all of these by any means fall under the rubric of “honour” crimes, but they are nearly all domestic, the product of the most intimate ties. It was Hitchcock who famously described television as bringing murder back into the home ‘where it belongs’ (Rose 2014: 142). The abuse that preceded this particular killing persisted over a number of years protected by a mutual alliance of domesticity and privacy. When such violence becomes public knowledge, something secret and hidden is brought to light which uncovers – indeed it throws in our faces – the comfortable myth of ‘home’. It is both the silence and the hidden nature of the crime that outsiders find most shocking, and it provokes inevitable questions: ‘why did nobody report what was happening, and how could they not hear what was going on?’ The neighbourhood and wider community are forced to confront or at least acknowledge an ugly underside of domesticity. A state of siege thus activated moves back and forth across the boundary between public and private  – from the very public face of gossip and rumour on the outside to the abuse hidden by seclusion on the inside, and back outside again. Siege, in its capacity to travel across borders, is one of the preoccupations of this chapter, and Freud’s interpretation of the parallel side of ‘heimlich’ (concealed and kept out of sight) is another. The primary instrument for examining these concerns is the ‘veneer of normality’ that Jacqueline Rose referred to in her description of the UK house, a screen of domesticity between inside and outside, public and private. This is more than a mere wall. The domestic screen encompasses the physical and mental aspects of domesticity, including spaces, furniture, accumulated beliefs, desires, politics and the daily transactions of the inhabitants. As both a visible and hidden sign of privacy, it manipulates the way that space inside is controlled and the outside is understood. The domestic screen may thus be considered a protagonist in the orchestration of siege. It forms a critical edge where crisis points are manifested and where the norms and connections on either side may effectively be disguised. This chapter will examine what we might see as different ‘states of siege’ impacting on the normal Western home. To be in a ‘state of siege’ suggests an abnormal situation; the typical conditions of domesticity may be surrendered in order to deal with the threat. Threat from outside is one element of this, but abusive behaviour and other perils situated on the inside may equally besiege the home. It is not just that the private-public line is always twisted, folded over itself, or porous – which it is. The point is that the definition of the line between private and public is itself an active participant in the violence occurring on either side of it, whether domestic or public. (Wigley 2002: 284)

The title of this book, Domesticity Under Siege, could be seen to reinforce what Henriette Steiner and Kristin Veel describe as ‘a trite private-public dichotomy, emphasizing the walls of the dwelling as a dividing line’ (Steiner and Veel 2017: 1).

56 Domesticity Under Siege

However, for this chapter such a distinction is useful. Mark Wigley sees privacy as a public statement of withdrawal. He describes, ‘privacy as a facade, a visible statement that something has been hidden – whether this statement is made by the outer surface of a house, a person’s body, clothes, rhetoric, or on the web’ (Wigley 2007: 284). Hannah Arendt offers an expanded view of the public-private dichotomy. She says: ‘The most elementary meaning of the two realms indicates that there are things that need to be hidden and others that need to be displayed publicly if they are to exist at all’ (Arendt [1958] 1998: 73). Distinguishing private from public in this way is a means of locating human activities in what she argues is their ‘proper place’. What appears in the public realm can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. For us, appearance – something that can be seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves – constitutes reality. Compared with the reality which comes from being seen and heard even the greatest forces of intimate life – the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights of the senses – lead to an uncertain shadowy kind of existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized, as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance. (Arendt [1958] 1998: 50)

One of the dangers of expansion of either of these realms at the expense of the other is the displacement of the ‘proper’ location of human affairs. Arendt writes: ‘The subjectivity of privacy can be prolonged and multiplied in a family, it can even become so strong that its weight is felt in the public realm’ (Arendt [1958] 1998: 57). In other words, aspects of the private world can seep into a public realm. Returning to the case of the ‘honour killing’, Rose described the way the siblings of the murdered daughter were under parental threat of silence, which they maintained for years. As a consequence, they found other ways to disrupt their domestic situation. ‘Both sisters had therefore felt the need to violate the abusive sanctity of the home – which might also have been their way of declaring its criminality to the world’ (Rose 2014: 140). In her discussion of public and private, Arendt mentions an opposition of shame and honour as being located respectively in private and public realms. In relation to the killing, carried out in an intensely private home, it seems that these have swapped places. Honour has travelled to the private realm where it is reflected back outside, whereas shame, which often strives for secrecy and concealment, is operating in public – first in the form of gossip and rumour and later as a threat to perceptions of domesticity. Consequently, the revelation of private violence provokes a frightened reaction as an additional state of domestic siege in the public realm. Siege is most often described as a military operation. A building is surrounded and essential supplies are cut off. A physical wall is thus conjured, which in the domestic realm is the mantle that encompasses privacy. When this is besieged the resources that domesticity depends on, namely safety, security and familiarity, are similarly endangered. Henry Porter alluded to this when he described ‘that great

The Domestic Screen 57

principle of English law, the inviolability of the dwelling house’. He says that this right has remained more or less intact until recent times. This right dates back to 1609. A man named Semayne complained that his home had been broken into and his assets seized by the sheriff. The judgment that followed declared: ‘The house of everyone is his castle.’ It went on to say that if a door is open, a sheriff may enter but that ‘it is not lawful for the sheriff, on request made and denial, at the suit of a common person to break the defendant’s house. (Porter 2006: 23)

The word ‘castle’ naturally invokes defence. The convention that domestic concerns shouldn’t be publicly aired is essential, as if to do so transgresses the hope invested in domesticity itself. Also, as Mark Wigley suggests, the revelation of a link between violence and domestic space is too disconcerting to face. We are unwilling to confront the fragility of the place that grounds and orients us. A lack of awareness of the domestic lives of others is exacerbated by an equal lack of curiosity. Domesticity thus flings a protective screen around the home, and the conventions of domestic life conspire to secure privacy.

Dividing line, wall, boundary, element of siege Steiner and Veel suggest that while a boundary is necessary to resist invasion from the outside (people, animals, virus), ‘the walls of a dwelling may also be approached as mediating devices that perform culturally specific connecting procedures’ (Steiner and Veel 2017: 1). The visible trace of a border is the most obvious sign of domesticity. However, as suggested above, it is responsible for negotiating the way the trappings of inhabitation move inside and out. A principal constituent of domestic construction in Western houses is the cavity or hollow wall; it presents a hard material face to the outside and a lighter, inner skin, which shapes the inhabited space. The cavity between these layers ensures that moisture, dust and organic material cannot easily penetrate the interior. Although the body of the wall is hollow, it is not empty. Various forms of insulation and conduits for water, air, electricity and information networks accumulate there. These physical links between inside and outside organize our dwellings and affect the way we act. We engage with them through daily contact with taps, switches, outlets and information appliances. Levels of infiltration, both inside and out, are adjusted by the domestic conditions inside. Robin Evans described the importance of the space of the hollow wall in its capacity for interruption with reference to a series of experiments carried out in the 1830s to limit communication between convicts. Michael Faraday and Abel Blouet, a French architect, created a number of different cavity walls in Millbank penitentiary in order to inhibit communication from one prison cell to an adjacent one. Evans states: ‘the important thing to note in this procedure is that the general aim was not reduction of noise transmission but reduction of the transmission of significant

58 Domesticity Under Siege

message’ (Evans 1997: 47). In other words, a barrier across which conversations are received as incoherent noise. It serves to anaesthetize one side against damaging communication that might affect the equilibrium on both sides. Communication may be distorted but it cannot be completely annihilated. Fragmented, confused or unwelcome communication may coalesce into threat. In spaces isolated and sealed by walls, the messages reaching the inside invariably become intensified. Eva Weisman wrote about a graphic that went viral on social media ahead of England’s World Cup football match against Tunisia, claiming: ‘No one wants England to win more than women.’ It was published by the domestic abuse charity ‘Pathway Project’, and it explained that domestic abuse rates increase by 38 per cent when England loses. The stats came from a study by Lancaster University that looked at the number of domestic abuse cases reported to one English police force during the World Cups of 2002, 2006 and 2010. In 2014 the average reported occasions of violence had risen to 79.3 a day during England matches, compared with 58.2 when they weren’t playing. Incidents were 11% higher the day after England played, whatever the outcome, and were at their highest when the team exited the tournament. (Wiseman 2018: npn)

‘Refuge’, the UK’s largest domestic abuse helpline, similarly pointed to an upward trend in demand for its services. During times of economic hardship or when people have been confined to the home, domestic violence has flourished. Mark Townsend, writing in The Observer, reported that ‘figures reveal that almost 50 suspected killings may have occurred during the first Pandemic lockdown’. Refuge also reported on the use of technology to intimidate and control partners. In addition, perpetrators were increasingly using smart locks, webcams and social media or sharing revenge porn, to harass their targets, and that it had investigated 195 cases of ‘tech abuse’ in the first lockdown (Townsend 2020: npn).

Siege from within [I]n a state of siege order is frozen; yet disorder boils beneath the surface. Like a giant spring slowly compressed and ready to burst at any moment, immense tension lies in strange repose. Time stands still, like the ticking of a time bomb, and if we are to take the full measure of Benjamin’s point, that the state of siege is not the exception but the rule, then we are required to rethink our notions of order, of center and base, and of certainty too. (Michael Taussig 1982: 10)

For Michel Serres, home is a place beyond siege. It is characterized by withdrawal behind layers and envelops that wrap the interior and the body (Serres 2008: 269). He describes home as a space of transformation where forces are calmed. We produce multiple variations on the box, enlarging and reinforcing it with membranes from hard to soft, layer upon layer. These layers include plumbing,

The Domestic Screen 59

wiring and membranes such as carpets, rugs, plasterwork and pictures on the wall. They all provide environmental protection beyond wind, cold, fog, light and dark, even beyond sound. Serres’s preoccupation with protection makes the home a place to hide and for silent contemplation of the world from the inside. He suggests we do not live as beings in the world; we invented the house and quickly filled it with boxes within boxes, forms of protection within which we are contained (2008: 268). Withdrawal delivers a sense of permanence, opposed to the prospect of provisional shelter on the outside. Siege, however, surfaces where it is least expected, especially when it was thought to have been banished. Taussig’s ‘underlying madness’ can erupt suddenly and violently release devastating forces within the confines of the home. A state of siege can arise in the form of imagined fears. There is danger in the house. Though I passionately wish for calm nourishing warmth and spaciousness, the promise of home, I am irredeemably caught in the house that Edgar Allan Poe built: the one in which someone has been buried behind the wall, alive. (Troutman 1997: 143)

Troutman suggests that the layers of the home are also the sites of primal fears. They entice siege through imagination. Spaces such as closets, hallways, stairways, doors and windows, attics and basements expand and contract with fear and desire. These are charged spaces, which can be mined as catalysts for the imagination. They are play spaces for malicious spirits, which run through our houses and cities. Evil enters, transformed in stories. Examples are figures such as ‘the Candyman’ who lives in the space between adjoining bathrooms and preys on inhabitants’ insecurities from behind bathroom mirrors; E. T. A. Hoffman’s 1816 tale of the Sandman, a mythical being who tears out eyes of naughty children; the ‘Cask of Amontillado’ by Poe, where a man is buried within the walls of a house. These stories are situated at points in the home, walls, peripheries and edges away from the calm centre desired by Serres. The home, in effect, turns in on its inhabitants. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, first published in 1892, depicts a woman who is confined to an attic space in a rented country house, away from her family. She becomes fixated on the yellow wallpaper in her room. Over the weeks of her confinement, she imagines that the wallpaper comes alive at night with the imagery of a woman also confined. I have finally found out. The front pattern does move – and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it. Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern – it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads. They get through. And then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down and makes their eyes white! If all of those heads were covered or taken off it would not be hard it would not be half so bad. (Perkins Gilman [1892] 2011: 263)

60 Domesticity Under Siege

In a lecture entitled ‘The First House’, Mark Cousins argued that anxieties related to human habitation are intensified by any perceived damage to the fabric of the home, or indeed, any violation of the private domain. At a rational level you might ask why it is that people have a horror, and in certain cases an extreme horror, of very minor defects in houses? Why is it that people have an absolute horror of things like stains or very minor leaks, which only require, at that rational level, a bucket under them? You know the house won’t fall down, nothing is going to follow from this leak. (Cousins 1993: 37)

He says that these things operate on powerful phantasies.1 The house has long been seen as the body’s shell, as well as a metaphor for both body and psyche. There is a certain correlation between the anxiety about the elements of the house that go wrong, and the repression about the body. Houses leave ineradicable traces of what spatial relations are and what the body’s place in those spatial relations might be. Consider the door handle’s place as you stand before the entrance to a room. You know that as you reach forward, your hand will move unerringly to one side or another of the door. But then you don’t encounter the handle, curl your fingers around it, and push forward because… it has actually been placed two feet above your head in the middle of the door, perched intransigently up there where it eludes your ready grasp, cannot fulfill its normal function, and does not announce what it is doing there. From that beginning dislocation others necessarily follow. The door may be pushed open on only one of its hinges. You must therefore enter the room sideways and at an angle but only after your coat or skirt is caught and torn by a nail designed to do that every time the room is entered. (Said 2000: 15)

In this quote, Edward Said describes the work of artist Mona Hatoum which plays on the uncertainty of home through dislocation of its layers. Familiar elements such as doors, entrance halls, furniture, kitchen utensils, beds and doormats are distorted and destabilized. For Hatoum, the domestic realm embodies loss and exile. The layers of the home are transformed into menacing and inhospitable objects. Said described Hatoum’s exhibition at Tate Britain in 2000 as a home that cannot be lived in. Familiarity and strangeness are locked together in the oddest way, adjacent and irreconcilable at the same time. For not only does one feel that one cannot return to the way things were, but there also is a sense of just how acceptable and ‘normal’ these oddly distorted objects have become, just because they remain very close to what they have left behind. (Said 2000: 15)

The ordinary objects, which together constitute the ‘feeling, if not the actual state, of being at home’, simultaneously become elements of siege. There is a passage in Kafka’s short story ‘The Burrow’, where the protagonist says to himself: ‘Your home is secure and well protected; you live in peace, are warm

The Domestic Screen 61

and well-fed, the master – sole master – of a multiplicity of passageways and plazas’ (Kafka [1923] 2007: 192). In fact, the creature is living in constant anxiety. ‘My life enjoys hardly a single hour of complete quiet’ ([1923] 2007: 183). Though he has a fascination with the outside and an obsession with the permeability of the barrier between public and private, he maintains the outside has nothing to teach him because the threat is inside. Hidden from view, he declares, ‘the number of my foes is infinite’. The real threat does not materialize so his imagination fills the gap. Nor is it only external foes that threaten me, there are also some within the earth itself. I have never seen them but I have heard stories about them and firmly believe in their existence. These enemies are almost unnameable; not even legend can describe them. (Kafka [1923] 2007: 184)

Threat is thus assimilated as rumour, which consequently intensifies his dread. Because horrors are always on the verge of occurring, a state of siege is contracted into the burrow. Kafka writes that the most delectable thing about the Burrow is its stillness, radiating an atmosphere of peace. But this is deceptive and can be threatened at any moment. In the story he continually reorganizes his defences and alternately consolidates and disperses his food resources. The creature’s sense of rationality dissipates in the burrow, as he stakes everything upon maximum security while at the same time realizing that total security is impossible ([1923] 2007: 190). Kafka’s story exemplifies siege crossing over from the outside and embedding itself beyond visibility on the inside. Kafka seems to be asking if we can ever truly be at home. In his yearning for a place, which is private, hidden and protected against the public realm, Kafka’s creature engineers a radical exclusion. His withdrawal is so extreme that ordinary communication is impossible. However, the world outside the burrow has not really ceased to exist as it enters through stories, myths and legends. This is where phantasy also enters, when thought is ‘internalised and distanced from particular objects and events in the world’ (Judge 1985: 120). His sense of siege is intensified as he is deprived of visual contact with others. Although he has never seen them, his foes take up residence in the burrow, rising from some darker ground, where they ‘can come to get you in your home’ (Kafka 2007: 185). Not having sight of the external world means his understanding of the relationship between inside and outside is replaced by obsession. ‘I require silence in my passageways’ (Kafka 2007: 203). On the inside, the slightest sound heightens his vulnerability. Sound is subversive; it connects him, unwillingly, with the outside as it flows through the limits of his burrow. His fixation on the infiltration provokes an aggressive reaction. The ferocity with which he defends his domain is striking: ‘I am fighting for my peace and quiet.’ His violence ultimately contributes to the destruction of the burrow, leaving it derelict, suggesting that there is something in extreme privacy that generates ferocity. There is a striking similarity between Kafka’s story and the tale of the ‘Mole Man of Hackney’. Writing in The Guardian newspaper, Paul Lewis described how

62 Domesticity Under Siege

William Lyttle, a resident in Hackney, East London, had been digging a network of burrows underneath his house for forty years. ‘According to the council, which used ultrasound scanners to ascertain the extent of the problem, almost half a century of nibbling dirt with a shovel and homemade pulley had hollowed out a web of tunnels and caverns, some 8 metres deep, spreading up to 20 metres in every direction from his house’ (Lewis 2006). He undermined the roads and houses surrounding his property and put the neighbourhood at risk. ‘I often used to joke that I expect him to come tunneling up through the kitchen floor’, one of his neighbours who lived a few yards from Mr Lyttle’s house said. The whole of the opposite street lost power one day after he tapped into a 450-volt cable. Council officials claimed that they had been powerless to act as it was a private property, but with increasing signs of damage, they eventually intervened. He was temporarily evicted to enable engineers to fill the holes with cement. They discovered the foundations of his property were supported by scaffolding poles and pit props and reportedly removed forty tonnes of excavated gravel and junk from his backyard. The antics of the ‘Mole Man’ testify to a fragmented life; isolated, self-justifying, bereft of social connectedness, unaware of the damage caused to the neighbourhood because of his lack of contact with the outside. As his constructions were uncoordinated, he undermined fixed structures in the world above. His random digging paid little attention to the domestic order above ground. His neighbours only became aware they were under siege when the damage became visible in the world above. Burrowing in all directions, he had no apprehensible understanding of the wider

Fig. 3.1  Exterior View of the Mole Man’s House in Hackney, London © Shutterstock.

The Domestic Screen 63

domestic environment. His excavations changed the visible contours of the world above along with the underlying terrain below. Redrawing boundaries in a space without any limits and disturbing foundations, the secretive nature of these activities placed a burden on the surrounding neighbourhood. Kafka’s creature in his burrow and the Mole Man in his extended basement have both imprisoned themselves in private worlds. The domestic screen, the point of contact with the outside, has largely been discarded. They are enclosed, as Sanford Kwinter says, within the same substance that simultaneously contains, multiplies and expresses the danger. ‘The earth itself pantheistically embodies both the threat as well as the potential (though of course only partial) release from it’ (Kwinter 2001: 168). The networks of connecting galleries and corridors, the ceaseless excavation of passages, escape routes, cul-de-sacs, zones of invisibility are tactics for avoiding or deferring contact with reality. It is difficult to have an understanding of the world and impossible to determine depth and surface within the earth. Both characters are immersed in an endless ground and become one with an internalized view of domesticity. Hannah Arendt writes: To live an entirely private life means above all to be deprived of things essential to a truly human life: to be deprived of the reality that comes from being seen and heard by others, to be deprived of an objective relationship with them that comes from being related to and separated from them through the intermediary of a common world of things, to be deprived of the possibility of achieving something more permanent than life itself. (Arendt [1958] 1998: 58)

Things buried deep tend to fester over time. Judit Pusztaszeri, in her chapter on ‘hoarding disorder’ in this volume, writes about the psychological undercurrents and hidden assumptions lying behind different types of alienation and deviant or mutant forms of dwelling. She describes the way such inward-looking disorders also create an interior in the absence of others.

Siege on domesticity from inside out When we venture into the depths of domesticity, we never know what we might uncover. Among the most hideous discoveries recently was the unearthing of the secrets of the Fritlz family in the town of Amstetten, seventy-five miles from Vienna in north-eastern Austria. In 2008, it was revealed that Josef Fritzl had imprisoned his daughter Elizabeth in a cellar underneath the garden in his house in Ybbsstrasse. He raped and fathered seven children with her over a period of twenty-four years, without his wife or anyone in the community suspecting a thing (Rose 2011: 115). Three of the children were deposited on the doorstep of the family home above, supposedly left there by the mother, together with a note asking her parents to care for them. The neighbours, the Austrian Social Services and even Fritzl’s wife – who

64 Domesticity Under Siege

was told that her daughter had run away – all claimed they had no knowledge of this crime. However, the head of the criminal investigation’s unit in the province of Lower Austria said it is difficult to accept that Fritzl’s wife was completely ignorant of her husband’s double life (Rose 2011: 114). He added: ‘We still find it hard to believe that no one – no neighbour, family member or acquaintance – noticed anything’ (Siddique and Stevenson 2008: npn). There are still many unanswered questions about this case. The sixty-square-­ metre cellar was kitted out with full plumbing, a fridge, freezer and washing machine as well as a television, video and radio. A small area housed a lavatory, sink and tiny shower. All the rooms were lit by harsh strip lighting. Caroline Davies wrote, ‘Police photographs of the labyrinth of cellar rooms show narrow, stone-lined passageways, uneven floors and ceilings no higher than 1.7m’ (Davies 2008: 24). This raised questions as to how Fritzl could have furnished the dungeon without provoking the suspicions of his wife and tenants in the house above. The chambers were so well hidden that police initially failed to find them until Fritzl guided them to his workshop. A total of eight doors had to be opened before reaching the purpose-built cellar. Concealed behind shelves laden with paint cans and containers, was a 1 metre high, reinforced concrete door, secured electronically. The area was so confined that police officers examining it could work for only an hour at a time because of the severe lack of oxygen. (Davies 2008: 24)

Tenants in the building above told police they had been strictly forbidden by Fritzl to go near the cellar, and it seems that none of them had dared to disobey his commands. At some point Fritzl expanded the cellar area, which again raised questions as to how it went unnoticed (Siddique and Stevenson 2008). However, as Kate Connolly pointed out, this was at the height of the cold war and nuclear bunkers were seen as a normal and necessary addition to an Austrian home (Connolly 2008a: 16). One of the most dreadful revelations came from a book about this case, by Stefanie Marsh and Bojan Pancevski. They describe a report by a sound engineer, an expert witness at the trial who tested the cellar’s acoustics. His report stated that the soundproofing of the cellar was imperfect. Cries for help would have been ‘very audible’ to the tenants living in flats above ground. Although there was a suggestion that some people had been able to hear, they had been unable to identify the noises that occasionally came from the cellar and nobody thought to investigate further (Marsh and Pancevski 2009: 12). Nicci Gerrard (2008: 25) described the case as a place where ‘epic horror meets familiarity’. She said it fits a whole set of domestic stereotypes, among which are: a family with children; a grandmother who activated the school run; children engaging in normal activities, such as music lessons and going to a youth club; and a grandfather who valued respectability, maintained control and discipline, and had his hobbies and his work place in the basement. Neighbours said the children who

The Domestic Screen 65

Fig. 3.2  Under the Fritzl Residence. The drawing shows the network of underground rooms built by Josef Fritzl over a number of years © Copyright Guardian News & Media Ltd 2022.

lived above ground appeared to have a normal childhood. They were often heard playing in the swimming pool in the family garden – above the very prison in which their siblings were held. In short, a familiar scene of the everyday routines and habits of domestic life. Gerrard suggests that ‘many women have no idea what their husbands get up to in their garden sheds or down in the cellar with their tools or their developing fluids. Indeed, many marriages are based on respecting the privacy of the spouse and allowing them their own space: “don’t ask, don’t nag, it’s his thing”.’ Fritzl insisted on being undisturbed and apparently his wife obeyed him. In answer to the question how could his wife not have known, Gerrard suggests, ‘they don’t know because it’s hidden, and they don’t know because they don’t want to know, and they don’t know

66 Domesticity Under Siege

because they have pushed the knowledge deep inside, and their world is arranged around that denial’ (Gerrard 2008: 25). Two years earlier in 2006, a similarly horrific case had surfaced also in Austria. Natasha Kampusch was kidnapped on her way to school at the age of ten and held in a cellar in the Austrian town of Strasshof an der Nordbahn for eight years before escaping. Her abductor, Wolfgang Priklopil, was trained as an engineer and he created a dungeon beneath a trapdoor in his garage. ‘It was so clandestine and ­fortified it took an hour to get inside; down some stairs, through a hollowed-out concrete wall hidden on the other side of a small metal hatch concealed behind a cupboard. The room was five by five metres, bare, soundproofed, windowless and filled with the constant irritating rattle of a plastic ventilator fan’ (Ronson 2010: npn). In what seems an inexplicable twist, Kampusch bought the Strasshof house where she was imprisoned. She said she did not want to see it vandalized or demolished or become a shrine for crazy fans. ‘It’s not as threatening as it was back then, but it is still a house of horrors for me’ (Smee 2008: npn). In 2014, Austrian film director Ulrich Seidl explored the world of Austrian basements as private domains for secrets and fetishes. Although he said that his idea for the project preceded the uncovering of the two imprisonment cases, his film In the Basement undoubtedly invokes the presence of Fritzl and Priklopil. Seidl shows his characters can be uninhibited in their basements. They live out fantasies, which range from the ordinary pursuits of a model railway, a drum practice room and a shooting range, to a gallery of Nazi memorabilia, which also doubles as a rehearsal room for brass band players, an S & M mistress with a love slave in a sex dungeon and other masochistic and fetishist obsessions. In his presentation of the film, Seidl explained his belief that the basement symbolizes the Austrian subconscious as ‘a place of darkness, a place of fear, a place of human abysses’. He suggested that intimate obsessions generally fizzle out when brought above ground (Bradshaw 2014; Feinstein 2015). For both Rose and Gerrard, the Fritzl case summons memories of Austria’s Nazi past. ‘It is like a nightmare symbol of Austria itself, a country that has pushed its past underground and represented itself as a victim rather than a perpetrator’ (Gerrard 2008: 25). Rose makes connections through Fritzl being packed off to a network of underground bunkers during the intense bombardment of Amstetten in the war and his mother’s incarceration for several months in one of the Nazi’s biggest death camps for refusing to take refugees into her house. ‘Fritzl’s town was a Nazi fortress. His childhood was one of camps, fortifications, and bunkers’ (Rose 2011: 114). Fritzl told his captives he had installed systems so that the doors would give them electric shocks if they tried to open them and poison gas would be released into the cellar if they tried to escape (Connolly 2009: npn). Natasha Kampusch also acknowledged the Nazi connection: ‘I think this exists worldwide, but I also think it is a ramification of the Second World War when the suppression of women was propagated and authoritarian education was very important’ (Rose 2011: 115). In The Guardian, Kate Connolly reported that residents in Amstetten

The Domestic Screen 67

were struggling to deal with the horror of the crime as the details unfolded (Connolly 2009: npn). Outsiders admitted the community was gripped by guilt as Austria sought answers to what the interior minister described as ‘the worst crime of its kind in the country’s history’. A neighbour said, ‘had we noticed anything we’d have said something’ (Connolly 2008a: 16). Until these stories erupted, it would no doubt have been possible to maintain the illusion of normal domestic life behind normal houses. Provincial order and dull domestic cliché were overlaid onto a house of horror (Gerrard 2008: 25). These cases caused Austria’s political leaders to fear for their country’s international image. The haste and certainty with which the authorities claimed lack of knowledge and lack of responsibility suggests that the ideal of domesticity is vital for the reputation of a country and the well-being of its people. Austria’s then chancellor, Alfred Gusenbauer, appealed to the world not to equate his country with the crimes of Josef Fritzl. He insisted that ‘it is not Austria that is the perpetrator. This is an unfathomable criminal case, but also an isolated case. We won’t allow a whole country to be held hostage by one man’ (Connolly 2008b: npn). Ian Traynor reported that Austria is particularly sensitive to outside criticism; the Fritzl scandal was accompanied by daily domestic media reports about what the foreign press was saying. Conolly wrote that Austria’s chancellor planned a global Public Relations campaign to save his country from being tarnished as the ‘land of the dungeons’ (Connolly 2008b: npn; Traynor 2009). The disclosure of this horror signals that siege has travelled full circle. We are back with the ‘honour killing’ where the wider perception of domesticity falls apart under the pressure of internal revelations. The defensive response of political leaders, although an evasion of the real issues, does show that familiar conceptions of domesticity are strained under the weight of expectations and ideals. Violence haunts domesticity as an often-daily occurrence, unseen on the outside. The domestic screen, as much an emblem of security as having a roof over one’s head, prompts the illusion of symmetry between private and public. Unchallenged, it is responsible for the creation of an inviolable notion of defence, and more often than not, it requires determined action to get beyond its power and control. Siege can disrupt a comfortable, cosy nostalgia with exclusion and violence and it exposes the private sphere to public view. Siege is therefore an active force, and while it lurks inside, it will also eventually expose the internal, inward-looking nature of privacy. It challenges simplistic and suspect notions of home, and in this sense, siege might be considered crucial, as through it, normally hidden things may be revealed. In this chapter, I have been concerned with the domestic screen as a protective boundary between inside and outside, public and private. I will conclude with a project that engages with this boundary and opens up these distinctions in a provocative way. The work of artist Esther Shalev-Gerz provides a challenge to the anonymity of the domestic screen.2 The artist was invited to create a project in the north inner city of Dublin in 2003. In a work entitled ‘Daedal(us)’ (which made reference to both the Greek mythological maze-maker and James Joyce’s character,

68 Domesticity Under Siege

Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses), Shalev-Gerz projected images of the façades of houses in one area of the inner city onto the façades in a different area. In this project, she linked places, which had different social problems and were undergoing various stages of gentrification. Rose says, ‘the extraordinary effect was to create houses that you recognise but also no longer know’ (Rose 2011: 142). Shalev-Gerz’s work defamiliarized the locality and unsettled the normality of neighbourhoods. It demonstrated that the walls of the homes were more significant than just being anonymous protectors of privacy. The projected images challenged memory, perception and scale of the domestic environments. There was the interplay of projection with live participants, and past was enmeshed with the present as the projected façades were layered onto real buildings. The pattern of the streets was also disrupted, which offered unusual connections between images and sites. On alternate weeks, images would appear in black and white and then with a red filter, again offering a new perspective on the area. Shalev-Gerz was interested in the ordinary domestic houses in the area and this involved penetration beyond the walls. First, seeking permission to project images of people’s houses, second, requesting permission to use other houses as places from which to project and finally asking permission from inhabitants for their houses to be projected on to (Shalev-Gerz 2013). In this way, she challenged the domestic screen through the dissolution of the private wall of the home and by breaking down the inviolable relationship between the inside and the outside. One of the functions of the domestic screen is that it is crucial for organizing who is and who is not part of the local community. It not only divides public

Fig. 3.3  Esther Shalev-Gerz, Daedal(us), 2003, projection, detail © Atelier Shalev-Gerz. DUO8.

The Domestic Screen 69

Fig. 3.4  Esther Shalev-Gerz, Daedal(us), 2003, projection, detail © Atelier Shalev-Gerz. 10.

from private but also restricts visibility and acknowledgement of the public realm. Shalev-Gerz’s challenge puts both those aspects into question. The route through her projections was changed from time to time, requiring visitors to pay close attention to location. In a district that is undergoing rapid transformation and regeneration, the wandering, remembering, and reclaiming may produce new kinds of mazes-like journeys and future memories. Once the displaced and relocated sites were recognised, reclaimed and re-affirmed, then the work of confrontation, identification and re-appropriation may begin. (Le Feuvre 2005)

By engaging with important features of the public realm, of sharing, of knowing and being known by others, she enabled people to determine who belongs in the street, the area and the community. Through the participation of the inhabitants of the various houses, she revealed the domestic screen to be porous, mobile and permeable. Although the project was simple in its conception, its effect was quite profound in the area. Through the interrogation of the façades, it signalled a re-examination of the domestic screen as a more inclusive element, neither defensive nor secluded. It also restored the cohabitation of public and private realms that Arendt considered to be so important. The exterior appearance of the ‘private realm’ is important for the city, as are the boundaries between one household and another. The law originally was identified with this

70 Domesticity Under Siege

Boundary line, which in ancient Times was still actually a space, a kind of no man’s land between private and public, sheltering and protecting both realms while at the same time separating them from each other. (Arendt [1958] 1998: 63)

Notes 1. Ro Spankie writes: ‘When used in psychoanalytic writings in the English language, “phantasy” with the “ph” spelling) generally refers to the unconscious psychic content of the drives. Fantasy with an “f ” spelling is used to refer to more conscious psychic content such as daydreaming and products of the imagination’ (Spankie 2012). 2. Jacqueline Rose wrote about this project at the conclusion of her chapter ‘The House of Memory’ (Rose 2011: 142).

References Arendt, H. ([1958] 1998), The Human Condition, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Bradshaw, P. (2014), ‘In the Basement: An Affectless Parade of Grotesques – Venice Film Festival Review’, The Guardian, 29 August. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/ aug/29/in-the-basement-ulrich-seidl-venice-film-festival-review Connolly, K (2008a), ‘Emotional Scenes as Family Meets “Cellar Siblings” for First Time’, Also ‘DNA results prove Fritzl fathered all imprisoned daughter’s children’ both published in The Guardian, 30 April. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/apr/30/ austria.internationalcrime Connolly, K. (2008b), ‘Plea to the World: Keep Nation’s Image Separate from the Crime’, The Guardian, 1 May. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/may/01/austria. internationalcrime1 Connolly, K. (2009), ‘Josef Fritzl Trial: She Spent the First Five Years Entirely Alone. He Hardly Ever Spoke to Her’, The Guardian, 20 March. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2009/mar/19/josef-fritzl-austria Cousins, M. (1993), ‘The First House’, Arch-Text, 1 (1): 35–8. Davies, C. (2008), ‘My Father Chose Me for Himself ’, The Observer, 4 May. https://www. theguardian.com/world/2008/may/04/austria.internationalcrime1 Evans, R. (1997), Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays, London: Architectural Association Publications. Feinstein, H. (2015), ‘On the Down Low, Ulrich Seidl’s in the Basement’, Filmmaker, 29 October. https://filmmakermagazine.com/96210-on-the-down-low-seidls-in-thebasement/#.Yk0lw-pBw2w Gerrard, N. (2008), ‘A Monster from the Pages of a Grimm Tale’, The Observer, 4 May. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/may/04/austria.internationalcrime Judge, B. (1985), Thinking About Things: A Philosophical Study of Representation, Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. Kafka, F. ([1923] 2017), The Burrow, London: Penguin.

The Domestic Screen 71

Kwinter, S. (2001), Architectures of Time: Towards a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Le Feuvre, L. (2005), Daedal(us), Dublin: Firestation Artists’ Studios. Lewis, P. (2006), ‘After 40 Years, Burrowing, Mole Man of Hackney Is Ordered to Stop’, The Guardian, 8 August. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2006/aug/08/ communities.uknews Marsh, S. and P. Bojan (2009), The Crimes of Josef Fritzl: Uncovering the Truth, London: HarperCollins. Perkins-Gilman, C. ([1892] 2011), ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, in L. Weinthal (ed.), Toward a New Interior. An Anthology of Interior Design Theory, 252–66, Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press. Porter, H. (2006), ‘How the Englishman’s Home Ceased to Be His Castle’, The Observer, 18 June. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/18/comment.politics Ronson, J. (2010), ‘Natascha Kampusch: Inside the Head of My Torturer’, The Guardian, 11 September. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/sep/11/natascha-kampuschinterview Rose, J. (2011), Proust Among the Nations: From Dreyfus to the Middle East, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Rose, J. (2014), Women in Dark Times, London and New York: Bloomsbury. Rose, J. (2021), ‘Shafilea Ahmed’s Murder Is a Crime Meshed in Migration and Modernity’, The Guardian, 6 August. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/05/ shafilea-ahmed-murder-migration-modernity Roven, R. (2018), ‘Uncanny’, The Chicago School of Media Theory, University of Chicago. https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/uncanny/ Said, E. W. (2000), ‘The Art of Displacement: Mona Hatoum’s Logic of Irreconcilables’, in Wagstaff, S., Wallis, C. and Meredith, R. (eds), Mona Hatoum, The Entire World as a Foreign Land, 7–17, London: Tate Gallery Publishers. Serres, M. ([2008] 2011), ‘The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies’, in L. Weinthal (ed.), Toward a New Interior. An Anthology of Interior Design Theory, 267–70, Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press. Shalev-Gerz, E. (2013, 4 October), Artist Lecture: Esther Shalev-Gerz, [Video]. You Tube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VshfZBDQew Siddique, H. and Stevenson, R. (2008), ‘Josef Fritzl: The Unanswered Questions’, The Guardian, 30 April. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/apr/30/austria. internationalcrime3 Smee, J. (2008), ‘Kampusch Buys House Where She Was Held’, The Guardian, 15 May. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/may/16/austria Spankie, R. (2012), ‘Drawing Out the Censors “Room”’, IDEA Journal, 12 (1): 72–87. Steiner, H. and K. Veel (2017), ‘Negotiating the Boundaries of the Home: The Making and Breaking of Lived and Imagined Walls’, Home Cultures, 14 (1). [Published online] Taussig, M. (1982), The Nervous System, New York: Routledge. Townsend, M. (2020), ‘Shock New Figures Fuel Fears of More Lockdown Domestic Abuse Killings in UK’, The Observer, 15 November. https://www.theguardian.com/ society/2020/nov/15/shock-new-figures-fuel-fears-of-more-lockdown-domestic-abusekillings-in-uk

72 Domesticity Under Siege

Traynor, I. (2009), ‘After Josef Fritzl: A Time for Introspection or Looking the Other Way? The Guardian, 19 March. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/mar/19/josef-fritzlaustria-society Troutman, A. (1997), ‘Inside Fear. Secret Places and Hidden Spaces in Dwellings’, in N. Ellin (ed.), Architecture of Fear, 143–57, Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press. Wigley, M. (2002), ‘Bloodstained Architecture’, in Ghent Urban Studies Team (eds), Post, Ex, Sub and Dis: Urban Fragmentations and Constructions, 281–94, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers. Wiseman, E. (2018), ‘Blaming Football for Domestic Violence Is Only Half the Story’, The Guardian, 1 July. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/jul/01/blamingfootball-for-domestic-violence-is-only-half-the-story-eva-wiseman

The Domestic Screen 73

74

4

Hoarding disorder, Schwitters’s Merzbau and its conflict with domesticity



JUDIT PUSZTASZERI

The concept of hoarding disorder incites an inherent conflict with the idea of domestic bliss. It is an extreme spatial dwelling practice that fundamentally undermines and beleaguers our ideals of domesticity through the overt accumulation of things. Yet, the two, however oppositional, are intimately related. As first highlighted by Mendelson (2014), hoarding is unique, being the only psychological disorder manifesting itself spatially,1 and hoarding is ultimately dependent on the surrogate environment of the home it wrecks for establishment and acknowledgement. Compulsive hoarders’ collecting habits could range from objects, animals or even junk to such a level that it has a detrimental effect on social relationships, mental and physical health and an overall ability to cope with their life. Additionally, the hoard can pose environmental risks such as fire, disease, infestation alongside the fundamental basics of domestic life for space to eat, work, or sleep. Where hoarding is considered, conceptions usually pen it as a result of an excessive acquiring mentality, where the hoarder is unable to let go of any seemingly pointless items. Only since 2013 has Hoarding (HD) been recognized as a separate clinical disorder2 by both the American Psychiatric Association and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder and appreciated as a distinct sub-category under the ‘Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders’ section’ (Frost and Steketee 2014: 43). The Cognitive-Behavioural Model of Hoarding (CBMoH) proposed three key contributing factors to clinical compulsive hoarding: 1. the acquisition of, and failure to discard a large number of possessions that appear to be useless or of limited value 2. living spaces sufficiently cluttered so as to preclude activities for which those spaces were designed 3. significant distress or impairment in functioning caused by the hoarding. 

(Frost and Hartl 1996; Frost and Steketee 2014)

My aim here is to explore a mode of besieged domesticity sitting outside accepted norms, questioning scripted action in the home and exploring the margins of

bodily experience through an understanding of the behavioural aspects of hoarding. In doing so I will draw on aspects of Kurt Schwitters’s Merz, how it blurred the boundaries between his home and artistic practice and how his creativity camouflaged perceivably classic symptoms of a clinical hoarding disorder. Schwitters’s artistic practice was defined by his approach to Gesamtkunstwerk, a total, ­consuming approach to making and experiencing art. I will discuss his early Merzbuild in Hanover to appreciate the situation beyond the autobiographical mythologies and artistic camouflage to establish the various ways his behaviour impeded on the domestic experience. This text most certainly doesn’t seek to label Schwitters, but by looking at his work  from a domestic platform, we can begin to make comparisons with hoarding behaviour, offering previously unexplored perspectives to hoarding as a lived experience within the home with Schwitters processing towards the Merzbau as symptomatic rather than causal. Hoarding impedes and interferes with what is accepted as a ‘normal’ sense of domestic life, but the aim here is to bring attention to another sense of domesticity, one framed around control, responsibility, perfectionism and safety, which are all triggers and responses recognized in hoarding behaviour. Our scripted actions fabricate a domestic breakdown through the dysfunctional activities of the hoarder who merely seeks to appropriate domestic space. It is a widely accepted phenomenon that our home has a key role in forming our identity which begs the question: what kind of identities emerge through this activity? Are there underlying causes leading to this occupation? How does the besieged home besiege our mind?

Schwitters and the [Sch]Merz Schwitters’s self-terminology ‘Merz-bau’ stems from the German word kommerz. It first appeared as part of a piece by Schwitters where the words ‘Kommerz und Privatebank’ were cut from an advert and used in the composition, titling the piece. The word soon became a key signifying element of Schwitters’s new mode of ­working, assembling artwork from leftover junk nailed together. Perhaps because of its obvious cultural influence and import, there has been little consideration of the impact Schwitters’s Merz building activities had on the domestic landscape in which it was set. However, when evaluated in this light we can start to frame questions: could we consider his early years of the Merz columns as a hoardlike activity? Was Schwitters a hoarder, collector or curator? Schwitters’s first Merzbau built in Hanover was seemingly systematically planned and constructed, an inevitable process that has come to be understood through reflection and post-rationalization. Rather than offer a critique from an art historical perspective or try to provide an all-encompassing detailed account of Schwitters’s oeuvre3; the intention here is to

76 Domesticity Under Siege

focus, through the lens of the CBMoH, on the influence the Merz had on the ‘other’ space, the domestic. I will consider how it began as a sculptural installation in a corner of a studio but spread in every way, a combination of collage, sculpture and architecture, until it occupied most of and influenced all of the house he shared with his extended family and other tenants. I will consider how the Merz evolved to impede on his and his family’s living spaces, limiting the usage that they were originally designed. Schwitters’s Merzbau included multiple displays of a great number of things, I question whether the objects incorporated in the build had been carefully chosen with a long-term vision to assemble a planned and considered collection for display qualifying him as a ‘collector’ or were they in fact randomly accumulated a result of an inability to get rid of them. I will also consider whether the construction of the Merzbau caused any ‘distress or impairment in functioning’ (Frost and Hartl 1996) on Schwitters’s behaviour, altering his identity. Kurt Schwitters shared the family home, Waldhausenstrasse 5 in Hanover, with his parents. After marrying his cousin, Helma Fischer, they settled on the second floor and it was here that their first child was born, sadly to die only eight days later. Not only was this their home but Schwitters also established his studio in a room on the ground floor, where, as well as working as a draftsman, he started to focus on exploring expressionist style and abstract painting modes. This work was to develop into a unique style of expression, ‘Merz’ which Schwitters dated from 19 November 1918, as its official birth, the same as that of the Weimar Republic, sensing in both a mark of irreversible change both in history and in his way of thinking. Schwitters saw Merz as a generic term which was to expand to include all his creative output, including his poetry and writing and he claimed ‘finally to all my relevant  activities. Now I call myself MERZ’ (Schwitters 1927 in Elderfield 1985: 12–13). The appreciation of the work as literally all-consuming can be seen in his years in exile from fascism in Europe, where Schwitters went on to rebuild the Merzbau three times. First, behind trees at the end of a sloping suburban garden in Oslo. Then, after Nazi troops invaded Norway in 1940, Schwitters fled to the UK where he settled first in London and then in the Lake District. It was here, in 1947, now assisted with a grant from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, he began work on what was to be the final version of the Merzbau. By this time Schwitters compulsive need to enclose himself in a sculptural shell had grown to a full-blown obsession, and he continued to work through one of the coldest winters on record, falling ill repeatedly until he was unable to continue. On 8 January 1948, he died from complications arising from pneumonia. In 1943, the house at 5 Waldhausenstrasse, with all the untold Merz grottoes, sculptures, pictures and collages, was completely destroyed in an Allied bombing raid. All critique and reflection of the house, the home and studio, and all of the work within are drawn from photographs alongside recorded first-hand accounts.

Hoarding Disorder, Schwitters’s Merzbau 77

Differences and similarities between collecting and hoarding The distinction between hoarding, curated space making and collecting plays a vital role in any rationale associating Kurt Schwitters’s Hanover Merz with a hoardlike behaviour. These terms differ, not only in how they affect the home but also in how society views and accepts what it sees, establishing the norms and boundaries, what is seen as admired as opposed to what is stigmatized; in short what is artistic ­practice  versus home wrecking. On closer inspection distinctions blur, playing against our common, morally based preconceptions. While hoarding is considered as a ‘dirty business’, collecting is highly regarded by society and seen as an activity that requires self-discipline, kudos and persistence. Yet both could be seen as ‘extreme ­consumption activities … both involving acquiring, owning and curating objects from the material world’ (Frost and Steketee 2014: 33). Terminology throws some light on society’s attitudes on the relationship between the objects within a collection or hoard and their owner. According to Belk, ­considering consumer culture and behaviour, ‘to possess something is also to feel it is a part of us’ (Frost and Steketee 2014: 34) Similarly, Sartre (1956) understood ­possession to involve an aspect of creative mastery over the object in question. However, if we were to acquire rather than possess, an action resulting in the sensation that the object of this action is our own, whether by chance, theft, borrowing or other, the emphasis is not as permanent or indeed as tangible as possession. Collecting is an ‘active, passionate and [importantly] selective’ (Frost and Steketee 2014: 34) process of acquisition which separates it from accumulation. Hoarding on a behavioural level is often characterized by a randomness, as in lacking an intention to framework or limit within which acquisitions correspond. The collector actively exercises discipline by making decisions on what sits within and out of the remit of the collection. The act of acquiring is habitual leading to a disorganized level of amassment of objects. The collector and the hoarder also garner their possessions in a different way ‘while collectors acquire items in multiple stages, including p ­ lanning, hunting and displaying the objects post-acquisition, individuals with Hoarding Disorder (HD) lack planning and do not organize or display their possessions’ (Frost and Steketee 2014: 49), and yet, in this light, some refer to collecting as mere ­‘obsession organised’ (Aristides 1988). One of the most distinct differences relates to the goal-oriented, finite concept of a collection, yet quite often ‘completion is both desired and also feared’ (Frost and Steketee 2014: 36). Once completion is achieved, the collector quite often resets the criteria, establishing new lines of inquiry and opening further avenues for acquiring. From this perspective, it is easily comparable to aspects of the hoarders’ behaviour who seeks control over what is knowable and to give a unique treatment to all objects in their property. Both collection and hoard are understood to be mirror images of the self and carry the imprint of the identity of their maker. However, while collectors look to share their interests with others, there is no desire to share the experience of the

78 Domesticity Under Siege

hoard or to display it. Both collector and hoarder have a strange priority in terms of collection/hoard and their family/people ‘outside’. According to Belk (Frost and Hartl 1996), the collector’s activity could lead to conflict with family members, who often feel that the collection is taking the collector away from loved ones, even elevating the role of collection to ‘that of a lover’ (Frost and Steketee 2014: 38). Similarly, the relationship between hoard and hoarder too can be so closely  entwined that when even family members touch items, the hoarder feels violated. Interestingly, both hoarders and collectors share the mutual belief that by keeping and acquiring, they are also ‘rescuing objects from the world that has not yet begun to appreciate properly’ (Frost and Steketee 2014: 35). This can lead in both cases to a strong bond. For example, collectors often use ‘the vocabularies of romantic or sexual love to describe their feelings about objects within their collection’ (Frost and Steketee 2014: 35). Yet a major difference lies in the collector’s ability to part from items from the collection in the hope that exchange could lead to the betterment of the collection overall (Belk 2001). By cluttering up all the areas in the home designated for dwelling, excessive acquisitions overwhelm and restrict spaces from functioning on a domestic level, while it is believed that ‘the living spaces of collectors remain fully functional, even if in some cases the actual amount of possessions may be similar to a person with HD’ (Frost and Steketee 2014: 49). There are some similarities between collecting and curating in what Belk says about the creative productive nature of both (Frost and Steketee 2014: 38). However, curating is not a process of acquisition (Frost and Steketee 2014: 35): the curator doesn’t add pieces to the collection.

Impediment on domestic life Although his wife or parents offer no direct accounts, his friends (Rudolf Jahns, Kate Steinitz) and his son Ernst provide testament to the direct effect Schwitters’s artistic endeavours had on the domestic life of the family and various tenants. Officially the first Merz creations began in 1919 but these didn’t start to form spatially connected structures until Schwitters moved to his second studio in the house, in around 1921–2. Schwitters’s family house, Waldhausenstrasse 5, was two-storey with an additional above ground basement. Originally the parents occupied the entire ground floor, but this changed as the family began to rent out parts of the building for tenants through the Weimar Republic’s compulsory billeting scheme, a consequence of housing shortages in the post war recession. Initially, the Boetel family rented out several rooms on the ground floor (Webster 2007: 275) occupying Schwitters’s first studio in 1921.4 It was here that Schwitters’s first Merz-column had been composed, consisting of scraps, cuttings, endlessly variable detritus, objects found, broken or acquired, with the column, ‘towering up two-third of the height of the room’ (Elderfield 1985: 146). Ernst also recollected, in a taste of things to come, how the room was ‘littered with

Hoarding Disorder, Schwitters’s Merzbau 79

disordered piles of collected objects from which, Schwitters said, he had built his “Merz-column”’ (Elderfield 1985: 146). By 1923, in Schwitters’s second studio, there were soon three columns under construction (the Hielige Bekkumernis, the Kathedral of Erotische Elends and the Great column) and Schwitters’s Merz began to expand into a ‘total environment’ (Elderfield 1985: 147). The way the work burgeoned in the space is remembered through the accounts of Ernst. As a result of Schwitters’s activities, Ernst had lost his playroom: he also had to share his room with his mother until he was fifteen. Schwitters’s parents lost three rooms of their own ground-floor apartment to the Merz, not to mention the psychological strain of living with this work, the debris, materials, construction and noise. According to Ernst, Schwitters would work at any time of the night or day and had even developed a method whereby he could drive nails into the Merzbau in the middle of the night without arousing the hostility of the other tenants of our house in Waldhausenstrasse. The method was simple; you put the nail in place and hammer it once with an almighty blow. That results in a single, enormous crash, which naturally wakes everyone up. But because people never actually know what has woken them up, they finally go back to sleep again. At least, that was the theory. You wait ten minutes, until everyone – you hope- has fallen asleep again and then you deliver a second hefty blow to the nail, with the same result as before; everyone wakes up, no-one knows why. You repeat this and so you can hammer in the nail; slowly, to be sure, but nevertheless in the middle of the night. (Webster 2007: 277)

Ernst explained that his father started to draw relationships between the freestanding columns and their environment; these included anything from cuttings fixed to the wall, pictures or objects on the floor or in the background. Once a relationship had been established, Schwitters would visualize these spatial interrelationships like a forensic scientist, first by drawing strings between components, later establishing a more abiding link through wire. These webs were then solidified into structures, later merged under a unified skin of plaster of Paris. This organic irregular mode of construction, putting emphasis on connections rather than structural supports, led to an irregularly shaped assemblage of convex and concave nooks and niches, described enigmatically by Schwitters as ‘grottoes, holes and caves’. The house, already home to three families, soon encompassed at least forty known different grottoes and was host to an ever-growing site of c­ onstruction, rupturing, bursting through and consuming the original building. Schwitters expanded the studio into an adjoining room, previously his son’s playroom, after it became so cluttered that he couldn’t actually use it for any construction work. This new space was designed as a working studio but soon this too became absorbed into the Merz. As part of this process, Schwitters constructed a windowless mezzanine where he slept. The construction continued to grow, swallowing up the balcony connecting the two spaces once that had been glazed over.

80 Domesticity Under Siege

But he didn’t stop there, the work had a never-ending constancy invading the living, public and private spaces of the house. Merz construction expanded and carried on through the space under the balcony via a hole cut through, projecting downstairs to the house’s inner courtyard, around 1.8 meters below. This space too was eventually enclosed, and he continued to push further, tunnelling down through to yet another room in the basement. The constructed boundaries of the property did not hold back the escalation of the Merz. Schwitters found a natural underground well and carried on tunnelling down beside it, excavating further and further until the Merz came to a halt at the water line. This narrative shows a sense of adjacency and continuity discoverable in how the construction expanded from the heart of the Merz the original studio. But other spatially unconnected areas of the building also hosted the viral growth. Around the same time as the Merz expanded across the ground floor, construction had also taken over an attic room with a skylight. Although this space housed mainly smaller pieces of work presumably due to the sloped ceilings, Schwitters devised a column that passed up and out through the skylight protruding upwards to reach the sky, an architectural feature completed in December 1936. This led to a small platform on the face of the house, creating an opportunity for further development: however, before Schwitters could continue, he left the country, castigated as a degenerate by the Nazi regime.

Impediment on domestic life versus excessive acquisitions Counter to the common belief that hoarding is defined through excessive amassment and failure in ridding oneself of seemingly pointless objects, the Cognitive Behavioural Model of Hoarding (CBMoH)5 first proposed by Frost and Hartl (1996) refocused on the experiential, the effect of hoarding on living, the distress and impairment in functioning, but also the influence on domestic, living spaces when sufficiently cluttered to preclude activities for which those spaces were designed. Hoarding, so long considered an eccentric, excessive collector-esque behaviour, is now implicated by a set of actions that undermine accepted forms of the notion of domesticity and how these impede the ability to live in one’s home. The CBMoH treats this disorder as a multifaceted problem where ‘­information processing deficits, emotional attachment problems, behavioural avoidance and erroneous beliefs about the nature of possessions’ (Frost and Hartl 1996: 343) contribute to a complex whole, which threatens the domestic, living environment.

Behavioural effects One of the three definitions in the CBMoH (Frost and Steketee 2014) is that living with clutter has a detrimental behavioural effect on the hoarder. Hoard and hoarder effect each other in a reciprocal manner, the more the hoarder accumulates, the more

Hoarding Disorder, Schwitters’s Merzbau 81

the hoard starts to have an impact on their identity and mental state, causing ‘distress or impairment’6, resulting in increased accumulation. The CBMoH suggests that possessions create safety signals for the hoarder. Commonly accepted opinion states that hoarders accumulate objects without reason or without any emotional connection. Most recent cognitive behavioural studies had refuted this and concluded that there is a strong evidence of emotional attachment between the hoarder and the hoarded items. The idea that belongings provide a sense of comfort, signalling a safe environment, but also the feeling that objects need protecting as their unique status established by the hoarder creates an emotional bond. This last statement breaks down to three areas of contributing causes of clinical hoarding. The object provides a source of comfort signalling emotional attachment problems. That the hoarder feels that each object is unique is a part of a problem with information processing and signals a deficit in decision-making. The idea that objects need protecting shows erroneous beliefs about the nature of objects and a necessity to maintain control over possessions with an inflated sense of responsibility. In Walter Benjamin’s understanding ([1982] 1999b), the collector is reactive to the age of memory crisis, of social, individual and cultural memories. Their actions are an attempt to salvage what is left, ‘to re-stitch the fabric of experience, to bring together the far-away and long-ago: a type of prosthetic memory’ (Dickerman and Witkovsky 2005: 117). In Schwitters life, belongings signalling a safe environment are seen in many ways. They seem to enable him to ‘gather his treasures around himself ’ (Dietrich 1993). The fact that many of the grottoes or caves were filled with personal ­fragments, collected, acquired and stolen from friends and family suggests that Schwitters desired to have a piece of each person, curls of hair, bras, cut nails, pencils, all signalling the origin’s identity. Although the Merzbau was filled with many odd bits, junk and fragments without any personal connection, by entering into and becoming part of a grotto they were ‘elevated from the anonymous heap of the junk pile to the status of signifiers. Pencil stubs now refer to Goethe’s genius as a writer and poet, a charcoal briquette is meant and understood to signify the mining areas of Germany, small reproductions of Michelangelo’s paintings and sculptures symbolize art exhibitions’ (Dietrich 1993: 185). What brought a source of comfort and security beyond the indexical quality of possessing the objects was the potential that lay in touch; ‘objects handled, clothes worn. In placing such treasures in the cavities of the Merzbau, the artist establishes a chain of contact – the bra taken from Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp that touched her skin, now housed in the Merzbau, creates a tactile link between him and her’ (Dickerman and Witkovsky 2005: 15). The very concept of memory was a tactile, sensuous experience for Benjamin who appreciated the value of physical stimuli in ­recalling past experience, voluntarily or not. For Benjamin, collectors, whose role was the domestification of objects into symbolic memories were ‘beings with tactile instincts’ (Dickerman and Witkovsky 2005: 16).

82 Domesticity Under Siege

In and out of control Although generally conceptualized as out of control, the manifestation of overt controlling tendencies contributes markedly to hoarding behaviour. Hoarders struggle with trusting their own memory and difficulties with their memory function as part of an information processing deficit symptom (Frost and Hartl 1996). They feel that the presence of their belongings furnishes the power to remember. This, coupled with an overestimation of the importance of remembering and recording information in general, generates complex and strong emotional links between the hoarder and hoard. They display an extreme level of knowledge about details regarding objects in their possessions. It becomes difficult to share items. There is also an increased tendency to acquire items when on offer or offered but not when needed, following the ‘one never knows, it might become useful one day’ principle.

Memory and the hoard Sight and ‘visual cueing’ (Frost and Hartl 1996: 347) hold importance for the hoarder in mediating the effects of information processing deficits. Hoarders struggle with keeping and processing hierarchies of information, in particular the values of memories, which often lead to problems with categorization and decision making. Sight allows the hoarder to control the memory, by having the item ‘on display’ the hoarder guarantees an eternal presence for that memory trace, yet if things are put away the hoarder believes that the memory will erode and creates fear as to the consequences of forgetting. This embodied aspect of sight in hoarding defies the simplicity of Michel de Certeau’s notion of the death of memory through its attachment to the object (de Certeau 1984). The hoarders’ approach in maintaining visibility with all their belongings keeps their memory-link active. Being visually surrounded by the hoard also creates a sense of physical ritual, a bodily, visceral relationship, and the spatial positioning of objects within the home carries meaning for the hoarder. Aside from the linear visual sense of memory, the hoarder creates more idiosyncratic organizations between objects and themselves. Just as the sight of a possession increases its value, when the hoarder enters into an active relationship with objects, that is starting to read a book. That object, from that moment, becomes unique and its position/location/coordinate, such as leaving the book open on the footstool, is also unique. The problem occurs as the hoarder continues to make unique/active relationships with many books, letters, newspapers left open in varying locations and these take on newer and newer spatial markers. The space of the home is a finite entity and the unique spots soon slide, merge, entwine and the unique signifying memory becomes lost. Yet this collapse generates the creation of new spatial landscapes sparking new, equally unique landmarks and relationships. ‘There is, among the chaos, a sort of temporal organization’

Hoarding Disorder, Schwitters’s Merzbau 83

(Frost and Hartl 1996) and it is this that defies any socially accepted norms of being in the home, as the socially coded activities which we accept in our homes lose their meanings under the clutter and continual increasingly idiosyncratic organization of the hoard. There are some direct accounts of the temporal coding and organization seen in the Merzbau, from Kate Steinitz witnessed: one day something appeared in the studio which looked like a cross between a cylinder or wooden barrel and a table-high tree stump with the bark run wild. It had evolved from a chaotic heap of various materials: wood, cardboard, scraps of iron, broken furniture, and picture frames. Soon, however, the object lost all relationship to anything made by man or nature. Kurt called it a ‘column’. (Steinitz 1968: 90)

Hans Richter observed how the Merzbau had changed in its conception from the initial sculptural expression. His description of ‘concave and convex forms which hollowed and inflated’ suggests an entity, developing daily with a life of its own, he saw it as ‘a document on Schwitters and his friends’ (Richter 1965: 152). When earlier parts had been encased, they eventually soften into impressions on the surface, bulges and protrusions. This oscillation between death and birth, remembering, forgetting and the creation of new memory landscapes over previous sculptural intents is visible in hoarding behaviours. When asked to organize or evaluate items to potentially discard, the hoarder will examine items, appreciating their unique attachments which led to the development of new organizational systems that allowed these unique items in transition to be placed somewhere/elsewhere for future more determined consideration as they were unable to decide what to do with it. This process is also continual, creating a shifting effect, where objects become ‘in motion’ but essentially nothing gets organized or discarded: a phenomenon Frost and Hartl called churning (1996: 345). Richard Huelsenbeck describes the complexity of such a fragile, temporal organization in Schwitters’s Merz: this tower or tree or house had apertures, concavities, and hollows in which Schwitters said he kept souvenirs, photos, birth dates, and other respectable and less respectable data. The room was a mixture of hopeless disarray and meticulous accuracy. (Huelsenbeck 1974: 66)

Schwitters’s Merz lends itself to readings of struggle or confidence with memory. He displays objects that seem to fulfil the mnemonic role to be in control of his memory in ways that are both social yet intensely private. Hal Foster and Brigid Doherty discuss in the DADA Seminars how Dadaists’ attention centres around traumatic shock: ‘repetitive behaviour masks a disturbed recollection’ (Dickerman and Witkovsky 2005: 1). Dickerman summarizes further: Other Dada activity suggests a broad fixation with mnemonic concerns … as an effort to tap into a primeval collective unconscious – a submerged common memory trace.

84 Domesticity Under Siege

In each of these cases, memory is figured in ways that point to the difficulty or inaccessibility of recollection. Dada’s concerns seem to be as much forgetting as remembering. (Dickerman and Witkovsky 2005: 1)

Whether Schwitters had personal struggles with controlling his own ability to remember or whether the Merz is a Dadaist testament for the memory crisis brought on by the age of change is impossible to know. However, recollections from Richard Huelsenbeck suggest a shifting allegiance in Schwitters to the values of the objects he surrounded himself with: You could see incipient collages, wooden sculptures, pictures of stone and plaster. Books, whose pages rustled in time to our steps, were lying about. Materials of all kinds, rags, limestone, cufflinks, logs of all sizes, newspaper clippings. We asked him for details, but Schwitters shrugged ‘It’s all crap’ (Huelsenbeck 1974: 66)

The Merz is a seemingly paradoxical process uncovering meanings and remembrances but also burying undesired or traumatic memories. As Dickerman says, ‘in its origins, the Merzbau foregrounds themes of memory, deploying accumulations of mnemonically significant forms and artifacts – those very things that reflect the artificial or extra-individual memory culture of modernity’ (Dickerman and Witkovsky 2005: 8). Although one can’t be certain whether he would have been able to refer in detail to all individual items used and built in as an act of compilation, nonetheless for Schwitters, the Merz provides a detailed version of his own and social memory. Where he is trying meticulously to categorize and capture all and anything from the everyday to short- and long-term memory, the experience is almost not one of living, but of documenting life in real time instead.

Benjamin and Freud – the role of the object in the collection Schwitters’s Merzbau offers an interesting microcosmic analogy of the nineteenthand early twentieth-century memory crisis, the fragmenting of both the collective and individual memories emanating from the inhumanity of displacement through mass industrialization and the horrors of global conflict. Merzbau’s detachment as a place between the outside uncertainties of the wider world and the safe-haven and continuity provided inside the home, allows it to assimilate and question the contemporary ideals of both collective memory with its primal form, the monument and the bourgeois, domestic interior. According to Benjamin in ‘Experience and Poverty’ ([1933] 1999a), existence in the fast-paced modern7 city led to fractured, instant and transient experience, short bursts of quick impressions that held little sustenance. Within modernity, Erlebnisse [what we feel most deeply] was all-consuming and constantly renewing – pushing, enclosing and demeaning traditions handed down through generations. The erosion of appreciation and understanding found in the collective, cultural and historical

Hoarding Disorder, Schwitters’s Merzbau 85

experience, Erfahrung [this experience], led to a sense of anxiety, from which the interior, with its impressionable surfaces, created a refuge for its inhabitant, the collector, creating a marked divide between public and private. Within this private realm objects had a key role as the symbols of continuity, representing the old traditions threatened with obliteration in the profligate, immediate demands of the contemporary city. Ownership, however, did not reflect any personal involvement in the creation of these objects, as it had in pre-industrialized times; such objects were manufactured. Owner did not mean maker anymore. It was through acquiring, organizing and displaying that Benjamin’s protagonist, the collector, countered the alienating effect of mass production, ‘domesticating’ (Rice 2006: 13) these items into symbols, illusions of long-term memories. In Benjamin’s view the collection of these objects in the home provided a buffer to the superficial cycle of urban experience, but, importantly, the collection should not be seen as the construction of these components: ‘rather it comes to exist by means of its principle of organisation’ (Rice 2006: 13). In Susan Stewart’s interpretation it was the labour involved in curating rather than simply collecting that allowed the formulation of an identity and the creation of a personal history through the collection (Stewart 1993: 155). Benjamin saw the collector not as somebody seeking to perfect a complete order but one who fluctuates between the states of order and disorder; the collection is never complete and therefore its meaning is never fixed, ‘for let him discover just a single piece missing, and everything he’s collected remains a patchwork’ (Benjamin [1982] 1999b: 211). The classification of hoarding is formed around the accumulation of unnecessary objects with most people believing individual objects contribute to this excessive habit, however, as with ‘memoire involontaire’ and Freudian analysis, these objects don’t just hold an indexical quality, directly pointing to the ‘problem’ of the hoarder but should be treated as the ‘body’ of a collection. The hoarders’ amassed tectonic landscape has the potential to be understood not through the individual objects that make it up, but instead treated as a wider metaphoric memory landscape. Benjamin saw connections between memory and patchwork (Benjamin [1982] 1999b: 211). He saw the collection standing for both a memoire volontaire and involontaire simultaneously. On the one hand, a classificatory system that provided order and framework with its completeness and, on the other, an always unfinished amassment where any individual item acts as a trace, holding a Proustian potential, evoking unconscious memories beyond any surface value. In this way the collection facilitates for the memoire involontaire, unfolding and traversing layers of consciousness to reforge connections with long forgotten subconscious memories. It is here that the domestic interior creates a possibility for an internalized/interior world of the self to unfold. As Rice puts it, ‘it is not the madeleine that itself is significant but the trace it opens up. Memory of the past releases experience from its object-prison, which in itself has no significance’ (Rice 2006: 17).

86 Domesticity Under Siege

For Freud too the collection was not just a symbol of conscious history creation for the individual, but also had a deeper connotation wherein which each object signalled a fragment of an unconscious past, a ‘thing’ bound by trauma, marked into the unconscious. The collection was the imprint of a psychic unconscious, where the surface, through transference and the process of psychoanalysis, would project one’s own unfolded interiority, an emotional underworld manifesting in the interior ‘where every object newly found memorialized a love object lost’ (Fuss and Sanders 2004: 78). Here, for Freud, fragments waited for recognition, often literally brought to the surface (consciousness) through the memoire involontaire, exposing what Lacan described as the ‘Freudian thing’ (Lacan 2006), a materialized trauma that shapes the symbolic nature of the object in question. Yet the ‘Freudian thing’ is ‘an originary trauma, in which something disavowed is nevertheless preserved as a denied fragment of the real’ (Reinhard 1996: 70). Yet clearly there is something more here. Schwitters’s accumulations within the Merzbau  go far beyond (in numbers, limits of propriety) those of the nineteenth-­ century collector described by Benjamin – an excessiveness that resonates with the hyperbolic manifestations of trace. (Dickerman and Witkovsky 2005: 16)

The emergence of the interior understood by Benjamin resulted from a period where continuities with history and tradition had been brought into question. It offered a safe haven against the miasma of uncertainties and provided a construct to understand the fragments that offered continuities with the past. Yet these emergent memories, precisely because they were traces and fragments, were unable to represent or point to the whole, exposing the ‘Interior as a condition of illusion … in its attempts to capture long experience’ (Rice 2006: 19). If the collector could not bring the fragment to the surface, if it stayed repressed or unconscious, then the collection could only exist on one level, what is seen defined by the present moment, an illusion of Erfahrung. Objects could not then be interpreted and traces to deeper meaning would remain hidden, resulting in them literally ‘becoming the subject’s personal history, and as such, act as a kind of compensation for the subject alienated from themselves’, argues Rice (2006: 47). He explains the danger of this act of indemnity as it erases any traces to the subject’s memory and reinforces a reliance on the illusion. With the object’s relevance lost, the collector turns from curation to proliferation as a means to maintain remembrance of what they consider to be an intimate portrayal. The relationship between collector and collection becomes subservient and ‘ultimately, the subject becomes possessed by the collection; the interior which encases the collection encases the subject also’ (Rice 2006: 47). In this sense, Rice’s ‘container of privacy’ (2006) becomes a containment – when things stop being presented in the hoarder’s space and the hoarder becomes the exhibit against the backdrop of her accumulated piles of things. ‘The true method of making things present is to represent them in our space (not to represent ourselves

Hoarding Disorder, Schwitters’s Merzbau 87

in their space) … We don’t displace our being into theirs; they step into our life’ (Rice 2006: 14). However, the hoarder goes so far in her collecting habits to even displace herself into the realm of things, out of what is considered as ‘normal’ social life. This is a visible shift where the boundaries of self are swallowed up by the hoard, or rather that the hoarder grows together with the hoard, an assimilation that extends the skin of the hoarder.

Hidden from view Schwitters control over the Merz went as far as painting any overlooking windows of the home with white paint, so no unpermitted eyes could peer in from the outside to steal any glimpses of his work. Only a few people were ever allowed to look at the Merz, even fewer knew it intimately (Grayson, Carolin and Cardinal 2006: 5). For these and for the people sharing the domestic setting with it, the Merz was accepted and closely guarded as a secret (Grayson, Carolin and Cardinal 2006: 3–5). Schwitters was well known for his interest and talents in advertising and ­publicizing his work, career and social profile, possessing what has been described as a ‘highly modern understanding of it as a condition of success’ (Grayson, Carolin and Cardinal 2006: 3–5). This appreciation, particularly considering the importance Schwitters himself put on the Merzbau as his Lebenswerk, his ‘life’s work’, draws comparisons to the overtly protective nature of a hoarder to their possessions. To maintain control over possessions hoarders often feel that if anybody touches their possessions their safety signalling status becomes broken. After the initial erection of columns and cabinets, Schwitters started to enclose and cover over the grottoes absorbing them into the body of work. A friend of Schwitters, the artist Rudolf Jahns witnessed this in a return visit: ‘later I have seen the grotto [Merzbau] once more. Everything was changed. Many caves were nailed shut and the total impression was that of a more closed structure’ (Dietrich 1993: 187–8). Whether these acts of burial were conscious decisions or just a necessary next step in the spatial logic of the Merzbau’s ever-expanding nature, it is important to note that rather than destroy or erase them, Schwitters believed that by building the fragmented objects into his grottoes he not only conserved but restored them. One contributing factor to this stems from a condition that the CBMoH describes ‘hoarders view many of their possessions as extensions of themselves. The possessions are part of their owner and are imbued with human-like qualities’ (Frost and Hartl 1996: 347). One distinct appreciation of this approach seen in Schwitters is an element of his first Merz column situated within the Cathedral of Erotische Elends (KdeE), called the ‘First Day Merz Column’. The most notable element of the column is the top/capital named ‘Leiden, suffering’. Initially made up from a bust cast of his wife Helma but replaced by a head cast of Schwitters’s dead son, Gerd.8 Considering the importance of the KdeE within the overall Merz and the visible focal point nature of the column, Schwitters never mentioned it in any description about the Merzbau. Is it because he felt that by talking about it, a

88 Domesticity Under Siege

level of safety signals would be broken, or was it just too painful to talk about this tragic memory of the family? Again, an understanding can be considered through the CBMoH, ‘When objects represent part of the self, they are called “pure-sentimentality” and by getting rid of the possession it evokes feelings similar to losing a close friend’ (Frost and Hartl 1996: 347). Involving the death mask in the Merz process suggests a totemic protection, eventually ‘slipping from the surface and absorbed in a materialized model of memory’ (Dickerman and Witkovsky 2005: 12). More an act of acceptance than forgetting, the idea lends itself to Freud’s understanding of the artist’s goal in pursuing the representation of his most personal wishful fantasies to ‘set himself free’ (Elderfield 1985:131). The idea of the Merzbau as a ‘visceral unconscious’ (Dickerman and Witkovsky 2005: 17) that suggests the absorption and digesting of knowledge, emotions and moments rather than a more prosaic accumulation and layering of found objects indicates a sense of merging of Schwitters with the Merz, the body with ­architecture. This merging together of the self and environment with possessions increasingly thought of as extensions of the self is a further development in hoarding behaviour closely linked to the personalization and anthropomorphism of objects. Dickerman, in the Dada Seminars, talks about the Merz like an organism, ­calling it ‘a living, daily changing document’ (Dickerman and Witkovsky 2005: 10). She continues that ‘the interior is aligned with both the body and the mind; boundaries between the home, corpus, and psyche collapse’ (2005: 12), drawing comparisons to Mark Cousins’s text about the First House when most people instinctively associate any opening on the surface of their property if it was their own skin being ­operated on in theatre. But Dickerman’s understanding of the body in this context is not idealized or even framed in reference to the humanist tradition ‘rather, the sense of interior suggested here, the series of holes, concavities, and protuberances within the structure, the introduction of liquid, the dissolution of boundaries all work to align the Merzbau with the grotesque body’ (Dickerman and Witkovsky 2005: 10).

The impact of traumatic life events Ideas, whether referencing traumatic life events, or more quotidian experiences, have a contributing influence on acute hoarding behaviour, but current research has not reached any clear conclusions (Grisham et al. 2006; Hartl et al. 2005; Timpano et al. 2011; Tolin et al. 2010). Notwithstanding, stressful life events may bring on the onset of hoarding behaviour (Frost and Steketee 2014: 27–8), and those with HD may react to traumatic episodes with excessive accumulating (Hartl et al. 2005). Some go as far as to attribute the birth of the Merz to personal tragedy. From the death of Gerd, Schwitters son, onwards ‘a clear trajectory of meaning begins to emerge for Schwitters’s Lebenswerk. It begins as a monument to the dead infant and morphs into a kind of multi-faceted mausoleum: a provisional cemetery for

Hoarding Disorder, Schwitters’s Merzbau 89

the living’ (Grayson, Carolin and Cardinal 2006: 35). I do not claim the impetus of the Merz as due to Gerd’s death, but it is interesting how little, if at all, Schwitters mentioned the death mask in documentations of the Merz. In fact, during the period of its investment and early maturity, in none of Schwitters’s discussions on the concept of a total art, to Gesamtkunstwerk, does he mention any aspects of the Merzbau. Images of the Merzbau were only first published over ten years after it was begun, (Elderfield 1985: 148) once many layers of meaning had developed, been concealed, protected from the uneducated glare and forgotten. When one considers the extremely personal nature of the work and the unconventional approach to domesticity, a consequence of the process, it is unsurprising so few were invited to partake in these private viewings established in early 1930 once the columns were considered exhibitable, if not complete, and with witnesses chosen for their ability to understand Schwitters’s aspirations. Unfortunately, however, ‘to the few who saw it, the Merzbau was a confounding riddle’ (Elderfield 1985: 160).

Excessive acquisitions An underlying principle of the Merzbau was to construct something new and different and whole from fragments of the old; no material or object was excluded, considered sacrosanct or taboo. In the light of this, it is arguable that Schwitters’s compositions had intent and therefore the correlation of the materials involved, establish Schwitters as closer to collector in the Benjaminian sense than a hoarder. However, if one examines the Merz as a longer-term process rather than a series of snapshots, one doesn’t see a definable end goal. Merzbau evolved over several decades and would indeed have continued to do so without outside interference. Hans Richter said on a return visit to the Merzbau in 1928, ‘all the little holes and ­cavities that we had formerly “occupied” [by proxy, through personal mementoes] were no longer to be seen. “They are all deep down inside” Schwitters explained’ (Dietrich 1993: 188). They were concealed by the monstrous growth of the column, covered by other sculptural excrescences, new people, new shapes, colours and details. Such actions lie closer to the behaviour of the hoarder, where excessive ­acquisition leads to temporary and idiosyncratic associations, rather than planned and premeditated, selective choosing. A diverse range individual objects made it into Schwitters’s assemblages; he collected objects left behind, souvenirs, broken toys, machine parts, newspapers and leftover packaging, photos, ‘words people dropped, respectable and not respectable data’ (Dietrich 1993: 109). Schwitters even invited some friends to display their own work in the Merzbau, like Hannah Hoch, who displayed her photo-collages in two of the caves. The grottoes were often developed around these items, like shrines but perhaps more similar to the reorganization of piles characteristic of the churning hoarder – if one cannot decide where to place an item, it being unique, then its ­location too should be unique.

90 Domesticity Under Siege

The influence of clutter on personality Seen through this reading of the Merzbau through the lens of hoarding disorder, canonical interpretations of it as a uniquely aesthetic response to the world do not hold up well under closer evaluation. In fact, the whole notion of the Merz as artistic endeavour could be brought into question. Dickerman acknowledged the organic qualities of the Merz while asserting that on the whole the venture ‘seemed to go beyond normative patterns to something more pathological’ (Dickerman and Witkovsky 2005: 10). Drawing closer to the third main definition of HD, that ‘significant distress or impairment in functioning causes … the hoarding’ (Frost and Hartl 1996). Hans Richter provides an important clue when he wrote: He cut off a lock of my hair and put it in my hole. A thick pencil, filched from Mies van der Rohe’s drawing board, lay in his cavity. In others, there was a piece of shoelace, a half-smoked cigarette, a nail paring, a piece of tie (Doesburg), a broken pen. There were also some odd (and more than odd) things such as a dental bridge with several teeth on it, and even a little gourd of urine bearing the donor’s name. All these were placed in the separate holes reserved for the individual entries. Kate Steinitz, too, searched for a missing key only to realize where it had gone, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp woke one morning to find that Schwitters had stolen away her bra to a grotto that bore her name. (Dietrich 1993: 115)

Accounts such as these raise the question of Schwitters relationship to the Merz. The objects above seem useless to an outside observer, but how they were acquired is, perhaps, significant in that hoarders often acquire belongings via stealing. But here it seems an underlying motive behind the stealing of these personal belongings was to place and display them in grottoes devoted to friendship. Alexander Dorner, a strong supporter of modern art and admirer of Schwitters, could not muster any positive feelings towards the grottos. He had described the Merzbilder as ‘positive pioneering experiments’ but critiqued the Merzbau as ‘the free expression of the socially uncontrolled self [that] had here bridged the gap between sanity and madness … a kind of faecal smearing – a sick and sickening relapse into the social irresponsibility of the infant who plays with trash and filth’ (Dietrich 1993: 185). It is well known that Schwitters collected and displayed human waste: there was urine placed in the KdeE’s grosse Grotte der Lieb (Big Love Grotto) and Steinitz reported that she had encountered urine samples glowing gold in the Cave of Murderers (Steinitz 1968: 90). She considered the grottoes as expression, an emotional outpouring where Schwitters emptied his ‘sour soul into the caves’ (Steinitz 1968: 90). In seeking to appreciate the influence of the Merz environment on Schwitters’s behaviour Elderfield noted that most critical accounts of the Merzbau were derived from biased accounts drawn from selected friends chosen as witnesses. However, there are some accounts such as those of Lissitzky and Sophie Küppers, who saw

Hoarding Disorder, Schwitters’s Merzbau 91

the work in 1923, and which were less favourable. Klippers ‘gazed in astonishment’ at the Merzbau in 1923, ‘unable to draw the line between originality and madness in Schwitters’s creations’ (Elderfield 1985: 162).

Conclusion Exploring the blurred boundaries of home and artistic practice in Schwitters’s Merz, I’ve considered these activities as hoard-like behaviours, elevating them to an analogical boundary between beauty (art production) and ugliness (illness). Kant regarded beauty as an ‘entirely disinterested satisfaction’ ([1951] 1987: 45) alluding to a strictly objective attribute rather than any phenomenon reliant on the individual’s feelings or taste. His disembodiment avoided any connection to the senses and stood at odds to Freud’s more visceral approach; ‘sexual excitement and pleasure are implicit in beauty, however unacknowledged, and however repressed by pure judgments of taste’ (Kuspit 2001: 4).9 Focus has always been heavily based on the beauty to be found in Schwitters’s constructs, as precedents to new ways of thinking in creative practice. But in doing so, the ugliness, difficulties and the problems they generated in their evolution have been undervalued and we may have missed valuable lessons. ‘We should look at problematic subjects because they are instructive, and because their opposite, anodyne beauty contains a dangerous surfeit of sweetness’ (Comaroff and Ong 2013: 7). The boundaries of art and clinical diagnosis, beauty and ugliness, are blurred in Schwitters’s work. Schwitters furthered this by his vision of the Merz as a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art. Schwitters was highly critical of the over-self-indulgent and self-expressionistic attitude of architects of the time, ‘paying too little attention to habitability, taking too little account of the way people change a room by their presence’ (Schippers 2000: 11). In a letter to Alfred Barr, 23 November 1936 Schwitters described the spatial boundaries he was creating through his work, questioning the concept of habitual space: In order to avoid mistakes, I must expressly tell you that my working method is not a question of interior design, i.e., decorative style; that by no means do I construct an interior for people to live in, for that could be done far better by the new architects. I am building an abstract (cubist) sculpture into which people can go. From the directions and movements of the constructed surfaces, there emanate imaginary planes which act as directions and movements in space and which intersect each other in empty space. The suggestive impact of the sculpture is based on the fact that people themselves cross these imaginary planes as they go into the sculpture. It is the dynamic of the impact that is especially important to me. I am building a composition without boundaries, each individual part is at the same time a frame for the neighbouring parts, all parts are mutually interdependent. (Elderfield 1985: 156)10

92 Domesticity Under Siege

We accept ritualized behaviour through the relationship of body to designed space in the name of comfort that ‘serves to structure daily life’ (Maldonado and Cullars 1991: 3). According to Maldonado and Cullars, comfort and the desire for hygiene, in principle, have come to dictate the contemporary bourgeois domestic setting, ‘they are suppliers of order. In this vision, comfort could appear as a restrictive design that does not allow opportunity for the diversification of individual actions’ (Maldonado and Cullars 1991: 4). This concept bears comparison with Foucault’s understanding of the norm,11 where ‘instead of a binary division between the permitted and the prohibited’, an unexceedable acceptability defines our cultural stance (Kelly 2019: 14), while ‘there is a reigning presumption that there exists an optimal state which can be discovered’ (Kelly 2019: 14). In contradistinction, the action of the hoarder wrecks the concept of comfort and hygiene as definitive of home; it defies any sense of order or the prescribed actions of the ordinary, breaking the spell of this restrictive framework of ‘positive standards that do not just tell us to what we should do, [but] indeed what we should be’ (Kelly 2019:17). Examining hoarding as a besieging activity to domesticity holds the potential to disturb the comfortable constraining ideals of domesticity. What do we call normal? or besieged? or ‘abnormal’? By exploring the margins of bodily experience, by considering the besieged concept of domesticity through hoarding, I seek to question scripted action in the home in the search for a non-linear mode of domesticity.

Notes 1. Zoe Menelson’s PhD thesis, Psychologies and Spaces of Accumulation: The Hoard as CollagMethodology (and Other Stories) 2014, is an invaluable contribution, and pioneering in investigating relationships between hoarding’s potential for critical, spatial, arts practice and theory. 2. PG43 hoarding previously wasn’t considered as a separate disorder but rather as one of the eight diagnostic criteria for obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OPCD). 3. Most notable and main contributions field are: Leah Dickerman’s ‘Merz and Memory’, on Kurt Schwitters 2005; John Elderfield’s essay on ‘Phantasmagoria and Dream Grotto’ in his Kurt Schwitters (London, 1985), 144–71; Dietmar Elgar’s ‘Kurt Schwitters: Merzbau in Hannover’, in Dada:Cologne/Hannover eds. Charlotte Stokes and Stephen C. Foster (New York, 1997), 193–205; Dorothea Dietrich’s ‘The Collages of Kurt Schwitters Tradition and Innovation’ (Cambridge, England, 1993), 164–209: and Gwendolen Webster’s PhD Thesis titled ‘Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau’, 2007. 4. According to Ernst Schwitters’ his father moved out in 1920 and the same event was dated by Dietmar Elger the move was dated to 19 March 1921. 5. In the Cognitive Behavioural Model of Hoarding the discovery and addition of these two extra criteria were a game-changer in the clinical diagnostics of the disorder and allowed the differentiation between cases of behavioural versus clinical symptoms. As well as linking the functional deficits to become part of the definition.

Hoarding Disorder, Schwitters’s Merzbau 93

6.

These are the key words describing the third definition of hoarding disorder relating to behavioural effects. 7. By modern Benjamin means the turnover of nineteenth to the twentieth century. 8. According to Gwendolen Webster (2007) based on a photograph of the column taken in 1932. 9. The Psychoanalytic Construction of Beauty by Donald Kuspit pg 4. From: Artnet magazine: http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/kuspit/kuspit7-23-02.asp 10. Letter to Alfred Barr, 23 November 1936. From the archives of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 11. Following in the footsteps of Canguilhem and his seminal work ‘The Normal and the Pathological’ – Canguilhem, G. (2012). On the Normal and the Pathological (Vol. 3). Springer Science & Business Media, Berlin.

References Aristides. (1988), ‘Life and Letters: Calm and Uncollected’, The American Scholar, 57 (3): 327–36. Belk, R. W. (2001), ‘Specialty Magazines and Flights of Fancy: Feeding the Desire to Desire’, ACR European Advances, 5. Belk, R. (2014), ‘Ownership and Collecting’, in R. O. Frost, and G. Steketee (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Hoarding and Acquiring, 33–42, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benjamin, W. ([1933] 1999), ‘Experience and Poverty’, trans. R. Livingstone, in M. Bullock, M. W. Jennings and G. Smith, (eds), (2005), Walter Benjamin: Selected writings, vol. 2, part 2: 1931–1934, 731–736, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap. Benjamin, W. ([1982] 1999b), The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin, London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge: Massachusetts. Comaroff, J. and K. S. Ong (2013), Horror in Architecture, Novato, CA: ORO editions. de Certeau, M. (1984), The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, Berkeley: University of California Press. Dickerman, L., and M. S. Witkovsky (eds) (2005), The Dada Seminars, New York City: Distributed Art Pub Incorporated. Dietrich, D. (1993), The Collages of Kurt Schwitters: Tradition and Innovation, New York: Cambridge University Press. Frost, R. O. and T. L. Hartl (1996), A Cognitive-Behavioral Model of Compulsive Hoarding’, Behaviour Research and Therapy, 34 (4): 341–50. Frost, R. O., and G. Steketee (eds) (2014), The Oxford Handbook of Hoarding and Acquiring, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fuss, D. (2004), The Sense of an Interior: Four Rooms and the Writers That Shaped Them, New York: Routledge. Grayson, R., C. Carolin and R. Cardinal (2006), A Secret Service: Art, Compulsion, Concealment, London: Hayward Gallery. Grisham, J. R., R. O. Frost, G. Steketee, H. J. Kim and S. Hood (2006), ‘Age of Onset of Compulsive Hoarding’, Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 20 (5): 675–86. Hartl, T. L., S. R. Duffany, G. J. Allen, G. Steketee and R. O. Frost (2005), ‘Relationships among Compulsive Hoarding, Trauma, and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder’, Behaviour Research and Therapy, 34 (2): 269–76.

94 Domesticity Under Siege

Huelsenbeck, R. (1974), ‘Memoirs of a Dada Drummer’, in Elderfield, J. (1985), Kurt Schwitters (ed), London: Thames and Hudson. Kant, I. ([1951] 1987), Critique of Judgment, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Kelly, M. (2019), ‘What’s in a Norm? Foucault’s Conceptualisation and Genealogy of the Norm’, Foucault Studies, 1 (27): 1–22. Kuspit, D. (2001), ‘The Psychoanalytic Construction of Beauty’, Art Criticism, 16 (2): 101–16. Lacan, J., and Fink, B. (2006), Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, New York City: W. W. Norton & Company. Maldonado, T., and J. Cullars (1991), ‘The Idea of Comfort’, Design Issues, 9 (1): 35–43. Mataix-Cols, D. and L. Fernandez de la Cruz (2014), ‘Diagnosis of Hoarding Disorder’, in Frost, R. O. and G. Steketee (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Hoarding and Acquiring, 43–58, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mendelson, Z. (2014), Psychologies and Spaces of Accumulation: The Hoard as Collagist Methodology (and other Stories). PhD thesis. Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Reinhard, K. (1996), ‘The Freudian Thing: Construction and the Archaeological Metaphor’, in S. Barker (ed.), Excavations and their Objects: Freud’s Collection of Antiquity, 57–80, New York City: SUNY Press. Rice, C. (2006), The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity, Abingdon, OX: Routledge. Richter, H. (1965), ‘Dada: Art and Anti-art’, trans. David Britt, in D. Dietrich, (1993), The Collages of Kurt Schwitters: Tradition and Innovation, 188 and 198 New York: Cambridge University Press. Sartre, J. P. (1956), Being and Nothingness, trans. H. E. Barnes, New York: Philosophical Library. Schippers, K. (2000), Holland Dada, AC Amsterdam, Netherlands: Querido. Schwitters, K. (1927), ‘Katalog’ (Vol. 20, pp. 98–105). Merz, in J. Elderfield (1985), Kurt Schwitters, London: Thames and Hudson. Schwitters, K. (1990), Typographie kann unter Umständen Kunst sein: Kurt Schwitters, Typographie und Werbegestaltung: Landesmuseum Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden, Germany: Das Museum. Steinitz, K. T. (1968), Kurt Schwitters; a Portrait from Life, Berkeley: University of California Press. Stewart, S. (1993), On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Durham: Duke University Press. Timpano, K. R., M. E. Keough, L. Traeger and N. B. Schmidt (2011), ‘General Life Stress and Hoarding: Examining the Role of Emotional Tolerance’, International Journal of Cognitive Therapy, 4 (3): 263–79. Tolin, D. F., S. A. Meunier, R. O. Frost and G. Steketee (2010), ‘Course of Compulsive Hoarding and Its Relationship to Life Events’, Depression and Anxiety, 27 (9): 829–38. Webster, G. (2007), Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau (Doctoral diss. Open University, Milton Keynes).

Hoarding Disorder, Schwitters’s Merzbau 95

96

Section 3  Wars and ­ disasters as agents

98

5

Under siege: The wartime home in British art of the London Blitz



GEORGINA DOWNEY

My body is everywhere: the bomb which destroys my house also damages my body insofar as the house was already an indication of my body. – Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Being and Nothingness’ 1943

This chapter focuses on images of bomb damage to domestic dwellings during the Blitz in London. Taking Sartre’s quote, ‘my body is everywhere’ as a provocation, I ask how the ‘civilian body’ was positioned in spatial relationship to the b ­ omb-damaged home? I explore five works representing besieged homes in the Blitz in order to examine how concepts of home were re-adjusted in a period of wartime. How were ‘body and home’ conflated when home itself was so vulnerable that its very function as ‘haven’ began to fall away? In probing Sartre’s claim that the physical integrity of the house is an ‘indication’ of the corporeal integrity of body – an idea which finds its complement in Walter Benjamin’s claim that the interior is the ‘casing’ of the modern individual – we will see in contradistinction how in the representation of the air-raid-damaged home during the Blitz, the body was not ‘everywhere’. It was not shown as shattered and dispersed, or even ‘in pieces’ emotionally, but rather, it was somewhere; its representation was in fact carefully regulated in terms of where and how it could be shown (Benjamin [1938] 2006: 38). These forms of visual regulation were not simply an effect of wartime censorship (or self-censorship on the part of artists) but were also due to exceptional historical circumstance; the shattered home, homologous as it was to the shattered body, was too traumatic to be confronted head-on. In the following discussion I will show how the body of the inhabitant in or near the besieged home was either drained of excess emotion or was shrouded and thus rendered invisible. In some cases damage to the house inhabitant’s body was evoked anthropomorphically through the damaged building itself, and finally, the vulnerability of the body was called to mind by the trope of the cut-away façade, giving a ‘doll’s house’ view into the war-torn interior. Consequently, according to Rod Mengham, the British wartime interior accrued projections, becoming a kind of threshold ‘between a past and a future whose relations needed to be revised, reconfigured and projected anew’ (2006: 250).

In exploring these works I will draw on Linda Nochlin’s notion of the visceral or ‘corporeal’ eye and specifically her claim that ‘all eyes are located not merely in bodies but in historically specific bodies and can thus be viewed within a history of representation and a history of practices, in short, that can thicken up our responses’ (Nochlin 2006: 15). Her model seems a fitting framework with which to deal with images of home in a crisis when not only was the house stripped of its role as a literal and symbolic haven but also when the emotional reactions of householders to its devastating loss needed to be displayed in certain re-keyed emotional registers to win the cultural battle for morale. I will thus explore a specific form of address evoked by the ‘corporeal eye’ engendered in the case study works, that of the ‘neighbourly’ or local gaze, located within the intact body; a trope which I will show allowed artists depicting air-raid-damaged homes to walk the fine line between an intimate address to viewers experiencing the same traumas as the pictures’ subjects and government censorship.

The censored home The triad of Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and the Blitz gave birth to the ‘New’ Britain – not just with a new vision of social and economic well-being but with a new vision of itself. Seventy-five years later, and now thickly overlaid with nostalgia and selective memory, the ‘Blitz spirit’ is yet being invoked by English political leaders, hoping to engender stoicism in the face of the current global pandemic. Yet with the exception of Brian Foss’s War Paint: Art, War, State and Identity in Britain, 1939– 1945 there are few studies of the representation of the besieged and undermined home in British art of the Second World War. Studies of home in this period are more established and indeed are growing in cultural, literature and cinema studies, and these readings lay important cross-disciplinary ground in the task of critically revising our understanding of the Blitz-besieged home. Another challenge in studying the art of the Blitz-besieged home is that even at the time, such representations were ‘tellingly biased’. At the very least they were not neutral and in many cases were skewed to ‘projecting a specific vision of Britain at war’ (Foss 1991: 300). I say ‘tellingly biased’ since the images of bomb-damaged homes in this chapter were in most cases not only censored but also filtered through a powerful set of monopolizing values which crystallised around the notion that ‘Britain could take it’. It was believed that the Luftwaffe’s targeting of civilian homes would lead, in the first few weeks of the Blitz in autumn 1940, to 600,000 deaths, with many more injuries, and over 4 million cases of civilian insanity. Therefore ‘the most urgent struggle for the wartime state was to project a Home Front that was modernized, disciplined, and fully mobilized, which would allow its citizens to carry on in the face of shattering violence’ (Deer 2009: 4). Thus as soon as the Blitz began in September 1940, and indeed in the lead-up to it, propaganda in the form of strong and directive mass messaging commenced. Bureaucrats and civil servants managed its production by

100 Domesticity Under Siege

artists, writers, filmmakers, designers and others in what was a concerted war effort. The stakes couldn’t have been higher; it was known from the build-up to aerial bombardment of England’s cities in 1939 that civilian morale would be one of the only things to stand between survival and invasion, and thence Britain becoming a slave state of Nazi Germany. Therefore, Britain’s official war leaders urgently needed to prepare the population for its darkest hour. Neither the number of deaths from aerial bombardment nor the number of adult mental trauma cases materialized to the degree authorities predicted. Nonetheless the scale, brutality and intensity of the air raids on domestic homes drove the need to both comprehend and win over the hearts and minds of the civilian population, creating what both Kristine Miller and Patrick Deer have identified as an ‘official’ war culture that touched upon every part of people’s lives, and especially cultures of home. Read together, Miller and Deer’s accounts reveal how powerful social undercurrents within the Blitz experience were suppressed, including class tensions; the peace movement; anti-Semitism; crime waves; despair over survival and psychological damages (to adults and children), distrust of the press as well as the ongoing lack of confidence in and criticism of the government.1 As well as extensive public messaging around issues such as civil defence of homes, the recruitment of volunteers and targeted programmes such as the removal of children from London, the Blitz also fostered the rapid formation of ‘soft’, or cultural, propaganda. However, this official war culture was iterative and not firmly in place at the outset of the first massive air raids on London in September 1940. The authorities, particularly at the Ministry of Information (MoI), eventually improved in their reading of the public attitude, and a distinctive wartime iconography was ‘rapidly improvised in the face of disaster… [that] crystallized around its core images and spokesmen, which were projected and disseminated in propaganda, the mass media, and the wartime culture industries’ (Deer 2009: 22). One of the most important of Britain’s wartime cultural industries, the War Artists Advisory Committee (WAAC), was established by the then director of the National Gallery, Kenneth Clark, in 1939 to oversee the War Art Scheme, which was run under the auspices of the Ministry of Information. Clark’s own stated purpose for the Scheme was to compile and exhibit a comprehensive artistic record of Britain throughout the war (Foss 1991: 260). This was not Clark’s only intention; he confessed in his autobiography to wanting to ‘stop artists from being killed’.2 However, his main plan for the Scheme was that it would provide the nation with an art collection, held in perpetuity that would be a ‘self-portrait’ of British character and identity, united together to face the worst trauma in its history (Foss 1991: 298). Clark wanted an interpretive record, and he believed strongly that artists rather than photojournalists could produce accounts that would capture the feel of the war. Under his directorship the WAAC commissioned, contracted or one-off purchased nearly 6,000 works by over 400 artists. The WAAC (the ‘little incubus’ as one senior civil servant called it) was nestled physically and administratively within the MoI, so Clark could argue efficiently for its establishment, and its continuation throughout

Under Siege 101

the war, an argument he won by citing the nation’s need for ‘cultural’ propaganda that would reflect a ‘civilized’ and free society to itself, in contrast to ‘barbarian’ Nazi Germany, where only Aryan arts and culture were permitted (Foss 1991: 202). In reality, the MoI required all WAAC-commissioned artworks to be passed before its censors. Additionally, artists who went out in public to record ordinary life required MoI-endorsed sketching permits which were issued by WAAC. The WAAC’s secretary, Edward Dickey, and his staff were responsible for liaising with the artists, and issuing them with permits and petrol vouchers so that they could fulfil their commissions. Dickey and his staff also had influence with regard to artistic licence and censorship. Regarding the latter, Dickey ‘urged artists to ensure their work was not “too grim”’ especially in the representation of air-raid-damaged homes (Bardgett 2020: 24). Conscientious, kind and an artist himself, Dickey’s powerful role as dispenser of commissions, permits and vouchers added additional heft to his words of advice. Four of the five artists in this study were WAAC-commissioned artists: Alex Mcpherson, Clifford Hall, Ethel Gabain and Carel Weight, and they were managed by Dickey and would have received such guidance either over cited works or over other commissions. In practice, what the WAAC (and the MoI censors) refused to pass were not images of devastating raid damage (rubble was, after all, everywhere to see); they focused rather on the depiction of the emotional reaction of the populace to the devastation of their homes, workplaces and neighbourhoods. For example, WAAC artist Frances Macdonald was told to replace frightened faces in a Chelsea air-raid shelter scene with more stoic ones (Bardgett 2020: 12), and Carel Weight was told to replace fleeing civilians with escaped animals from the London Zoo (Foss 2007: 43).3

Effects of air raids on domestic life At no other time in British history was the home so precarious, both physically and symbolically, than during the Blitz. A total of 3.5 million homes were destroyed, over 1 million of those in London. The loss of people’s homes (and some families might be ‘bombed out’ more than once) caused an almost unimaginable level of dispossession and homelessness. Post Office records show that between 1940 and 1945 there were over 34 million changes of address, out of a population that in 1939 stood at 41 million (IWM: np). Understandably this mass loss of ‘hearth and home’ led to a ‘scepticism about the stability of the traditional ideal home’ (Fisher 2014: 68). ‘Home’ needed to be made and re-made nightly in unlikely places; most memorably ‘home’ was remade underground, in London’s Tube stations, down into which people carried bedding, vital documents, food and drink, amusements and often clothing for the next day. At the peak of the Blitz in mid-September over 177,500 people nightly took shelter in the Tube in 1940 (Woolven 2001: 160). The local council authorities had difficulty administering the enormous task of re-housing the sheer number of homeless people in their areas. Patching repairable homes within reasonable times was a major priority. Delays to this work itself

102 Domesticity Under Siege

exacerbated the trauma of homelessness. In some instances, people who had been bombed out took re-housing themselves into their own hands. They used ‘axes or smashed windows to gain entry to abandoned houses’. This could be dangerous as terraced houses were rendered unstable by nearby blasts. Some houses concealed worse. One pair of squatters was confronted with the sight of ‘a poor bloody airman, dead with his wife, and the walls caved in’ (Gillman 1986: np). For most people their relation to home became nomadic and contingent. Finding home might mean moving to a different part of the house, the cellar or ground floor or down the street to the nearest public shelter, or to friends or neighbours with Anderson (back garden) shelters. Some Londoners spent so much time underground they referred to themselves as ‘trogs’ or ‘troglodytes’. Winston Churchill himself, sequestered in his Cabinet Rooms bunker, referred to ‘his troglodyte existence’ (Holmes 2009: 64). Henry Moore’s shelter drawings exemplify this, as do Bill Brandt’s photographic series of people sleeping in unusual forms of shelter, including an older gentleman sleeping in a stone sarcophagus in Christ Church, Spitalfields.4 Even the smell of home changed: from the normal comforting house smells to ‘the acrid overtone from high explosive… the mean little stink of gas, seeping up from broken pipes and leads… The smell was greater than the sum of its parts. It was the smell of violent death itself ’ (Strachey 1941: np). Rose Macaulay writing just post-war noted that ‘new ruins are… blackened and torn… they smell of fire and mortality’ (Macaulay 1953: 453). Many civilians experienced a deep fear of immurement, of being trapped in their homes beneath huge piles of lethal rubble. Stella Bowen, the Adelaide-born artist in London (who was to become an official Australian War artist in 1943), wrote in 1941: ‘when there are loud bangs and the windows rattle, my knees shake and even my voice gets wobbly. I waste a lot of energy imagining what it would be like to be buried, or gassed, or machine-gunned’ (1942: 21). Virginia Woolf ’s fear of dying under rubble was a lot more specific. Sitting at ‘Monk’s House’ on the 2 October 1940 she wrote in her diary: ‘I’ve got it fairly vivid  – the sensation: but can’t see anything but suffocating nonentity following after… a swoon; a drum; two or three gulps attempting consciousness – & then, dot dot dot’ (Bell 1977–84: [5] 327).

Representing besieged homes in the Blitz During the Blitz, ‘total war’ entered every part of the domestic realm. Even if a house was still standing relatively intact, the damage could trickle into remote corners. Elizabeth Bowen captured this sense of exposure in her novel The Heat of the Day, when she has her narrator lift a sash window, empty of glass, after a raid and it has let ‘drifts of grit’ into her bedroom. She reaches for the phone, but it is cut off; she is oppressed by the ominous silence in the Square beyond and inside her head she feels a panic ‘a sort of imprisoned humming’ (Quoted by Mengham 2006: 250). Similarly visual artists had to find novel ways to represent the Blitz-besieged home. As Rebecca Arnold has written of Cecil Beaton’s Vogue fashion photographs using

Under Siege 103

bombsites as backdrops, artists needed to ‘translate the chaos of war into something comprehensible’ (2017: 342). The images they created present us with the violent convergence of two previously separate symbolic systems: ‘home’ and ‘battle front’. Consequently, and as Fisher has found, ‘distinctions between private and public space in regards to the home began to fade’, and as homes were routinely ‘swept into the category of public space’, they were increasingly unable to uphold their functions of reliably enclosing and supporting the social norms of private domestic life (2014: 59). Fisher goes on; ‘civilians became soldiers on the home front; private homes and their backyard shelters became the trenches of a new urban battlefield, symptomatic of what Susan Grayzel calls “the domestication of modern war”’ (36–7). These air-raid-damaged interiors had in many instances ‘interred’ the dead and wounded. As such they carry a specific non-verbalizable surplus that probably remains in part unrecoverable to our contemporary gaze (Mitchell 2002: 180). Like the contemporary artworks of today about Covid-19, these works representing the air-raid-damaged home were commissioned specifically to record the ‘unprecedented global event’ of Total War.5 However, the unshrouded, clearly recognizable dead body was virtually never shown. A couple of exceptions are Louis Duffy’s two beautiful paintings – Casualty No.1, 1940, and Aftermath, 1941 – showing the prone bodies of his fellow Camouflage Establishment comrades at Leamington Spa after an air raid. These dead are depicted tenderly and respectfully, laying as if asleep, and unmarked. Foss explains of this aspect of the air-raid-damage-themed WAAC works: ‘few artists had the stomach to sketch the wounds and death that became increasingly common in many cities and towns beginning in the late summer of 1940’ (Foss 2007: 41). Instead, artists quickly began drawing on an anthropomorphic relation between bodies and homes, with ‘architectural damage acting as a visual surrogate for the unseen broken bodies of former inhabitants, thus displacing bodily trauma onto architecture’ (41). Additionally, arriving on site ‘too soon’ to document air-raid damage to homes could add to victims’ trauma, or at the least unleash the spillover of public rage and pain onto the artist himself or herself. John Piper, Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore, Ethel Gabain and photographer Cecil Beaton all experienced such crowd confrontations directly, and found them frightening and depressing.6

Ruin or rubble? Historical conventions of the gaze Not only is the recognizable body in death largely absent from these works, so were large crowds. Yet despite the pre-Blitz evacuations of those Londoners who had the economic means to move to safer areas, as well as the evacuation of young children to safer places in the country, the streets of London were not as de-populated as much official air-raid damage imagery proposes.7 The absence of crowds calls to mind the comparable removal of figures from eighteenth-century aesthetic landscape genre. The lavishly produced fine art editions, for example ‘Italian Sketchbook’ by

104 Domesticity Under Siege

Bradshaw, similarly exclude crowds in bucolic settings to accord with the convention of the singular ruins-gaze of the cultural tourist. Classically educated, and thence inducted into the aesthetics of the ruins gaze by their ‘Grand Tours’ to Greece and Italy, the gentlemen for whom these fine prints of ruins in landscapes were produced understood the melancholic pleasures of contemplating ruins, sans the distraction of the crowd. However, the lofty objects of their gaze, the ancient, crumbling limestone Piranesi-esque ruins of temples and so forth experienced a material shift in the modern period. Ruins’ uglier counterpart, rubble, replaced it as a key visual trope of the twentieth century. Rubble was the product, as Anthony Vidler has pointed out, of modern technologies of war; of aerial bombardment; of dropping high explosives which, when they hit buildings made from modern materials like bricks and concrete, tend to vaporize and atomize their targets, producing grey and pulverised waste that cannot truly be contemplated with melancholic pleasure (Vidler 2010: 29–30). Yet the traditional ruins-gaze didn’t necessarily differentiate between the two. There are further philosophical nuances here, but what concerns us is that some wartime artists of the mid-twentieth century found rubble, like ruins, to have an aesthetic quality, and while some war and post-war writers and artists did attempt to differentiate between them, many used the terms ‘ruin’ and ‘rubble’ interchangeably.8 During the Blitz, visiting actual air-raid ruins became a popular social practice. In fact, ruins gazing en masse returned with such force that the Air Raid Precautions (ARP) teams attending incidents were required to learn crowd-control techniques as part of their general training. And the objects of the ruins gaze now were not just ruined historical and landmark buildings but ordinary homes, and the ‘gazers’ were ordinary people. George Orwell wrote in 1941: ‘Regular features of the time: the neatly swept piles of glass, litter and stone and splinters of flint, the smell of escaping gas, and knots of sightseers waiting at the cordons where there are unexploded bombs’ (Gardiner 2010: 273, my italics). Stella Bowen notes how she was driven around the ‘worst bits of the West End… [and then taken to see] ‘the messes in Chelsea’ (Bowen 1942: 21). Whether on foot, in a car or by bicycle, rubble-sightseeing was widely practiced. Katherine Fisher notes: Wartime diaries and Mass-Observation reports overflow with people drawn to the spectacle of ruins (‘taking a Roman holiday,’ as some put it): devoting Sunday afternoon walks to investigating the latest bomb damage, taking visiting friends on cycle tours of the worst-hit neighbourhoods, obsessively marking the locations of ruins on maps. (Fisher 2014: 62)

This new wartime social activity of ruins-gazing was sometimes sneered at as ‘gawping’. But as Juliet Gardiner argues, it was in fact a necessary act in acknowledging reality, as awful as it often was. Every Londoner, she writes, was ‘affected by the loss

Under Siege 105

of, or serious damage to landmarks that were long familiar to them’, even if their own homes had escaped damage. ‘The tragedy of the Blitz’, she writes, ‘was not a private affair; the sense of bereavement was not vicarious. If London called upon its citizens to defend it… they had to be able to try to make sense of their city’s wounds in whatever way they could’ (2010: 355). A final and pragmatic motivation for communal ruins-gazing was that reports in the radio and print news of air-raid damage to homes could not be relied upon, because these were not merely censored in terms of when and how they could report on air raids but that many newspapers engaged in further forms of ‘self-censoring’ (Hodgson 2014: 284).9 He writes: With the censor insisting that national newspapers could not name bombed cities until it was certain the Germans knew where they had raided, normally meaning a delay of two days, and restrictions on identifying localities and damage to buildings for 28 days, the news value was diminished, particularly when the local population could witness the damage with their own eyes. (261)

‘What targets for a bomb!’ The wartime home in the art of Alex McPherson, Clifford Hall and Ethel Gabain In the Blitz, homes were not only besieged by damage, they also underwent dramatic adaptations and changes to their internal disposition and programme, array and domestic rituals and practices. Alex McPherson depicts these changes in The Alert, a chalk drawing in the IWM collection.10 In The Alert we see a family responding to the wail of the air-raid alert siren. Standing by the stove fastening the neck of his mackintosh is an ARP volunteer, his tin helmet already on. Kneeling down by the coat rack is another man, lacing his boots. His ARP helmet, rubble-picking stick and coat are hanging at the ready. To our right a woman rifles through a desk drawer searching for her ID cards, and any policies or documents she might need should the house be hit. Her thick coat, head scarf and duffle bag suggest she is headed for either Women’s Volunteer Service (WVS) work or an air-raid shelter. While this family’s home is physically in one piece, the war occupies every corner of it. It seems to function now as the ‘control centre’ for this family of volunteers, who are in a hurry to get out and undertake their civilian duties. Its role as a haven and refuge hasn’t been lost, but it has undoubtedly been overshadowed and adapted since the pre-war period. The identities of its occupants are wrought from their roles from beyond home, not within it, and this is the case also for the woman in The Alert, who, now like millions of women around the country, has been drafted into paid and voluntary war work. Feature films produced in Britain during the war period are interesting in their representations of the home and of gendered occupation of the space of the home. Whereas Nazi cinema tried everything in its power to bring women back into the home, reflecting on an albeit limited number of British mainstream films, Elizabeth

106 Domesticity Under Siege

Fig. 5.1  Alex Macpherson, The Alert, c. 1940, chalk on paper, IWM © Imperial War Museum (Art.IWM ART LD 1515).

de Cacqueray has found that women protagonists in war years English cinema now tended to be more often portrayed outside the home. She has also noted that a ‘new slant’ on the home was forming during the Blitz – one different and less sentimental: on the whole, the home is accorded much less time and importance in the narratives than in films of earlier or later periods (in British films) and women, during the war period, are not necessarily closely associated to the homes which are portrayed… [and additionally]… ‘the home tends to become a fairly empty, not very attractive or positively connoted shell’. (2010: 3)

The psychological reasons for the home’s ‘less positive connotations’, and its reduction to a ‘not very attractive or positively connoted shell’, are graphically evident in Clifford Hall’s ink and wash drawing, But Damage was Slight and the Number of Casualties Very Small, 1941. Here we see a London Air Raid Precautions (ARP) team dealing with the immediate aftermath of an air-raid attack. A shrouded body lies on a stretcher in the foreground, with another body being carried by two stretcher bearers. The other team members stand together discussing the incident. The house behind them has suffered a direct hit and seems to have exploded into a shapeless

Under Siege 107

Fig. 5.2  Clifford Hall, ‘… But Damage was Slight and the Number of Casualties Very Small’, 1941 © Imperial War Museum (Art.IWM ART LD 2648).

heap of rubble. Hall’s rapidly applied pen strokes limn the essentials of the scene, and the drab greys of the ink and water wash convey a sombre sense of fatigue. By placing the victim ‘at our feet’, albeit covered and thus unidentifiable, the body becomes not only a blank canvas for our projections but also incontrovertible evidence of the horror of air raids on civilian populations and a tribute to the sacrifices non-combatants were making. This particular truthful but constrained emotional register is signalled by Hall’s team’s body language; this is conveyed as being somewhat weary; there’s a resigned slump to their shoulders, and though relatively featureless, we note their eyes are mostly downcast; there’s a stillness and lack of haste that suggests not only that they’ve experienced this many times before but also that here they have found the number of bodies listed in their records as living at that address. The drawing’s title is Hall’s angrily sardonic take on a headline that appeared in the Evening Standard in October 1940. Government restrictions on the press announcing numbers of casualties meant that newspapers couldn’t list the exact number of dead and injured for a certain period of time, although they could acknowledge that these were small/‘slight’/low, to moderate, to high/heavy. There’s a double kind of veiling occurring, with Hall’s depictions of the shrouded bodies echoing the nebulousness of how events were being reported, both of which served to make the dead less visible. The work is based on the artist’s own experiences; shortly before the beginning of the London Blitz in July 1940, Hall joined an ARP stretcher party in his

108 Domesticity Under Siege

neighbourhood of Chelsea. His role gave him access to scenes of the grim reality of the besieged home. This experience completely changed him. Previously to the Blitz, Hall had been known as a ‘painter of ballet, circus… streets… and landscape’, but like many artists of the WAAC, the experience of being sent out to cover specific scenes of air-raid damage functioned not as an obstacle but rather as a catalyst for categorically different and more intense works. His hasty ARP sketches also differed stylistically from his pre-war work. Here his loose and rapid pen strokes take the place of his previous more finished and polished ‘Beaux-Arts’ training in draughtsmanship. Hall was ‘profoundly shocked at the ghastliness and futility of the air war on civilians… [however]… as an artist, he was ‘surprised and stirred at the strange loveliness which emerged from the grimness of the rubble heaps’ (Meadmore 1941: np). As a stretcher-bearer Hall was an eye witness and participant in the awful daily task of digging through rubble (often bare-handed), hoping to find people buried underneath but still alive. A further key dimension of this work and those that follow was that ARP workers were recruited locally, within the borough or council, and worked locally – meaning that in terms of a kind of visceral eye connected to a body, Hall’s eye was that of a resident, a neighbour; and while he may not have known these particular interred, the house-holders he was rescuing were in his own neighbourhood. In the period of his ARP volunteering, Hall captured many similar scenes, producing rapid sketches on anything to hand, ‘an old envelope, or a cigarette packet’ during the attendance of his team at ‘incidents’. These drawings were exhibited together at

Fig. 5.3  Ethel Gabain, Bombed Out, Bermondsey, 1940, Lithograph on paper, Cuming Museum, Southwark © South London Gallery Collection/Southwark Art Collection/Southwark Council.

Under Siege 109

the Leger Gallery. Hall’s catalogue essayist W. S. Meadmore praised their brevity and constraint, and noted ‘their appeal to the imagination is overbearing. Hardly finished, they say all that needs to be said’ (1941: np). Placing the viewer similarly as an ‘actant’ or a participant within the scene of the Blitz-damaged home, Ethel Gabain’s 1941 lithograph Bombed out, Bermondsey depicts a street in South London the morning after an air raid that has destroyed two local homes. Bermondsey, positioned near docks, bridges, warehouses, factories and railways, was a vulnerable target, and became one the most heavily bombed areas in Britain. It experienced nearly 400 raids from October to December 1940. The suburb took further heavy raids in February 1941, and up until May of that year, at which point the Blitz ended as Hitler turned his attention to the Eastern front, and ‘Operation Barbarossa’ in Russia. In Bombed out, Bermondsey householders and neighbours are grouped along a gently receding diagonal plane; a woman holding a toddler on the far-left stands staring over the street towards a party of men and boys who are combing through what is likely the remains of her home. Beside her stand a close circle of older women, their winter-coated bodies pressed together in silent condolence, their sunken eyes and grim faces signalling to the viewer that this raid has likely brought not just homelessness but also death. Nearest the picture plane to the far-right is a boy speaking to the crop-haired boy next to him, who just stares down at the rubble at his feet. Their figures frame two other boys on the opposite side of the street carrying salvaged objects. While it has the impact of heightened realism, this is a carefully staged image. Given the way Gabain worked on her air-raid damage commissions for WAAC, it is unlikely any of these people were ever together as depicted in this particular moment. Gabain’s method was in fact to use real settings and situations but to then populate empty architectural space with pre-drawn figures in meticulous compositions from sketches made earlier. In fact, in a series of sequential press photos of Gabain working on site, we can see how she added pre-prepared sketches of figures for another work Raided Area, Stepney.11 Bombed out, Bermondsey shows emotion but it is tightly contained, an approach that probably allowed it to be passed by the censor. At the time of its display, it was described as a ‘quiet study of resignation, with the two Bermondsey boys who are old enough to understand what has happened to their homes, and the tired women’ (Morton 1942: 7). Understood thus as a powerful and authentic portrayal of the Blitz experience, Bombed Out was hung as part of the cumulative public display of WAAC works at the National Gallery. It was also selected for inclusion in the WAAC’s Britain at War exhibition in New York – a deliberate and eventually successful visual imploration for the United States to enter the war (Wheeler 1941: 96). In Bombed out, Bermondsey the sense of address here to the viewer is similar to Hall’s. The emotional register is comparable, a kind of reflexive resignation. But the position we are put in is not so much that of ARP team member, or ruins-tourist, but rather here we are assigned the position of the local passer-by literally peering over

110 Domesticity Under Siege

the crop-haired boy’s shoulder at this devastating loss of home. In creating this sense of immersion in the life of a street, Bombed Out is heavily invested in constructing early visual tropes of the ‘blitz spirit’. It’s a local and neighbourly witnessing, rather than a singular one. Additionally, the pragmatic salvaging of the remnants of home enacted by the figures in the background reinforces both ‘blitz spirit’ and stoic resilience. Gabain’s method of blending straight reportage with invented figural arrangements was the way she preferred to work, but adding the figures after her initial on-site sketches of architectural damage and in the privacy of her studio also enabled her to avoid the social discomfort of depicting grieving householders in person. As her son Peter recalled: My mother was not always welcome on the scene after a bomb raid and sometimes she had to handle the situation with great delicacy. When she was sent to make a record of a big bomb raid in the East End, she stepped out of her car with her drawing book and pencil and the survivors were hostile, they saw her as a curious journalist making pictures of their devastation and wanted rid of her. (Thomson 2008: 7)

The ‘cut-away’ interior view, and ‘everyday’ Surrealism: Stella Bowen’s The House Opposite, 1941, and Carel Weight’s The Battle of Suburbia. c. 1940 Long familiar to architects as a diagramming technique for building, the traditional cut-away or section view didn’t include human figures or their accoutrements, nor was expected to function as social critique. Sharon Marcus has argued that due to increasing architectural forms of interiorization, it took on new meaning in ­nineteenth-century Paris, since it permitted a kind of transparency of vision. She claims it forms a synecdochal relation to the realist novel, with both offering ‘microcosmic’ views of city life (1999: 146). She includes among various examples Alfred Robida’s cartoon of an apartment building sans façade, appearing like a cross between a section view and a comic strip, published to satirize Zola’s 1882 novel Pot Bouille. So it was a familiar narrative device before, albeit it is usually seen at the level of illustration rather than naturalistic representation. During the Blitz the cut-away view of the urban domestic interior could also be achieved in violent reality through air-raid damage. This peculiar kind of destruction was quite common, and was described in wartime memoirs as making homes look like ‘dolls houses’ with their doors opened up disturbingly to public view (Beaton 2018: 59). Stella Bowen’s The House Opposite, 1941, portrays an exposed interior seen directly from the artist’s own window. A bomb has sheared off its façade, literally erasing the boundary between interior and exterior. Bowen found the exposure of private life that occurred when façades were torn off like this, ‘fearfully indecent’ (Speck 2014: 126).

Under Siege 111

Fig. 5.4  Stella Bowen, The House Opposite, 1941, oil on cardboard, private collection.

In The House Opposite, we see that the impact of the bomb has also wrenched the floors and ceilings into a steep downward slope, and the double bed, its white linens flapping, threatens to slide right out of the room and into the street, along with the up-ended chair and armoire with its doors flung open. The mirror over the bed tilts on an odd angle. At either side, like theatre drops, waft a pair of very delicate lace curtains, underscoring the artificial feel of this urban-scape. These curtains not only frame the wreckage but also seem to push into the composition, increasing, like the potted primrose, with all the strength of their quiddity, their ‘thingness’ and material everydayness, the powerful contradictions Bowen has set up here between normality within, and chaos beyond. As she herself wrote, ‘the amazing thing is the way the horrible and the normal are jumbled together. One house is disembowelled, and next door the kettle is singing on the gas’ (Bowen 1942: 21).

112 Domesticity Under Siege

While there is still an interest in sociality and class, here the cut-away façade view stands for the vulnerability of being aerially bombed. From the relatively anodyne space of her own home, Stella Bowen depicted the grim reality of air-raid damage very close by. She uses the tropes not only of the cut-away but also a dreamlike juxtaposition of normality and strangeness that evokes surrealism. Surrealism, with its central precepts of the wavering space between dream and reality, between horror and beauty, between the personal and collective unconscious, and the divide between a split second and eternity, becomes here a kind of ‘perfect shorthand’ for artists to depict air-raid damage. Mellor notes that everyday surrealism ‘enabled reportage when more conventional tropes appeared debased or inadequate’ (Mellor 2011: 93). The House Opposite was painted while Bowen was living in the lower half of a four-storey house on the eastern side of Paulton Square, Chelsea. She used this flat as a pied-à-terre during the week, and she rented it in order to make her living as a painter, and to keep in touch with the art world and cultural life of London. Her permanent home was a renovated seventeenth-century cottage, ‘Green End’ at Purleigh in Essex. It’s difficult to know, given the painting isn’t day or month dated, which air raid over Chelsea caused this damage. The fact that the primrose is in bloom indicates that the season is spring 1941, a time that coincided with some of the worst bombing of the whole Blitz, including ‘terror’ attacks on previously lightly bombed West London. These nights included a raid so ferocious on Wednesday 16–17 April 1941 it became known as ‘The Wednesday’. This was followed by another on the night of 19–20 April, known as ‘The Saturday’. On both of these nights, many residents in the Royal boroughs of Chelsea and Kensington died either at home or in shelters. In Chelsea alone large numbers of bombs fell along the Embankment, with two direct hits on civilians and ARP workers sheltering at the Church of Our Most Holy Redeemer. The viewing position this work invites us to take is of standing in the shoes of the artist herself, and looking out the window of her own intact home, and trying to quantify the infinite, essentially unquantifiable randomness of the fall of a bomb. How might the odds be calculated, at night, in the dark, from a plane flying at 300 mph, and with average operating heights of between 10,000 to 20,000 feet up to 40,000 feet above sea level (although diving lower to drop bombs), while factoring in wind speeds and a blacked-out set of targets? In truth, defying calculation, the high explosive, parachute and incendiary bombs might land anywhere.12 Indeed, they did in this shabby-genteel borough, full of affordable accommodation for artists and writers, including fellow WAAC artists Frances Macdonald, Anthony Gross and of course local ARP stretcher bearer Clifford Hall. In the day to day of Blitz life, the need to focus on the present meant that few Londoners, including Bowen, had the time to pour much energy into the fatalistic question of where a bomb would land. It became common in popular attitudes to the raids to manage fear with the truism that a bomb either ‘had your name on it, or it didn’t’. As Bowen writes, ‘you get to think of a bomb as a familiar – almost a

Under Siege 113

domestic object – and if a bomb drops nearby your reaction will be, as described by Hemingway, ‘well, it wasn’t me – See?’ (1942: 21). Bowen confessed to being completely terrified of raids, but tried to think of death probabilistically. In ‘Letter from London’, reproduced in Australian Women’s World in 1942 and based on a letter to her cousin Kathleen in Adelaide, she wrote: ‘just as the buildings of London occupy only one-fifth of its total area, and only a tiny proportion of them can be hit even by the biggest raid, so at any given moment, only a small percentage of the nation’s consciousness is occupied by fear and anguish’ (1942: 29). In fact, the odds of being hit were uncomfortably high. Longmate has calculated that a UK citizen stood a 1 in 272 chance of being killed or injured by air raids during the war (1976: 190). Bowen is being disingenuous here, but she was conscious of writing for an Australian readership, consciously or not, she was also shaping her narrative around the emerging Blitz myths of bravery and stoicism. As with Gabain’s reconstruction of the air-raid-damaged scenario, in The House Opposite, we are witnessing a visual assemblage, not a piece of straight reportage. This is in keeping with the idea in previous depictions of the air-raid-damaged home – with the exception of Hall’s – which tended not to directly depict the u ­ n-seeable or sayable but rather to portray war besiegement of the home through forms of transposition and construction. This is not a criticism in any way of Bowen’s achievements with this work but rather a reflection on the fact that many similar depictions of air-raid-damaged homes are only partially taken from direct observation. The House Opposite may not in fact have been as ‘opposite’ as the title proposes. According to London Council Bomb Survey maps, four HE (high explosive incendiary) bombs did fall on houses on the western side of Paulton Square in spring 1941, and since Bowen’s address puts her on the eastern side, the only way she could have depicted that particular damage at that time of year, of the house directly opposite her, was if she expunged the detail of Paulton Square’s central park. This park wasn’t much to speak of at the time – denuded of its railings, melted down for munitions but it would still have been full of trees. Even so, this intervening green swathe doesn’t appear between the window sill and the ‘house opposite’. If Bowen had lived in Paulton Street, rather than on the Square, the optics are far more straightforward, since a bomb did also fall on the terrace of houses lining the southern end of the Square.13 The House Opposite was shown at the Royal Academy and the Times ‘gave it five lines’ (Modjeska 1999: 153). This was an achievement in itself, given the large number of entries, even in wartime (Royal Academy 1941: 31). It was not a WAAC commission though Bowen did attempt twice to apply to the WAAC for a commission in 1942 and 1944 (Foss 1991: 428). The reasons for her rejection are at present unknown, although as Jan Gordon’s newspaper article in the Observer warned, Bowen was possibly one of those ‘outsiders’. She was an expatriate Australian from Adelaide, and had spent most of the 1920s up to the mid-1930s in Paris as the consort of writer and publisher Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939), who had been the editor of

114 Domesticity Under Siege

the Transatlantic Review and friend to Hemingway, Pound, and many others in the international modernist avant-garde. Bowen’s modernist credentials may have been sufficiently plain, or Clark wasn’t familiar with her work, but he and the WAAC did not put her on commission or buy any works. Consequently, this painting and her other air-raid-damage-themed paintings had to be shown outside the WAAC sphere. Her Flight from Reason, showing the destruction of Inner Temple, was shown at the Association of International Artists (AIA) exhibition held in September–October 1941 at Charing Cross Underground Station ticket hall.14 Here, under the auspices of a more socially ­radical organization, it hung alongside Ethel Gabain’s Bombed Stepney, Raided Area, Stepney, and Carel Weight’s It Happened to Us (AIA 1941: np). In contrast to Bowen, the Hammersmith-born painter Carel Weight occupied more of an insider’s position within the WAAC, since he was a friend of Clark’s, and towards the end of the war, he received an official WAAC commission to Southern Europe to depict the role of the British Army in the restoration of civil society after the conflict. Notwithstanding, Weight still experienced rejection by the WAAC of a painting of his they had commissioned: It Happened to Us, depicting a group of Londoners on a bus scrambling in terror during a daytime air raid. The WAAC thought it portrayed too much public panic.

Fig. 5.5  Carel Weight, The Battle of Suburbia, 1940, oil on canvas, Leeds Art Gallery © Leeds Museums and Galleries (Leeds Art Gallery) UK/Bridgeman Images.

Under Siege 115

Weight’s The Battle of Suburbia, painted in 1940, now in the Leeds Museums and Galleries collection, correspondingly features ordinary Londoners enduring the Blitz, but notably, as in Bowen’s The House Opposite, it features the same cut-away façade, or dolls house view, as a key trope for dealing visually with the war-damaged home. Set matter-of-factly in the busy communal front garden of a block of terraced public housing, we see the exposed interiors of six rooms in the middle block. Two per floor, their bright wallpapers are summarized by Weight down to rudimentary pinks, blues, roses, yellows and beiges. They contrast sharply with the dominant surrounding themes of dull browns and greys of brickwork and sky. The neat black fireplaces in each room have been crisply delineated, as have the faint lines of the dado rails over contrasting papers. Immersed in their quotidian lives, Weight’s cast of neighbours populate the scene and create a longing in us to ‘complete’ a set of stories that might connect them or explain their presence. Yet as Grey Gowrie has explained in terms of ‘story’ in Weight’s work, ‘you are thwarted until you realise that the story is in fact the emotion: the people before you are moved by something’, creating a sensory tenor to the image that becomes more important than straightforward narrative (Gowrie 1988: 50). The emotion here is one of menace, or at the very least disquiet. This was an effect Gowrie claims Weight achieved with his brilliant instinct for the light and atmosphere of London, which, Gowrie notes, ‘covers ordinary scenes and settings with a veneer of unease’ (ibid.). The pearly light, which seems to almost emanate from the ground up, has that quality of flat evenness that often in London presages a thunderstorm. The sky here shows a storm brewing only moments away. Yet the touches of red in the dirty grey cumulonimbus clouds massing on the left could be read either as touches of evening light or reflected fires from bombing raids. Overall, the painting’s effects are largely figured around evoking a particular mood, yet it also contains a discrete protest. In front of the shorn-off and exposed interiors to the right we see a small structure, with a curved black-painted concrete roof. This is a public ‘surface’ type brick air-raid shelter. Weight has somewhat ominously added to its brick wall the unlucky number ‘13’ on the façade, as well as placing the black cat right beneath it in the composition. These two details are not happenstance, but Weight pointing to the issues with the provisions for public air-raid shelters, which varied a lot from local council to council. The ‘Anderson’ shelters required access to a private back or front garden, and these were not available for poorer apartment dwellers, who may not have had gardens at all – hence the construction of these communal surface shelters for housing estate communities such as those found in Weight’s home grounds of Fulham, Putney, and Battersea. As Richard Overy has written, these surface brick-and-concrete public shelters rapidly developed a ‘reputation for tragedy’ due to their jerry-built nature and the propensity for the concrete to collapse on occupants after the weaker brick walls gave way (2013: np). After several tragedies and deaths in the autumn of 1940, the

116 Domesticity Under Siege

government started building surface brick shelters with a much smaller capacity, which explains the small size of the one we see here. They usually had flat rooves; the curved black one we see here is somewhat unusual. As with Gabain’s Bombed out, Bermondsey none of these figures were physically actually there, although, as is consistent in both Gabain and Weight’s oeuvres, the spatial settings were real. As Weight explains, ‘All my figures are imaginary, all these figures are entirely made up. Very rare do I ever use actual people’ (Courtney 1991: 184). Weight recalled, ‘I do remember seeing so often people walking along the road carrying wreaths, and going to funerals, and, it was an amazing situation really because there was such a feeling of closeness to everybody’ (184). Weight’s concern with showing the breakdown of usual social reserve during the Blitz is belied by the fact that none of the figures in this picture show any notable relaxation of social difference, but yet taken as a whole, their formal arrangement to each other, their ‘matter of fact-ness’, does actually, in its own quixotic manner, convey a weirdly subtle kind of sense of community, or at least tolerance of social age and class difference. All the same, there is a very real sense of emotional tautness in this picture, a sense of impending disaster, which is palpable. The focus on the quietness and psychological interiority of the figures, despite their conspicuously damaged architectural environment, conveys a huge amount about what it was like to live in the besieged London home in the Blitz.

Conclusion The works we’ve explored here stand as visual records of explicit domestic loss during  the London Blitz. Each of the works explored present us with the vision of how the Blitz penetrated every corner of the home and disrupted relationships between occupant and home. The complexities of this disruption, however, have been smoothed out by the operation of the ‘Blitz myth’ and the need to re-key particular affective registers to win the cultural battle for morale. Images of death can be disturbing as they confront viewers with gore and the vulnerability of the human body. By inference images of air-raid-destroyed homes are likewise disturbing as the home functions as the body’s foremost ‘covering’ and form of shelter. In these, as we’ve seen, the body, shattered both emotionally and physically, was not, as Sartre decreed, ‘everywhere’ but was in fact carefully staged to be precisely ‘somewhere’, and rendered with officially acceptable levels of emotional affect. Death must have seemed to be everywhere, as was its calling card, rubble, which was all that was left of more than one in ten of London’s houses. After the war much of the rubble depicted here that flowed across London was either swept into basements, crushed and used for road-building, or sent to New York City for civil construction along the East River (Larkham 2015: np). With the rubble gone, and the fear of death it conveyed removed, the rhetoric around home and housing began to focus on reconstruction. In this sense, rubble was perhaps ‘tomorrow calling’, and aligned

Under Siege 117

intimately with modernity’s concern with transcendence and progress. Larkham has counted literally hundreds of planning submissions and schemes to rebuild London, starting as early as the outbreak of the Blitz. Such visions of a better future gave civilians and soldiers something to fight for. We see the temper of this in Abram Games’s 1943 poster ‘Your Britain Fight for It Now (Health Centre)’  – a poster showing the dramatically modern ‘Finsbury Health Centre’ (Berthold Lubetkin for Tecton 1935–8), behind which looms an old bomb-damaged, leaky slum dwelling, in which stands a small boy with rickety legs. Slum clearance and the need for more modern and equitable public housing were also at the heart of Ealing Studios’ two post-war rubble films Hue and Cry (1947), and Passport to Pimlico (1949). Similarly, each of the air-raid-damaged homes works examined in this chapter can be read for how they mobilize or privilege a kind of neighbourly or local gaze. Positioned spatially within these works as viewers with neighbourly bodies, the distinctly temporal conditions of destruction become recognizable to audiences of the period, and for those afterwards, provided unique documentation of the London home at its most vulnerable. At the same time this emphasis on the local was also an attempt to make visual sense of the morale messaging that was going on at the highest of national levels. And, as in Passport to Pimlico, with its telling segue from a scene of gangs of children playing in rubble to a local father working on a to-scale model of a design for a civic centre and playground to replace the rubble, this neighbourly or communitarian gaze informed strident calls for strategic and inclusive rebuilding. As Rod Mengham has written, the interior during the Blitz became a stage or ‘back drop for the acting out of alternative futures [and] the bombed house became the focal point for a competition between widely varying social blueprints’ (251). However, national war debt, lack of materials and lack of agreement about future directions (those ‘varying blueprints’) meant that nothing much got achieved until the 1950s. Nonetheless the clearing and shovelling away of the rubble provided a physical tabula rasa for modern housing and amenities. These representations of the war-besieged home by Macpherson, Hall, Gabain, Bowen and Weight likewise have a grim but also a promissory quality. In them, we see the glimmer of a post-war communitarian vision, emerging and coalescing around locale and municipality. In sum, if the horrors of the Blitz in London led to homes being pulverised into rubble and torn apart for all to see, then it was only fair that the municipal gaze and embodied voice, forecast early in War art, should be heard in the process of reconstruction.

Notes 1. Kristine A Miller, British Literature of the Blitz, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2009, p 1. Of this culture Miller has found that the blitz myth covered up a range of real class and gendered dissimilarities on the Home Front. Patrick Deer, ‘Culture in the Blackout: Living Through the Blitz, 1940–4’ in Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern

118 Domesticity Under Siege

British Literature, Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2009, p. 22. Deer has explored the ways in which this official culture was not only exclusionary but psychically disturbed in the way it elided real trauma, creating what he calls a ‘central wound’. 2. Brian Foss, ‘British Artists and the Second World War with Particular Reference to the War Artists’ Advisory Committee of the Ministry of Information’, thesis submitted to University College London for the degree of PhD History of Art, 1991, p. 166. 3. The WAAC in its commissioning of artists was indeed rather ‘hands-on’, with Laurie Benson noting that not only did ‘[it] reject works that did not conform to [its] standards and some artists were asked to modify their work accordingly’. But also, ‘those practising abstraction or styles that were deemed confronting to the general public were unlikely to receive patronage (Benson 2007: 233). This policy satisfied some such as the military leaders on its Committee, but it infuriated others who felt it should represent the full gamut of [then] contemporary British art. In an overall post-war appraisal, the collection as a whole has been described as ‘unadventurous’ even by its foremost scholar, Brian Foss (1991: 411). ‘E.H.’ in The Burlington in April 1945 went further, describing it as ‘conveying that wealth of detail which a child would admire’ (1945: 104). Nevertheless by 1945 the WAAC was a stated success. However, earlier in the war its values, tastes and policies were seen to exclude certain kinds of artists, including those interested in documenting the air-raid-damaged home. This was plainly perceptible at the time; Jan Gordon for the Observer noted in 1941 ‘artists hit by the war and apparently competent… complain that having applied for jobs “on the Record” [for the WAAC]… have been told that there was very little chance of “outsiders” getting anything to do’ (Gordon 1941: 7). Thus in a real sense Clark and his committee became British art’s foremost ‘gatekeepers’ for the duration of the war. The irony now is that those handful of modern artists who pressed the WAAC’s aesthetic conservatism to its limit, Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore and John Piper, are now the highest valued. 4. This extensively circulated visual refrain of wrapped shelter sleepers conjures Walter Benjamin’s notion of the interior being the ‘casing’ of the modern individual; in actuality, during the Blitz the interior become the second but last casing to the body, as people were reduced to the clothing they stood up in, and a blanket. 5. Progressively fewer people are left who lived as adults through the Blitz, and despite the vast amount of archive material on the Blitz, the plethora of diaries, oral histories, books and academic research, it remains to say that without recollection of what Raymond Williams has termed the ‘structure of feeling’ of the Blitz period (1961: 4) and what Barbara Rosenwein has called its ‘emotional communities’ (2006), interpretation of these works is inevitably complex and contingent. Williams’ term ‘structure of feeling’ refers to ‘the defining characteristics of a culture that are firm and structured but also operate in the least tangible parts of our activities’. The Long Revolution (1961), p. 4. Barbara Rosenwein’s term ‘emotional communities’ refers to an approach to history that focuses on how each community has its own particular norms of emotional valuation and expression. Quoted in T. Alberson, ‘Visualizing Wartime Destruction and Postwar Reconstruction: Herbert Mason’s Photograph of St. Paul’s Re-evaluated’, The Journal of Modern History, 87 (September 2015): 548.

Under Siege 119

6.

Beaton wrote in his diary: ‘I went to Albermarle Street to see if the wax head I had seen among the debris of a former hairdressing establishment was still there. Suddenly the usual officious passer-by appeared. A little man with ferret eyes and a pointed red nose… I explained… my photographs had to be submitted to the censor. But the discontent had started and now gathered momentum’. [He was then taken to a police station by a ‘plain clothes man’ for questioning.] ‘The constable explained that I had done wrong in provoking the antagonism of the crowd… When one looks around at the damage, one realizes that the people have every reason to be highly-strung and super-sensitive. I felt thoroughly sad and somewhat unnerved as I walked down the havoc of Savile Row and Conduit Street, where scarcely a window-pane remains intact’. Cecil Beaton, Cecil Beaton’s Diary: The Years Between; 1939–1944, Sapere Books, 2018, p. 43. 7. Amusingly, some rubble spectators also left graffiti in the form of; ‘music-hall jokes and puns…. Scribbled defiance on heaps of rubble… as unconquerable as secret laughter’. These writings by passers-by or small shop owners appear rarely in the air-raid-­damagedthemed works in the WAAC collection, with the exception of B. Howitt-Lodge’s 1941 painting, Business as Usual, depicting a furniture salvage shop with its front wall bearing the chalked words ‘They can smash our windows but never our spirits’. J. B. Morton, Introduction, ‘Blitz’ volume 2 in War Pictures by British Artists, OUP 1942, 5. See also Mass Observation Wall Chalkings 1939–1943. [Topic Collection, Mass Observation  Online, http://www.massobservation.amdigital.co.uk.proxy.library.adelaide.edu.au/Documents/ Details/TopicCollection-87 (accessed 25 September 2020). 8. ‘Ruins-gazing’ or to give it its chronologically correct term, ‘rubble-gazing’ (incorporating ruinlust, ruin porn, and dark tourism) has been positioned in the twentieth century as a reflexive critique of modernity and the single-minded re-pursuit of progress, by Andreas Huyssen, Svetlana Boym and Julia Hell. It is the ‘logic of the ruin’, Hell claims, to belie an inherent anxiety about the present and a nostalgic longing for and grief over the insuperable break from an archaised or Classical past (Hell 2010: 5). Certainly some categories of Blitz ruin imagery afforded these kinds of traditional forms of ruins-gazing, notably the many city views of bombed London, and particularly those of St Paul’s cathedral and other public and historic landmarks by Muirhead Bone. Photographer Herbert Mason’s famous photograph of the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral rising like a phoenix out of a sea of smoke and flame accords well with historic conventions of ruins-gazing. This photograph was repeatedly selected as the cover image of picture books, such as Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire, which enjoyed six print runs, Britain Under Fire, with a foreword by J. B. Priestley, and Front Line, which similarly sold over a million copies. This ‘strangely beautiful’ ruins image attests to the public appetite for the ‘barely disguised aestheticisation of destruction’ (Allbeson 2015: 557). 9. Hodgson’s doctoral research focuses on the reporting of the Blitz in Manchester but his findings apply to the national press. 10. The Alert was one of rather few works in the genre of the ‘interior view’ exhibited during the war especially if we compare numbers of works in this genre with earlier decades in English art, say for example from the 1890s to the 1910s. During this period artists in the New English Art Club, the Fitzroy Street, Camden Town and London groups, as well as Omega

120 Domesticity Under Siege

11.

12.

13.

14.

Studios-connected artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant produced many fine interiors. Possibly it became less relevant for the duration of the war due to its French roots, its narrower market and maybe also for its unapologetic focus on individual rather than collective worlds. Now in a private collection, Raided Area, Stepney shows a streetscape filled with people gathering their belongings from the ruins. Various stages of its completion were recorded by Press Agency photographer Reg Speller. Thanks to Speller, we have three consecutive photographs depicting Gabain at work on it while standing on a heap of rubble on site in Stepney in November 1941. The photographs suggest Gabain adhered to the factual details of the architecture, but added the human figures since the only others visible in the image are barely noticeable background figures picking through the rubble. These photographs are: Reg Speller, ‘Painting Damage 1940’ Getty/Hulton Archive HP9583; https:// www.gettyimages.com.au/detail/news-photo/two-curious-boys-look-on-as-miss-ethelgabain-paints-a-news-photo/2667785; Gordon Cooke, 2020, Ethel Gabain Biography, ‘Ethel Gabain at Work During World War Two’ https://www.copleygabain.com/artists/ gabain accessed 9 September 2020; ‘Commissioned artist Ethel Gabain appointed by the Ministry of Information to record the travesty of war Nov 28 1940’ https://www.asisbiz. com/Battles/Battle-of-Britain/pages/33 With visual navigation impossible except on the clearest moonlit nights, electronic aids became vital. In the Blitz of London and other cities, the Luftwaffe used a system called Knickebein, in which bombers followed one radio beam broadcast from ground stations on the continent until that beam was intersected by another beam at a point over the target. Lead bombers dropped incendiary bombs, which set fires that guided other bombers carrying high explosives as well as more incendiaries. This painting is often identified as being painted in Danvers St, Bowen’s subsequent ­residence round the corner from Paulton Square. Yet Bowen didn’t move to Danvers Street  until 1943 after her daughter Julie’s wedding. Curiously, her late partner Ford Madox Ford’s old mistress, Jean Rhys had lived in Paulton House, Paulton Square, between 1936 and 1938. The AIA was founded as the Artists’ International in 1933 and grew out of the ­anti-Fascist and anti-war political climate of the 1930s. ‘This exhibition was seen by over 120,000 people, its success put down to its attractive display; ease of access and intensely human subjects… that were within the personal experience of most of the people who attended’. AIA Bulletin, December 1941. Quoted in Veronica Davies, ‘Steering a Progressive Course’? Exhibitions in Wartime and Postwar Britain, 5 December 2008. Henry Moore Institute Online Papers and Proceedings. www.henry-moore.org/hmi

References A.I.A. Exhibition of War Pictures (1941), Charing Cross Underground Ticket Hall, 16 September–9 October. Introduction by F. D. Klingender. ‘Growing up in the Second World War’ http://iwm.org.uk/history/growing-up-in-thesecond-world-war (accessed 6 August 2020). ‘New Subjects for the War Artists’ (1940), Manchester Guardian, December 9, 4.

Under Siege 121

Alberson, T. (2015), ‘Visualizing Wartime Destruction and Postwar Reconstruction: Herbert Mason’s Photograph of St. Paul’s Re-evaluated’, The Journal of Modern History, 87: 548. Arnold, R. (2017), ‘Fashion in Ruins: Photography, Luxury and Dereliction in 1940s London’, Fashion Theory, 21 4: 341–63. Bardgett, S. (2020), Wartime London in Paintings, London: Imperial War Museum. Barthes, R. (1972), Mythologies, selected and translated from the French by Annette Lavers, New York: Hill and Wang. Beaton, C. (2018), Cecil Beaton’s Diary: The Years Between; 1939–1944, London, UK: Sapere Books. Bell, A. (Ed.) (1977–1984), The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 5, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Benjamin, W. in Jennings, M (ed) (2006), The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Benson, L. (2007), ‘Second World War’, in Gott, T., Benson, L. and Matthiesson, S. (eds), Modern Britain: 1900–1960; Masterworks from Australian and New Zealand Collections, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria. Bowen, S. (1942), ‘Letter from London’, Australian Woman’s World, 11 February: 21. This article was a transcript from one of Bowen’s radio broadcasts for the BBBC’s Pacific Services ‘On Life in the Blitz’. Bowen, S. (1941), Drawn from Life, Sydney: Picador, 1999. Calder, A. (1992), The People’s War: Britain 1939–1945, London, UK: Random House. Cooke, G. (2020), Ethel Gabain Biography, ‘Ethel Gabain at Work During World War’ Two’. Available online: https://www.copleygabain.com/artists/gabain (accessed 9 September 2020). Crowley, D. (2009), ‘The Dark Side of the Modern Home: Ilya Kabakov and Gregor Schneider’s Ruins’, in Massey, A., Sparke, P., Keeble, T. and B. Martin, Designing the Modern Interior: From the Victorians to Today, 233–47, Berg, Oxford and New York. de Cacqueray, E. (2010), ‘New Slants on Gender and Power Relations in British Second World War Films’, Miranda, 2. Available online: http://journals.openedition.org/ miranda/1146 (accessed 13 October 2020). Deer, P. (2009), ‘Culture in the Blackout: Living through the Blitz, 1940–4’, in Deer, P. (ed.), Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature, Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. E. H. (April, 1945), ‘War Pictures by British Artists’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 86 (505): 104. Essex-Lopresti, T. (2005), A Brief History of Civil Defence, Derbyshire: Civil Defence Authority. The exhibition of the Royal Academy (1941), https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/ exhibition-catalogue/ra-sec-vol173-1941. Fisher, K. E. (2014), ‘Writing (in) the Spaces of the Blitz: Spatial Myths and Memory in Wartime British Literature’, Ph.D dissertation, University of Michigan. Foss, B. (1991), ‘British Artists and the Second World War with Particular Reference to the War Artists “Advisory Committee of the Ministry of Information”’, PhD thesis submitted to University College London. Foss, B. (2007), War Paint: Art, War, State and Identity in Britain, 1939–1945, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

122 Domesticity Under Siege

Ganeva, M. (2014), ‘Fashion Amidst the Ruins: Revisiting the Early Rubble Films, and the Heavens Above (1947) and The Murderers are Among Us (1946)’, German Studies Review, 37 (1): 61–85. Gardiner, J. (2010), The Blitz: The British under Attack, Hammersmith: Harper Press. Gillman, W. A (1986), [Sound Recording] Ref 9420 / Reel 20, IWM Sound (interviewer Peter Hart. Available online: https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80009208 Gordon, J. (1941), ‘Art and Artists’, The Observer, August 3, 7. Gowrie, G. (1988), ‘A Consideration of Carel Weight’, Modern Painters, Autumn, 1 (3): 48–51. Hell, J. and A. Schönle (2010), Ruins of Modernity, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Hodgson, G. R. (2014), ‘Manchester and its Press Under the Bomb: Britain’s ‘Other Fleet Street’ and its Contribution to a Myth of the Blitz’ Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Chester, United Kingdom. Holmes, R. (2009), Churchill’s Bunker: The Secret Headquarters at the Heart of Britain’s Victory, London, UK: Profile Books. Larkham, P. (2015), ‘Replanning London after the Second World War’, Gresham College Lecture, 7 July. Available online: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/ replanning-london-after-the-second-world-war (accessed 25 November 2020). Longmate, N. (1976), Air Raid: The Bombing of Coventry, London: Hutchinson. Macaulay, R. (1953), The Pleasure of Ruins, London: Thames and Hudson. Mass Observation Online, Wall Chalkings 1939–1943. Available online: http://www. massobservation.amdigital.co.uk.proxy.library.adelaide.edu.au/Documents/Details/ TopicCollection-87 (accessed 25 September 2020). Matheson, N. (2008), ‘National Identity and the Melancholy of Ruins: Cecil Beaton’s Photographs of the London Blitz’, Journal of War & Culture Studies, 1 (3): 261–74. Meadmore, W. S. (1941), ‘Introduction; Bombs on Chelsea: Exhibition of War Drawings by Clifford Hall’, Catalogue, J. Leger and Son, May. Available online: https://www.tate.org.uk/ art/archive/items/tga-20052-2-11-5/j-leger-son-exhibition-catalogue-titled-exhibitionof-war-drawings-by-clifford-hall-bombs Mellor, L. (2011), Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mengham, R. (2006), ‘Anthropology at Home: Domestic Interiors in British Film and Fiction of the 1930s and 1940s’, in J. Aynsley and C. Grant (eds), assisted by Harriet McKay, Imagined Interiors: Representing the Domestic Interior since the Renaissance, 244–55, London, UK: V & A Publications. Miller, K. A (2009), ‘Introduction: Fighting the People’s War’, in British Literature of the Blitz, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Miller, K. A (1999), ‘“Even a Shelter’s Not Safe”: The Blitz on Homes in Elizabeth Bowen’s Wartime Writing’, Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 45 (2): 138–58. Mitchell, W. T. J. (2002), ‘Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture’, Journal of Visual Culture, 1 (2): 165–81, 180. Modjeska, D. (1999), Stravinsky’s Lunch, Sydney: Picador. Morton, J. B. (1942), ‘Introduction, ‘Blitz’ volume 2’, in War Pictures by British Artists, 5–9, London: Oxford University Press.

Under Siege 123

Neade, L. (2017), The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Post-war Britain, New Haven: Yale University Press. Nochlin, L. (2006), Bathers, Bodies and Beauty: The Visceral Eye, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Overy, R. (2013), The Dangers of the Blitz Spirit. Available online: https://www.historyextra. com/period/second-world-war/the-dangers-of-the-blitz-spirit/, np. Pohlad, M. B (2005), ‘The Appreciation of Ruins in Blitz-Era London’, The London Journal, 30 (2): 1–24. Rawlinson, M. (2000), ‘What Targets for a Bomb!’ Spectacle, Reconstruction and the London Blitz’, in British Writing of the Second World War, 68–109, Oxford University Press. Rosenwein, B. (2006), Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Saunders, L. (1994), ‘Carel Weight’, Modern Painters, Summer, 7 (2): 40–3. Saunders, L. (1997), ‘Obituary: Carel Weight’, Modern Painters (Autumn), 129. Schönle, A. (2011), ‘Between the Iconic and the Symbolic: The Ruin Photographs of Boris Smirnov and the Aesthetics of Trauma’, The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 86 (4): 277–93. Speck, C. (2014), Beyond the Battlefield: Women Artists of the Two World Wars, London: Reaktion. Strachey, J. (1941), Post D: Some Experiences of an Air Raid Warden. Available online: https:// spartacus-educational.com/2WWblitz.htm (accessed 6 August 2020). Thomson, D. A (2015), ‘Narratives of the People’s War in British film, 1940 –1958’, thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Arts at Monash University Melbourne. Thomson, S. (2008), The Life and Works of Ethel Gabain, Warrington: Manchester Art Press. Vidler, A. (2010), ‘Air War and Architecture’, in J. Hell and A. Schönle (eds), Ruins of Modernity, 29–40, Durham & London: Duke University Press. Weight, C. (1991–2), ‘Artists‘ Lives’, Interviews with Cathy Courtney, National Life Story Collection, British Library National Sound Archive, C466/07, Tapes F1898-1910, F25462554. Wheeler, M. (1941), Britain at War, T. S. Eliot, H. Read, E. J. Carter and C. Dyer (eds), New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art Exhibition 23 May to 2 September 1941. Wigley, M. (2002), ‘Bloodstained Architecture’, in Ghent Urban Studies Team (eds), Post Ex Sub Dis: Urban Fragmentations and Constructions, 281–94, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers. Wilkins, L. (Ed.) (2002), Stella Bowen, Art, Love & War, Canberra, ACT, Australia: Australian War Memorial. Williams, R. (1961), The Long Revolution, London: Chatto & Windus. Woolven, R. (2001), Civil defence in London 1935–1945: The Formation and Implementation of the Policy for, and the Performance of, the A.R.P. (later C.D.) Services in London, London: Department of War Studies King’s College 1 October.

124 Domesticity Under Siege

6

Searching for (A) home in the rubble: The Heimkehrer-Flâneur in Wolfgang Staudte’s Die Mörder Sind Unter Uns’



KAI-UWE WERBECK

Introduction: The Heimkehrer -Flâneur in German Rubble Film Those returning to Germany from the literal and figurative battlefields of the Second World War often found their home(s) significantly altered, politically, affectively and spatially. The urban centres in particular had changed drastically, posing a variety of physical and psychological challenges to those walking in the bombed-out cities in which interiority and exteriority had seemingly become invalid categories. As Jaimey Fisher argues with a nod to Walter Benjamin, ‘the harsh contingencies of everyday life overwhelmed any would-be wandering dandies’, yet, he continues, ‘rubble-films like Die Mörder sind unter uns deploy [the figure of the flâneur] in order to simultaneously invoke and problematize modern metropolitan contexts and experiences’ (2005: 462). This chapter adapts Fisher’s concept of the Heimkehrer-flâneur, a mediated type who explores ‘in panoramic and quasi-touristic fashion, once familiar cities  – familiar to the viewers both from lived experience, but also cinematically’, and applies it to Wolfgang Staudte’s melodramatic Die Mörder sind unter uns [The Murderers are among us] (2005: 466).1 I argue that Die Mörder sind unter uns not only pursues a didactic project of national and personal redemption but also formally negotiates a shift in the individual’s way of perceiving and occupying his or her home. The film’s two protagonists, Dr Hans Mertens (Wilhelm Borchert) and Susanne Wallner (Hildegard Knef), find themselves confronted by an unsafe Heimat (home), understood in this chapter as both the cognitive and affective concept of a homeland and the physical places where people dwell, now eerily reminiscent of Weimar culture’s expressionist landscapes. Against the powerful backdrop of the rubble, Hans and Susanne  – who are, it should be noted, not truly Heimkehrer in the strict sense of the word, which traditionally refers to returning prisoners of war  – attempt a reclaiming of their home(s) that renders visible in multiple configurations the forces of history inscribed in the destruction.

Released on 15 October 1946, two weeks after the conclusion of the Nuremberg Trials, Die Mörder sind unter uns was the first German post-war film, and also stands as one of the paramount exercises in the short-lived yet formative genre of the ‘rubble film’.2 Many film scholars consider this Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft production one of the most important contributions to German cinema after 1945, even as, over the next couple of years, rubble film was quickly rejected by audiences weary of seeing the destruction not only in their everyday lives but also on the screen.3 In the context of the immediate post-war years, discussions of home in Die Mörder sind unter uns are inextricably linked to the lived experiences in a drastically reconfigured urban landscape as geographical and personal borders are constantly challenged and redrawn.4 To be sure, Staudte engages directly with the socio-political realities of Berlin under Allied control in his film, including the general shortage and reallocation of living spaces. As such Die Mörder sind unter uns is invested in a (gendered) negotiation of the rules of cohabitation via a genre in which, as Mattias Frey writes, ‘women detect and attend to symptoms of male weakness’ and thus function as agents of national but also domestic restoration (2013: 27). Shot in part on-location in the streets of Berlin and in part at two nearby studios, Die Mörder sind unter uns tells the story of Dr Hans Mertens, a former surgeon who, after his return from the Eastern front, struggles to find normalcy. Affected by post-traumatic stress disorder, Hans frequently walks the streets of Berlin and only rarely returns to his dilapidated apartment, which actually belongs to Susanne Wallner, a young woman who comes back to the city after having been liberated from a concentration camp where she has been incarcerated for the last three years. Initially forced to share the apartment – repeatedly called an ‘atelier’ in the film to emphasize its double-function as a workspace – in a state of uneasy co-existence, Hans and Susanne fall in love. When Hans learns that Ferdinand Brückner (Arno Paulsen), his former Wehrmacht captain who is responsible for a massacre of Polish civilians on Christmas Eve three years prior, is still alive and well, he sets out to kill him. As an entrepreneur, Ferdinand has easily adapted to the new situation under occupation. He presents himself as a good democrat, model citizen and successful capitalist, concealing his eager partaking in the atrocities of the National Socialists. In the film’s climax, it is only thanks to Susanne’s melodramatic intervention that Hans does not shoot Ferdinand. Instead, the eponymous murderer among us is convicted and sentenced to jail in a fair trial by the Allies, while the couple reclaim their domestic space in an individual act of unification. As this short synopsis indicates, Staudte’s film advocates for a process of denazification in which the discovery and removal of high-ranking war criminals ensures the nation’s ideological purification after the Third Reich and thus re-establishes a safe home for everyone else.5 Because Hans – an officer in the Wehrmacht, in 1942 positioned at the Eastern front, where the aforementioned massacre occurred  – confronts his guilt, begins a heteronormative relationship and re-enters the workforce, he can be redeemed and eventually become an accepted member of a democratic society despite his Nazi past. Susanne, on the other hand, functions

126 Domesticity Under Siege

primarily as an enabler, before she retakes her place in the domestic sphere as a selfless caregiver essentially concerned with, in her own words, ‘leben, arbeiten und helfen’ [‘living, working, and helping’] (00:46:53–00:46:56).6 Along these lines, the expressionist elements in Die Mörder sind unter uns had long been discussed as signifiers of the nation’s shattered psyche and its painful reconstruction after capitulation.7 Over the last two decades, however, exciting inroads have been made into the rubble, discussing it as more than psychological projections of personal distress as the result of national defeat.8 These supplementary approaches invest in expanding our understanding of rubble films’ visual registers and formal strategies.9 In a similar vein, I focus on the deceptively expressionist ruins of modernity and their dialectic relation to realist impulses that probe the ontological quality of the rubble itself.10 In particular, I examine how Die Mörder sind unter uns addresses issues of home and domesticity – including the incorporation of the concept of Heimat into the blood-and-soil ideology of Nazism during the Third Reich – through the figure of the Heimkehrer-flâneur, a critical, if at times absent-minded (and even intoxicated) observer of the nation’s altered topographies. To be clear, it is not my goal to challenge the film’s narrative of personal and national redemption unfolding in the chiaroscuro rubble but rather to identify elements in Die Mörder sind unter uns that reframe its message of a new beginning unaffected by National Socialism. These elements are connected to modes of perception and processes of sensorial recalibration and thus link the cinematic representation of the destruction to the reclaiming of the notion of home on film after the Nazis’ conquest of the imaginary. As Heimkehrer-flâneurs, Susanne and Hans belong to a new phenotype that emerged as a minor motif in the Trümmerfilm [rubble film] of the immediate postwar years as the nation attempted to redefine what coming back to the post-fascist home meant after 1945. This cinematic category indexed the almost insurmountable physical and ideological challenges to film-making itself after the rupture of civilization initiated by the Third Reich had also affected the industry on an infrastructural as well as an ideological level. In Staudte’s film, these particular Heimkehrer undertook a critical reformulation of the task of the Weimar flâneur, on screen no less, in the sense that the latter’s art of getting lost in the city produced an anaesthetic effect in a space devoid of clearly demarcated lines between the interior and the exterior, between home and not-home.11 After 1945, Benjamin’s leisurely yet observant man on the Schwelle [threshold] was replaced by types such as the Heimkehrer, the shellshocked soldiers coming home from imprisonment or the Trümmerfrauen [the women of the rubble], who stood in a more immediate (and, one must add, tactile) relation to the urban environment. For these Heimkehrer-flâneurs no outside to the ruin existed  – even when occupying the supposedly private spaces of their home(s) – and thus for them, there was hardly a vantage point from which to take in the totality of the destruction as a detached observer, let alone a leisurely one. The overall situation had changed drastically by nature of an existential crisis that is as much a result of the air raids on Berlin as Nazi Germany’s complete defeat by the Axis Forces. Rediscovering, experiencing and reshaping their broken home, the

Searching for (a) Home in the Rubble 127

Heimkehrer-flâneurs confronted a phantasmagoric scenery, at the same time familiar and uncanny, that went beyond Benjamin’s more subtle alterations of cityscapes as indicators of historical trajectories under capitalism. In Die Mörder sind unter uns, Benjamin’s profane illuminations – ‘the instant in which an image of the past sparks a flash of recognition in the present’ – are violently realized in the ruins of modernity (Lowenstein 2005: 14). The rubble on display in Die Mörder sind unter uns illustrates the sudden reconfigurations of Nazi Germany’s national spaces, the Volksräume, in ways that address questions of cause and effect and eschew notions of ahistoricity, embracing instead what Georgina Downey in her contribution to this edited volume calls the forward-pointing, ‘promissory quality’ inscribed in the destruction (2023). In Die Mörder sind unter uns, renegotiations of a drastically altered home as the result of the Second World War occur in two interrelated ways. The first takes place primarily on the level of narrative, as the main characters seek to find their way around Berlin and establish a new sense of belonging. As briefly mentioned above, the text argues for a sanitized post-fascist Germany, successfully purged of the transgressions of the past after those ‘truly’ responsible for National Socialism’s catastrophe have been identified and tried. The moral project attached to this process of settling in, the narrative suggests, rests on the ability to accept and make hospitable the redistributed spaces of living and to accept and integrate your randomly assigned neighbours and fellow survivors into post-war Germany’s domestic matrix. Broadly speaking, Hans is initially repelled by the concept of home whose demarcation lines seem perforated to him, while Susanne feels intrinsically drawn (back) to it, acutely aware of its geographical and affective coordinates. The second occurs on the formal level and is evident at moments which Staudte performs radical stylistic shifts – resulting in what Robert Shandley has described as ‘competing generic structures’ in his influential work on Die Mörder sind unter uns – that probe the (cinematic) rubble as a historical configuration (2001: 29). This in turn evokes Johannes von Moltke’s call for a ‘dialectical construction of Heimat’ that unsettles ultimately unstable dichotomies inscribed in the term, in particular local and foreign, place and space, traditional and modern (2005: 14). In Hans’s case, Staudte oscillates between competing registers, exemplified in the interplay of expressionist techniques and the more (neo-) realist moments in the film. The male Heimkehrerflâneur initially dwells in flat expressionist landscapes devoid of other people but leaves them behind as he learns to perceive the rubble as lived-in spaces instead of static backgrounds. Susanne, on the other hand, already comes equipped with the ability to see the historicity inscribed in the city’s ruinous topography, including the people that populate it. Before she returns to the safety of a heteronormative relationship framed by the four walls of her apartment-qua-workplace, her alterity as a victimized, female Heimkehrer-flâneur allows her to reintegrate the ‘foreign’ (and quite renitent, one might add) elements that occupy her home into the matrix of a renewed German community – and this project decidedly includes the former Wehrmacht officer Hans.12

128 Domesticity Under Siege

Making Berlin safe again: The Heimkehrer- Flâneurs in Die Mörder sind unter uns and the reclaiming of home The two ‘discordant’ protagonists in Die Mörder sind unter uns, Hans Mertens and Susanne Wallner, both seek to retrieve and remap a lost home that has been physically altered by the war and affectively compromised by National Socialism’s inhumane ideologies (Shandley 2001: 31). Hans is a former officer whose initial belief in Nazi ideology remains largely undiscussed in the film, while Susanne returns from a concentration camp where she was interned, as the narrative tentatively suggests, because of her father’s political activism. While neither of the two is Jewish, they represent the categories of perpetrator and victim, respectively. The first half of this chapter is devoted to Hans hesitantly reclaiming his home, not only morally but also ontologically and epistemologically, while the second half focuses on scenes that put Susanne’s ‘feminine’ view centre stage as she learns to love the second-hand murderer among her and offer him a rebuilt domestic safe space. I discuss Hans’s relation to a surrounding landscape that shifts constantly and which eventually he seeks to stabilize, an environment he must learn to experience not as a theatrical spectacle but as a concrete, three-dimensional historical configuration. In Die Mörder sind unter uns, Hans initially fails to properly assess the world around him as historicized. Unable to acknowledge the state of Berlin’s condition as the direct result of Nazi Germany’s misguided war efforts – and thus as something for which he, too, is in part to blame – Hans is not at home in the spaces he traverses, his incompatibility with these spaces visually emphasized through the off-kilter relations established between him and his surroundings. His subsequent transformation suggests that he gradually begins to perceive his home anew, not, the film’s stylistic choices suggest, with the ‘cynical, desperate eyes of German Expressionism, but rather with new optimistic eyes’ (Brockmann 2010: 206). Expressionist cinema, Anna Powell argues, is characterized ‘by a jagged Gothic geometry’ that has a strong interest in the ways in which a change in direction illuminates obstacles as well as the impulse to overcome these impediments, both physical and psychological (2005: 29). These abrupt cinematic shifts in vertical and horizontal movement are realized in the ways Hans moves through the frame as he struggles to leave his expressionist confinement behind and transition into a realist, which is to say historicized representation of Berlin.13 Through its formal structure Die Mörder sind unter uns not only negotiates the need for a shift in the individual’s way of perceiving his or her home but also has a stake in the difficult reconfigurations of German visual culture after National Socialism. Hans and Susanne traverse a complex cinematic landscape still tainted by its prior co-option into Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda machinery. As such Die Mörder sind unter uns stands at the forefront of post-war aesthetic debates in the context of complete national reinvention. The film’s formal sensibilities point towards an extra-diegetic examination of the ways in which home is negotiated and made representable again in the image world of German post-war cinema. Thus,

Searching for (a) Home in the Rubble 129

Staudte engages with the debate in the arts about Realism and Expressionism, which essentially centred on tensions between mimesis and abstraction. Pitting Realism and Expressionism against each other, intellectuals from Klaus Mann to Bernhard Ziegler to Georg Lukács weighed in from different sides of the divide. At the core of the debate was the question of whether Expressionism had succumbed to a ‘formalism that disfigures the familiar and repeats the alienation of the modern world in the decadent products of many modern artists’ or whether it had in fact been the only feasible reaction to a modernity that would result in the Holocaust (Nägele 2004: 842). While initially a literary discussion, the seemingly irreconcilable dichotomy between the two paradigms resurfaces, slightly recalibrated, as a point of contention for post-war German cinema when it attempted to distance itself from the culture of the Third Reich. Interestingly, however, Staudte’s film establishes Expressionism as that which must be overcome. The idea that psychological dispositions are projected outwards – one of the calling cards of Weimar Expressionism – is still valid in Die Mörder sind unter uns, yet the text reverses some of the style’s value designations to express the various blind spots, conflicting perspectives and irreconcilable tensions (as opposed to stylistic stability, historical clean breaks and black-and-white delineations of guilt) as the nation attempted to redefine what coming back to a post-fascist home meant. In a sense, then, the film articulates Staudte’s own insecurities as a director working in the shadow of Nazi cinema. In Die Mörder sind unter uns expressionist imagery signifies non-home. This said, one must be careful not to read the film’s expressionist qualities – which, to complicate matters, are often ironically the result of on-location shots – as an accusation of a high-modernist aesthetics significantly shaped by Jewish film professionals who exported it to Hollywood when they fled Nazi Germany.14 What does matter in this context, however, is Expressionism’s ‘feeling of constriction’ which suppresses a ‘sense of freedom to move about’ and ‘underscores a narrative centered on control, fear, and paranoia’ (Kaes 2004: 720). Given Staudte’s anti-fascist agenda, his use of expressionistic imagery must be understood in this context of its radical Otherness, with regard to both the sensual distortion and the immovability of its protagonists rather than as a critique of the signature cinema of the Weimar Republic. In the opening scene of Die Mörder sind unter uns, Friedl Behn-Grund and Eugen Klagemann’s skilful cinematography captures piles of rubble and links the palpable feeling of standstill to the representation of debris in a crisp black-and-white tableau indeed reminiscent of Germany’s formerly haunted screen, a haunting that is now a feature of everyday life. The first frames are shot as close-ups of objects which, for a couple of seconds, set the signifiers of physical damage into relation with several other pregnant signs in the mise en scène. Among the various objects that litter the landscape are a helmet, a tin can and withered weeds. The city is present, but for the time being it remains a blurred background. Although the opening frames can hardly be mistaken for a still photograph, movement is essentially absent. Out of necessity, Staudte frequently opted for frequent on-location shots, yet immediately makes the audience aware that his film – like the world to which it refers – resides on the border between the

130 Domesticity Under Siege

dream-like and confused quality reminiscent of expressionist cinema and the raw ‘the world speaks for itself ’ approach of Italian Neo-Realism.15 As a result, the mise en scène of Die Mörder sind unter uns signals instability and simultaneously conveys the paralysis of time through stationery objects that have outlived their purpose, their standstill amplified through the slow-moving cinematography and the overall scarce use of editing. Die Mörder sind unter uns opens in a liminal space in which a theatrical quality subtends the neo-realist representation of Berlin in 1945, when the film takes place. During the film’s first minutes, Hans continuously appears as if trapped in jelly, an arrested condition reinforced through an at best vertical and at worst motionless visual register that gradually gives way to a horizontal and mobile one. Hans emerges out of a cross – an object that conceals him at first – as he rises from a realm outside of history into a city unhinged, a transition that the aesthetic hybridity of the film underscores. Staudte suggests that movement through Berlin – even though marred by a profound incompatibility between the individual and his environment – becomes the prerequisite for the moral project with which the film engages. Hans sluggishly strolls down the street in a relatively long take of forty-five seconds, while the camera follows him, without any cuts, from a long shot to a medium close-up. The canted angles that dominate the first scene render his walk a continuous descent from the upper left of the frame to the lower right so that the spatial confusion adds to the suspended temporality of what, for Hans, is a city of the dead. In the shadows of the rubble, the camera then reluctantly abandons its vertical trajectory and follows Hans diagonally, adapting to his slow pace. When he suddenly stops, the camera lingers on for the duration of five seconds while the protagonist looks around and takes in the ragged concrete ridges where ‘das moderne Kabarett’ [‘the modern cabaret’] promises ‘Tanz, Stimmung, Humor’ [‘dance, fun, humor’] (00:02:11). As Hans strides towards the club’s entrance – more of a home to him than the besieged (by the outside world, memories, nosy neighbours and eventually, the female Other) apartment into which he moved – the film utilizes a fade-out. Tellingly, Staudte never shows him crossing the threshold into the entertainment venue, a phantasmagoric space of intoxication, forgetting, and libidinal energies that he clearly prefers over his negatively charged domestic space.16 In his 1952 speech ‘Bekenntnis zur Trümmerliteratur’ [‘In Defense of Rubble Literature’], the author and later Nobel Prize–winner Heinrich Böll observed that Germany’s cities had been bombed into ‘graveyards’ that reminded him of ‘stage settings’ (2006: 272).17 Echoing Böll’s description of this phenomenological shift, Hans calls the city a necropolis as he leads Susanne to one of the broken windows after they meet for the first time and prompts her to take a look after a hostile standoff at the door during which he acts as a gatekeeper. Mertens dares Susanne, telling her, ‘Gehen Sie ruhig durch die Ruinen, dort finden Sie ihre Gräber noch’ [‘go ahead, walk through the ruins, there you will still find their graves’], assuming that during the war she had abandoned her fellow German citizens and hid in the countryside (00:10:53–00:10:56). Hans’s condescension is quite cynical, given that he, because of

Searching for (a) Home in the Rubble 131

his military affiliation, was one of the aggressors who now accuses one of the victims of ignorance and cowardice – he is clearly prone to mixing up the two categories. Unable to draw the connection, he experiences the city as detached from temporal progression, which is to say as one of Böll’s all-too-real stage-settings in which everyday life amounts only to moments of theatricality that in turn prohibit any sense of responsibility. The scene depicts Hans and Susanne – the soon-to-be couple brought together by chance and necessity  – looking at the city through a broken window whose ragged shards of glass superimpose fissures over the two observers.18 In the midst of Hans and Susanne’s deliberations about sharing the apartment, Staudte briefly inserts an artificial-looking panorama, a rectangular frame that evokes the movie screen itself framing a nocturnal still life of Berlin that mirrors Hans’s understanding of the city as ultimately artificial and lacking depth. By extension, the viewer is invited to understand the ruined cityscape as indexical of a style and a philosophy, Expressionism, now relegated to Germany’s past; its darkness literally exists outside of one’s home on which it consistently encroaches, threatening to eradicate the threshold. As such, the scene holds up a dark mirror to similar scenes of city-gazing in the Third Reich’s so-called home-front films, in which British air raids often framed intimate love stories and war constituted a positive force and catalyst in the lives of German civilians.19 This scene of a broken domesticity is dominated by frame motives that draw attention to the lack of borders  – visualized, quite literally, via missing window panes  – and suggest an erasure of the differences between internal and external spaces.20 In Die Mörder sind unter uns the two paradigms have bled into each other and thus become indeterminable, signifying the dissolution of a possible distinction between the frontline and the home front. Dagmar Barnouw rightly reads the visual composition as proof that ‘there is no clear distinction between inside and outside and the ateliers are constantly invaded by rubble carried in by wind, rain, and snow’ (2008: 52). The dark urban landscape infringing on the perforated walls of their home – a sound-stage background strongly gesturing towards painted expressionist motifs – emphasizes Hans’s understanding of the city as a space that prohibits any sense of security (see Figure 6.1). After he passive-aggressively pressures Susanne into offering him to stay and share the apartment (or, alternatively, trying to get her to leave), he agrees in principle to co-inhabit the space but exits immediately – an escape reflex – once again headed for the nightclub, the only place of shelter from the burden of history that he knows before Susanne selflessly reconstructs their home. The cloak of night covers the ruins of Berlin and, after a cut, the film immediately shows Hans, drunk, in the ‘Kabarett’ that clearly belongs to the unreal, nocturnal realm established in the preceding sequence. Once again, the film never shows him actually crossing the threshold, so to speak, as he merely materializes in the dance club without ever entering it. With dancehall music still playing in the background, a lap dissolve then gradually cuts from the graceful movements of a dancer to the awaking, destroyed streets of Berlin, which, in Hans’s field of vision, are devoid of

132 Domesticity Under Siege

Fig. 6.1  Hans and Susanne in Front of a Window Framing a Nocturnal Berlin, still from Die Mörder sind unter uns, directed by Wolfgang Staudte, 1946 © DEFA-Stiftung/Friedl Behn-Grund, Eugen Klagemann.

other people, fellow Germans and members of the Allied Forces alike (00:18:29– 00:18:55). Even in the film’s opening scene – where others are present, in particular children, but also some adults mostly delegated to the frame’s margins as fragmented bodies – Hans does not pay attention to any of them as if they are immaterial beings, ghosts of a past he cannot see.21 After Hans exits the dance club after a night of heavy drinking, we see his reflection in a pool of water, distorted by ripples which result from falling rain drops, a cinematic convention evoking the visual blur of a person half asleep. The unstable reflection – through the overlapping imagery of a lap dissolve still connected with the oneiric world of the club – in turn gives way to a crisp and unvarnished, realist representation of the rubble. For several seconds, the city exists in an in-between state of dreaming and awakening, reminding viewers that they, too, are looking at a mediated version of the destruction, which they cannot easily identify as either photorealistic representation or special effect. The continuous tilting shot that elevates the perspective from a puddle of mud to a medium-to-long shot of Hans staring at the destroyed buildings culminates in a total that captures the barren landscape of the city, one of the panoramas that threaten to confuse the reluctant Heimkehrer-flâneur. The border between the visual styles, however, remains permeable even when, eventually, the ratio shifts in the favour of realism. Soon after, the film’s most pronounced moment with regard to the blurring of styles takes place in the ‘night scene where the couple walks through a passage of ruins, the ridges of structures in the background carefully lit’ (Rentschler 2010: 432).22 Both registers, the expressionist and the realist, collide and fuse in this scene, during which Hans’s moral quest reaches its tipping point as Susanne quite suddenly confesses her love

Searching for (a) Home in the Rubble 133

for him and Berlin is incrementally re-established as his home. Still – after coming face to face with the war criminal Ferdinand Brückner, whom he believed dead – Hans remains shaken by his traumatic memories, not yet visualized and only hinted at via fragmented sound effects. The narrative makes it clear that his subconscious guilt exonerates him; he was indeed appalled by Nazism’s atrocities, which in turn marks him as fit for resocialization. The appearance of Ferdinand sets in motion Hans’s engagement with the world around him, driving the processes that turn Berlin into the latter’s home again. When the captain asks Hans, whom he deems more knowledgeable in terms of Berlin’s restructured topography, to lead him to a ‘Lokal, wo es auch ein paar nette Mädchen gibt’ [‘bar where I can also find some nice girls’] (00:50:52), Hans agrees, with the intention of killing Ferdinand already fermenting in his mind. While the film’s art direction displays Berlin as a desolate wasteland in which a murder might go unnoticed, the actual walk through the ruins plays out differently for the two characters. The establishing shot to the whole sequence is the first one to include clear horizontal panning associated with Hans, a remarkable change in visual style in contrast to the film’s opening sequence. Although disrupted by several slightly canted perspectives and further distorted through the use of a telephoto lens, the scene conveys an overall feeling of progression for Hans. In the cramped ruins and completely oblivious of the people removing the rubble, Ferdinand does not navigate as effortlessly, at one point exclaiming, ‘Halt, Hans, laufen Sie mir doch nicht weg, ich bin doch fremd in dem Gebirge hier’ [‘stop, Hans, don’t run away from me, I am foreign to these mountain ranges’] (00:51:36–00:51:40). As the topography grows increasingly less populated, Ferdinand starts feeling disoriented because, in contrast to Hans, he has not sufficiently engaged with the city’s affordances and its overall position in the continuum of history. The film shows Ferdinand living in a spacious, bright and tidy bourgeois home, that he touts as ‘tip-top in Ordnung’ [‘A-OK’] and in which the glass windows have already been replaced (00:42:00). Represented in a starkly realist mode, the sealed-off location – unlike Hans and Susanne’s border- and window-less apartment that renders privacy difficult – allows Ferdinand to separate himself from the outside world, that is to say from the historical events that so drastically transformed the nation into a pseudo-expressionist phantasmagoria. Kept clean by a maid and overseen by a wife that, according to Susanne, is ‘beneidenswert unverbraucht’ [‘enviably unspent’], the apartment represents an enclosed reserve from which the recent past has been effectively barred (00:41:26). In this sequence, Die Mörder sind unter uns suggests that the new German man has to learn to accept and connect both temporal layers and thus link processes of defeat and reconstruction. While Hans eventually experiences the destruction that the Nazis brought forth, Ferdinand spatially and psychologically distances himself from these personal ruins of modernity. Displaying his unwillingness to take responsibility for the past, Ferdinand describes the post-war urban geography as the ‘reinste Wüste’ [‘most barren of deserts’], a desolate space which one

134 Domesticity Under Siege

doesn’t want to see and therefore ‘sollte man vergessen’ [‘should forget’] (00:52:14– 00:52:20). As Hans answers ‘aber das kann man nicht’ [‘but one can’t’], the close-ups of the two actors become almost completely static, suggesting that Hans’ newfound agency is threatened during this looming act of vigilantism (00:52:21). This moment of suspended movement and progress that negotiates the memory politics of postwar Germany is resolved by the sudden intrusion of human life into the seemingly barren desert. A desperate woman, looking for a doctor to help her suffocating child, exerts a strong feeling of urgency and gives depth and thus substance to the rubble. When she emerges out of thin air with her cry for help, she inadvertently keeps Hans from shooting Ferdinand. This time, Staudte shows Hans’s crossing the threshold in a continuous shot. The space into which Hans enters – which Ferdinand is unwilling to do  – is rank and dark, full of shadows that only barely obscure the degree of physical damage, a condition emphasized visually by the utilization of vertical movement and canted angles again. As this return to the visual language at the beginning of the film suggests, acquiring mastery over the ruin-scape is not a pleasant task. Overcoming his anxieties and inhibitions, he treats the suffering child and contributes to a new cycle of life in the ruins. The possibility to provide medical support puts Hans back on track in terms of his work ethic and moral purpose in life, which eventually sets him apart from Ferdinand – with his privileged and secluded lifestyle that severed all connections to his earlier identity – who perceives the post-war ruins as totally flat, both with regard to historicity and spatiality. On his way home, Hans appears to be a changed man; the short montage that shows his walk through the rubble is full of energy and horizontal movement. Once he arrives at the apartment, an upside-down shadow that moves into the light, he confesses his love for Susanne and finds shelter in the domestic space that she has diligently prepared for his eventual return. Even after Hans finds a new purpose in life, however, Die Mörder sind unter uns’s realist paradigm does not remain stable, which is to say that Hans’s state as a redeemed man is threatened by a potential relapse into his ontological and psychological crisis. Central to Hans’s potential breakdown is the misconception that he will be redeemed by killing Ferdinand, which would prove a self-deceptive act in the sense that Hans’s guilt exists independently of Ferdinand’s and must consequently be negotiated separately. With Christmas approaching  – the day when Ferdinand ordered the massacre in the Polish village three years ago – Hans becomes restless again and the visual register follows suit. The rubble now a part of his identity, he walks into a roofless, bombed-out church, and sees snowflakes swirling inside the structure during mass. In this scene, the readings of the rubble in Die Mörder sind unter uns as a projection of the protagonist’s mental state are clearly valid. With the choir singing, Staudte places Hans in a contrastive composition whose loose framing presents him as utterly forlorn (01:09:39–01:09:54). As he casts a feeble shadow on the walls, the sheer force of the rubble weighing in on him threatens to paralyze him again before Susanne can intervene one final time.

Searching for (a) Home in the Rubble 135

Leading up to this last temptation, the decidedly expressionist scene depicts him as demarcated from the worshippers who are visually absent in the long shot in which we only hear them sing; they only become part of the frame after Hans turns his back on them in order to leave and the camera tracks to the right. As the former perpetrator, even one who attempted, futilely, to intervene and stop the killing, he remains excluded from spiritual salvation. The film finally allows its audience to watch the atrocious events as they transpired in the Polish village, linking space to processes of remembrance. After the hectic flashback, full of lap dissolves and disjunctive splits between sounds and images to emphasize the validity of Hans’s trauma, Staudte seemingly completes his educational project on the level of narrative. Due to Susanne’s last-second intervention, Hans does not kill Ferdinand. Instead, Ferdinand is arrested and put on trial, while Hans finally returns home. Die Mörder sind unter uns’s expressionist final shot of a graveyard is thus not only a visualization of the war’s many dead, it also signals National Socialism’s potential return as men such as Ferdinand and even Hans remain susceptible to a misreading of historical continuity. At this point, it makes sense to shift the focus on Susanne. In scholarship on Die Mörder sind unter uns, she is often read as a home-making deus ex machina, a partly valid evaluation that is reductive nonetheless. As William Rasch argues, ‘it may be true that rubble films were “largely blind” to what concerns today’s viewers’ but he immediately follows this up with the question ‘what [it is] in those films’ that evokes blindness (2008: 4). Along these lines, I search for the blind spots in Susanne’s representation. In the remainder of this chapter, I examine her specific realization as a female Heimkehrer-flâneur. In particular, I look at the ways in which Staudte highlights her perceptual capacities and illustrate the uncanny aspects of the new home she encounters and reshapes. At a cursory glance, Susanne’s narrative function appears straightforward in the melodramatic context of Die Mörder sind unter uns. She returns to Berlin, where she meets Hans and falls in love with him. Through her patience and empathy, she enables Hans to reintegrate into German post-war society. Susanne also intervenes when Hans is about to kill Ferdinand, displaying a less emotional understanding of and approach to justice. In other scenes, Staudte shows her as a woman of the rubble, which is to say that immediately upon arrival she begins cleaning up the apartment she shares with Hans. When Hans realizes what she is about to do, he reacts aggressively, perceiving her as an irritant because she embodies the return of the repressed on multiple levels. An icon of newfound domesticity, Susanne not only rearranges her apartment physically, she also literally brings her work home without hesitation. One scene shows her designing and painting posters, something, the narrative insinuates, she used to do professionally before the war. Susanne is thus the best of both worlds: someone who simultaneously contributes to the reconstruction of Germany through her professional work, and a home-builder who rarely has to leave the domestic spaces to which she so willingly returns as soon as she has been freed from the concentration camp. To be clear, it is not my intention to reframe Susanne as an inherently subversive element in the

136 Domesticity Under Siege

text, but I do wish to identify moments in the narrative that trouble an exclusively conservative reading of the character. The differences between Susanne and Hans in the context of the Heimkehrerflâneur are significant in this regard. Whereas Hans has to re-learn to perceive of his home as a lived-in space to complete his personal didactic project of coming to terms with the past, Susanne already experiences the world around her as the result of historic processes from the moment she enters the narrative. Through Susanne’s eyes, the text succeeds in illuminating  – in a Benjaminian sense  – the historical indexes that created the rubble in the first place. In contrast to Hans’s introduction to the narrative as a ghostly element already dwelling in Berlin’s haunted topography, Susanne arrives on a train that brings home the displaced masses of modernity, a mundane method of transportation that also evokes associations with the concentration camps.23 When the train arrives at the partly ruined station (after having cut the frame in halves to announce its disruptive power), it releases a large number of people who move directly toward and past the camera before the focus settles on one of them, Susanne. In contrast to Hans’s, her world is already filled with others, even though members of the Allied Forces are still conspicuously absent from her version of Heimat. To underscore her ability to perceive causality, Susanne’s introduction into the realist urban environment is marked by a striking point-ofview shot, ‘by definition a subjective, and hence expressionistic device’ (Turnock 2019: 25). Yet, Susanne is precisely not a stand-in for the internal conflicts usually made visible in expressionist cinema, but rather someone who sees all-too-clearly, categorically speaking, after her ordeal.24 Through her unspecified experiences in the concentration camp she has already gained a less distorted perspective on her altered home. It is indubitably true that her pronounced capacities as a proficient Heimkehrer-flâneur in the end merely qualify her to fulfil two main functions: (a) to accept and eventually love the former National Socialist from the moment she meets him and (b) to rebuild a welcoming and inclusive domestic space of the German middle class into which they can both move – albeit not without resistance from the neighbours – by the end of the narrative. Yet, Die Mörder sind unter uns also allows Susanne to negotiate more complex aspects of the nation’s status quo during the rubble years.25 As mentioned above, Die Mörder sind unter uns showcases Susanne’s gendered ability to perceive her home historically, both the neighbourhood in which she lived before the war and the apartment she had leased up to her internment and which she now reclaims. Her introductory scene emphasizes Susanne’s recalibrated sensorium as soon as she steps off the train and observes the train station and the disabled Heimkehrer that primarily populate it. Whereas Hans initially remains in front of the rubble (and is never depicted as crossing the threshold until much later in the narrative), Susanne moves right into the image’s field of depth as her gaze penetrates it with the ‘superhuman sharpness and distance of the camera eye’ (Barnouw 2008: 46). The duration of Susanne’s POV shot  – a perspective which the audience is altogether denied in Hans’s case  – is uncharacteristically long, a

Searching for (a) Home in the Rubble 137

noteworthy fact given that the first-person perspective is often associated with the unconventional in narrative cinema (00:03:23–00:03:40).26 Staudte thus evokes a strong sense of continuity, as he hints at the possibility of a coherent temporality among the spatial chaos and implies that the cinematic image is able to suture the city’s disjunctions. As Susanne moves through the station hall, the POV shot approaches a faded travel poster of a building in Nuremberg that reads ‘das schöne Deutschland’ [‘the beautiful Germany’]. Through Susanne’s eyes, the film directly confronts the viewers with a double exposure by contrasting the pre-war photograph with the filmic image of post-war rubble. When the lap dissolve replaces the photograph on the poster with the ruins of a similar-looking structure in Berlin, Staudte creates a dialectical image that offers a powerful visual accusation of National Socialism’s wretched aspirations. The image operates metonymically in that it visualizes the then-and-now of Hitler’s regime through the ruins of a Reich [empire] that was supposed to last for a thousand years.27 The gradual replacement of one image in one medium with another simultaneously indexes continuousness and rupture  – not to mention processes of perception per se  – and in doing so complicates both categories by drawing attention to the act of looking as a means of making sense of the world. Susanne already acknowledges the ruins as the result of the Nazi regime’s efforts of aggressive national expansion and as such the burden of initiating progress falls on her. For her, post-war Germany is not an ahistorical place arrested in eternal destruction but a drastically reshaped home that demands restoration after the successful process of recognition as such. Whereas Hans’s development is formally negotiated through the vast landscapes in which the camera often places him, Susanne is equipped with a probing gaze that pierces the rubble’s illusion of theatricality and makes possible the realization that borders have been redrawn on multiple levels. When Susanne – by association still equipped with the super-human gaze of the camera established in the preceding POV shot – arrives at the front of the house in which her apartment is located, the scene’s composition shifts towards an inherently dark register, a counterpoint to the brightness that dominates her entrance to Berlin. Before she arrives, Staudte shows Hans stumbling drunkenly through the shadowy staircase, prompting negative comments from the other tenants. He is part of the expressionist darkness that holds the community in its thrall. It is the first scene in Die Mörder sind unter uns shot on a soundstage, staging her return home as a decidedly unreal experience, that threatens to reverse her ability to perceive the world as it ‘really’ is. The camera shows Susanne from behind as she approaches the rugged façade of the building. Before she crosses the threshold into this formerly private space – the space that now houses someone uninvited, Hans, and that will eventually contain her as a devoted housewife – she pauses briefly and gazes at the building, a smile spreading on her face. The audience is only able to see her smile, however, because the camera zooms in, past Susanne, an optical gimmick that catches her reflection in a broken mirror as a beam of lights from beyond the surface illuminates

138 Domesticity Under Siege

Fig. 6.2  Susanne Arriving at her Apartment, still from Die Mörder sind unter uns, directed by Wolfgang Staudte, 1946. © DEFA-Stiftung/Friedl Behn-Grund, Eugen Klagemann.

the darkness (see Figure 6.2). The broken mirror symbolizes Susanne’s equally broken home, yet this also constitutes the moment in which cinematic refraction takes the place of reflection, at least for the time being. To the right of the frame is a makeshift fence with the word ‘Optik’ written above it – both a symbol of something that needs to be overcome and, literally, a perceptual barrier – whose wooden bars only barely allow a powerful light, a glimmer of hope, to filter in, a visual hint at an illuminating force seeking to find its way (00:04:54). Susanne’s ascend into the salvific light (of the cinematic apparatus), however, leads her right through the chiaroscuro twilight that awaits her inside the building’s staircase. Nonetheless, she enters her former abode without further trepidation, ready to re-establish a sense of order in its porous and besieged walls. The shattered mirror image of Susanne occurs in the first scene in the film to use sets instead of on-site locations, emphasizing the uncanny ontological quality of what used to be home and despite its changed appearance still is.28 Something hides in the cracks and fissures of bombed-out Berlin, however, assigning a complexity to the concept of home that Hans’s quest never truly unearths. Up to this point, the director conveys his intentions mostly through visual means and background noise, suggesting that it is in fact a well-known visual language that writes postwar Germany’s narrative of national reinvention. In this supremely expressionist

Searching for (a) Home in the Rubble 139

environment, Susanne’s return triggers gossip among her fellow Germans  – the enemy within, as it were  – for whom she represents their own repressed guilt. A victim of National Socialism, Susanne enters a space that does not offer her shelter any longer, a home under siege by neighbours that show hostility towards her because she is not supposed to reclaim these homely spaces. What is more, she reminds them of the absences in the apartment building, which index the ‘disappearance’ of their former neighbours during the Third Reich. In this compromised home not only covert rejection awaits but also a former Wehrmacht officer who has claimed her personal space. Despite her superior perceptive faculties, however, she is unable to ‘see’ that Hans was, at least with regard to his military career, a National Socialist, albeit one with a guilty conscience. As the symbol of the broken mirror implies, not everything is revealed to her – and when she finally realizes it, she does not mind. What follows is the scene, discussed above, in which Staudte establishes Hans’s perspective of Berlin’s rubble as a flat background. Re-reading the same scene with a focus on Susanne allows for a largely overlooked aspect of reclaiming one’s home in Die Mörder sind unter uns, the clash of German victims and perpetrators other than Ferdinand. The dialectical processes that lead to Hans’s exoneration and Susanne’s eventual delegation to the role of maternal caretaker are put in sharp relief here. Susanne, as Staudte implies, already has a better understanding of what is necessary to mend the rifts that subtend the nation. As such, it is her responsibility to forgive her enemy by preparing a home for him out of the ruins which he has, by association, brought forth. At one point Staudte shows Susanne physically interacting with the rubble. Immediately, Hans reprimands her for cleaning up the apartment, condescendingly calling her efforts ‘hausfräuliche Passionen’ [‘passions of a housewife’] aimed, in his words, at the restoration of the bourgeois order (00:22:10–00:22:21). While Susanne, lingering statically inside the domestic sphere, resumes her restorative work – both in terms of the household and her vocation as a visual artist – Hans declares that ‘ich erinnere mich nicht daran Ihnen gesagt zu haben, dass ich mich hier wohl fühle’ [‘I don’t remember telling you that I like it here’], a phrase that the English subtitles of The Ice Storm DVD translate as ‘who said I feel at home’ (00:22:30; my emphasis). Her haptic engagement with the city triggers an abject revulsion in Hans, as he cannot endure the thought of the rubble being removable and thus becoming real. Unable to settle into the condition of wholesome domesticity, Hans prefers ‘Spazieren’ [‘taking a walk’] because, as he claims, ‘man hat ja jetzt so viel Platz auf den Straßen’ [‘there is so much room now in the streets’] (00:23:23–00:23:25). Yet, when he leaves, he grudgingly offers to take out a bucket filled with debris, his first contact with the physical reality of Berlin. It is no coincidence that the following shot, in true expressionist fashion, depicts the crumbling façade of a bombed-out building. At this point, Staudte insinuates, Hans’s own façade begins to crack  – what Susanne puts back together in reality, he deconstructs in his head. When he returns from his aimless walk, the atelier is bright and clean, its chiaroscuro veneer scrubbed away by Susanne.

140 Domesticity Under Siege

The act of cleansing and rebuilding immediately triggers a reaction from the neighbours, who accuse Hans and Susanne of an inappropriate sexual relationship based on her domestic activities, ‘wo sie doch für ihn einkauft, kocht, wäscht’ [‘now that she goes shopping for him, cooks and does his laundry’] (00:32:44–00:32:50).29 Thus, Susanne’s selfless efforts not only initially overwhelm and antagonize Hans but also alienate many of her neighbours who in turn assign illicit libidinal energies to her acts of rebuilding. Whereas they tolerate the insufferable, self-pitying Hans – even if they criticize his alcoholism – the former concentration camp inmate with the audacity to reclaim and reconfigure the spaces of Heimat upsets the community. While Hans realizes at this point that he has to overcome his idea of a Germany outside of historical progress, many of the fellow travellers and profiteers who populate the building react in inimical fashion because they refuse to be reminded of their guilt. The concept of home for them, Die Mörder sind unter uns implies, is thus as much under siege from within as from without, namely by the figure of the female, German – if non-Jewish – victim, a damning evaluation of the Zero Hour in which the ideologies of National Socialism are still very much a part of German post-war society below the level of high-ranking Nazis such as Ferdinand or even inherently ‘good’ and repenting National Socialists such as Hans.

Conclusion This chapter has shown how Die Mörder sind unter uns engages with the question of how to render one’s home safe again after a war and a murderous authoritarian regime. In the character of Hans Mertens, the film offers a way to examine the postwar subject’s ethical obligations to face the destruction and the history behind it head-on. Here, the rubble is not merely the psychological projection of the main characters’ inner devastation but also actively participates as a landscape in the quest for a new German personal and cultural narrative, a challenging reconfiguration that the film underscores formally through its changes in stylistic choices. Thus, Staudte’s film implicitly subverts Germany’s myth of a clear-cut new beginning, the so-called Kahlschlag, after 1945 formally rather than on the (ostensibly more conservative) level of narrative. While Hans’s development from inattentive drifter to Heimkehrerflâneur  – increasingly aware of his surroundings and the traces of the past (and future) inscribed in them – is reflected in the transfers between Expressionism and Realism, the figure of Susanne Wallner suggests a project of forgiveness. Because she already ‘sees through’ Berlin’s condition, it is expected of her to incorporate the perpetrator into the city’s post-war matrix even as she becomes the object of her neighbours’ scorn by doing so. To be sure, both characters render the film’s seemingly straightforward message of love and justice more complex, going beyond the pedagogical message that the legally sanctioned punishment of selected perpetrators will result in a tabula rasa. Together, the pair constructs a new home and renders their shared space safe again in the process. In Hans’s case, home becomes a valid

Searching for (a) Home in the Rubble 141

category after he engages in a monogamous relationship, re-enters the workforce and confronts his (non-) guilt and responsibility. Susanne, who is clearly involved in Hans’s ability to reclaim his home as a caregiver, also maps out a visual Heimat freed from the shadows of Weimar Expressionism, one, however, from which the spectre of National Socialism is much harder to exorcize than Captain Brückner, the obvious ‘murderer among us’.

Notes 1. Harald Neumeyer argues that the flâneur has always been a fluid concept, his premise being that ‘ausgehend von der Minimaldefinition, daß der Flâneur richtungs- und ziellos durch die Großstadt streift,… die Figur des Flâneurs als ein ‚offenes Paradigma’ gesehen werden [soll]’ [‘starting from the minimum definition that the flâneur roams the city without direction and aim, the figure of the flâneur should be seen as an open paradigm’] (1999: 17). 2. Sabine Hake defines the genre’s key aspects in deliberately broad strokes: ‘typically in these films, a man returns home from the war and, confronted with the ubiquitous signs of destruction, is forced to make sense of his personal tragedy and, by extensions, that of the German people’ (2002: 98). 3. The Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA) was founded in the spring of 1946 in the Soviet Occupied Zone in eastern Germany; it was the first film-production company in post-war Germany. 4. Dagmar Barnouw states that ‘if the film has been seen as the most important of the German Trümmerfilme, it is for the unmediated, unmatched visual power of its literally inhuman protagonist’, a reminder of the possible threat that the spectacle of the ruin may overshadow the individual characters who roam the terrain (2008: 53). 5. As Robert C. Holub notes, ‘By March 1946, denazification had been turned over to the Germans themselves, in whose hands it gradually degenerated into a farce’ (2004: 827). 6. The time codes in this chapter are taken from the remastered 2017 The Ice Storm DVD (Region 2; PAL), screened on a region-free U.S. Blu-Ray player. Unless noted otherwise, all translations are my own. 7. In such a reading, ‘the ruins attest to the desired erasure of the past and the promise of a new beginning captured in the myth of Zero Hour’ (Hake 2002: 98). Bettina Greffrath, as a case in point, emphasizes that in ‘DIE MÖRDER SIND UNTER UNS… die Ruinen vor allem für die seelischen Zerstörungen [stehen], die der Krieg, d.h. das Vergangene in den Menschen angerichtet hat’ [‘THE MURDERERS ARE AMONG US the ruins mainly signify the psychological damage that the war, i.e. the past, has inflicted on the people’s minds’] (1995: 218). To give another example, Eric Rentschler remarks that ‘already in [Die Mörder sind unter uns’s] initial image, rubble assumes the double guise of a commanding physical presence and an objective correlative for a man who is a virtual wreck’ (2010: 430).

142 Domesticity Under Siege

8. Lutz Koepnick cautions critics to keep in mind that ‘to live among ruins is to live in a world in which the visual and the auditory no longer add up to a whole anymore’ (2008: 199). He moves beyond a purely expressionist reading and suggests a severe (and very real) perceptual distortion affecting the German people, in particular in the urban centres. 9. Here, I refer to the film’s constant shifts between expressionist and realist registers as well as the often unclear ontological status of the rubble. As Robert Shandley writes, for example, Die Mörder sind unter uns’s bombed-out buildings form expressionist ‘urban canyons’, a visual quality that evokes film as an appropriate medium for capturing the surreal condition in the cities (2001: 1). He further argues that the ruins in Staudte’s film are ‘stylized versions of ruins mostly created in the studio and used as a backdrop’ (2001: 120). Disagreements in determining the dominant style in Die Mörder sind unter uns, however, prevail among scholars. To offer one counter-example: Maggie Hoffgen states that ‘nothing is more real than real locations’, what she considers the visual master aesthetic of Staudte’s film (2009: 66). So whereas Shandley makes his readers aware that ‘we are not being shown what Berlin really looked like in 1945’, Hoffgen implies the opposite (2001: 32). 10. Johannes von Moltke examines ‘the aesthetic, ontological, and epistemological imbrication of cinema and ruin in modernity’ (2010: 396). Proposing a ‘broadly realist representational mode that unites ruins and cinema by virtue of their shared indexical link to the past’, he establishes a correlation between the rootedness of both the cinematic image and the physical structure of the rubble in an earlier moment (ibid.). 11. As Peter Buse et al. write, the flâneur was ‘open to stimuli and walks the street of the modern city at a slow and leisurely pace, an observer and recorder of modernity, the archetypal modern subject, passive and open’ (2005: 4). The emergence of National Socialism and its ‘effort to create a new aural and visual space’, however, dashed the flâneur’s hopes to produce new organizations of perception and declared him a fossil, arguably as outdated as the department stores that doubled as his Berlin training grounds (Fritzsche 2004: 795). 12. Drunk, Hans even calls Susanne his ‘Haushälterin’ [‘maid’] at one point (00:32:02). 13. As I have argued elsewhere in the context of German rubble literature, ‘there is not only a past embedded in the rubble but also an index of the future’ (Werbeck 2016: 196). 14. Staudte’s film comes too early to be considered a part of the cinema of exile, when Jewish émigré directors, ‘in the course of the 1950s, tried to return to West Germany and offer their talents to the reemerging film industry of the Federal Republic’ (Koepnick 2002: 4). 15. Neo-Realism originated in Italy after the Second World War. The non-commercial movement championed the use of high-speed, grainy-film stock, actual locations and decor, near natural lighting, a reliance on nonprofessional actors, an unobtrusive camera and a loose causality of the plot. I am not claiming that Die Mörder sind unter uns is a neo-­realist film but rather that it contains notable counter-elements to its expressionist imagery that at times approximate the modes of the Italian movement.

Searching for (a) Home in the Rubble 143

16. At one point Hans tells Susanne, ‘in dieser Stadt stehen einem Mann wie mir fast alle Häuser offen, auch ohne Mietsvertrag’ [‘in this city, most houses are available to a man like me, even without a lease’] (00:13:25–00:13:29). The covert reference to his Nazi-past, ‘a man like me’, suggests that he could have chosen a less dilapidated home because of his connections, but selected this particular apartment as a means, it appears, to hide from the world and punish himself for his inability to stop the massacre. 17. Andreas Huyssen claims that the twentieth century in particular produced a ‘very different imagery of ruins’, one in which ‘Roman ruins are sanitized and used as mise-enscene for open-air opera performances’ and ‘industrial ruins are made over into cultural centers’ (2010: 19). Huyssen suggests that the ruin has become an inherently visual object, evoking both the image world of cinema in general and Nazism’s synchronization of sights and sounds in particular. 18. Interestingly, later in the film the apartment’s windows are covered by X-ray images, presumably procured by Hans, who used to work as a surgeon. As Jennifer M. Kapczynski notes about Heinrich Böll’s rubble literature in this regard, ‘Böll insisted that the contemporary author must confront his real surroundings and record them truthfully. This perspective entailed a vision that could see even those things that had not yet “surfaced in the optical realm” – what Böll, in a later essay on fellow rubble author Wolfgang Borchert, dubbed a writer’s “X-ray gaze”’ (2004: 851). As Hans allegorically learns to see into that which has not yet surfaced in the ‘optical realm’, he at the same time seals his home’s border between the interior and the exterior with images that simultaneously reveal and conceal. 19. See for example Rolf Hansen’s 1942 Die große Liebe (True Love), in which war ‘changes ordinary experiences into a reality more beautiful than a fairy tale’ (O’Brien 2002: 198). As Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien notes about the couple in Hansen’s film in a scene that invites comparison to the one in Die Mörder sind unter uns as a dialectical image, ‘as they look out over the darkened city in anticipation of a bombing raid, Paul and Hanna discuss how wartime reality, despite its dangers (or maybe because of its dangers) makes the city beautiful. When Hanna mentions that the city looks like a fairy tale, Paul disagrees, saying that the city is “even more beautiful. Like reality”’ (2002: 198). 20. The world of Die Mörder sind unter uns is frequently compartmentalized via frames of various kinds, which – usually empty, distorted or smudged – point towards the fragility of borders and thus declare the external world abject. Next to windows, Staudte’s film prominently features doors, mirrors and other framing devices to further suggest a sense of confinement coupled with a concern about what awaits outside of now permeable boundaries. 21. In an essay about Böll’s posthumously published rubble novel Der Engel schwieg  – a literary text that in many ways mirrors but also subverts Die Mörder sind unter uns – I argue that ‘the city is initially marked as an ahistorical plane of existence, a timeless realm populated by ghosts’ before some of the protagonists learn to see Cologne anew (Werbeck 2016: 187). 22. Rentschler interprets this scene as a leaving behind of the rubble, turning the ruins into static (background) images of the past in the process. He detects the ‘telos of the narrative’

144 Domesticity Under Siege

23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

in Hans and Susanne’s need ‘to take leave of the past so that they might occupy a rubblefree future’, a ‘manifest destiny’ that will find its ‘definite incarnation in the Heimatfilm’ (2010: 432). The semantic field of the supernatural evokes Weimar Expressionism’s own infatuation with the spectral, a style ‘shorn of naturalistic detail, artificial, ghostly and silent,… an image of a mortified world that is at once elemental and liminal’ (Kaes 2004: 720). Stephen Brockmann calls her perspective ‘female’, explaining that it ‘breaks free from many of its Expressionist Weimar models’ (2010: 205). In this context, I am indebted to Erica Carter and Hester Baer’s groundbreaking work on the complex constellations of gender, narrative form and history in rubble film. Alexander R. Galloway aligns the first-person perspective either with characters which are ‘intoxicated, frightened, or otherwise out-of-joint’ or with ‘aliens, criminals, monsters, or characters deemed otherwise inhuman’ (2006: 50). Julia Hell speculates whether the ruinous history – the historical index – of the Third Reich was inscribed in its cities from the beginning. ‘We do not know’, Hell concludes, ‘whether Hitler and Speer expected their monuments to slowly disintegrate, be overtaken by nature, or be sacked by enemies. But we may safely assume that they did not expect them to be reduced to rubble by Allied air raids within four years’ (2010: 186). When Susanne talks briefly with the optometrist Mondschein (Robert Forsch), she verbalizes her anxieties, in particular, an ‘Angst vor dem Wiedersehen mit unserer Stadt’ [‘a fear of seeing our city again’] (00:06:58). It is also telling that Mondschein, a character with a last name that suggests a Jewish background, has to die before the apartment building can become a safe home again. One woman exclaims, ‘es ist ein Skandal. Die Hausgemeinschaft müsste sich da beschweren über so etwas’ [‘this is scandalous. The tenants should complain about it’]. Her elderly interlocutor then asks rhetorically, ‘bei wem würde man sich denn heutigen Tages beschweren?’ [‘But to whom could we direct such a complaint these days anyways?’] (00:32:06–00:32:12).

References Baer, H. (2009), Dismantling the Dream Factory: Gender, German Cinema, and the Postwar Quest for a New Film Language, New York: Berghahn. Barnouw, D. (2008), ‘A Time for Ruins’, in W. Wilms and W. Rasch (eds), German Postwar Films: Life and Love in the Ruins, 45–60, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Benjamin, W. (2008), ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’, in M. W. Jennings et al (eds), The Work of Art in the Age of Its Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, 19–55, Cambridge: Harvard UP. Böll, H. (2006), ‘In Defense of “Rubble Literature”’, in M. Black (ed.), L. Vennewitz (trans.), Stories, Political Writings, and Autobiographical Works, 269–73, New York, London: Continuum. Brockmann, S. (2010), A Critical History of German Film, Rochester: Camden House. Buse, P., et al. (2005), Benjamin’s Arcades: An UnGuided Tour, Manchester: Manchester UP.

Searching for (a) Home in the Rubble 145

Carter, E. (2000), ‘Sweeping Up the Past: Gender and History in the Post-War German “Rubble Film”’, in U. Sieglohr (ed.), Heroines Without Heroes: Reconstructing Female and National Identities in European Cinema, 1945–1951, 91–110, London: Cassell. Die Mörder sind unter uns (1946), [DVD]. Directed by Wolfgang Staudte, Germany: DEFA. Available from Icestorm under license from DEFA-Stiftung. Fisher, J. (2005), ‘Wandering in/to the Rubble-Film: Filmic Flánerie and the Exploded Panorama after 1945’, German Quarterly, 78 (4): 461–80. Fisher, J. (2008), ‘Planes, Trains, and the Occasional Car: The Rubble Film as Demobilization Film’, in W. Wilms and W. Rasch (eds), German Postwar Films: Life and Love in the Ruins, 175–92, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Frey, M. (2013), Postwall German Cinema: History, Film History, and Cinephilia, New York, Oxford: Berghahn. Fritzsche, P. (2004), ‘Germans Reading Hitler’, in D. Wellberry et al (eds), A New History of German Literature, 795–800, Cambridge & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP. Galloway, A. R. (2006), Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, Minneapolis: U Minnesota P. Greffrath, B. (1995), Gesellschaftsbilder der Nachkriegszeit: Deutsche Spielfilme 1945–1949, Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus. Hake, S. (2002), German National Cinema, 2nd edn, London and New York: Routledge. Hell, J. (2010), ‘Imperial Ruin Gazers, or Why Did Scipio Weep?’ in J. Hell and A. Schönle (eds), Ruins of Modernity, 169–92, Durham & London: Duke UP. Hoffgen, M. (2009), Studying German Cinema, Leighton Buzzard: Auteur Publishing. Holub, R. C. (2004), ‘Guilt and Atonement’, in D. Wellberry et al (eds), A New History of German Literature, 824–30, Cambridge & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP. Huyssen, A. (2010), ‘Authentic Ruins: Products of Modernity’, in J. Hell and A. Schönle (eds), Ruins of Modernity, 17–28, Durham & London: Duke UP. Kaes, A. (2004), ‘Cinema and Expressionism’, in D. Wellberry et al (eds), A New History of German Literature, 718–23, Cambridge & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP. Lowenstein, A. (2005), Shocking Representations: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film, New York: Columbia UP. Kapczynski, J. M. (2004), ‘Making History Visible’, in D. Wellberry et al (eds), A New History of German Literature, 851–6, Cambridge & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP. Koepnick, L. (2002), The Dark Mirror: German Cinema between Hitler and Hollywood, Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: U California P. Koepnick L. (2008), ‘The Sound of Ruins’, in W. Wilms, W. Rasch (eds), German Postwar Films: Life and Love in the Ruins, 193–208, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kracauer, S. (1979), Von Caligari zu Hitler: eine psychologische Geschichte des deutschen Films, R. Baumgarten and K. Witte (trans.), Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Nägele, R. (2004), ‘History, Evidence, Gesture’, in D. Wellberry et al (eds), A New History of German Literature, 841–6, Cambridge & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP. Neumeyer, H. (1999), Der Flâneur: Konzeptionen der Moderne, Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann. O’Brien, M. (2002), ‘The Spectacle of War in Die große Liebe’, in R. C. Reimer (ed.), Cultural History through a National Socialist Lens, 197–213, Rochester: Camden House. Powell, A. (2005), Deleuze and Horror Film, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Rasch, W. (2008), ‘Introduction’, in W. Wilms and W. Rasch (eds), German Postwar Films: Life and Love in the Ruins, 1–5, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

146 Domesticity Under Siege

Rentschler, E. (2010), ‘The Place of Rubble in the Trümmerfilm’, in J. Hell and A. Schönle (eds), Ruins of Modernity, 418–38, Durham & London: Duke UP. Shandley, R. R. (2001), Rubble Films: German Cinema in the Shadow of the Third Reich, Philadelphia: Temple UP. Turnock, B. (2019), Studying Horror Cinema, Leighton Buzzard: Auteur Publishing. Von Moltke, J. (2005), No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema, Berkeley, et al., Los Angeles, London: U California P. Von Moltke, J. (2010), ‘Ruin Cinema’, in J. Hell and A. Schönle (eds), Ruins of Modernity, 395–417, Durham & London: Duke UP. Werbeck, K. (2016), ‘Beyond Weimar Expressionism and Agfacolor: Literary Representations of Rubble Space in Heinrich Böll’s Der Engel schwieg’, Monatshefte, 108 (2): 185–201.

Searching for (a) Home in the Rubble 147

148

Section 4  Hauntings, ­ eeriness and the uncanny

150

7

‘I have ended up like the house, pretending to be myself’: Uncanny heritage house museums



HANNAH LEWI

Act one: ‘I Have Ended up Like the House, Pretending to be Myself’ There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can ‘invoke’ or not. Haunted places are the only ones people can live in – and this inverts the schema of the Panopticon. (de Certau 1988: 108)

For many years I have harboured an interest in the ghostly qualities of heritage houses and house museums. This fascination was initially pursued through a quest to sleep in a series of modern heritage house museums in Australia. From my weekend perambulations and somnambulations, I concluded that the house designed by Robin Boyd for the Australian historian Manning Clark in Canberra in 1952 was indeed haunted by the Professor’s lingering presence (Lewi 2012). So, if a relatively mundane, light and airy home triggered an uncanny sense of unease, what were the spectral qualities of other older heritage house museums? And given I don’t really believe in the supernatural per se – to cite Erving Goffman – what was really going on here? (Goffman 1986: 8). This chapter is therefore an attempt to return to these investigations by rummaging back through a series of other visits (three real and one fictional) to houses that are situated in the early nineteenth century, or that attempt to roughly simulate the Georgian period. My aim is to dig deeper into the ways in which these houses and their fabric and contents, which are now devoid of living residents and the quotidian flow of memories and debris they bring, take on the role of simulating some historical ‘pastness’ and sense of life. In reference to Jean Baudrillard’s definition of the simulacrum, these houses are arguably besieged by some idealized and copied pretence of their former selves which no longer exists (Baudrillard 1988). To understand them I invoke the ideas of framing experience, conventions of theatre and the notion of the uncanny as applied to domestic houses on public display. The scenario begins with a fictional visit to a country estate in England which is the setting for Alan Bennett’s play People written in 2012. This serves to perceptively and comically open our ears and eyes to the eccentricities of the stately home

industry. Written and performed as theatre, it is highly attuned to the role of former inhabitants as actors performing for both the theatrical audience and the house visitors. We then pay a visit to three house museums: John Soane’s House at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, Dennis Severs’ House in Spitalfields, East London and The Johnston House in East Melbourne, with Soane’s house acting as a guiding inspiration for these other two. All are arguably sites of theatrical performance that attempt to prop up the story of their dead owners, and all three houses play with frames of apprehension and mechanisms of theatrical display and stage-setting. Goffman’s account of social experience poses the question that if ‘all the world is like a stage… what’s the stage like?’ (Goffman 1986: 124). In answering this question around a series of everyday social and cultural situations, and our involvement with them, Goffman adopts the concept of the ‘frame’ to define and analyse the ‘organization of experience’ (Goffman 1986: 10). I have found this useful in understanding the staging of the house museums investigated in this chapter, and thinking through the kinds of theatrical sets that are being deployed. Found within historic houses on public display are arguably all sorts of ‘theatre-like’ settings and devices that do not entirely conform to the expectations of either actors or audience, with no clear division between the stage and auditorium and therefore no clear frame that separates the two realms (Goffman 1986: 126). Am I supposed to make myself at home and sit in a chair, covet the real estate potentials, or view at a respectful distance as in a museum? With this ambiguity comes the opportunity of shifting or breaking these frames of experience, whether through actors stepping out of or through them, and disrupting the theatrical convention of the ‘fourth wall’ to interact with the visiting audience, or through incongruous staging, costumes and stage-set effects, all of which may result in some ‘bewilderment and chagrin on the part of the participants’ (Goffman 1986: 347). This playing with the perceived frame in heritage interpretation and display, as in the theatre, can thereby sometimes enliven otherwise ‘deadly’ conventions of a three-walled interior set with immediacy and incompleteness (Brook 1968: 78). When the animation of heritage houses is successful, visiting audiences are asked to reassess their assumed position and question whether they are indeed aware of the performative framing (what Goffman calls keying), whether they think they are inside the frame or outside of it, and whether there are multiple and partially ‘fabricated’ frames leading to further ambiguous illusions of eavesdropping on other people’s lives and thus suspending our modern sense of disbelief (Goffman 1986: 138; Smith 2009). Such domestic theatrics are not always an entirely pleasant experience. Sometimes we are just thoroughly bored and tired by endless dusty and irrelevant objects roped off in tableaux of historical room settings. On rare occasions, however, we actually begin to be embarrassingly and uneasily taken in by the pretence of recreating what Michel de Certeau describes as ‘diverse absences’: ‘What can be seen designates what is no longer there: “you see, here there used to be…,” but it can no longer be seen’ (de Certeau 1988: 108). So we may open ourselves to being momentarily caught out

152 Domesticity Under Siege

by a magical illusion that brings to life a long dead inhabitant who has seemingly just left the room. Here, Anthony Vidler’s account of the uncanny as a ‘lurking sense of unease, rather than from any clearly defined source of fear’ is also valuable in unpacking just what is going on (Vidler 1992: 23). Vidler redrew attention to the house as a setting for the uncomfortable and the unheimlich. That houses themselves could be thought of not just as passive settings but also as highly complicit in the translation of uncanny and haunting powers that seemed to come ‘unwillingly, against all reason’ (Vidler 1992: 18). The unsettling transition from a living home to a dead house museum that attempts to contain and preserve memory is, despite best intentions, therefore ultimately doomed by what Vidler describes as ‘a history that lent it the air of a tomb’ and that Freud characterised as the ‘slow unfolding of the homely into the unhomely’ (Vidler 1992: 19, 25). Heritage houses can thereby reveal and remind of the potential unease of nostalgia. For, whatever their curatorial agenda, they must seek to halt change through deprivation of light, access, air and use. As visitors, we feel both uneasy and yet excited by the idea that when the doors are closed at the end of the day and the lights grow dim we too might be ‘sacrificed’. Robert Harbison continues this line of thought: ‘a degree of immurement is the hope of most museum visits’ so that we may allow ourselves to be immersed in some alchemic apprehension of objects and rooms that appear for a moment to stop time (Harbison 1997: 147). The uncanny can lurk in any house not just those that have undergone a conscious process of immurement. Like de Certeau, the novelist Julie Myerson writes on the comforting separation that we all try to maintain between the home ‘now’ as our living container and the house ‘then’ as the abode of former ghosts: Most of us live in our homes knowing we’re not the only ones to have done so. But we rarely confront those shadows in any significant way. Why should we? This is us and that was them. Their clutter, their smells, their noises, and their way of doing things is long gone… Our moments have blotted out theirs. Maybe this is a necessary element of domestic living – maybe it’s the only way we can coexist comfortably with each other’s past lives, each other’s ghosts. (Myerson 2005: 23)

This unattainable coexistence can account for the fascination and popularity of visiting house museums that invite us to imagine the possible ghosts that lurk behind closed doors and in roped-off attics and basements, and which typically remain firmly shut away in our everyday homes. The following visits explore houses that are no longer about providing shelter and comfort to their occupants, yet neither are they classic haunted houses in which the domestic present is disrupted by the historical past. Rather, the buildings, and the furnishings and artefacts they contain, seem to have the uncanny capacity to behave unexpectedly and responsively in reaction to their slightly confused visitors’ gaze. All the houses don’t fit into the conventional expectations of public museums, and instead hold on to a mission to keep the memory of their former owners ‘alive’, or what the historical novelist Hilary Mantel calls ‘the practical job of resurrection’ (Mantel 2020).

Uncanny Heritage House Museums 153

Act two, scene one: Other people Alan Bennett’s play People, first produced in 2012, is set in a crumbling stately home in South Yorkshire. The action revolves around the remains of a family – two sisters, Dorothy and June, and various hangers-on – who are in the throes of dealing with the future safeguarding of the family estate, which after much debate is acquired by the National Trust. Bennett’s notes at the introduction to the published script reveal his motivations for writing this play, and his own ‘sense of unease when going round a National Trust house and being required to buy into the role of reverential visitor’. Bennett continues: National Trust guides… assume that one wishes to be informed about the room or its furniture and pictures, which I don’t always… Sometimes I actively dislike what I’m seeing: yet another table massively laid for a banquet, for instance, or massed ranks of the family photos ranged on top of a grand piano with royal visitors given some prominence. (Bennett 2012: npn)

Bennett goes on to voice his own annoyance with arranged displays and guides in stately homes, and his scepticism that the seemingly real displays are ‘but halftruths and deceptions’: ‘Is this really a private room or just a private room for public consumption? These drinks (and the bottle of vitamin pills beside them), have they been artfully arranged to suggest a private life? Is there somewhere else, another flat which is more private?… Surely all this is meant to be seen?’ (Bennett 2012: npn). Dorothy is an eccentric old woman who still lives in relative squalor in her family’s estate with her companion Iris. Echoing Bennett’s scepticism, the National Trust’s ‘man’ Lumsden visits and makes an inventory of all the contents of the house so that it can be put on display to the visiting public: but not in ‘aspic’, not with red ropes and ‘do not touch’ labels. Lumsden reassures: ‘Nowadays the scullery and the still room are as important as the drawing room. And we interact… racks of costumes, frock coats, doublets… Visitors can feel themselves a part of the house. But no pretence.’ In this searching for the authentic, the trust’s strategy is explained as one in which no attempt would be made to repair or discard, not even the fraying rat-eaten tapestries for instance, nor the frayed residents Dorothy and Iris who would remain living in a small refurbished little part of the estate: ‘They are after all a testament to time and its abrasions. And we cannot halt time… but we can put it on hold – while we live in the present’ (Bennett 2012: npn). However, as it unfolds, there are more odd remnants lurking in the dusty nooks and crannies of the house than the National Trust was first aware of. For example, we learn that Dorothy has decades worth of old newspapers stuffed in the attic rooms which she goes up to read on a daily basis to catch up on the news (she perennially remains at least a decade behind). And Lumsden is introduced to a large closet located in the Adams Room interior that was refurbished into the billiard room in the nineteenth century, which is stuffed with antique chamber pots. Each

154 Domesticity Under Siege

of the two dozen pots is still full of ancient urine, with the names of the urinators carefully labelled underneath the pots – Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy, Mr Asquith and more  – who all stayed at the house and availed themselves rather than make the long trek to the downstairs lavatory. Lumsden exclaims that the National Trust longs to ‘bring the house back to life’. Despite no financial alternative, Dorothy’s reticence lies in the dislike of being overrun with ‘other people’. Lumsden attempts to reassure her that ‘nothing will change’; however, Dorothy astutely remarks that ‘The looking will change it. Looking always does’ (Bennett 2012: npn). In the concluding scene of the play set at some time in the future, the estate has indeed been transformed into a heritage house on public display. However, in the process of cleaning the house, the newspapers in the attic and the ancient urine samples were accidentally discarded, only to be simulated anew for the public. Dorothy takes up her new role in the house too – as a kind of ‘metaphor’ for nostalgic eccentricity: ‘a living ghost’ wandering the house in her fur coat and plimsolls and ‘interacting’ with groups of paying visitors. In the final scene, as the house is closing to the public for the day, Dorothy explains: ‘If I’m on the door when they’re going I’ll sometimes say “And did you find what you were looking for?”… They never know, of course.’ She continues: ‘A comforting parable, a life like mine. An antidote to envy. Celebrity, aristocracy, the lofty brought low.’ Ultimately Dorothy is subsumed into the role of inhabiting the house museum and suggests that she has ‘ended up like the house, pretending to be herself ’. She finally activates the public announcement and then slowly turns each section of the lights off with her iPod. A Recorded Voice states: ‘The House is now closed’ (Bennett 2012: npn). This play sets the scene for ways of seeing that operate at our other houses, where both houses and their contents assume roles as active characters in various historical scenarios as an audience looks on. Despite curatorial intentions to keep them animated and not in aspic, these houses have inevitably transformed from once lived-in homes to house museums that serve to construct, support and display historical narratives of national and personal identities. The former owners too, as ‘living ghosts’, have been gradually entombed within their displays.

Act two, scene two: The Soane house Georgian townhouses have not endured in public imagination and nostalgia in the way that country houses in England have, nor have they survived in bricks and mortar, as most have been lost or significantly altered. Lincoln’s Inn Fields is today a rare example and a site of architectural pilgrimage. The house was not unique in aspiring to combine private domestic interiors with the hosting of very public events. There were many examples of significant Georgian townhouses in London from the latter eighteenth to early decades of the nineteenth century that were venues for displaying and viewing very significant collections of art and artefacts, staging

Uncanny Heritage House Museums 155

lectures and performances at home, and as destinations for genteel house-touring which was a popular and highly sociable pastime (Richter 2019: 234). Every time I visit London I try and go to John Soane’s house and museum at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The building and its architect have been written about and researched in great depth by many other scholars, with Helene Furján’s capturing of the house in Glorious Visions resonating with my own interests in its theatrical and magical effects (Furján 2011: npn; Smith and Lewi 2008: 633). After falling into relative obscurity until the second half of the twentieth century, interest in Soane and his work resurged and his house was re-evaluated as a masterwork in the creation of a space of Georgian theatre. With the owner of course long dead, the overwhelming collection of artefacts, architectural and archaeological fragments, paintings and objects have become the leading players in the creation of an intimate and atmospheric domestic performance that has carefully choreographed what Furján describes as a ‘phantasmagoria of melancholic effects’ (Furján 2011: npn). Soane acquired the property and its neighbouring terrace houses in 1792 and undertook a major redevelopment financed by his wife’s inheritance. The house performed for Soane and his guests prior to his death in 1837, and it continues in a somewhat sanitized and depleted form to perform for visitors today. There are many fascinating elements to this interiorized stage-set that have been enduring and influential, and I highlight just a few here that have been consciously transmitted into the other houses to be examined. Soane’s house created an interiorized exploration of picturesque and p ­ ainterly sensibilities and effects that arguably extended the aesthetics of scenographic ­landscape-making into interior space (Macarthur 2007). As Jonathan Hill writes, Soane conceived of his house ‘as a garden of architecture… Sculptures and antiquities cover every surface like architectural foliage, recalling the shaggy aesthetic of the late eighteenth-century picturesque’ (Hill 2016: 119–20). These effects were heightened through the design and manipulation of theatrical devices including lighting, the framing of views and vistas, the curating and display of historical fragments, follies and artefacts, and through the careful guiding of the walking viewer. The contemporary fascination with the ‘Gothick’ and with the archaeological fragment motivated Soane’s design of a complex ‘theatrical machinery’ in his house. For example evocative lighting was achieved by the manipulation of shadowy and reflected natural and candle-light, contrasted with ‘moments of dazzling brightness’ that animated his remarkable collections of archaeological fragments and artefacts. Picturesque effects are therefore experienced here, not through gardening traits like meandering paths, naturalistic framing of views and arrangement of plantings and so on but through the making of sublime interiorized scenes within and between interconnected rooms and floors that could be apprehended and appreciated through multiple visits. As a further technique in manipulating light and perceptions of space, Soane used convex and concave mirrors in many of his interior rooms, most famously the ocular glass inserts in the breakfast room ceiling, but also in other less obvious places

156 Domesticity Under Siege

like the surrounds of picture frames and above bookshelves. As in other Georgian townhouses of this period, mirrors and gilded surfaces were employed to reflect and enhance luminosity in interiors that, despite large vertical windows, were otherwise prone to darkness (McCormack 2019: 183). Mirrors refracted and repeated things, people and surfaces, and thereby amplified impressions of an illusory sense of interior spaces. Mirrors also intimately engaged the viewer through their own reflected image and arguably their own subjectivity. It is this ‘emplacing’ of the visitor within picturesque and theatrical domestic settings in Lincoln’s Inn Fields that has also been consciously employed within the other houses on our itinerary. The architectural writer Ian Nairn, responsible in some part for reviving interest in Soane’s house in the latter decades of the twentieth century, wrote of his visit: The Breakfast Room is downstairs, behind the staircase. One of Soane’s hanging ceilings fits over it. But it is embroidered with tiny convex mirrors which show up the room with you in it, in miniature – a microcosm. On two sides of the ceiling, great bleary light comes streaming down from outside-macrocosm. The third side is a bookcase (inner life), the fourth side is the outside world (outer life). (Nairn 2014: 110–11)

Thus Nairn appeared highly attuned to the theatricality of this pivotal room, as a stage-set with its fourth wall effectively removed to allow for audience appreciation. The ‘Gothick’ and fictional imaginings were most powerfully conveyed in the basement level of the house, named the ‘Monk’s Parlour’, where visitors would have originally experienced this space as like a gloomy ‘medieval’ catacomb, or what was described at the time as ‘a stack of mouldering burial urns cast in an unearthly yellow light, glowing as if endowed with supernatural power’ (Furján 2011: npn). Visitors could have participated in these contrived scenes by taking tea down in the Parlour and crypt, or by attending magic shows staged by lamp-light at night for up to 900 guests (Hill 2016: 106). And although these theatrical qualities have largely been lost today with subsequent renovations, they were captured through Joseph Michael Gandy’s sublime interior watercolours. As in our other heritage houses, the frisson of terror could be achieved ‘through the drama of a fictional history, the play of narrative’ (Furján 2011: npn). Soane’s vast archive of art and antiquarian artefacts were displayed artfully rather than chronologically or typologically within the rooms of the house. And this mood further contributed to the creation of possible fictive historical narratives which could be appreciated through the scenes depicted on the surfaces of paintings and artefacts, and through the house as an entire archive that uplifted the figure of Soane himself and his grand travels (Darley 2020: 246). The most well-known of Soane’s collection of paintings, displayed in ingenious unfolding panels in the picture room, are Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s views of the ruined Greek temples at Paestum, and William Hogarth’s ‘A Rake’s Progress’. Both series augment this reading of the house as an analogy for a panoramic tour through the edifying ruins of classical architecture and, in turn, the lowly ruins of contemporary civil society in London.

Uncanny Heritage House Museums 157

Fig. 7.1  Interior Drawing of Sir John Soane’s House, Lincoln’s Inn Fields London © Sir John Soane’s Museum, London.

These fictional qualities were further enhanced by Soane’s own attempt at constructing a mythic description of his house that remained unpublished. Written in 1812, ‘Crude Hints Towards an History of My House in Lincoln’s Inn Fields’ set out to establish the associations and provenance of the house and collection, at a time when it was still under construction (which lasted some forty years) (Dorey 1999: 53–78). The characters in the account were all alter-egos of Soane himself: ‘a monkish hermit forced to withdraw from the world’ and a ‘necromancer… a conjurer able to call forth such visions’ (Furján 2011: npn). As Hill also suggests, stimulated by the picturesque, his house was ‘a living ruin’ which ‘became a dead one after his death’ (Hill 2016: 114). There is no doubt, however, that today the site has become not only a revered architectural destination but also an influential model for showing how small, immersive and private house museums might be sustained.

158 Domesticity Under Siege

Act two, scene three: The Severs house Turning to the second of the ‘real’ house visits, Dennis Severs’ House in Folgate Street, Spitalfields, East London, has been a museum, of sorts, since he first moved into the house in 1979 with the aim of bringing it ‘back to life’. Gradually Folgate Street evolved into a fantastical and uncanny historical stage-set and domestic theatre. In his memoir, Severs describes how he began by sleeping in each of the former Georgian Huguenot house’s ten rooms with candle and chamber pot to arouse his intuition ‘in the quest for each room’s soul’ (Severs 2001: npn). ‘Museum’ was a label that the eccentric Severs was at pains to dispel during the twenty plus years he set out to conduct what writer Iain Sinclair describes – in the equally fascinating story of a nearby house Rodinsky’s Room – as his ‘personal interrogation of the past’ (Lichtenstein and Sinclair 1999: npn). I have remained intrigued by it since my first visit in 1996 when Severs still lived in the house as curator, director and docent. At this time his presence, and thereby the breaking of that illusory fourth wall, was only hinted at through glimpsing his computer and bike hanging on the wall behind a makeshift screen in one of the upstairs rooms. Like Bennett’s character Dorothy, Severs gave himself a part to play. And despite his aim to bring life to the house, he too was slowly being embalmed and engulfed by this house until his death when, as Emma McEvoy aptly suggests, he became some kind of ‘impresario, a Svengali operating now from beyond the grave’ (McEvoy 2016: 90). I revisited Folgate Street again twenty years later in the gloom of a winter evening, now with two children of my own in tow. After the death of Severs himself in 1999 the house museum has been maintained through being bequeathed to the Spitalfields Historic Buildings Trust. At the time of my second visit it was set up with a Christmas-themed tableaux: a strange immersive pantomime which, needless to say, scared the living daylights out of children with its stiflingly close atmosphere of sounds, smells and flickering lights in the gloom. On a typical visit, ticket-holders who dare to knock on the gas-lit door are ushered inside where strict rules must be followed: willing and obedient, or at least compliant, visitors are participants and audience in the game. Severs demanded a lot but provided little by way of explanations or interpretation. No display cabinets or signs, rather he relied on his dictum of ‘you either see it or you don’t’. And not all parts of the house marched to the same historical tune, with different rooms experienced by moving in sequence from the basement kitchen to the dining room set in 1724, to the Victorian squalor of the attic, with cobwebs and detritus from an imaginary London weaving family who had hit hard times. Therefore each room’s tableaux or still life can be thought of as a plot set in some historical moment using gothic effects of light and shade, smell and sound, rough and smooth, and an array of objects ‘standing to attention’. The presence of the cast of imaginary characters who inhabit the various levels of the house across time and space is conjured sometimes through drifting actors but mostly through personal effects that are carefully strewn around – a jacket, wig and hat left hanging on a stair newel post, a crumpled

Uncanny Heritage House Museums 159

Fig. 7.2  Interior of the Smoking Room, Dennis Severs House, Spitalfields, London. Image credit; Dennis Severs House, London.

napkin catching crumbs, stacked crockery, overflowing baskets of real food, the smell of fresh baking, a warm fire and the residues of burning candles. These clues to the past interrupt the present in an uncanny manner. Within Severs’s world, importance is placed less on the authenticity of the objects collected and more on the spaces between them, and their contribution to the overall scenic atmosphere. Sinclair calls Severs an ‘aether broker’: a man dedicated to creating ‘atmosphere’ (Lichtenstein and Sinclair 1999: npn). One of the more tightly themed interiors adopts its plot from a copy of the painting and engraving of 1732 ‘A Midnight Modern Conversation’, by William Hogarth, which hangs on the wall of the smoking room. A satire on the effects of drink the picture, which is typical of Hogarth’s hugely popular prints, depicts a group of men lolling about a table covered in a white tablecloth, fallen glasses and the remains of a large punchbowl. A central character in a red coat in the foreground is seemingly in mid-flight and coming out of the picture plane into the room as his chair gives way. Severs writes: ‘The scene is held up there by a simple wooden moulding… almost as if on hearing our approach the whole party retreated to the wall and froze there in an attempt to hide’ (Severs 2001: npn). The room reveals a Hogarthian sense of disarray and intricacy that has spilled forth from the frame but has frozen in time. Here the normal expectations of looking appear to be upset by this trick: the picture appears to reflect back the atmosphere experienced in the room, rather than the room mimicking the image in the painting.

160 Domesticity Under Siege

The most powerful metaphor that Severs returned to again and again in his manuscript that describes the house through the course of one night is that of living within a theatrical and painterly ‘frame’. He writes: The only problem with living inside a painting is the messy business of getting in and out of that wretched frame. For almost twenty years now visitors to this house have watched me light a candle in a dark cellar and lift it to an empty frame. Then, after I catch their eyes, they see me pass the candle through the frame and out the other side. I say ‘You see… I am going to take you through the frame’. (Severs 2001: npn)

Severs achieves an immersive theatrical experience by recreating in ‘four dimensions’ the space of the house: its back and forth, up and down, and space ‘in between’ things and people which he characterises as ‘thick as treacle’ – the fourth dimension of time itself. As in Bennett’s play, the attic assumes a heightened role in the drama. In Severs’s world, it is home to a different fictional family occupying it in Dickensian squalor. A heightened sense of unease is experienced as you ascend the ever-narrowing stairs to this top room. Tour guides point out the hook in the ceiling from which William Jeeves hanged himself. And Severs uses all sorts of narrative and sensory tricks to build our tension: Crushed beneath our feet on each tread are dried crusts of bread, seashells and pieces of broken clay pipes  – playthings for children. The lower portions of the walls, at hand level, reflect the glisten of grease. From ahead comes the sound of a silk loom, fitted into a makeshift garret in what was once the Jervises’ old attic. All day long: click, clack – boom! Click, clack – boom!… Before us now is new ground: hopeless poverty. (Severs 2001: npn)

The attic sits outside the made-up history of the rest of the house, more ethereal and more extreme. The heightened melodrama of the scene appears also to polarise visitor reactions all the more – as Severs retorted often, ‘You either get it or you don’t’.

Act two, scene three: The Johnston house I have been given personal access to the Johnston Collection and house in East Melbourne on a weekend when it is normally closed to the public. ‘Fairhall’, and its vast antiquarian collection of objects, furniture and artworks, was gifted to the public by its owner and opened as a private museum in 1990. Standing in the hallway entrance, as my eyes adjust from the glare of the street to the darkness of the interior, I begin to focus on a landscape painting on the left that says, ‘Alva House, Stirlingshire, the seat of Johnston Esq.’ Am I to believe that this is a true record of Johnston’s ancestry, his home and his family, or a fictional construct? This ambiguity is left hanging throughout my visit. The only hint that I am still in the twenty-first

Uncanny Heritage House Museums 161

century comes from the electronic hum at the front door with winking security cameras and alarms to remind me that I am not a time traveller. From the hallway I make my way to the Green Drawing Room, which Johnston claimed was the reason for buying the house. Again a number of portraits adorn the walls: a woman in blue, Rococo-style candelabra, gold gilded sofas, large mirrors with ornate frames and heavy blue damask curtains. The most imposing piece of furniture is the Louis XV Bureau sitting c1745, alongside some of Johnston’s cherished pieces including a pair of late-eighteenth-century English Hepplewhite chairs covered in yellow silk damask, a Chinese Temple Lion and other items that were acquired supposedly from the Viceroy of India. Johnston’s criteria for collecting was that things had to be beautiful, usable and preferably with original patina. Various collections of porcelain figurines and silhouette miniatures on display reinforce his aspirations towards a refined atmosphere of ancestry. The house is dressed for its latest installation in which artists explore textures and cloth: the two high-backed chairs are draped with scarves, and pinecones are placed on the seats to reserve a place for absent visitors, or to stop me from sitting down? In another downstairs smaller living space, pink in tone, I am surrounded by porcelain cats and a chandelier that flickers with a slight glow. The table is set for afternoon tea with two dainty teacups on the sideboard ready to be filled for immanent guests. This is not a totally immersive riot like the Severs House, nor has it the antiquarian and architectural pedigree of the Soane house and museum, but there is an intimate and yet highly choreographed presence. On display here, however, is a strikingly similar attempt at creating the feel of an inherited collection to ensure posterity: ‘a shrewd and deliberate attempt to emulate collections contained in Great English Ancestral Houses’ (Knight 1997: 24) yet within a distinctive colonial character. In the blue, nautical-themed study off the downstairs corridor, pictures of ships and an exotic mirror line the walls. A small television from the 1970s offers lurking technological evidence of the real Mr Johnston, perhaps like the computer in Severs’s bedroom, or Dorothy with her iPod. The final rooms downstairs comprise oddly configured kitchen areas, fitted with adapted antique oak furniture and Johnston’s preferred flooring of black and white chequered lino laid throughout the service and circulation areas. Copper Bundt cake tins and Staffordshire ware hang in this tiny and fairly rudimentary kitchen. Jars of preserves feature in the current kitchen installation, which somehow encapsulate the whole house. Another metaphor perhaps; not the breaking of the frame but rather the bottling and sealing up of this eclectic collection to be carefully put on display in various configurations for evermore. Ascending the stairs lined with small portraits, George IV features prominently alongside Chinese, Indian and other exotic objects, all in keeping with the Regency theming of the house. Upstairs are a series of smaller equally well-dressed rooms, one with an imposing four-poster bed, mustard yellow in colour. Effective use of looking glasses and mirrors throughout allows further comparison to Soane’s house. The mirrors here, as there, reflect back one’s own incongruous image. And while looking out of the upstairs front windows, the vista is a peculiarly

162 Domesticity Under Siege

Fig. 7.3  Interior of the Green Drawing Room, Johnston House, East Melbourne. Image credit; the author.

timeless Victorian mismatched streetscape, whereas the view from the back of the house reveals a contemporary scene that disrupts any illusion of timelessness. The house is theatrical and is presented like an enveloping window dressing which reflects its owner. Later, after my visit, I do some further research courtesy of the Johnston Museum’s publications and have a discussion with the current director to answer some of my many questions. William Johnston was an antiques dealer who was born in relatively humble beginnings in Melbourne. His unpublished biography describes him as known, in turn, for his violent temper, his elegance and his charm: ‘a man of many facets, and no one person, no matter how close to him they thought they were, ever saw all those facets’ (Black ND: npn). Johnston perpetrated ambiguity and enigma, choosing to conceal much about his family background, early life and facets of his own personal life. He is noted for creating fictional worlds by letting those that encountered him make their own assumptions, influenced in no small part by the environments he created to live in. William Johnston’s ancestors had in fact arrived in Victoria during the gold rushes of the mid-1850s and settled in a working-class suburb of Melbourne that was the centre of the shoe-making industry. He was born in the east of Melbourne in 1911, and he would start work for a furniture business and go on to create the window dressings for the company. Johnston developed an eye for auction rooms and started buying and selling antiques in the mid-1940s after

Uncanny Heritage House Museums 163

Fig. 7.4  Reflection of Author at the Johnston house, East Melbourne. Image credit; the author.

an early discharge from military service. A period of time spent in London allowed him to buy up antiques cheaply, including large quantities of unwanted Victorianera furniture that there was little demand for in post-war England, and which he shipped to Melbourne to satisfy an enduring trend for decorating in a ‘colonial’ style to enhance Melbourne’s own Victorian ancestry (Knight 1997: 33). Although a connoisseur, he was by no means a purist and was known for turning a handsome profit through a ‘good eye’ for a bargain at country house sales. Pieces were ‘improved’ and stories spun about aristocratic provenance (Knight 1997: 33). He was an arranger, not just of flowers and garden plants but of all sorts of objects trouvés, artfully curated to mimic the serendipity of acquisition that an aristocratic family of means may have amassed over a long period of time.

164 Domesticity Under Siege

On his return to Australia, he began to buy and rent properties including in the inner-urban area of East Melbourne which, like Johnston himself, was an area then of mixed fortunes with former grand terraces and large stand-alone houses often subdivided into flats. He bought ‘Fairhall’ in Hotham Street in 1952, that had been built in 1860 for a dental surgeon and extended in 1870 to a double-fronted residence. Johnston tweaked the house’s provenance – as though like another piece of antique furniture  – changing the name and altering the windows and finishes to transform it from a Victorian to a Georgian-looking house (Knight 1997: 41). As Anthony Knight noted with some irony: ‘In spite of its lack of authenticity, Fairhall is now on the registers of all the relevant heritage bodies, including Heritage Victoria. Johnston had a knack of making things look right even if historically they were not. He was always a creator, never an academic’ (Knight 1997: 42). Johnston would live in part of the house, and after a heart attack in 1972, he began to renovate it further with a significant remodelling program, adding the French doors to the courtyard, enhancing the architectural features in the drawing room and fitting it out with interior features and materials salvaged from a house in nearby Carlton. Johnston had amassed exotic collections from sales in India, Fiji and Europe, and the house became an extension of his antiques business. Arrangements in rooms were changed often and these tableaux were used as a demonstration for clients. It was at this time that he began to think about the future of the collection and how to gift it to public custodianship through the National Trust. Johnston died in 1986, and today the Johnston Collection is an award-winning museum that curates a regular programme of artists and designers to re-interpret the house and the huge and highly personal collection. At Johnston’s request, and to avoid the frozen character of a house museum, the collection must be changed frequently although the ‘overall ambience, style and impression remain constant’ (Knight 1997: 27). Anthony Knight has described the collection today, only one-tenth of its original size: ‘one must see it as a vast bowerbird or jackdaw-style hoard, a seemingly indiscriminate accumulation of an enormous number of things… The result of this activity is a superb if idiosyncratic collection’ (Knight 1997: 21). There have been concerted attempts to create intimacy while removing much of the off-putting clutter, with little evidence of typical museum interpretation and crowd management techniques. However, visitor behaviour is still tightly managed; there is no touching, no sitting, and the rooms are restricted in their access to natural light and can be only experienced through a guided tour. Like in our other houses, here Knight muses on the possibilities of the Johnston House as an unusual theatrical setting, and one where there is an ‘imaginary proscenium arch’ that could ‘establish an aura around things which prevented contact, allowed intimacy yet maintained security without intimidation’. He asks: ‘How cluttered could a space be without making people nervous?’ (Knight 1997: 59). And ultimately, he frames Johnston’s legacy much like Severs and Soane, as a kind of impresario from the grave who can orchestrate and render tactile an imaginative historic experience.

Uncanny Heritage House Museums 165

Act three: The frame To return in conclusion to the ideas set out in Act One of this account, as theatrical settings and museums these heritage houses enable to some greater or lesser extent the visitor’s own recreation of a sense of historical inhabitation and drama. The orchestrated experience of house visitations acts like a surrogate plot or narrative, invoking dramas of past times and memories through their displays and interior architecture. We might therefore think of them and the stuff they contain as becoming what Sinclair has described as ‘loquacious rubbish’. Each of the four houses present various metaphors for understanding their display whether as an empty picture frame, a painted historical scene, a preserved time capsule or an imaginarium of curiosities. They all involve creative, intricate and unique manipulations and fabrications of frames of apprehension and experience: as in Dorothy becoming a tour guide in her own simulated home, or the dropping in of artefacts from the recent past that give some apparent feeling of ‘eavesdropping’ on an ‘unfolding reality’ in the Severs and Johnston houses. These partial and multiple fabrications serve to create an audience who are ‘captured by two realities: a story and its telling’, or in our case also its diegetic showing (Smith 2009: 633). They dwell in an uncomfortable place between the historical and the fictional. All the houses and their owners exhibit a profound anxiety for their posterity – of the physical fabric of the buildings and their collections of artefacts, plus the ongoing fostering of the presence of their founders. To return to the opening quote by Michel de Certeau, we may then consider all these houses as an inversion of the panopticon, haunted by their overly attentive original inhabitants looking inward at the occupiers and visitors of the present. They present the impossible task of keeping alive the homes of the dead by holding on to the pretence that they remain as authentic homes yet available for the apprehension of the living. This renders our visiting experience either somewhat lame and hackneyed or when the pretence is successful it can open up all sorts of intriguing scenes and sensations that are uncanny in a titillating way. All the houses therefore also occupy an ambiguous space between authentic historical truths and fabricated scenarios. Akin to the mode of historical fiction, as the novelist Hilary Mantel suggests: ‘the work of the historical novelist is not inferior to the historian who deals in “facts”, but rather it is to recreate the texture of lived experience: to activate the senses, and to deepen the reader’s engagement through feeling’. Ultimately then to return to Goffman’s question as to what exactly is going on here, I feel that the best way to describe this species of haunted heritage houses is as a particular genre of historical fiction writing translated into a physical experience. For as Mantel continues: ‘As soon as we die, we enter into fiction… It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it  – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more “the past” than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey’ (Mantel 2020: npn).

166 Domesticity Under Siege

References Baudrillard, J. and M. Poster (1988), Baudrillard: Selected Writings, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bennett, A. (2012), People, London: Faber & Faber. Black, S. William Johnston: A Decorative Life, unpublished research notes accessed courtesy of the Johnston Collection, npn. Brook, P. (1968), The Empty Space, New York: Touchstone. Darley, G. (2020), ‘John Soane and House Autobiography’, in K. Kennedy and H. Lee (eds), Lives of Houses, 246–56, Princeton: Princeton University Press. de Certeau, M. (1988), The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, Berkeley: University of California Press. Dorey, H. (1999), ‘Crude Hints’, in Christopher Woodward (ed.), Visions of Ruin: Architectural Fantasies and Designs for Garden Follies, 53–78, London: Sir John Soane Museum. Furján, H. M. (2011), Glorious Visions: John Soane’s Spectacular Theatre, Online edn, London: Routledge, npn. Goffman, E. (1986), Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience, Boston: Northeastern University Press. Harbison, R. (1997), Eccentric Spaces, Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Hill, J. (2016), A Landscape of Architecture, History and Fiction, London: Routledge. Knight, A. (1997), The Johnston Collection, Melbourne: The Johnston Trust. Lewi, H. (2012), ‘Deranging Oneself in Someone Else’s House’, Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts, December: 85–91. Lichtenstein, R. and I. Sinclair (1999), Rodinsky’s Room, Kindle edn, London: Grants Books, npn. Macarthur, J. (2007), The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities, London: Routledge. McCormack, H. (2019), ‘Superb Cabinets or Splendid Anachronisms? Anatomy, Natural History and Fine Arts in the London Town House’, in K. Retford and S. Avery-Quash (eds), The Georgian London Town House: Building, Collecting and Display, 169–90, London: Bloomsbury. McEvoy, E. (2016), Gothic Tourism, London: Pallgrave Macmillan. Mantel, H. (2020), The BBC Reith Lectures ‘Can These Bones Live?’ www.bbc.co.uk/radio4 (accessed 29 September 2020). Myerson, J. (2005), Home the Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House, London: Harper Perennial. Nairn, I. (2014), Nairn’s London, London: Penguin. Richter, A. N. (2019), ‘Glitter and Fashion in the “Louvre of London”: Animating Cleveland House’, in K. Retford and S. Avery-Quash (eds), The Georgian London Town House: Building, Collecting and Display, 233–246, London: Bloomsbury. Severs, D. (2001), 18 Folgate Street, London: Chatto & Windus. Smith, W. (2009), ‘Theatre of Use: A Frame Analysis of IT Demonstrations’, Social Studies of Science, 39 (3): 449–80. Smith, W. and H. Lewi, (2008), ‘The Magic of Machines in the House’, The Journal of Architecture, 13 (5): 633–60. Vidler, A. (1992), The Architectural Uncanny, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Uncanny Heritage House Museums 167

168

8

Suburban horror story



JAMES F. KERESTES

Horror films have been a mainstay of popular culture for over a hundred years, with some of the earliest examples dating back to the 1890s. The reasons for the popular appreciation of horror, whether realistic slasher films or fantastic ghost stories, are wide ranging and can only tenuously be attributed to specific psychological principles (Tudor 1997: 443–63). George Méliès’ 1896 film, Le Manoir du Diable, is one of the first to consist of subject matter focused on the supernatural and macabre, and is an early example of the use of special effects. The short film has many familiar horror-themed elements intended to scare viewers – transforming bats, disappearing skeletons and a magical cauldron, all elements that operate in the fantastic. They represent the unrealistic and impossible while producing visual content that engages and prompts the viewer to curate their own story and context. Architecture has the capacity to operate in this manner as well. In an interview, architectural critic Jeffrey Kipnis (2013) was asked to define architecture. He responded by drawing parallels between the discipline of architecture and the soundtrack of a film. The music is in support of the actors and plot, aimed at telling the viewer how to feel. Architecture is the soundtrack to the built environment; it can be withdrawn or emphasized based on those who engage with it. Like architecture, horror films aim to engage the audience by invoking a range of emotions; only the horror genre does so predominantly by exploiting our worst fears. A common trope used by the genre to eliminate our preconceptions of safety is to allow antagonists of the story to invade our most sacred spaces: our homes. Anthony Vidler (Vidler 1992: 17) notes in his book The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely that houses embody and remind us of our family’s history. The nostalgia we feel elevates our home to serve as our last and most intimate shelter after the security of the womb. In our homes, we are the gatekeepers; we determine who is allowed entry, and their entry point. For this reason, residential architecture is commonly used as a setting for horror movies as a means to violate and detach us from our most familiar and personal spaces. Gaston Bachelard (2014: 26) refers to our homes as our own corner of the world. He continues by stating that our attachment to a chosen spot is tied to the primary function of inhabiting (Bachelard 2014: 26). The house embodies our thoughts, memories and dreams (Bachelard 2014: 28). As Bachelard (2014: 29) writes, the house we were born in

is an environment in which protective beings live. When our homes are no longer safe or are characterized as the setting for a horrific act, our fear is amplified by the disconnection between the sense of familiarity and well-being we typically experience in these environments. In the book, Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film, Barry Curtis (2008: 33) emphasizes that we fantasize about scenarios of penetration and threat because of the comfort and security we experience within our homes. Residential architecture depicted in the horror genre can be characterized in one of three ways: the witness, the agent or the perpetrator. The difference between each characterization depends on the degree in which the physical structure actively participates in the story. The house acts as a witness when it is a passive backdrop, a container, where events can unfold. As an agent, the structure serves as an intermediary between entities, rituals or dimensions; it has agency in the plot to act but does not perpetrate the crimes. Finally, the house as a perpetrator actively participates and assists in carrying out the goals of the plot; it is an active character, and sometimes, the perpetrator itself. A common thread in the three characterizations is the manner in which filmmakers utilize the unstructured spaces of the house, as either a scene, an intermediary or a participant in the horror narrative. In the built environment, unstructured spaces are areas meant to be unseen and tend not to have a particular use prescribed to them. These spaces are everywhere within a home. From closets between rooms, to the gaps between the walls, to the rarely occupied attic, unstructured spaces are intentionally forgotten or ignored in the Western lifestyle; they are a by-product of the building and living process. Within traditional architectural drawing conventions, the areas hidden behind a wall or floor are represented as solid black fills in a plan or section drawing, clearly defining the unstructured space as existing outside of the intended programme. Defined as poché, this term refers to a visual representation technique where detailed contents in a drawing are redacted or omitted by blacking out the area. Exposing, occupying, or altering areas of poché reveal the extent of hidden spaces within residential architecture. Robert Venturi (1977: 71) states that buildings can have things within things or spaces within spaces. Mediating between these layers is where we find poché. Often, filmmakers activate and engage hidden or unstructured spaces within houses to frighten audiences. In the book The Horror Film, Stephen Prince (2004: 2) states that the experience of horror lies in the confrontation with uncertainty and the unnatural. Houses consist of numerous interstitial areas that exist, unseen by the casual resident, and that can embody the characteristics of the unknown. By allowing characters to access cavities in the floors and walls, wait in a closet, or hide in the attic or basement, the safe spaces in the home are eliminated; there is nowhere left to hide from impending terror. To access somewhere implies there is a threshold to be crossed; architect and theorist Robert Venturi has argued that a threshold can reveal and express the amount of poché between the inside and outside of a volume (Venturi 1977: 70). For example, if we return to the film Le Manoir du Diable (1896), we see the selection of

170 Domesticity Under Siege

Fig. 8.1  James Kerestes, ‘Abstract X-Ray Image of a Typical North American Bungalow Home Revealing the Underlying Poché within the Structure’, 2018.

scenery as a psychological backdrop. The entrance to the castle – a constructed set – serves as the focal point framing the significant elements to the story. The doorway, or threshold, is highlighted as a prominent element in this scene. As the film begins, a large bat hovers in the doorway of the castle before transforming into a sinister being dressed in black. A cross-wielding cavalier chases the being away, implying it was the devil himself. The entry threshold serves as a visual device to frame the perspective and subject matter of the film. It can also be considered as the threshold between good and evil as well as a witness to the dramatic storyline. If it were not for the brave cavalier, the antagonists would have breached the castle and unleashed their misdeeds on the occupants.

House as witness Not all horror films rely on the supernatural to scare audiences. Slasher films are a popular subgenre where the antagonists are human rather than supernatural. Moreover, in some slasher films the storyline is drawn from ‘true crime’ murders. The characters represent probable depictions of perpetrators, often drawn from real-world accounts. These accounts of physical or psychological terror follow a straightforward and consistent formula: an unknown intruder or killer systematically terrorizes and murders unsuspecting victims by masking their identity and attacking at unpredictable times and locations. Gary Heba (1995: 106–15) writes on the rhetoric of what he terms the ‘incoherent’ slasher film where the perpetrator goes

Suburban Horror Story 171

free, or remains uncaptured, at the end of the film. While these films are developed by production companies to provide opportunities for lucrative sequels, their openendedness also makes them more frightening. Heba states, ‘Ideologically, incoherent movies reinforce the idea that the writing of the master narrative is continuous and ongoing, and never quite complete’ (Heba 1995: 106–15). Can the same be said for domestic architecture? Poché represents the incomplete vision, the leftover pieces, of an architectural design. Poché and unstructured space offer undefined architectural narratives where new narratives can be developed, rendered, and deployed. Some of the more well-known examples in the slasher film genre revolve around home intrusion in suburban settings, since these are locations where victims have been programmed to feel safe and tend to let their guard down. In these films, the house bears witness to horrific events as they unfold while providing shelter and coverage for the antagonist. Whether hiding in the closet, taking up residence in the attic or basement or moving between the layers of the visible structure, killers activate the home in unique and alternative ways. In an effort to remain anonymous and to be successful in carrying out their nefarious plans, these interlopers make use of unstructured spaces and zones of poché within the home. The 1974 film Black Christmas, directed by Bob Clark, illustrates a number of ways in which an antagonist can make use of these spatial conditions in order to move around without being seen, carry out their murders, and find refuge in intimate proximity to their victims. The film begins from the point of view of ‘Billy’, who surveys a way to enter the residence of a college sorority, a large Tudor revival-style house in an affluent neighbourhood. The camera follows Billy (Albert J. Dunk) as he scales a trellis and gains access to the sorority through an attic window. His choice of entry through an unconventional threshold is the first indication to the audience that Billy is the film’s antagonist. This will be the first of many unexpected thresholds that he will exploit in the building. In the film, the house has a common organizational layout separating public and private spaces by floor level. The first floor of the house is predominantly comprised of rooms for entertaining, while the second floor consists of the bedrooms for the sorority sisters, and there is a basement in addition to an attic. Billy attacks his first victim, Clare (Lynne Griffin), in her bedroom while the other sisters are hosting a party on the first floor. He lunges at Clare from a secondary cavity in the back of the closet. It is unclear if he travelled through the walls to position himself out of view, which raises the question as to the nature of the space behind and in between the walls. In that moment, he is occupying the poché of the closet, a terrifyingly secluded space situated within striking distance of several vulnerable areas of the home. Billy smothers Clare with a sheet of plastic and transports her body up to the attic using an access ladder located in a small alcove just off to the side of the stairs on the second-floor landing. The audience watches as Billy carries Clare’s body up through the hatch in the ceiling and positions her in a chair, still draped in plastic. Within this single narrative sequence, Billy has utilized a number of unstructured spaces to carry out this murder; the closet, the alcove adjacent to the stair landing, and the attic.

172 Domesticity Under Siege

The attack on Clare predominantly directs our attention to the closet, a domestic space normally concealed behind a door and dismissed as an uninhabited part of a room. Barry Curtis (2008: 37–8) highlights the history of the closet from the late fourteenth to the nineteenth century, describing it as an area to withdraw to or display precious objects. Curtis (2008: 37–8) continues by stating that in the 1840s, closet rooms were developed to accommodate a rise in the accumulation of material possessions that could no longer be stored in traditional freestanding furniture. Billy’s intention in the film is to remain unseen in order to fulfill his deadly plans. His use of the closet, and even more so a secondary cavity within the closet, further emphasizes this notion and enables him to attack Clare by catching her off guard. The attic, where Clare’s body is positioned for the remainder of the film, is also a

Fig. 8.2  James Kerestes, ‘Analytical Drawing Illustrating the Unstructured Spaces Utilized By “Billy” in the Murder of Clare’, from Black Christmas, 1974, directed by Bob Clark, 2020.

Suburban Horror Story 173

representation of an unstructured domestic space. Like the closet, these areas are typically not intended for human occupation and are closed off from view. Billy remains hidden in the attic throughout the course of the film, only exiting at the opportune time to murder one of the sorority sisters. Four years after the release of Black Christmas (1974), John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) depicted another suburban town terrorized by a mysterious killer: the masked Michael Myers. After escaping from a mental institution, Michael (Nick Castle) returns home to the fictional town of Haddonfield, Illinois. In the last act of the film, Laurie Strode, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, investigates the house across the street from where she is babysitting for a boy named Tommy Doyle (Brian Andrews). She finds her friend, Annie (Nancy Kyes), dead in an upstairs bedroom. While in a state of shock, she stumbles backwards only to find the body of her friend, Lynda (P. J. Soles), in a closed storage unit. The body of Lynda’s boyfriend Bob (John Michael Graham) appears swinging upside down in the adjacent closet. The antagonist, Michael Myers, placed the bodies of Lynda and Bob in spaces meant for items to remain hidden. Referring again to Barry Curtis (2008: 38), he states that closets are places of interior exclusion that have the capacity to absorb disorder allowing the domestic spaces to appear ordered and in harmony. By storing the bodies of Laurie’s friends in the unstructured spaces in the house, Michael is using the house to facilitate his deadly intentions by co-opting familiar spaces for a new purpose. Like Billy in Black Christmas (1974), Michael aims to keep himself and his deeds hidden. After Laurie discovers her murdered friends, Michael emerges from the shadows of an adjacent room and attacks her. She flees back to the Doyle residence and seeks refuge in a bedroom closet on the second floor. By hiding in the closet, Laurie is relying on an inconspicuous space to keep her safe. Barry Curtis (2008: 38) refers to the closet as spaces within walls that take part in a secret architecture of storage. Laurie is relying on this claustrophobic cavity to shield her from Michael’s view. When referring to boxes, chests and caskets, Gaston Bachelard (2014: 102–3) points to the power that comes with the ability to open and shut the containers. Laurie is tapping into this psychological power to keep her safe from harm as she shuts herself into the closet. Unfortunately, Michael discovers her and breaks through the doors. She fights back long enough for Dr Loomis (Donald Pleasence) to show up and save her from the same fate as her friends.

House as an agent Nancy Thompson is asleep in her bed. The wall above her bed begins to bend and move as if pressed from the inside. As she sleeps, the silhouette of a person becomes clear as if it is trying to penetrate the surface. These scenes from 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, directed by Wes Craven, demonstrate how the activation of unstructured spaces and poché can provide agency to the house, serving as a mediator between occupant and perpetrator. As the character Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) presses against the wall above Nancy (Heather Langenkamp),

174 Domesticity Under Siege

the wall cavity physically expands and changes, as if the plaster were no more than fabric. By occupying the poché of the wall, the space begins to have implausible characteristics, where the materials used for the construction of the interior wall are now malleable and no longer operate in practical ways. The uncanny nature of an expanding poché, one that transforms from uninhabitable cavity to navigable space when activated through narrative, plays upon our psychological attachment to the architecture of the home. It also highlights our innate understanding of the physical properties of building products. If the western lifestyle were dominated by fabric or tent-based architecture, where fluctuation in the surface was common, a heaving wall would not trigger fear in the same way. The suburban house represents a sublime achievement of progress, one that is terrorized into imperfection in horror films allowing it to take on new properties that are fearful, strange and unusual. Vidler (1992: 21–8) notes in his summary for the development of the definition of unheimlich, the precursor to uncanny, that the term is situated specifically in special relationships of orientation and in domestic experiences. Horrific architectural elements, such as stairs that can swallow feet or walls that can reach forward, are terrifying not only because they engage with occupants in unexpected ways but also because their actions and uncanny qualities reverse what we understand culturally as proper functionality of space. Following the wall incident, there are a number of further instances where the house and inanimate objects mediate exchanges between Freddy and Nancy. While taking a bath, Nancy begins to fall asleep. Freddy’s hand emerges from the water between her legs. His hand, adorned with a knife fingered glove, recedes back under the water as Nancy’s mom knocks on the door. Moments later, the hand violently pulls Nancy under the water into an impossible cavity below the tub. The space below, no longer defined and informed by the building materials of the floor, is dark with no legible boundary. The only light comes from a hole in the base of the tub. Nancy is able to escape back through the hole and to safety. Robert Venturi (1977: 71) proposes that buildings can have interior configurations that misalign or contrast with their containers. In this example, the realistic void between the bathroom floor and the ceiling of the room below would be significantly more shallow and be subdivided by the framing members necessary to construct it. This scene gives us a glimpse of the potential space beyond the visible surfaces of the room and manipulates the programme of the home, specifically the bathtub in the bathroom, from a relaxing space to a terrifying one. In another dream sequence, Nancy runs away from Freddy. Back at her house, she attempts to run up the stairs to the second floor until the poché of the steps slows her down. Her feet sink into the treads of the stairs, engulfed by a thick, viscous substance. The physical properties of the steps have transformed into an impossible material, similar to the wall in her bedroom. The house is aiding the antagonist by hindering the victim from moving freely. Stairways are traditionally thought of as transition spaces and are not intended to be occupied or inhabited for an extended period of time. In this example, the poché of the steps change the function of the

Suburban Horror Story 175

Fig. 8.3  James Kerestes, ‘Analytical Drawing Illustrating the Juxtaposition between Nancy’s House and the Impossible Space Below the Bathtub’, from A Nightmare on Elm Street, 1984, directed by Wes Craven, 2020.

stairway from one which allows passage from one floor to the next in an uninterrupted way, to one which assists Freddy in capturing Nancy. Another example of Freddy occupying impossible spaces occurs during the killing sequence of Nancy’s boyfriend Glen, played by Johnny Depp. As Glen falls asleep on his bed, Freddy’s gloved hand emerges from the mattress and pulls him through a hole in the bed. An enormous amount of blood rises from the opening like a geyser, flooding the ceiling and the room. The bed consumes Glen, giving agency to inanimate objects to assist Freddy in murder. Unlike Nancy’s traumatic experience within the dark abyss beneath the bathtub, the audience does not see the space within the mattress. Glen and Freddy are both occupying the poché of the mattress, insinuating that the cavity extends well beyond what is visible from the outside in the bedroom.

176 Domesticity Under Siege

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) demonstrates how unstructured spaces and zones of poché reveal and accommodate other realms and spaces within spaces. Physical inconsistencies and irregularities in materials and components of the house give way to breaks in reality. These irregularities provide a link, or portal, to other dimensions and realms. The speculative environments presented within the film occur because the house, the architecture, has agency to facilitate passage between the real and the impossible. Architectural history is no stranger to depictions of speculative environments and building proposals that represent the sublime, uncanny or grotesque. In the mid-eighteenth century, Italian architect, artist, and printmaker Giovanni Battista Piranesi produced a series of etchings titled Imaginary Prisons (1761). The sixteen etchings depict monumental spaces and massive labyrinths draped in shadow. Figures within the drawings are dwarfed by the cavernous volumes of stone and timber, where primitive and seemingly pointless machines operated by extensive rope and pulley systems are depicted throughout. Each image draws the viewer into an impossible reality. Huxley (1949: 24) writes, ‘because the Prisons are images of confusion, because their essence is pointlessness, the combination of architectural forms never adds up to an architectural drawing, but remains a free design, untrammeled by any considerations of utility or even possibility, and limited only by the necessity of evoking the general idea of a building’. The atmospheric effects represented in the etchings by Piranesi challenge reality and scale while referencing vaulted underground tombs. Many of the representations depict winding stairways cluttered with shadowy figures, oversized statues and massive industrious operations not yet realized in this period. Like the special effects that would later appear in film, the static images presented fantastic visual information. Roncato (2007: 3–18) notes that it is through the use of skewed and slightly out-of-proportion perspective that Piranesi amplifies the viewers’ sense of foreboding. The architectural elements in the images pile on top of each other for no apparent reason, adding to the disconnection between the apparently realistic renderings created with illogical physics. ‘The initial etchings of the Carceri are ominous, not because of what is there but because of what is merely implied. The most harrowing feature of the prisons depicted is their endlessness in space and time’ (Wegner 2002: 12). The 1987 film Hellraiser (dir. Barker) makes use of similar visual information in order to juxtapose a familiar domestic space with the labyrinths of Hell. This film, based on Clive Barker’s original horror novella The Hellbound Heart (Barker 1986), was adapted into a feature length film that Barker would also write and direct. Hellraiser (1987) is the story of Frank Cotton (Sean Chapman), a hedonist in an endless search for exotic pleasures. While abroad, Cotton purchases a puzzle box he suspects will unlock unimaginable experiences, satisfying his insatiable desires. He brings the box back to his family’s unoccupied home in London in order to solve the puzzle, unaware that unlocking the box will create a gateway to a realm where pain and pleasure are indistinguishable. Cenobites oversee the realm, mutilated beings

Suburban Horror Story 177

who were once humans in search of indulgent behaviour. In the novel The Hellbound Heart, we learn that the Cenobites collect those who open the box and subject them to an eternity of torture and sadomasochism (Barker 2007). By choosing to open the box inside the house, the structure becomes both a gateway for the Cenobites and a prison for Frank. The London house is a three-storey structure with a gambrel roof. Entertaining and relaxing rooms are on the ground floor while the bedrooms are located on the second floor. The attic takes up the third floor, consisting of three separate rooms. Unlike in Black Christmas (1974), these spaces appear as part of the rest of the house, accessed by the main stairway. Frank chooses one of the three empty rooms in the attic as the location he will occupy while solving and opening the puzzle box. The lath and plaster walls have deteriorated, leaving large holes that reveal the narrow wooden strips. Frank sits in the middle of the space on the wood floor, surrounded by candles. A soft, blue light emanates from behind the walls while Frank solves the puzzle box, the first indication that there is an unexpected nature to the space between the walls. As the box opens, hooked chains spring out from the box and pierce Frank’s body. The box, in addition to the room, proves to be both a gateway to another dimension and a container for an impossible space. The camera cuts away revealing the exterior of the house and various views of the interior levels before returning to the room in the attic. Numerous sets of chains now hang from the ceiling along with other grotesque paraphernalia. The room, unlike the rest of the house, has changed. The house has become a passage to another realm. Remnants of Frank’s body litter the floor as a Cenobite retrieves the box and returns the room to its previous state. The poché of the house becomes Frank’s prison. There are a few differences between the novel and the film as it pertains to Frank’s imprisonment. For instance, we do not learn how Frank becomes trapped within the poché of the house, but the novel provides perspective and insight from Frank as he is imprisoned within the interstitial voids of the attic. ‘Sometimes it seemed that eons came and went while he lingered in the wall, eons that some clue would later reveal to have been the passing of hours, or even minutes’ (Barker 2007: 57). In addition to the loss of time and being subjected to various forms of torture, Frank was able to gaze back into the room in which he solved the box configurations (Barker 2007: 62–3). Frank has conjured a fathomable horror of torture and sadomasochism in an unfathomable space or realm. Not long after Frank’s encounter with the Cenobites, his brother Larry (Andrew Robinson) and his wife Julia (Clare Higgins) move into the house. The first time Julia enters the room where Frank is still prisoner, she immediately expresses disdain for the space. It is not like the other rooms; the air is stagnant and the walls clammy (Barker 2007: 28–9). From this point on in the novel, Julia refers to the space as the ‘damp room’. Over time, Julia’s attitude towards the room changes from disdain to comfort. She routinely visits the space, describing it as a ‘womb of sorts, a dead woman’s womb’, an appropriate description as it will soon facilitate the resurrection or rebirth of Frank, the brother (Barker 2007: 38).

178 Domesticity Under Siege

Frank’s imprisonment within the poché of the attic room ends when his brother sheds blood from an accidental cut on the attic floorboards. The blood seeps into the wood and is sucked into the cavity below the floor. The floorboards rattle as the nails keeping them in place begin to withdraw and fall to the ground. Smoke and light rise from the poché of the floor while a bloody, viscous ooze comes through the wood along with fleshy, skeletal human remains. Frank is regenerating and the house is birthing him back into a physical existence. The physical structure of the home serves as the threshold for his passage from one realm to the next. The agency of the house lay dormant until Frank solved the puzzle box. This act revealed and activated the structure’s ability to serve as a mediator and threshold between realms. The film does not reveal the extent of the transitionary space between the realms, located within the poché of the building, or the vastness of the realm of the Cenobites. As in the case of the etchings by Piranesi, the audience must imaginatively complete for themselves the details of the context.

House as perpetrator The Amityville Horror was released in 1979, captivating audiences by presenting another instance of how our most safe and familiar spaces can be occupied by threatening, unwanted guests or spirits. Directed by Stuart Rosenberg, the film reveals that the house at the centre of the story has a long and complicated history. The residual memory of the building and land contributes to the active role the house has in terrorizing its inhabitants. The plot of The Amityville Horror (1979) follows the married couple, George and Kathy Lutz (James Brolin and Margot Kidder), who purchase a home in Amityville, New York. Unfortunately for the Lutz family, the previous family that lived in the home died as part of a mass killing carried out by the family’s father. Additionally, a satanic worshipper had also lived on the property. This malevolent history causes manipulative supernatural forces to torment the Lutz family. Throughout the film, the house appears possessed and responsive to the presence of evil. Doors close by themselves and blood drips from the walls and stairs at the climax of the film. The building’s poché is hidden in a similar manner as the invisible perpetrators. The only way to identify the extent of the hidden cavities between the walls is to breach the surface or to compare careful measurements between the interior spaces and the exterior container. The structure has bonded with George, the father. It appears to be nurturing a relationship with him, attempting to influence him to murder his family. The house resists the family’s escape by preventing the front door from opening. George successfully gets his family out of the house and in their car. Before leaving, he decides to return to the house and retrieve the family dog, falling through the basement stairs in the process. He lands in a ruptured gash in the basement floor, submerged in a thick black liquid. The climactic focus on the basement energizes a space within the house that is often dormant. Basements can take many forms, from dirt or concrete floors to

Suburban Horror Story 179

completely finished or furnished spaces. Gaston Bachelard (2014: 39) refers to the cellar as the foremost dark entity of the house due to its immersion below ground and that it partakes of subterranean forces. It is a place with no natural light: a place that is often colder and damper than the rest of the home. Bachelard ([1958] 2014: 41) states that cellars have the capacity to be the site of buried madness, a form of walled-in tragedy. They are the sites of childhood fears, not fully encompassed in the fabric of the home. The black liquid George is mired in is like the manifestation and accumulation of horrible memories witnessed by the house. As George and the dog escape the basement, the house makes one final attempt to prevent George from leaving by not allowing the front door to open again. The house has moved from witness and agent to perpetrator, throughout the film. George wastes no time breaking a window, an unexpected threshold, and finally rejoins his family with the dog. As the family leaves, never to return or collect their possessions, the film pans to perhaps the most memorable aspect of the house, its anthropomorphic exterior façade. The scale, outline, and position of two windows near the top roofline on the side elevation make it seem as though the house has the features of a face, and remind us of the residual memories each home possesses. As Bachelard ([1958] 2014: 67) proposes, homes are far more than mere familiar geometric forms or inert boxes, but rather inhabited spaces that transcend geometric spaces. The final example of ‘house as perpetrator’, the 2020 film Relic, expands on the connection between architecture and the human psyche through the intimate relationship between a home and its long-time resident. Relic (2020), directed by Natalie Erika James, centres on the cognitive decline of Edna (Robyn Nevin), mother to Kay (Emily Mortimer) and grandmother to Sam (Bella Heathcote). Edna’s sickness establishes the underlying tone and theme of the film, leading viewers to discover that the majority of the horrific visuals in the film consist of dual meanings. The story takes place in Edna’s home, the place where Kay grew up. Edna has wandered away and is missing. Kay and her daughter Sam travel to the home to search and care for Edna. The house plays two roles in the film, as a reflection of Edna’s deteriorating mental state and as a container for the family’s memories. Edna suddenly returns home, unharmed, and the three generations of women reconnect after having previously spent significant time apart. The house is cluttered with memories in the form of physical objects, photo albums, trinkets and an abundance of Edna’s possessions. Edna spends her time carving candles at an easel in her living room, transforming the simple wax objects through subtraction. At the same time, an intensive transformation is occurring to her cognitive abilities. Boxes and clutter overwhelm an upstairs room, just like the memories in Edna’s mind. Kay discovers a closet in a room with an additional lock, leading to more spaces of disorganized content. The walls inside the closet have a black stain, similar to discoloured bruises that appear on Edna, which grow and change in unison. This is a visual reminder of the connection between Edna and the home.

180 Domesticity Under Siege

In the climax of the film, Sam explores a locked closet to find that it extends significantly beyond what would be expected, or realistic, in a home of that size. This is an indication that the interior configurations of the home do not align with the exterior façade or the building’s overall silhouette. This impossible space, like those adjoining it, is also cluttered with even more of Edna’s possessions and heirlooms. Sam explores the newly discovered halls and rooms only to learn that as she progresses through the labyrinth, the spaces behind her have changed. The entry point is no longer passable, so she must make her way through the progressively more cluttered and precarious spaces. The walls, noticeably stained with a black substance, lead to new areas where the ceilings lower and the hallways become thinner. The space is expansive, layered, and changing. Sam, now crawling through the tight cavities, breaks through the lowered ceiling and encounters her mother

Fig. 8.4  James Kerestes, ‘Analytical Drawing Illustrating the Spatial and Volumetric Relationships between the Living Room and the Expansive Closet in Relic’, 2020.

Suburban Horror Story 181

and grandmother. The three women are occupying a significant zone of unseen poché in the house. Edna is not herself and has become a threatening presence to Sam and Kay. The mother and daughter try to escape from Edna by breaking through a second wall, only to tumble into the living room through a hole above the fireplace mantle. Edna follows and is incapacitated following a beating from Kay. The film concludes with the three women lying in an embrace on a bed, supporting each other as they grapple with Edna’s deteriorating physical and mental states. The transformation of Edna’s home through the rearrangement of constituent components reveals the incoherent relationship between the container, the house, and the interior composition. The poché navigates between these spaces as the house reconfigures over time in sync with Edna’s mental decline. The tense and claustrophobic scenes of the three women scrambling through the walls do not lead to a fantastic portal or imaginary realm, but rather lead the characters to discover the discord within their own family. With each successive reconfiguration, new thresholds emerge between an incoherent arrangement of rooms and hallways. The resultant configuration makes the home’s original appearance and nostalgia a distant memory.

Horrific encounters The architectural elements within horror films can be found all around us. Whether a long, foreboding hallway, a motel off a busy highway or the bedroom in our home, audiences routinely encounter these spaces in daily life. Horror films permeate our psyche and suggest that these mundane environments are not only portent but potentially threatening. The atmosphere and setting of horror cinema can be just as important to the story and recognizable to the audience as the lead antagonists. Some films lean heavily on the influence an environment, a location or an architectural language can have in support of a film’s narrative. Examples of architecture driving the narrative forward can be seen in building types as varied as the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (dir. Kubrick 1980), the apartment layouts in Rosemary’s Baby (dir. Polanski 1968), the exterior of The Amityville Horror (dir. Rosenberg 1979) house, Dr Frankenstein’s castle in Frankenstein (dir. Whale 1931) and the cabins of Camp Crystal Lake in Friday the 13th (dir. Cunningham 1980). In each of these films, the buildings all consist of domestic spaces under siege from unknown or unexpected threats. The home exerts a powerful agency of its own in the plot. It may hinder a protagonist’s escape from danger, serve to protect a vulnerable antagonist or act as a relatable stage for a horrific sequence. Through the activation and occupying of poché, domestic spaces become vulnerable to outside forces. The house ceases to operate as an impenetrable, safe space and transitions to contributing to the entrapment, confusion and terror of its rightful inhabitants.

182 Domesticity Under Siege

The consistent presence of poché and unstructured space is not confined to a historical context. These latent conditions, like those depicted within the etchings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons (1761), in George Méliès’ film Le Manoir du Diable (1896) or Black Christmas (dir. Clark 1974), are still evident in contemporary residential architecture. Closets, attics, basements and interstitial zones within walls and floors exist in the standard homes presented in Halloween (dir. Carpenter 1978), A Nightmare on Elm Street (dir. Craven 1984) and Relic (dir. James 2020). Twentieth-century and twenty-first-century domestic architecture has evolved in large part due to the advancement of building materials and construction methods, but has maintained a consistent compositional logic as it pertains to the organization and function of spaces within a home. Horror movies act as a barometer of our cultural understanding of comfort and safety. These films reveal the spatial environments where we feel most vulnerable and most secure. Looking to horror films and their engagement of poché and unstructured spaces can spur alternative approaches to the construction and aesthetic of our homes, allowing domestic architecture to evolve in ways unencumbered by expectations of the past.

References The Amityville Horror (1979), [Film] Dir. Stuart Rosenberg, USA: American International Pictures. Bachelard, G. ([1958] 2014), The Poetics of Space, New York: Penguin Books. Barker, C. (1986), ‘The Hellbound Heart’, in G. R. R. Martin (ed.), Night Visions 3. The Hellbound Heart, 155–225, Chicago: Dark Harvest. Barker, C. (2007), The Hellbound Heart, New York: HarperCollins. Black Christmas (1974), [Film] Dir. Bob Clark, CA: Warner Bros. Pictures. Curtis, B. (2008), Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film, London: Reaktion Books. Frankenstein (1931), [Film] Dir. James Whale, USA: Universal Pictures. Friday the 13th (1980), [Film] Dir. Sean S. Cunningham, USA: Paramount Pictures. Halloween (1978), [Film] Dir. John Carpenter, USA: Compass International Pictures. Heba, G. (1995), ‘Everyday Nightmares’, Journal of Popular Film & Television, 23 (3): 106–15. Hellraiser (1987), [Film] Dir. Clive Barker, UK: Entertainment Film Distributors. Huxley, A., J. Adhémar, and G. B. Piranesi (1949), Prisons with ‘Carceri’ Etchings by G.B. Piranesi, Los Angeles: Zeitlin & Ver Brugge. Kipnis, J. (2013), Interview by Luca De Giorgi for What Is Architecture? Available online: https://www.whatisarchitecture.cc/jeffrey-kipnis (accessed 13 October 2020). Le Manoir du Diable (1896), [Film] Dir. George Méliès, FR: Star Film Company, 1896. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), [Film] Dir. Wes Craven, USA: New Line Cinema. Piranesi, G. B. (1761), ‘Imaginary Prisons’, etching and engraving, Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey. Available online: https://artmuseum.princeton. edu/object-package/giovanni-battista-piranesi-imaginary-prisons/3640 (accessed 14 October 2020). Prince, S. (2004), The Horror Film, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Suburban Horror Story 183

Relic (2020), [Film] Dir. Natalie Erika James, AU/USA: IFC Midnight. Roncato, S. (2007), ‘Piranesi and the Infinite Prisons’, Spatial Vision, 21 (1–2): 3–18. Rosemary’s Baby (1968), [Film] Dir. Roman Polanski, USA: Paramount Pictures. The Shining (1980), [Film] Dir. Stanley Kubrick, UK/USA: Warner Bros. Tudor, A. (1997), ‘Why Horror? The Peculiar Pleasures of a Popular Genre’, Cultural Studies, 11 (3): 443–63. Venturi, R. (1977), Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Vidler, A. (1992), Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, Cambridge: MIT Press. Wegner, H. L. (2002), ‘Scientific Reproduction and the Terrain of Terror: Metaphysical Prisons from Giambattista Piranesi to Franz Kafka’, West Virginia University Philological Papers, 49, 12 [Online]. Available online: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A103381699/ LitRC?u=munc80314&sid=LitRC&xid=c1617a15 (accessed 10 November 2020).

184 Domesticity Under Siege

Index Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. air quality tests 31 Albert, Prince 24 Amityville Horror, The (dir. Rosenberg) 179–80 ants 38, 39, 42–3, 46 architects and Victorian homes 18–26 architecture, engagement with 169 Arendt, Hannah 57, 64, 70–1 Arnold, Rebecca 103–4 Association of International Artists (AIA) 114, 121 n.14 Austrian domestic crime scenes 64–8, 66 Baby (magazine) 26, 32 Bachelard, Gaston 169–70, 174, 180 Ballin, Ada 29–30 Barker, Clive, The Hellbound Heart 177, 178 Barker, Lady M. A. 28–9 Barnouw, Dagmar 132, 142 n.4 Bates, Henry Walter 39 Baudrillard, Jean 151 Beaton, Cecil 103–4, 120 n.6 beauty, conceptions of 92 bedbugs 44–6 beds 27, 44, 45 bees 39, 43, 44 beetle wing dress 40 beetles 40–1, 44, 46 Behn-Grund, Friedl 130 Belk, Russell W. 78, 79 Benjamin, Walter and domestic screen 59 and Schwitters’s Merzbau 82, 85–6, 87, 90, 94 n.7 and Staudte’s Die Mörder sind unter uns 126, 127, 128, 137 and wartime home in art of London Blitz 99, 119 n.4 Bennett, Alan, People 154–5 biblical stories 48

Biehler, Diane 45 Birds, The (dir. Hitchcock) 43 Black Christmas (dir. Clark) 172–4, 173, 183 Blouet, Abel 58–9 body and house in sanitary reform 19, 20, 23, 26 Böll, Heinrich 144 n.18 Der Engel schwieg 144 n.21 ‘In Defense of Rubble Literature’ 131, 132 boundary between inside and outside 4 See also under domestic screen Bowen, Elizabeth, The Heat of the Day 103 Bowen, Stella 103, 105, 113–15 Flight from Reason 115 The House Opposite 111–15, 112, 118, 121 n.13 Boyd, Robin 151 Bradshaw, John, ‘Italian Sketchbook’ 104–5 Brandon, James 55 Brandt, Bill 103 British art. See wartime home in art of London Blitz British cinema and Second World War 106–7, 118 Brockmann, Stephen 145 n.24 Brydon, John McKean 33 Burgess, Ian F. 38 Buse, Peter 143 n.11 candle test 31 Candyman 60 care, notions of 5 Carroll, Lewis, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There 41 ‘castle’, as term 58 cavity walls 58–9 censorship and London Blitz 100–2, 106 children’s literature, insects in 37, 41, 42, 48 Churchill, Winston 103

churning in hoarding 84 Clark, Kenneth 101–2, 115, 119 n.3 Clark, Manning 151 Clifford, Lady Anne 30 closets, history of 173, 174 cockroaches 38, 39, 46 Cognitive-Behavioural Model of Hoarding (CBMoH) 75, 81–2, 88, 89, 93 n.5, 94 n.6 collecting 78–9, 85–8 comfort and hygiene concept 93 comfort in hoarding 82 Comyns Carr, Alice 40 Connolly, Kate 65, 67–8 contagious diseases 21, 22–3, 24, 26–9 control in hoarding 82, 83, 88 Copley, Peter 111 Corfield, William Henry 27 corporeal eye (Nochlin) 100 Cousins, Mark 61, 89 Covid-19 and domestic abuse 59 and exterior spaces 25 and home 1–2, 3–4, 17, 33 and hospitals 33 and social class 21 transmission of 24 creepy crawlies. See insects and creepy crawlies Cullars, John 93 curating 78, 79, 86 Curtis, Barry 170, 173, 174 cut-away interior views 111, 113, 116 Dada 84–5, 89 Darwinian evolutionary theory 39 Davies, Caroline 65 death, representations of 104 de Cacqueray, Elizabeth 107 De Certeau, Michel 83, 151, 152, 166 Deer, Patrick 101 denazification 126, 142 n.5 Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaf (DEFA) 126, 142 n.3 Dezenski, Lauren 3 Dickerman, Leah 84–5, 87, 89, 91 Dickey, Edward 102 diseases insects as transmitters of 38, 44 Victorian era 21, 22–3, 24, 26–9, 33 doctors and Victorian homes 18–26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32 Doherty, Brigid 84

186 Index

domestic abuse 58, 59 See also ‘honour killings’ Domestic Sanitation Movement 19, 20 domestic screen boundary between inside and outside 2–3, 4, 58–9 definition 56 private and public realms 56–8, 70–1 siege from inside out 64–71 siege from within 59–64 Dorner, Alexander 91 drainage systems 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 31 Drysdale, John James 20–1 Duffy, Louis Aftermath 104 Casualty No.1 104 dust 27, 31 Eassie, William 23 Edward, Prince of Wales (later Edward II) 24 Elderfield, John 91 Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital (London) 33 emotional attachment in hoarding 82 Empire of the Ants (dir. Gordon) 43 English Woman’s Journal 32 entomological fear. See under insects and creepy crawlies Erfahrung 86, 87 Erlebnisse 85 Evans, Robin 58–9 Expressionism and Realism in film. See under Mörder sind unter uns, Die (dir. Staudte) exterior spaces and health 25 ‘Fairhall’. See Johnston Collection (Melbourne) Faraday, Michael 58–9 fashion 40 fear of disease 22, 26–7, 33 fear of insects and creepy crawlies. See under insects and creepy crawlies feminist theory 2 Fisher, Jaimey 125 Fisher, Katherine 104, 105 flâneurs 142 n.1, 143 n.11 fleas 44 flies 38, 41, 44 football and domestic abuse 59 Ford, Ford Madox 114–15 Foss, Brian 100, 104, 119 n.3 Foster, Hal 84

Foucault, Michel 93 frame concept (Goffman) 151, 152, 166 Freud, Sigmund and domestic screen 55, 56 and fear of insects and creepy crawlies 48 and heritage house museums 153 and Schwitters’s Merzbau 86, 87, 89, 92 Frey, Mattias 126 Fritzl case 64–8, 66 Frost, R. O. 84 Furján, Helene, Glorious Visions 156 Gabain, Ethel 102, 104 Bombed Out, Bermondsey 109, 110–11, 114, 117, 118 ‘Raided Area, Stepney’ 110, 115, 121 n.11 Galton, Douglas 27 Games, Abram, ‘Your Britain Fight for It Now’ 118 Gandy, Joseph Michael 157 Gardiner, Juliet 105–6 Georgian homes. See heritage house museums German Expressionism 129 German rubble films 142 n.2 See also Mörder sind unter uns, Die (dir. Staudte) germ theory 21, 27 Gerrard, Nicci 65–7 Gladstone, Catherine 28 Goffman, Erving, frame concept 151, 152, 166 Gordon, Jan 114, 119 n.3 Gowrie, Grey 116 Grayzel, Susan 104 Greffrath, Bettina 142 n.7 Grey Gardens (dir. Sucsy) 43 Gross, Anthony 113 Gusenbauer, Alfred 68 Hafez, Salam 55 Hake, Sabine 142 n.2 Hall, Clifford 102, 108–10, 113 ‘But Damage was Slight and the Number of Casualties Very Small’ 107–8, 108, 114, 118 Halloween (dir. Carpenter) 174, 183 Hansen, Rolf, Die große Liebe 144 n.19 Harbison, Robert 153 Hartl, T. L. 84 Hatoum, Mona 61 haven, home as 1, 2–3, 17–18 Haweis, Mary 40

Hayward, John Williams 21 Heal and Son (furniture maker) 27 healing role of women 30 health. See sanitary reform; sanitary responsibilities of women Heba, Gary 171–2 Heimat. See under Mörder sind unter uns, Die (dir. Staudte) Heimkehrer-flâneurs. See under Mörder sind unter uns, Die (dir. Staudte) heimlich 55 Hell, Julia 120 n.8, 145 n.27 Hellraiser (dir. Barker) 177–9 heritage house museums in Bennett’s People 154–5 and Goffman’s frame concept 151, 152, 166 Johnston Collection 161–5, 163, 164 Severs House 159–61, 160 Soane House 155–8, 158 theatricality of 152–3, 156–7, 159–61, 163, 165, 166 uncanny quality of 153 Hill, Jonathan 156, 158 Hillman, James 38 Hitchcock, Alfred 56 The Birds 43 Hoarding Disorder behavioural effects 81–2 Cognitive-Behavioural Model of Hoarding (CBMoH) 75, 81–2, 88, 89, 93 n.5, 94 n.6 collecting and hoarding compared 78–9 control in 82, 83, 88 memory in 82, 83–5, 86, 87 possessions as extension of self 88–9 recognition of 75, 93 n.2 and trauma 89 See also Schwitters, Kurt, Merzbau Hoch, Hannah 90 Hodgson, G. R. 106, 120 n.9 Hoffgen, Maggie 143 n.9 Hoffman, E. T. A., ‘The Sandman’ 60 Hogarth, William ‘A Midnight Modern Conversation’ 160 ‘A Rake’s Progress’ 157 hollow walls 58–9 Holub, Robert C. 142 n.5 home as haven 1, 2–3, 17–18 homelessness during London Blitz 102–3 ‘honour killings’ 55–6, 57, 68

Index 187

horror films engagement with 169 house as agent 170, 174–9 house as perpetrator 170, 179–82 house as witness 170, 171–4 insects and creepy crawlies in 42–3, 46, 48 residential architecture as settings 169–70, 182–3 horror literature 37, 40–1, 48, 60 Hoskins, George Gordon 33, 34 hospitals 33 house and body in sanitary reform 19, 20, 23, 26 house as medical technology 26–9 house museums. See heritage house museums housing estates 12 Howitt-Lodge, B., Business as Usual 120 n.7 Hue and Cry (dir. Crichton) 118 Huelsenbeck, Richard 84, 85 Hunt, Dr Harriot 30 Huxley, Aldous 177 Huyssen, Andreas 144 n.17 illumination 23, 26, 156 impossible spaces in horror films 175–7, 178, 181–2 information processing deficits 81, 82, 83 insecticides 38, 41 insects and creepy crawlies collecting and studying 37, 39–40 fear and loathing of 38–9 imagined fears 40–3 real fears 44–8 International Health Exhibition (London, 1884) 18–19, 21, 23, 24, 27, 28 In the Basement (dir. Seidl) 67 invasion literature and films 37, 42–3, 48 It Happened at Lakewood Manor (dir. Scheerer) 43 Italian Neo-Realism 131, 143 n.15 Ives, Burl 42 Jahns, Rudolf 79, 88 Johnston Collection (Melbourne) 161–5, 163, 164 Kafka, Franz ‘The Burrow’ 61–2, 64 Metamorphosis 37, 40 Kampusch, Natasha 67 Kansas, US, 1874 locust plague 38, 46–8, 47

188 Index

Kant, Immanuel 92 Kapczynski, Jennifer M. 144 n.18 Kipnis, Jeffrey 169 Klagemann, Eugen 130 Klein, Barrett 38, 39 Klippers, Sophie 91–2 Knight, Anthony 165 Knowle West Estate (Bristol, UK) 12 Koepnick, Lutz 143 n.8 Kwinter, Sanford 64 Lacan, Jacques 87 Ladies’ Sanitary Association (LSA) 32 Lancet Sanitary Commission 24 Larkham, Peter 118 Larson, Magali Sarfatti 23 Leslie, Eliza 45 Lewis, Jane 30 Lewis, Paul 62–3 lice 38, 44 lighting 23, 26, 156 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London 155–8 Lissitzsky, El 91–2 ‘Little Miss Muffet’ 42, 48 local/neighbourly gaze 109–11, 118 Lockwood, Jeffrey 39, 44 locusts 38, 46–8, 47, 49 Locusts: The 8th Plague (dir. Gilmour) 43 London Blitz. See wartime home in art of London Blitz Lovecraft, H. P., The Rats in the Walls 37, 43 Lyttle, William 63, 63–4 Macdonald, Frances 102, 113 Maguire, William 31 Maldonado, Tomas 93 Mallet, Shelly 4 Manoir du Diable, Le (dir. Méliès) 169, 170–1, 183 Mantel, Hilary 153, 166 Marcus, Sharon 111 Marsh, Richard, The Beetle 41 Marsh, Stefanie 65 Mason, Herbert, St Paul’s Cathedral during the Blitz, 1940 120 n.8 mass production 86 McCauley, Rose 103, 105 McEvoy, Emma 159 McPherson, Alex 102 The Alert 106, 107, 118, 120 n.10 Meadmore, W. S. 110

medical profession and Victorian homes 18–26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32 medical technology, house as 26–9 Mellor, Leo 113 memory in collecting 86, 87 memory in hoarding 82, 83–5, 86, 87 Mendelson, Zoe 75 Mengham, Rod 99, 118 Merz. See Schwitters, Kurt, Merzbau metal beds 27 middle-class Victorians. See Victorian middle-class homes Millbank penitentiary (UK) 58–9 Miller, Kristine 101 Mimic (dir. Del Toro) 43, 46 Ministry of Information (MoI) (UK) 101–2 mirrors 156–7, 162 ‘Mole Man’ of Hackney 62–4, 63 monocultural food production 46 Moore, Henry 103, 104, 119 n.3 Morantz, Regina Markell 28 Mörder sind unter uns, Die (dir. Staudte) expressionist and realist registers 128, 129–31, 132, 133–6, 137, 138, 139–40, 141, 143 n.9 Heimkehrer-flâneur and Heimat themes 125, 126–9, 131–42 importance as rubble film 126, 142 n.4 stills 133, 139 Mortein Insect Spray 41 Myerson, Julie 153 Nairn, Ian 157 Nash, Paul 119 n.3 National Trust (Australia) 165 National Trust (UK) 154–5 Nazi era cinema 106, 132 and Josef Fritzl 67 and Kurt Schwitters 77, 79 London Blitz 101, 102 See also Mörder sind unter uns, Die (dir. Staudte) neighbourly/local gaze 109–11, 118 Neo-Realism 131, 143 n.15 Neumeyer, Harald 142 n.1 new technologies and home 5 Nightmare on Elm Street, A (dir. Craven) 174–7, 176, 183 Nochlin, Linda 100

O’Brien, Mary-Elizabeth 144 n.19 open plan homes 17 Orwell, George 105 outdoor spaces and health 25 Overy, Richard 116 Pancevski, Bojan 65 Panton, Mrs (J. E.) 28 Parikka, Jussi 48 Passport to Pimlico (dir. Cornelius) 118 Pathway Project (domestic abuse service) 59 penitentiary walls 58–9 peppermint test 31 Pepys, Samuel 44 Perkins-Gilman, Charlotte, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ 60 Phol, Greg 40 Pinocchio (dirs. Sharpsteen and Luske) 41 Piper, John 104, 119 n.3 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista Imaginary Prisons 177, 179, 183 Paestum drawings 157 plumbing 23, 24, 25, 31, 33 Plunkett, Harriette 21, 29 Women, Plumbers, and Doctors 29 poché in horror films 170, 171, 172, 174–7, 178, 179, 182–3 Poe, Edgar Allan, ‘Cask of Amontillado’ 60 Poore, George Vivian 23 Porter, Henry 57–8 possessions as extension of self 88–9 Powell, Anna 129 Powell, Francis Sharp 18 Priklopil, Wolfgang 67 Prince, Stephen 170 private and public realms 56–8, 70–1, 86, 104 propaganda and London Blitz 100–1, 102 Punch 40 Rackham, Arthur 42 Rasch, William 136 rats 33, 34, 37, 43 Realism and Expressionism in film. See under Mörder sind unter uns, Die (dir. Staudte) refuge, home as place of 1, 2–3, 17–18 Refuge (domestic abuse helpline) 59 Reinsch’s test 31–2 Relic (dir. James) 180–2, 181, 183 Rentschler, Eric 142 n.7, 144 n.22 Rice, Charles 86, 87–8

Index 189

Richardson, Benjamin Ward 30 Richardson, Dorothy, Pilgrimage 33 Richter, Hans 84, 90, 91 Riley, Charles 48 Robida, Alfred 111 Roncato, Sergio 177 Rose, Jacqueline 55–6, 57, 67, 69 Rosenwein, Barbara 119 n.5 rubble, symbolism of 142 n.7, 143 n.8 rubble films 118, 142 n.2 See also Mörder sind unter uns, Die (dir. Staudte) rubble literature 131, 144 n.18 rubble removal 117–18 ruins, 20th century imagery 144 n.17 ruins/rubble gazing 104–6, 120 n.8 Ruskin, John 17–18 Said, Edward 61 sanitary inspectors 24 sanitary reform 18–26 sanitary responsibilities of women 27–33 Sarasohn, Lisa T. 44 Satre, Jean-Paul 78, 99, 117 Schwitters, Ernst 79–80 Schwitters, Gerd 88, 89–90 Schwitters, Helma 77, 88 Schwitters, Kurt, Merzbau as art or hoarding 91–2 concealment of 88–9, 90 domestic life impeded by 79–81, 93 n.4 excessive acquisitions in 90 history of 76–7 and memory 82, 84–5, 87 and object’s role in collection 85–8, 94 n.7 spatial boundaries in 92 and trauma 85, 89–90 See also Hoarding Disorder second wave feminism 2 Second World War 44, 49 See also Mörder sind unter uns, Die (dir. Staudte); Nazi era; wartime home in art of London Blitz Serres, Michel 59–60 Severs House (London) 159–61, 160 sewer rats 33, 34 Shalev-Gerz, Esther, ‘Daedal(us)’ 68–70, 69–70 Shandley, Robert 128, 143 n.9 sickrooms (Victorian era) 27–9 ‘siege’, as term 2, 3, 57 See also under domestic screen

190 Index

sighting of possessions in hoarding 83 Sinclair, Iain 159, 160, 166 slasher films 171–2 slum dwellings 21, 45 ‘smart home’ 5 smell of home 103 Soane, Sir John, ‘Crude Hints Towards an History of My House in Lincoln’s Inn Fields’ 158 Soane House (London) 155–8, 158 social class and bedbugs 44, 45 and contagious diseases 21, 24 Southall, John, A Treatise on Bugs 44–5 Sparke, Penny 4 Speller, Reg 121 n.11 spiders 42, 48 Stanley, Lord 20 Staudte, Wolfgang. See Mörder sind unter uns, Die (dir. Staudte) stealing by hoarders 91 Steiner, Henriette 56, 58 Steinitz, Kate 79, 84, 91 Stewart, Susan 86 surrealism 113 Sutherland, Graham 104, 119 n.3 Swarm, The (dir. Allen) 43 swarming insects 37–8, 43, 46–8, 49 Taeuber-Arp, Sophie 82, 91 Taussig, Michael 59, 60 Teale, Dr T. Pridgin 18, 19, 21, 22, 29, 31 Dangers to Health 19, 19–20, 21–2, 22 technology and domestic abuse 59 temporal organization in hoarding 83–4 termites 38–9, 46 Terry, Ellen 40 theatrical domestic settings. See under heritage house museums theft by hoarders 91 Them! (dir. Douglas) 42–3 ‘There Was an Old Lady who swallowed a Fly’ 42 Ticks (dir. Randel) 43 tiles and dust 27 Townsend, Mark 59 trauma in Freudian analysis 87 trauma and hoarding 85, 89–90 Traynor, Ian 68 Troutman, Anne 60 typhoid 22, 24

underground spaces 61–8, 66, 102, 103, 179–80 unheimlich 55, 153, 175 United Kingdom, domestic abuse statistics 59 unstructured domestic spaces in horror films 170, 172–7, 173, 176, 179–80, 183 Veel, Kristin 56, 58 veneer of normality 55, 56 ventilation 21, 23, 26 Venturi, Robert 170–1, 175 Victorian middle-class homes as Covid-19 lockdown spaces 17 insect collections 40 and sanitary reform 18–26 sanitary responsibilities of women 27–33 Vidler, Anthony 105, 153, 169, 175 Vogue 103–4 Von Moltke, Johannes 128, 143 n.10 Vuohelainen, Minna 41 War Artists Advisory Committee (WAAC) 101–2, 104, 110, 114–15, 119 n.3, 120 n.7 Britain at War exhibition 110 War Art Scheme 101 warfare and insects 44, 48–9 wartime home in art of London Blitz air raids and domestic life 102–3

artists (see Bowen, Stella; Gabain, Ethel; Hall, Clifford; McPherson, Alex; Weight, Carel) censorship of 100–2, 106 and neighbourly/local gaze 109–11, 118 and ruins/rubble gazing 104–6, 120 n.8 ways of representing 103–4 Weight, Carel 102, 115, 116–17 The Battle of Suburbia 115, 116–17, 118 It happened to us 115 Weimar Expressionism 130, 142, 145 nn.23–4 Weisman, Eva 59 Wigley, Mark 57, 58 Wilder, Laura Ingalls, On the Banks of Plum Creek 46–7 Williams, Raymond 119 n.5 women ‘honour killings’ 55–6, 57 represented in film 106–7 sanitary responsibilities 27–33 Wood, Catherine J. 29 Wood, Reverend J. G. 42 Wood-Allen, Mary The Man Wonderful in the House Beautiful 26 The Marvels of our Bodily Dwelling 26 Woolf, Virginia 103 Zola, Émile, Pot Bouille 111

Index 191

192

193

194

195

196

197

198