[PDF] The Use of Space in Gothic Fiction - IS MUNI

7208_1The_Use_of_Space_in_Gothic_Fiction.pdf

Masaryk University

Faculty of Arts

Department of English

and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Bc. Veronika Majlingová

The Use of Space in Gothic Fiction

Master's Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Bonita Rhoads, Ph. D.

2011
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. .....................................................

Author's signature

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank my supervisor, Bonita Rhoads, Ph.D., for her kind help and valuable advice. I am particularly grateful for her swift feedback, which made finishing this thesis considerably easier.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction...............................................................................................................1

2. Gothic Origins - Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics and the Gothic Revival...................4

3. The Division of Literary Space................................................................................13

4. The House...............................................................................................................20

5. The Castle ...............................................................................................................32

6. The City ..................................................................................................................40

7. Conclusion ..............................................................................................................53

8. Bibliography............................................................................................................55

9. Résumé ...................................................................................................................59

10. Resumé..................................................................................................................61

1

1. Introduction

"They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements" - Susan Hill Gothic fiction as a genre is very complex and not easy to define. For many decades it was derided by critics as worthless reading for the masses; however, it survived and evolved and finally rekindled the interest of scholarly circles. The complexity of the genre is evidenced by the many "Gothics" that have emerged in the academic discourse of recent decades. Fred Botting in his introduction to

The Gothic

(2001) lists for example the eighteenth-century Gothic, Victorian Gothic, modern Gothic, postmodern Gothic, female Gothic, postcolonial Gothic, queer Gothic, and urban Gothic. In spite of this generic multiplicity, however, one of the first things that come to mind when one thinks about a proper Gothic story is the setting. Whether it is an eerie castle on the top of a hill in the middle of a stormy night, a haunted house, a gloomy dilapidated neighborhood in a busy city or a dead spaceship drifting in space, from its very beginnings, Gothic fiction is connected with the architectural spaces in which its narratives are set. Titles of Gothic novels are teeming with names of buildings: The

Castle of Otranto

, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, "The Fall of the House of

Usher",

Bleak House, to name just a few. It is also often the case that the setting of the story, a ruined castle, abbey, a haunted house, etc. is a character of its own, sometimes more important than some of the main characters. Going deeper, one discovers that spatiality on various levels is an undeniable feature of Gothic fiction. The Gothic genre sets out to uncover the dark and twisted

2corridors of human mind where all the terrible secrets lie hidden. It is inherently

transgressive in that its main purpose is to disrupt the established order whether it is a social order, patriarchal order, or psychological restraints. The reason why the Gothic lasted so long, why it is so malleable is that it deals with the fundamental contradiction of human existence. It is the contradiction between the civilized and the barbaric, the realm of order and the realm of chaos, Our space and the space of the Other. Human nature always strives for the one by excluding the other without realizing that they are uncannily dependent on each other. Manuel Aguirre writes that "[t]he thresholds which horror fiction characters shun or violate, the boundaries behind which the enemy lurks, are essentially lines dividing domains of being: the human world closes itself to, and yet longs for, contact with an Otherworld it deems non-human, unreal, and evil" ("Closed Space" 3). This is manifested for example in that "a proper definition of a given thing in a given dimension requires reference to another dimension" (Ibid. 10), so in the myth of creation there are six days of doing completed by one day of non-doing and there is death to complete life. The role of Gothic is to point out the inevitable relationship of these two spheres by having characters transgress borders, forcing them to undergo a journey from their safe home to a place of evil and back. Gothic is about "blurring of metaphysical, natural, religious, class, economic, marketing, generic, stylistic, and moral lines" (Hogle 8-9), it brings the marginal into the centre. The aim of this thesis is to explore this Gothic spatiality in its various forms. Although the adaptability and diversity of the Gothic causes the different genres of the Gothic to make use of space in innumerable ways, with regard to the scope of this thesis, the focus will be limited to four texts of British authors writing between the second half of the eighteenth century and the end of the nineteenth century. The origin of the Gothic novel as a historical form is usually dated between 1764 and 1820, the

3years which saw the publication of Horace Walpole`s

The Castle of Otranto and Charles

Maturin`s

Melmoth the Wandererrespectively. However, it is now clear that the Gothic novel lived on in various forms, adapting on to the new times and environments, of which especially interesting with regard to space is the burgeoning urban environment of the nineteenth century. For the sake of comparison, therefore, not only the "proper" Gothic texts will be included in this thesis but also some examples from the later period. In the first chapter we will look at the origins of the Gothic, at the aesthetics of the eighteenth-century Britain and the connection to the Gothic Revival in architecture. The following chapter will be concerned with the division of literary space into three areas: the home, the residence of the hero/heroine, which is part of the everyday world, a safe place. Then there is the border or threshold and the anti-home, which is the realm of the Other, a place of chaos and evil, the abode of the villain. The rest of the thesis consists of three chapters and each chapter deals with an important setting of the Gothic fiction, a representative of one of the outlined areas of literary space: the house, the castle, and the city. 4

2. Gothic Origins - Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics and the

Gothic Revival

Gothic fiction emerged from a fusion of unique aspects of the eighteenth century. First, the heightened interest in England`s past, especially the mediaeval era brought to the architectural foreground looming cathedrals and mansions with labyrinthine structure, towers and gargoyles. Second, the changes in aesthetic feeling granted more importance to one`s personal sensibilities and imagination prepared ground for reveling in the sublime feeling evoked by the terrors that may be found lurking in such cathedrals and mansions. These changes happened partly as a reaction to the Enlightenment. During the eighteenth century, the term "gothic" underwent significant changes of meaning and connotations. Originally, the term comes from the name of one of the Germanic tribes, the Goths, who played an important role in the destruction of Rome. Due to lack of written materials in subsequent periods and general confusion of terms, "'Gothic' became a highly mobile term, remaining constant only in the way it functioned to establish a set of polarities revolving primarily around the concepts of the primitive and the civilized" (Punter 3). Gothic came to denote everything uncivilized, barbaric, in architecture all that is irregular and ugly, especially in comparison with the classical style. As Ruskin wrote: "when that fallen Roman, in the utmost impotence of his luxury, and insolence of his guilt, became the model for the imitation of civilized Europe, at the close of the so-called Dark ages, the word Gothic became a term of unmitigated contempt" (Ruskin 6). In architecture, the opinion of the Gothic style began to change as part of the nationalist sentiments of the time: "As the Italians of the Renaissance looked back to Rome, so the 'Gothic Gentlemen' set out to build for themselves structures in keeping with their own history" (Lang 254). Since the word

5Gothic was connected with the Goths, it was also connected with Germanic tribes in

general and therefore with the history of Britain: "the Gothic Revival was an English movement, perhaps the one purely English movement in the plastic arts" (Clark xix). Although the style of building was not always called Gothic, there is certain evidence that the style as such had never really died out. For example, Kenneth Clark, in his Gothic Revivalmused, if it would not be more appropriate to speak of Gothic survival rather than revival. He wrote: "from 1600 to 1800 perhaps no year passed which did not see the building of some pointed arch and gabled roof, or the restoration of some crumbling tracery" (Clark 1); he also traced the continuation of the tradition, naming various buildings and pointing out the various ways in which the Gothic survived. One of these ways was the enthusiasm of the antiquarians, gentlemen mostly without professional education in architecture but completely absorbed by the romantic sensibilities of the time and who brought the style back from the brink of oblivion: "This scholarly interest in archaeology, followed by a sentimental delight in decay, is the true source of the Revival" (Ibid.). Thus, the architectural style called, perhaps not correctly, the Gothic style, survived and experienced a rise to popularity, sometimes in surprising ways. The term Gothic slowly found its way into discourses other than that of architecture and the meaning also began to change. At the turn of the eighteenth century it was still used negatively, for example Dryden wrote in 1697: "all that hath nothing of the ancient gust is called a barbarous or Gothic manner" (qtd. in

ơ11).

Even in 1711, Joseph Addison wrote in one of his essays for

The Spectator: "I look

upon these writers as Goths in poetry, who, like those in architecture, not being able to come up to the beautiful simplicity of the old Greeks and Romans, have endeavored to supply its place with all the extravagances of an irregular fancy" (Addison qtd. in

6McIntyre 645). One of the early proponents of Gothic was Richard Hurd, who preceded

Ruskin in defending the architectural style and, like Addison, preceded Horace Walpole in connecting the term with literature in his

The Letters on Chivalry and Romance,

published in 1762. Here Hurd defends Gothic architecture saying that the styles should not be compared but that every style should be judged by its own rules: "When an architect examines a Gothic structure by Grecian rules, he finds nothing but deformity. But the Gothic architecture has its own rules, by which when it comes to be examined, it is seen to have its merit, as well as the Grecian" (Hurd 61). He further states: "The same observation holds of the two sorts of poetry" (Ibid.). Hurd attempts to rebuke criticism of the structure of Spenser`s

Faerie Queeneby pointing out that it has its own

unity of design, which he calls Gothic and which is different from that of classical poems but equally valid nevertheless.

Then, in 1764, Horace Walpole published his The

Castle of Otranto, in later

editions subtitled a Gothic story, which is almost universally considered to be the first Gothic novel, where the term Gothic acquired its new connotations of something terrifying and supernatural. The importance of Horace Walpole stems from the fact that in him is combined both the writer and the architect. He was among the enthusiasts interested in the Gothic style of architecture, mentioned by Kenneth Clark. However, their Gothic was not "real", both in the sense that it is impossible to build medieval castle in the eighteenth century and also in the sense that they did not even try to reproduce the buildings truthfully. Instead, they appropriated different elements and applied them according to their tastes for completely different purposes and using different, often inappropriate materials: They looked through prints and books more than at actual buildings, and helped themselves freely to whatever took their fancy and what they thought would fit in well. Tombs were turned into fireplaces, façades of

7cathedrals became wall decorations, the vault of the Henry VII Chapel

was echoed in the Gallery (of Strawberry Hill). (Lang 253) One of the stranger manifestations of this superficial interest in Gothic as well as of the nascent consumerism was the popular trend to build fake medieval ruins as garden decorations. These ruins had nothing to do with the Gothic as architectural style, they were instead expression of romantic sensibilities and the nationalist need for continuous history even if it has to be imagined and the ruins bought. Gothic architecture eventually went its own way; it ceased to be just a plaything in the hands of amateurs and their work was criticized by professional architects such as James Essex or Edward James Willson. In one of his criticisms, Wilson wrote about buildings like Strawberry Hill: "True principles of taste have been sadly overlooked in many imitations of such buildings: showy compositions have been made up of parts indiscriminately copied from castles and churches, reduced to petty dimensions, stripped of their proper details" (Willson qtd. in Lang 261). Willson wrote this in

Specimens of Gothic Architecture

(published in 1821 and 1823), on which he collaborated with A.C. Pugin. His son Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin and his grandson E. W. Pugin were both prominent figures in the Gothic Revival style and Neo-Gothic style respectively. The fakeness of follies and buildings such as Walpole`s Strawberry Hill or Beckford`s Fonthill Abbey can be found in the literary works as well. Walpole, for example, pretended to be only the translator of

Otrantoand he claimed, in proper spirit

of antiquarianism, that the work was found "in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England" and that it was an Italian text printed in gothic script, "in the black letter, in the year 1529" (Walpole 59) although he set the date of the origin even further back, in the time of the crusades. Actually, a lot about

The Castle of Otrantois

fake. As Jerrold Hogle writes, it is a "fake translation by a fake translator of a fake

8medieval story by a fake author, the novel turns on a false nobleman unlawfully

inheriting both title and property through a false will and attempting to secure a false lineage through nefarious schemes" (Hogle 23-5). A similar situation is apparent also in Radcliffe`s stories which are almost always set in "exotic" southern countries and distant periods but the characters are very obviously contemporary and English: [Radcliffe] may specify the date, 1658 or 1584; she may let her fancy play over frowning castles, Arcadian peasants, and the rigid life of Italian cloisters; but her heroine is always a young lady of eighteenth century England, irreproachable in manners, unrelenting in propriety, able to draw a little, sing a little, play a little, though as a concession to time she is given a lute instead of a piano. (McIntyre 651) The reason for this is that these writers, the creators of almost all Gothic conventions, were not really concerned about historical faithfulness of their stories: "'Gothic' as a genre conscious of itself as such, originates, not in the feudal culture and customs to which it refers, but in eighteenth-century constructions and inventions, in fake origins" (Botting 2). Through the works of these early authors, as through the amateurish architectonic efforts of people like Horace Walpole, Gothic became more than a style of architecture or a term from history; it became a symbol for expression of their concerns, fears and desires. The eighteenth century, now known as the Age of Reason or Age of Enlightenment, was "a time when enlightenment was seen as possible and the rational explanation of natural and human activities formed an agenda in the service of which most of the European intellectuals of the age worked" (Punter 7). However, underneath the uncompromising trust in all that is rational there slumbered the need for unrestrained imagination and emotions. We can see it for example in the philosophy of David Hume, who stated that "[r]eason alone cannot be a motive to the will, but rather is the slave of passions" ( Stanford Encyclopedia); we can see it in Pope`s poetry, in his Essay on Man

9he wrote: "On life`s vast ocean diversely we sail,/Reason the card, but passion is the

gale" (Pope 66); most of all, we can see it in the various literary forms that originated in this century, such as the works of the Graveyard poets, the novel of sensibility and, of course, the Gothic novel. In this way, therefore, we can see the Gothic novel as part of a rebellious tendency against the excessive rationalization and order of the era, "in general it can be seen as one symptom of a widespread shift away from neoclassical ideals of order and reason, toward romantic belief in emotion and imagination" (Hume

282). As Horace Walpole wrote in the preface to the second edition of his

Castle of

Otranto

, "the great resources of fancy have been dammed up, by a strict adherence to common life" (Walpole 65) and so one of the main reasons behind his writing the story was to blend the "two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern" (Ibid.), where the ancient, or medieval romance was full of the imagined, the supernatural. The stress put on the imagination was in accord with the characteristics of the Gothic buildings. Ruskin admiringly described Gothic style as a product of a builder who "smites an uncouth animation out of the rocks which he has torn from among the moss of the moorland, and heaves into the darkened air the pile of iron buttress and rugged wall, instinct with work of an imagination as wild and wayward as the northern sea" (Ruskin 9). The Gothic style fit perfectly the sensibilities of the time; its ruggedness and irregularity, signifying wildness and untamed natural force were stimulating the imagination much better than the smooth lines of the classical architecture: "the effects of a rugged and broken surface seem stronger than where it is smooth and polished" (Burke 100). The difference between these two styles and their effect on the observer is roughly parallel to the concepts of the sublime and the beautiful as described by Edmund Burke.

10The concept of the sublime was one of the most influential concepts of the era`s

aesthetics. Although it has its origins already in the writing of Longinus, it was brought to general attention in Edmund Burke`s

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our

Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

, published in 1757. In it, Burke attempts to explain the indulgence in melancholy that was prevalent at the time; the feeling of pleasure derived from things that should be depressing or terrifying, such as ruins of buildings or steep cliffs. He famously wrote that pain and danger "are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances ... Whatever excites this delight, I call sublime" (Burke 84). The sublime can be evoked in numerous ways, for example, by the authority of enormous power, such as that of God, it can be evoked by the seemingly infinite size, power and mystery of the nature, its mountains and seas. The sublimity of nature is used exceedingly in the descriptions of Gothic settings; in Ann Radcliffe`s novels, the nature is described almost exclusively to the purpose of evoking the sublime. Apart from natural forms and phenomena, Burke lists various other sources of the sublime, such as darkness, solitude, silence, or greatness of dimension such as "a tower an hundred yards high, or a rock or mountain of that altitude" (Burke 100). Apart from that, Burke writes that "[i]t is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our passions. Knowledge and acquaintance make the most striking causes affect but little" (Ibid. 91). The imagination works best when it is left alone, in the dark, with little to no information which brings us back to the conflict between the Gothic and the Enlightenment. In order to rationally explain everything there is, the Enlightenment also sought to uncover all that was hidden. It was "not only a movement of illumination through reason but a movement of exposure, an effort to bring light to all the dark and secret places of European society" (Leithart, "Enlightenment and the Gothic"). Michel

11Foucault said that the second half of the eighteenth century was haunted by "the fear of

darkened spaces, of the pall and gloom which prevents the full visibility of things, men and truths" (qtd. in Cameron 31); the role of the Enlightenment was to destroy such spaces. However, it can be also said that "if there is nothing lurking in the darkness then illumination and exposure are pointless" (Leithart, "Enlightenment and the Gothic") and the Gothic, therefore, became a representation of the reverse side of the Enlightenment: "Gothic novels develop a whole fantasy-world of stone walls, darkness, hideouts and dungeons which harbor, in significant complicity, brigands and aristocrats, monks and traitors" (Foucalt qtd. in Cameron 31). Placing the stories in distant times and distant areas and the use of exaggeration and the supernatural allowed the authors of the Gothic genre to explore the dark spaces of human society, it gave them freedom to write about the anxieties of their dramatically transforming world: "Gothic, precisely insofar as because of its historical and geographical distancing it does not appear to represent a 'real' world, may in fact be delivering that world in an inverted form, or representing those areas of the world and of consciousness which are, for one reason or another, not available to the normal processes of representation" ( Punter 15). Although the Gothic is "a genre that has over the centuries consistently depicted the transgression of natural and moral laws, aesthetic rules and social taboos" (Botting 1), doing so under the protective cover of fantasy secured it almost indefinite continuation. It is clear that the histories of the Gothic architecture and the Gothic novel are intertwined. They have common origin in the social, cultural and political situation of the eighteenth century and buildings of various kinds keep populating the Gothic novels`s settings and titles even today. However, in its quest to explore all that is hidden or forbidden, the Gothic novel invested its edifices with symbolic power and so we have concepts such as the domestic sphere of the heroine, the castle as the villain`s symbol of

12power, the house as an image of the human psyche, etc. In the following chapters, I will

analyze some of these concepts while following the scheme of literary space divided into two parts, one that is known, rational, ordered and one that represents everything that is unknown, irrational and chaotic with the border as an important liminal space. 13

3. The Division of Literary Space

The concept of division of the universe into two parts, realms or domains of which one is safe and familiar and the other is not has been around for some time. Manuel Aguirre for example writes that it has been "theorized since the early twentieth century", but it may as well be "as old as narrative and thought" ("Geometries of Terror" 3). We can find it in various fields of study; it is perhaps most known in relation to the study of myths and fairytales in seminal works such as Vladimir Propp`s Morphology of the Folktale(1928) and Joseph Campbell`s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), where Campbell describes the basic structure of a myth as follows: "A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man" (Campbell 23). The world of Gothic and everything that happens in it is based on this scheme: Gothic can be said to postulate two zones: on the one hand, the human domain of rationality and intelligible events; on the other hand, the world of the sublime, terrifying, chaotic Numinous which transcends human reason (but which need not be the supernatural). These are separated by some manner of threshold, and plots invariably involve movement from one site to the other - a movement which, most often, is presented as a transgression, a violation of boundaries. ("Geometries of Terror" 2-3) Yuri Lotman`s semiotic approach to literary space offers further insights. In

Universe

of the Mind (1990), Lotman also divides the space into two opposed areas divided by a boundary: "If the inner world reproduces the cosmos, then what is on the other side represents chaos, the anti-world, unstructured chthonic space, inhabited by monsters, infernal powers or people associated with them" (Lotman 140)". From the subjective viewpoint, it is also divided into I-They spheres: "the boundary can be defined as the outer limit of a first-person form. This space is 'ours', 'my own', it is 'cultured', 'safe',

14'harmoniously organized', and so on. By contrast 'their space' is 'other', 'hostile',

'dangerous', 'chaotic'" (Lotman 131). Lotman also divides the characters into mobile and static ones: "characters can be divided into mobile ones who are free to move about the plot-space ... and immobile ones who are in fact functions of that space" (Lotman

157). The mobile character is usually the hero or heroine who crosses the boundary and

moves from one sphere to another. In Ann Radcliffe`s novels, for example, this scheme applies almost exactly: a young heroine is forced to leave her beautiful and serene home and she is transported into the other sphere, the castle (or convent), where she interacts with the villain. After numerous complications she successfully escapes and returns home, usually to marry the hero, her savior. Places and characters belonging to the individual spheres are depicted accordingly and we can usually infer the moral status of the characters from the description of the places they live in. The line between the two spheres is no less important. Called the boundary, frontier, threshold or the limen, it is an area between two spaces "predominantly associated with provisionality, instability, intermediate forms; what lies between the known and unknown, or 'other'" (Messent 23). The concept of liminality and the liminal phase originates with the French ethnographer and folklorist Arnold van Gennep and his work concerning rites of passage ceremonies. Gennep outlined "a tripartite pattern in ceremonies which accompany life crises such as birth, adoption, marriage, and death. The three stages of a rite of passage are separation, transition, and incorporation" (Gennep qtd. in Mobley 28). The transitional or liminal phase was subsequently elaborated upon by the British anthropologist Victor Turner who described the persons in transition as "betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial" (Truner qtd. in Mobley 28).

15Gothic characters usually become liminal heroes by leaving behind the world that is

known to them, their families and friends or the social norms. Aguirre makes another important contribution to the concept of liminality by proposing that the boundary is not just a line that is crossed but that the liminal area is a space that is actually part of the numinous sphere: "It appears that the distinction between a threshold and Other space may be an equivocal, if not a spurious one: for the threshold is a part of the Other " ("Geometries of Terror" 5, italics in original). While standing in a door or a passage to the other side, wondering if he should cross or not, the hero already isin the realm of the Other, for the threshold "is already that which it delineates and isolates, and becomes what it defines; or, to put it in different words: the Other takes over and 'colonizes' its own frontiers" (Ibid.). The liminal space is therefore ambiguous, it separates the different spheres and at the same time it is the point of contact between them. It does not belong exactly to either of the two sides but as Aguirre writes, in its characteristics it belongs more to the sphere of the Other. There are many places that are considered liminal and all these places "are figured as interstices: underneath, above, around the side of, parallel to, or in the fissures in established places and being" (Wisker 412). Such places can be deep woods, cemeteries, the tower and the catacombs or alternatively the attic and the basement; socially it is the margin of the city: "Less valued social groups are settled on the periphery" (Lotman 140) an example of which will be seen in the following analysis of

Bleak House.

Windows and doors are the most literal manifestations of the boundary and they are therefore significant symbols in the concept of liminality. Windows and doors are points of entrance and egress; they are the points of transgression from one sphere into another as well as contact points between these two spheres. The conventional image

16concerning windows is a face (human, a ghost`s, etc.) looking into a room, startling the

inhabitants. Famously, in Wuthering Heights, the ghost of Catherine seeks entrance into the house by scratching at the window and grasping the hand of the unfortunate sleeper through the broken pane. In this case, the window divides the sphere of the living from the sphere of the dead and at the same time it divides the past - the character of Catherine is from the past of the narrative and it is in a child`s form as well - and the present, where Mr. Lockwood visits Wuthering Heights, hears the past of the story and sees its end. The door, frequently used to induce fear by making grating sounds or opening and closing on its own, is also a frequent point of transgression. It can be a metaphorical transgression, for example in

The Castle of Otranto, Matilda opens the door to

Theodore`s cell, thereby acting against the will of her father. Similarly, in

The Italian,

Vivaldi enters Ellena`s house "unlocking a private gate, of which he had lately received the key" (Radcliffe 40) although he acts directly against his father`s wishes as well as against the wishes of his mother delivered in the form of a warning by a mysterious monk. The door is very important in

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The

first chapter is notably entitled "Story of the Door" and a neglected door is thus a primary inducer of the whole plot. The story also ends with a door, or people breaking down the door to Jekyll`s cabinet which also makes it a literal transgression. On the whole, it can be said that "Dr. Jekyll`s story is the story of a door, or several doors" (Frank 215) (see 4. The House). The door is ambiguous; when locked, it can be perceived as a safety measure but also as an obstacle, it can keep the monsters out but at the same time imprison the heroine, and as Ellis says: "Any enclosed space seemed to me to present this paradox, which links the 'safe' sphere of home inseparably to its dark opposite, the Gothic

17castle" (Ellis x). The ability to hide in an enclosed space is often welcomed but the

advantage can quickly turn into trouble. Equally terrifying as a locked door is a door that cannot be locked at all which leaves the inhabitants vulnerable. Secret doors are also frequent plot elements in Gothic tales; they are a source of fear because they are out of control of the inhabitants and they can give the numinous access to an otherwise safe space of the locked room at any time. One such example can be found in The

Italian,

when Ellena is kept prisoner in the decrepit house on the beach and the evil monk Schedoni plans to sneak up on her through a secret door and kill her with a dagger. On the other had, if the hero or heroine finds the secret door or passage, it can be helpful to their escape plans like in the case of Isabella in

Otranto, where she escapes

the castle through a secret trapdoor. The places beyond boundaries are also inhabited by specific creatures which would be usually called monsters. K. A. Nuzum offers an interesting definition of a monster. According to his definition, monsters are liminal physically; they are "often displaying characteristics of more than one species ... They are neither one thing nor the other. Their bodies are chaotic, incapable of complete definition, and, thus, resistant to our complete understanding or control" (Nuzum 207). Monsters are also liminal spatially; they live in places described above, such as dark woods, cemeteries, attics, etc., places "at the far limits of civilization, locations distant from out daily lives" (Ibid.). Finally, monsters are liminal temporally. As with space, time has also its liminal zones, usually times of transition such as the transition between day and night (twilight), or between old and new year (the New Year`s Eve). Nuzum divides time into historic/linear in which we live our everyday lives, then mythical time which is the time of repeated rituals such as Christmas, and liminal time, for example the teenage years. Nuzum writes that "[a]lthough human beings live out their lives in all three of these

18temporal realities, historic/linear, circular/mythic, and liminal/marginal time, monsters

are limited to only two: mythic and liminal time. They cannot maintain their existence in history and must relinquish their hold on linear time" (Nuzum 210). That is why creatures like vampires do not age - they do not exist in the linear time. Mr. Hyde is a creature fitting the description very well. People find him repulsive yet they cannot describe exactly what is it that is wrong with him: "He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why ... No, sir; I can make no hand of it; I can`t describe him" (Stevenson 12). He is also neither wholly human, nor wholly ape but he possesses features of both. He lives in a bad part of the city, on the margin of society and enters Jekyll`s house through a separate back entrance. He is also temporally limited, at least at first; he can only come to life while the potion affects the man and he moves around usually at night. At the end of the story Jekyll starts to loose control over Hyde, he no longer appears only in separate places and times, he appears anywhere and at will, finally taking over completely, however, he cannot survive in the non-liminal space and the story therefore ends by death of both entities. Finally, we have to consider the Gothic genre itself as a liminal space, not only for the reason that it was for a long time marginalized by literary critics. As was already mentioned in the introductory chapter, the role of the Gothic is to deal with the anxieties of every period, to challenge the established order and explore all that is repressed: "[e]xcess, disorder, and violation are innate to fictional fearful world of the Gothic" (Sencindiver 4). In literature, Gothic is the rebel; already Walpole wrote about his Otranto: "I did it in spite of the rules, the critics, and the philosophers" (Walpole 262). The nature of Gothic is transgressive, even paradoxical; everything is combined at will:

19the medieval with the contemporary, the rational and the supernatural; as Maggie

Kilgour writes:

[The Gothic] is always a boundary breaker which erodes any neat distinction between formats and modes, combining sentimentality and the grotesque, romance and terror, the heroic and the bathetic, philosophy and nonsense. This promiscuous generic cross-breeding is part of the gothic`s 'subverting' of stable norms, collapsing of 'binary oppositions,' which makes it appropriate for a postmodern sensibility. It appears to offer both a critique and an alternative to our Enlightenment inheritance: as it warns us of the dangers of repressing energies, natural, social, psychic, textual, or sexual, the gothic offers itself a means of expressing otherwise taboo forces. The gothic draws on the modern assumption that it is dangerous to bury things (which always return, as Pet Semetary shows); by bringing the unspoken to light, it acts as a potential corrective. (Kilgour 40-41) From its very beginnings, Gothic became a literary space full of potential, where ordinary rules did not apply and where everything was possible. In the following chapters, I will analyze the three most important spaces in Gothic fiction: the house, the castle, and the city. With regard to the division of space as was outlined in this chapter, the space of the normal, everyday world is represented only scarcely, since the Gothic fiction is predominantly focused on the nature of the border and beyond. This homely sphere is therefore usually represented only in the form of the heroine`s house where she starts and ends her adventure. However, even the house is more often than not depicted in the form of a haunted house, which ceases to fulfill its function as the safe and normal place and becomes part of the numinous sphere, of which the castle and later the city are the primary examples. 20

4. The House

The home is the most important place in human life and the house is therefore a very powerful symbol. As such, it is also one of the most important settings in Gothic fiction. There are two main appearances of the house: first is the safe haven, connected also to the ideal of domesticity and the house as the female sphere. In this case the main character, most often a female heroine, lives happily until she is forced by various circumstances or direct violence to leave the place and to deal with dangerous situations before being able to return. The other use is the haunted house, one of the trademark settings of Gothic tales. In the first case, the evil, the numinous is an exterior force and the hero/ine strives to keep it that way, while in the case of the haunted house the evil is contained inside the building, usually in the form of a past secret and it will not stop tormenting the inhabitants until the situation is resolved, often ending with the destruction of the building itself or the death of the inhabitants. The house provides its occupants with shelter and stable, safe background. It is the means of standing up against the forces of the environment; it is the symbol of civilization triumphing over brute nature: "the house can be seen as the manifestation of man` s triumph over nature. Protected from the unpredictable and merciless workings of the latter, man can withstand and attempt to tame it" (Ronneburg 8). ơ ơ s novels "the windows of the heroine`s room overlook onto nature with its sublime, beautiful and picturesque views", in order to provide the heroine with "a feeling of expansion, of greatness and freedom"

ơll). However, the image of a person

sitting in a room and admiring the beauty of natural scenery also emphasizes the role of the house as a haven, as a triumph of man over nature. It evokes the feeling that one gets watching a snowstorm or a thunderstorm, while sitting in a warm and cozy room.

21The feeling of the sublime, as Burke defined it, observing something that is potentially

dangerous while being out of reach of the actual danger.

The Italian`s Ellena, confined

in the convent in mountains, finds a turret with a grandiose view of the surrounding nature, and surely enough, "[t]he consciousness of her prison was lost, while her eyes ranged over the wide and freely-sublime scene without" (Radcliffe 87). However, she was feeling a lot less calm, when she had to actually cross a feeble narrow bridge hanging over an abyss few days before. The house is "the centre and focus of the world order" (Lotman 97). It is a sacred place from where evil and chaos are banished. It is common folk belief, for example, that evil spirits, demons, or the devil cannot enter someone`s house unless they are invited and we can find multiple instances of this belief in literary works. In

Goethe`s

Faust, for example, the doctor has to invite Mephistopheles three times into his study; most famously, the classic Gothic monster, the vampire, cannot enter a house without invitation. However, the safety of the house being in the hands of weak human beings, the evil forces usually find a way to cross its borders. Since the Gothic genre deals with various transgressions, its characters either issue the invitation or, more often, are themselves the source of the evil which leads Kate Ferguson Ellis to state that "it is the failed home that appears on [the Gothic novel`s] pages, the place from which some (usually 'fallen' men) are locked out, and others (usually 'innocent' women) are locked in" (Ellis ix). In that case, the home ceases to fulfill its purpose of being the safe haven and becomes part of the numinous sphere, a house haunted either by ghosts or by its flawed inhabitants. The home is a personal space: "[t]he House is one`s own space, a place that is familiar and at the same time enclosed and protected ... This is the world of the human personality, a world that stands up to the elements and to anything which belittles and

22denigrates the life of the individual" (Lotman 97). To furnish and decorate a house is a

means to express one` s personality and the general outlook of a house is often used in literature to signify the goodness or villainy of the characters. For example, in The

Italian

, the house where Ellena lives with her aunt is described thus: "From the style of their residence, [Vivaldi] imagined that they were persons of honorable, but moderate independence. The house was small, but exhibited an air of comfort and even of taste" (Radcliffe 3). The house is modest yet elegant and beautiful as Ellena herself and is therefore a symbol of the morality of her character. On the other hand, "the morally corrupt [characters] see their homes as status symbols, which can be bought and sold and which, in their turn, mirror their owner`s hedonism and lack of taste" ( ơ

40). So for example Mr. Tulkinghorn, the villain of Bleak Houseand otherwise an

emotionless keeper of secrets, likes to indulge in drinking old wine which he keeps locked very carefully in a cellar under his gloomy mansion: When he dines alone in chambers ... he descends with a candle to the echoing regions below the deserted mansion, and heralded by a remote reverberation of thundering doors, comes gravely back encircled by an earthy atmosphere and carrying a bottle from which he pours a radiant nectar, two score and ten years old, that blushes in the glass to find itself so famous and fills the whole room with the fragrance of southern grapes. (Dickens 216) Apart from the look and position of the house, further information about its inhabitants is provided by taking the house as a legal property. We can judge the owner by the way he treats his possessions: "what one owns and how one disposes of it says something about one`s character" (Frank 218) which is quite important in Jekyll and Hyde, since the law, lawyers and wills are a significant part of the story. The incredibly reckless way in which Jekyll seeks to transfer his house and money on the untrustworthy Hyde is a source of embarrassment and worries for Jekyll`s lawyer, Mr. Utterson. Jekyll`s will "offended him both as a lawyer and as a lover of the sane and

23customary sides of life" (Stevenson 14) and so he keeps it hidden deeply in his safe, in

its "most private part" (Ibid.) as "something shameful, something to be suppressed (if not repressed)" (Frank 218). The fact that Jekyll, otherwise an intelligent and respectable man, would be able to do such a thing, points Mr. Utterson to a flaw in

Jekyll`s character.

As a personal space, home also serves as a source of consolation or courage in the face of the rough world outside. The heroine often remembers home to find the strength for awaiting battles. The absence of home leaves the character unable to find his way out of the realm of chaos as in the case of Jo who never knew his family and never had a proper home. He ends up roaming around the city plagued by hunger and disease, which finally kills him. In the case if imprisonment, the heroine sometimes attempts to create the feeling of domesticity at the place of her confinement. Ellena, locked in a bare cell of a nunnery, is nevertheless provided with some additional items, such as books. The natural thing for her to do is to tidy up the room and await her further fate: "Having arranged her books, and set her little room in order, she seated herself at a window, and, with a volume of Tasso, endeavored to banish every painful remembrance from her mind" (Radcliffe 92). The home or the household is an especially important place in the female fiction as it is considered to be a female sphere and is connected with the cult of domesticity. In the eighteenth century, as the power of the aristocratic class was fading and the middle classes were on the rise, the ideal of domestic happiness was born, an ideal of home separated from workplace, home signifying wealth and respectability, a place of safety and comfort. The woman was simultaneously assigned to be the guardian of these values and excluded from anything else: "[the] conception of 'domestic happiness' emerged toward the end of the eighteenth century, as the middle-class home, distanced

24in ideology and increasingly in fact from the place where money was made, became a

'separate sphere' from the 'fallen' world of work" (Ellis ix). The importance of the household even increased during the nineteenth century, in the Victorian period, which saw another Gothic revival, this time specifically in literature. The house as the comfortable domestic space and the woman as its guardian became a symbol of respectability for the Victorians. The sentiments concerning the female role were expressed in Coventry Patmore`s now notorious poem "The Angel in the House", however, they were more concisely articulated a few decades later by Virginia Woolf who described the infamous Angel thus: She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it--in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. (Woolf 141) The first and foremost role of a woman at that time was simply to be a good housekeeper and a good wife, which mostly amounted to the same thing. In

Bleak

House , Esther Summerson is such an ideal housekeeper. One unusual thing about her is that she is actually writing her story in the book, which was not a typical occupation for women. Apart from that, however, Dicken`s sticks to the contemporary conventions in his depiction of the female characters.

Women in

Bleak Houseare identified with the state of the houses they are responsible for. Esther, as well as the more traditional and older Mrs. Rouncewell are examples of good housekeeping, while Mrs. Jellyby is their opposite. Her case shows the terrible result that comes out of neglecting one`s house and family and devoting the energy to other enterprises. Her house is in terrible disorder, her husband is unhappy and her children are neglected and uneducated, worst of all, she did not have the time to

25teach her oldest daughter how to be a proper wife. When one of Mrs. Jellyby`s

companions angrily remarks that "the idea of woman`s mission lying chiefly in the narrow sphere of home was an outrageous slander on the part of her tyrant, man" (Dickens 297), it sounds rather as a bitter critique of the women`s efforts considering the mess around them. The goodness of Esther`s character, on the other hand, can be literally compared to the outlook of a house that she is given as a marriage gift: [A]s we went through the pretty rooms, out at the little rustic verandah doors, and underneath the tiny wooden colonnades garlanded with woodbine, jasmine, and honey-suckle, I saw in the papering on the walls, in the colors of the furniture, in the arrangement of all the pretty objects, MY little tastes and fancies, MY little methods and inventions which they used to laugh at while they praised them, my odd ways everywhere. (Dickens 608) Oddly enough, her future home is called Bleak House, after the main Bleak House, one of the main settings of the story. Here is where Dickens subverts the trope of cozy little house vs. dangerous labyrinthine castle. In spite of the name and the traditionally gothic structure of the main house, these places are safely in the sphere of the everyday, the normal (see 6. The City). Although the house continued to be the female domain, the Victorian era saw the appearance of another Gothic character connected to home: male bachelor, professional, a scientist, breaking the laws of God, science, or society; a character epitomized in the person of Dr. Jekyll. The house became this man`s castle, his private space protected from the scrutiny of the society and his most significant feature was his split personality; his double appearance - one for the private space, one for the public. The kind of house this man inhabited was not separated into the sphere of domesticity and professional life: "the domesticity of this male world is different: social but not public, private without necessarily being personal ... Stevenson depicts an in- between zone of professional work within the home" (Frank 219) and so the scene of

26Jekyll`s cabinet combines "kettle singing its thin strain" and "nearer the fire, the things

laid out for tea" with "glazed presses full of chemicals" (Stevenson 73). Significantly, apart from some minor appearances, women are completely absent from the novel. The house in the novel is not a place of comfort to be guarded by a female Angel, it is a place of privacy for the workings of the male mind. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hydeis significantly concerned with the notion of privacy as well as the "property`s significance to any understanding of subjectivity" (Frank 217). There are lawyers, wills and documents that uncover the true story of Dr. Jekyll. The book begins with a chapter titled "A Story of the Door" and ends (excluding the two added letters) with a cry "Down with the door, Poole!" (Stevenson 73) from Mr. Utterson, who was always the first to respect the right to privacy of his friend: "the novel seems to transgress the very boundaries it sets up: first producing the interiority that needs legal protection by showing its violation, then judging when such incursions into another`s private life may be justified" (Frank 217). The ancient belief that the house is the sacred space of its inhabitants that can be entered only by their permission, whether by other people or evil spirits thus evolved into an issue of the law. Cathrine O.

Frank in her analysis of

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hydeemploys the influential essay, The Right to Privacy(1890), by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis which explored the legal nature of individual`s privacy connected to the "familiar notion of the house as middle-class man`s equivalent to the castle" (Frank 216). They connected the right to privacy with property, tangible or intangible, thus delineating the personal private space of a person not only physically, but also "creating a metaphysical counterpart to the door, that is, an interior life inaccessible to others except by its possessor`s permission or desire" (Ibid.). The house, and everything that goes on inside it, is protected by a man`s right to privacy and his right to secure his reputation.

27Reputation is a currency valued the most in the novel. Mr. Utterson uses it to threaten

Hyde after his incident with the girl, he says to Hyde that he will: "make his name stink from one end of London to the other" (Stevenson 8). In fact, the ultimate reason for Jekyll`s experiments is to preserve his good name, while being able to indulge in his darker desires at the same time. The double face goes back in Gothic fiction, for example, already Matthew Gregory Lewis`s Ambrosio is outwardly a holy man, while privately he is a man swayed by perverse desires. However, the Victorian man was, more than ever before, aware of his duality: "Victorian man was haunted constantly by an inescapable sense of division. As rational and sensual being, as public and private man, as civilized and bestial creature, he found himself suitable to the occasion" (Saposnik 716). The period experienced a turn inward: "outward modes of perception were replaced by a new emphasis on introspection, the roots of which are to be found in Burke, and its culmination in Freud`s account of the unconscious" (Smith 1). The disturbing elements of Gothic genre, the numinous, ceased to be an external threat from which it is possible to escape to the safety of home. It became part of the hero, it became an enemy within and with the liminality internalized, the house ceased to be the comfortable place, the safe haven and source of courage for the heroine and it became an uncanny place. A good part of Freud`s essay on the uncanny is concerned with the etymology of the words heimlichand unheimlich. The evolution of meaning of these words is important for the understanding of their complicated and ambiguous nature. Since heimlichmeans belonging to the house, familiar, homely (Freud 126), it would seem that unheimlichstands for the exact opposite - all that is unfamiliar. However, the word heimlichmeans also something that is concealed, kept hidden (Freud 129). The ambiguity of the word heimlichresults in a strange situation: "among the various shades

28of meaning that are recorded for the word

heimlichthere is one in which it merges with its formal antonym, unheimlich, so that what is called heimlichbecomes unheimlich" (Freud 132). From this mixture of meanings, then, emerges Freud`s definition of the unheimlichas "everything that was intended to remain secret, hidden away, and has come into the open" (Ibid.). The negative prefix un-, therefore, does not mean negation at all, it is "the indicator of repression" (Freud 151). The English equivalent of unheimlich - uncanny - retains the meaning of un/familiarity, however, it lacks the important second meaning of that which is connected to home. As Freud himself observes, German is one of the few languages which reflect the ambiguous, double nature of the house: "A house contains the familiar and congenial, but at the same time it screens what is familiar and congenial from view, making a mystery of it ... What takes place within the four walls of a house remains a mystery to those shut out from it" (Tatar 169). Thus, Jekyll`s house not only protects the owner`s privacy, it also contains and "hydes" the repressed side of Jekyll. We have already seen that house can represent the character of its inhabitant. In the case of Jekyll and Hyde, the situation is more complex, because the spaces connected to these "two" people signify not only their difference but also their similarity, or common foundation. Jekyll`s house is described as an ancient and handsome house, a noble remnant among the rest which is decayed and let out instead of being occupied whole. The door of the house "wore a great air of wealth and comfort", it is opened by "[a] well-dressed, elderly servant", and the visitors are ushered into "a large, low-roofed, comfortable hall, paved with flags, warmed (after the fashion of a country house) by a bright, open fire, and furnished with costly cabinets of oak" (Stevenson 24-25). Utterson also thinks of Jekyll as a man of good taste; overall, Dr.

29Jekyll is a respectable, well-off man. However, Hyde also lives in a reasonably nice

house: In the whole extent of the house, which but for the old woman remained otherwise empty, Mr. Hyde had only used a couple of rooms; but these were furnished with luxury and good taste. A closet was filled with wine; the plate was of silver, the napery elegant; a good picture hung upon the walls, a gift (as Utterson supposed) from Henry Jekyll, who was much of a connoisseur; and the carpets were of many piles and agreeable in colour. (Stevenson 38) In this respect, Jekyll and Hyde are the same. What separates them is the section of the city in which their houses can be found (see 6. The City). The similarity of their homes points us to the fact that these two characters are in fact one person. Thus, the villain is no longer external; he is part of the self. Hyde represents "a creature ever present but submerged; not the evil opponent of a contentious good but the shadow self of a half-man" (Saposnik 717). In his theory that "man is not truly one, but truly two" (Stevenson 95), Stevenson is a forerunner to Freud`s theory of the structure of the psyche. Further still, his guess that "man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous, and independent denizens" (Ibid.) predicts the fragmented self of postmodernity. The main conflict between the presentable Jekyll and the murderous Hyde, however, is still that of ego and id: "In Jekyll and Hydesubjectivity is fragmented and this relates to Freud`s idea of the subject split upon a conscious/unconscious divide" (Smith 168). Already Hyde`s name suggests that he is something that has to be, or should have stayed, hidden. He is described as "ape-like" (Stevenson 34) and "troglodytic" (Ibid. 24) which suggests something primitive, in the context of Darwinian evolution something animal that still slumbers in the deeper recesses of the human soul. However, the attempts to describe Hyde by the respectable men, a doctor and a lawyer, are actually quite unsuccessful. They also feel an unexplainable hatred for him: "[Their]

30immediate, physical loathing foreshadows the later revelation that Hyde is more than a

stunted figure of a man, that he is in truth an amoral abstraction" (Saposnik 723). He represents everything they all have to repress in their daily respectable lives. When Hyde first appears in the story, he enters a sinister looking door: "The door, which was equipped with neither bell nor knocker, was blistered and disdained" (Stevenson 6). The door is neglected and not very welcoming to visitors; apparently, whoever enters it, must have a key which Hyde indeed does. Incidentally, the door is revealed to be the back door to Jekyll`s house. As was already said, for Jekyll, reputation is everything and he is, therefore, deeply ashamed of any urges that are not consistent with his ideal image of himself: "Many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views that I had set before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame" (Stevenson 94). However, the problem with Jekyll is that he is not satisfied with repression of the "lower elements in [his] soul" (Stevenson 97), he wants to get rid of them completely and when he does not succeed, he starts to exploit the situation to enjoy himself and keep his name untainted at the same time. Pretence is not enough for him and he goes too far: "Mere disguise is never sufficient for his ambition and his failure goes beyond hypocrisy, a violation of the physical and metaphysical foundations of human existence" (Saposnik 721). By this transgression, Jekyll creates Hyde, an embodiment of everything dark inside him. But he does not banish him from his life, Hyde is always invited in Jekyll`s house, he has the key to the back door. Only after Hyde commits an irreversible crime, a murder, Jekyll tries to go back to his normal life. He locks himself inside his respectable house and breaks the key to the back door: "with what willing humility, I embraced anew the restrictions of natural life! with what sincere renunciation, I locked the door by which I had so often gone and

31come, and ground the key under my heel" (Stevenson 112). Thus he tries to rebuild the

barrier, to restore the division between the normal and the liminal that was disturbed. However, the line is no longer reparable, no door or potion can control the process of transgression any longer; in the end, the two entities collapse which is signified by Jekyll`s inability to discern between the first and third person in his final letter. Henry Jekyll is an articulation of the anxiety of his age, of the self-imposed restrictions under which his repressed desires, his weaknesses strive to break through. When he describes his first feelings after transformation, he says: "I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a mill-race in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul" (Stevenson 98). It is the bonds of obligation that torment his life; he is a "cry of Victorian man from the depths of his self-imposed underground" (Saposnik 721). The house is one of the most frequent settings of Gothic fiction and it can have different forms and uses. It can be an important female sphere for the heroine in Gothic romances, it can be a haunted space subverting the patriarchal trope of house as a female sphere as is the case in Charlotte Perkins Gilman`s short story "Yellow Wallpaper" (1892). In some cases, especially in the later period, it can become the middle-class, urban version of a sinister castle. The original Gothic castle is the subject of the next chapter. 32

5. The Castle

The castle, together with a monastery/ a convent is a primary setting of the anti- home sphere in classic Gothic novels and therefore it will be the subject of the following chapter. However, there are some exceptions which should be mentioned. Firstly, already Clara Reeve, Walpole`s contemporary, made an important change in the Gothic setting: "Clara Reeve made an invention which was to become an essential ingredient of all tales of horror - not only an old castle could function as a setting for a Gothic novel but also any other ruined building could serve this purpose" ơ those inventions that secured the Gothic genre its longevity. However, whether it is a proper castle, monastery, or any ruined building, there are features and purposes that all these places, as representations of the numinous sphere, share. Another exception is that sometimes, the castle can be, similarly as the house, an a