Florets #3: Hauntings

by Nicky Watkinson

Note on language: I’m using the word “lesbian” as a catch-all term to refer to queer women, nonbinary people, and people with other gender identities which include “woman”. It’s used by both Bechdel and Machado to describe themselves and their experiences, so I’ve followed their lead. 

You walk into a house.

Lesbians have always existed. On the fringes, in the shadows, in the gaps between the lines.

Maybe it’s a familiar house – your childhood bedroom, family photos, a thick rug in the entryway. Maybe it’s not. The point is that you are in a house, and that you can’t leave.

Terry Castle’s The Apparitional Lesbian traces the figure of the lesbian in popular culture, from the eighteenth century onwards – lesbians are “alienated from the real or ‘everyday’ world the rest of us inhabit. The lesbian is never with us, it seems, but always somewhere else: in the shadows, in the margins, hidden from history, out of sight, out of mind, a wanderer in the dusk, a lost soul, a tragic mistake, a pale denizen of the night.”

Maybe this sounds like a threat. Maybe you’ve spent your whole life running from this moment. Maybe you will spend the rest of your life in one corner, afraid to go further, trying not to touch anything. Maybe you know, deep down, what waits for you. Maybe you don’t.

This hiddenness stems from “an anxiety too severe to allow for direct articulation.” We are so afraid of lesbians and female homosexual desire that we sublimate this fear, turn women into ghosts who haunt the edges of existence, of the archive, of culture. It’s not that surprising that lesbianism, long considered “unnatural”, is closely associated with the supernatural – not only ghosts but witches, those on the outskirts of society, unbound by (patriarchal) norms. This liminal existence renders lesbian history difficult to uncover – nothing like Wilde’s gross indecency trial exists for us. 

In one of the rooms, you’re twenty-two and in a university class. A (cis, white, gay, male) lecturer tells you that it was never criminalised, as though women being shipped off to asylums and subjected to medical experiments – hysterectomies, lobotomies – makes you somehow more privileged than the gay men sent to prison. As though your history is less important than his – as though they’re not different facets of the same history. This competitiveness rankles.

If our identity is constrained to the liminal, to the not-right-but-never-illegal, to the spaces between spaces, then there are few places where we can go and be as both people and lesbians, where those identities are not mutually exclusive. Queer bars, for example, are both safe and not-safe spaces – we can go to find community, but in doing so we risk making ourselves targets. Even in the spaces we carve out for ourselves, we are still in a liminal state of being, caught between safe and not-safe.

You are twenty-four the first time you go to G-A-Y, even though you’ve lived in London since you were nineteen. Maybe your friends just weren’t big on nights out; maybe you were afraid of what it would say about you, to be seen in these spaces.

The house, too, is a dual space – safe and not-safe, straight and queer at once. The house represents domesticity: the nuclear family, and the U-Haul lesbian utopia. It is, for many queer people, an oppressive space to escape from – and it’s also the safe haven we hope to escape to, some day. It is a reminder of the cisheterornormativity we can’t participate in, as well as a place where we can carve out our own narratives. Safe, and not-safe; home, and not-home.

The house is both welcoming and not, home and not. It is familiar – it is yours, after all. But you don’t necessarily want that, a space full of you. You’re afraid of what might be lurking.

In the same way that “mainstream” popular culture has been haunted by the figure of the lesbian, I have a feeling that lesbian culture has been haunted by the metaphor – or sometimes the material reality – of the house. What is a home? we ask ourselves. Is it something we can make for ourselves? Does our identity rest, to some extent, on the spaces we move through, or haunt, or occupy? In Heroic Desire, Sally Munt argues that it is the interplay of space and time that gives rise to identity – how we move through the space, over time. Perhaps this construction of identity as something kinetic, spatial – a process of becoming through movement, rather than static being – is a consequence of the failure of language: what does it mean to be a lesbian?

, somewhere in the house is an 11-year-old, who stands accused of being a “lesbian” by her so-called best friend. It is petty adolescent drama, jealousy over you hanging out with another girl at lunchtime, but the word itself does not feel petty or light – it feels heavy. It is a word you do not want to be called again.

Even when we want to talk about ourselves, to share our history, to articulate our desire, we don’t have the language for it – (English) language is a tool of the patriarchy, of white supremacy, of cisheteronormativity. It is not for us; we can only define ourselves against it, not inside it. We can make our own words, but they are never quite sufficient – someone is always left behind, left out, left to hover at the edges of articulation.

Somewhere else in the house is a you who identifies as straight. Somewhere else, a you who identifies as not-straight. Maybe somewhere there’s a you who’s found a term you positively identify with, but you haven’t found her, or it, yet. Sometimes you worry there isn’t a word for you.

Language is not built for us – form is not built for us – queer love is not a journey in the way that straight love is. There is no roadmap; no milestones in the “traditional” sense. We have to be experimental, to be outcasts, we have to take things apart and build our own wor(l)ds out of the fragments that remain.

There is a room in the house where the walls are papered with maps. They are the maps you have drawn of your life, the different trajectories you plotted for yourself at seven, eleven, fifteen, nineteen, twenty-one, twenty-four years old. For the first twenty two years or so, the maps follow a similar structure. The more recent ones are different – more meandering, branchier – no longer beholden to a timescheme, biological or social. More opportunities, more time. More bad stuff, too.

Being without, or beyond, conventional linguistic and formal structures consigns us to the shadows; when we write about ourselves it is similarly precarious, tinged with inarticulacy. The inability to speak our experiences, identities, and desires boldly and directly means that we invent new ways to express these without / beyond articulation. Rather than telling a story, we invite you to experience it. Come in, take a look around.

The house is an archive; your life, its ups and downs, the things you’ve lost, the things you can’t put down. They’re all here.

In being excluded from the mainstream, there is a kind of freedom – freedom to invent, to experiment. Queer texts are formally and linguistically experimental because queer life is formally and linguistically experimental, simply. And – particularly in texts which are biographical, which trace a story of becoming – the motif of the house recurs, as a structure around which the text can be arranged. In these texts, it is not (only) language that reveals story; rather, it is movement through space that propels narrative discovery.

You are invited to explore – to walk through the house, pick up objects, trail your fingers over the fading wallpaper – and to discover. As you discover the house, maybe, just maybe, you will discover things about you, too – the things that live in your dark spaces, the things that haunt you, the things that make you who you are.

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home both is, and isn’t, about a home. The title refers to the family funeral home, not the actual house Bechdel grew up in – a kind of double sleight of hand: we expect fun and get funeral, expect a home and get a funeral parlour . Neither the funeral home of the title, nor the family home we expect to read about, is really a home. This failure of domesticity is convenient for Bechdel’s portrait of a dysfunctional family – the house traditionally represents family life, but their house fails to be a “real” home just as Alison fails to be a “real” (read: heterosexual) daughter; just as her father fails to be a “real” father, or husband. The house is an unreal space – a maze, a labyrinth: “mirrors, distracting bronzes, multiple doorways. Visitors often got lost upstairs.” Alison cannot escape its orbit, even into adulthood, finding herself returning again and again to the milieu of her childhood.

Somewhere in the house is a child – maybe twelve, or ten, or fourteen – who wants to leave it. But she is a child, so she can’t. And, despite what she often believes about herself, she is more or less a good child, who does what she is told, so she does not seriously consider running away. She climbs into her wardrobe instead (the irony doesn’t escape me) and sits there, knees bunched up to her chest, hidden by the hanging clothes. She hears her mother marching through the house, looking for her – she even looks in the wardrobe, but she misses her, curled up tight like a fist. She stays there until she starts to feel bad for her mother, then quietly climbs out and pretends she was never hiding.

In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir about domestic abuse within a lesbian relationship, also centres on a house, on the question of what makes a house a home. The titular house, Machado tells us, is both real and not real: “it is as real as the book you are holding in your hands [...] If I cared to, I could give you its address, and you could drive there in your own car.” The structure of the book, though, is more concerned with the “Dream House” as unreal, as a function of narrative – each section is titled “Dream House as [something]” (e.g. “Dream House as Set Design”, “Dream House as American Gothic”, “Dream House as Déja Vu”). As Machado writes, “Places are never just places in a piece of writing. If they are, the author has failed. Setting is not inert.” The Dream House is both a real house and a Dream House, a fantasy, a nightmare – a setting which is alive, interactive, a character in its own right. The house – the real house – is circular, we are told; you walk through the rooms to end up back where you started. Not the labyrinth of Bechdel’s family home, but similarly unreal, similarly impossible to escape – Machado recounts a childhood nightmare in which “hiding was all I could do; there never seemed to be the possibility of opening the door and going out into the world beyond the house,” something which seems to reflect the experience of being trapped inside this abusive relationship.

You both are, and are not, trapped in the house. You can’t leave, but even if you could, it wouldn’t matter. But it’s your choice whether or not you’ll explore it. You could just sit here, on the carpet, in the corner of the foyer, for the rest of your life.

In Gone Home, you are deposited in front of a house – your house, although you have never been here before. You have returned from a trip abroad and your family, rather than being in the new home to welcome you, are all gone. The game is a quest to find out what happened, specifically to your younger sister Sam. Unlike Fun Home and In the Dream House, the story is fictional, not a memoir; the house does not really exist. Again, though, the game interrogates the motif of the house: what does it mean to go “home”, especially if you are going to a new, unfamiliar house? If the lights are all off and your family is missing? If it’s an ancestral home that is possibly haunted by the ghost of your great uncle? Where, and what – or who – is “home”?

You have lived in many houses (and flats) over the years, but not all of them have been homes. All of them are here – your childhood bedroom up here, over there your uni halls of residence. The flat you live in now, your mum’s house, your bedroom from the flat in Golders Green – some of these are more safe, and some more haunted, than others.

All of these texts not only centre on a house, but are structured around exploration – each of them is a kind of quest, a journey of discovery – about the house, its inhabitants, and maybe oneself. As we engage with each text, we explore possibilities – of form, of narrative, of queer life – and map out new ways of writing, being, and living. This exploration echoes the self-exploration that queer people go through in figuring out our identities – feeling your way around, or through, something you don’t know the proportions of yet; stumbling upon new information that you pick up and carry with you. There’s something, particularly, about being forced to explore: making your way through the minutiae of a life, exploring lesbian identity from the inside – we have no choice but to identify with the characters as we learn about their experiences, told in first person, and we gradually manage to assemble a portrait of queerness we can understand, and relate to. You have nothing to lose by engaging – it’s not possible to “lose” Gone Home, unlike many typical video games. You win by uncovering the whole story, but there are no traps, no complex sequences, no enemies to fight. You don’t need to be someone who thinks of themselves as a gamer – there are no conditions on entry, you can come as you are. All you need is curiosity, a willingness to explore.

The problem is, is that you are not someone who is “good” at exploration, you think. You stick to the insides of things, do what you’re told, or what you expect to be told. Again and again, people talk about books, TV, bands you have never even heard of – not because you’re not interested, but because you never knew where to look. You don’t know where to look here, either. But you take a deep breath.

In Fun Home, we return again and again to the same rooms in the house, the same moments in time, each time with new information. The house, and the events of Bechdel’s childhood, are visited over and over in the search for meaning. The text is deeply concerned with questions of place, and space – Bechdel maps out for us, literally, the town she grew up in, and her father’s movements across that space over the course of his life. The house is what binds and separates Alison and her father – in one panel we see her and her father framed in separate windows, viewed from outside.

At twenty-two, you have never seen Pride or read Tipping the Velvet or consumed basically any queer media, especially not lesbian media, other than what you have picked up accidentally or been assigned for class. In 2017, you are twenty-two and you intentionally read a book about queer women for the first time. Deep breath.

One of the epigraphs to In the Dream House is a Louise Bourgeois quotation: “You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture.” In “Dream House as Memory Palace”, Machado envisions the house as a repository for different moments of her life – “The back patio: college” – the text, the house, and her life are all conceived of in terms of spatial configuration, as things to be moved through. 

In “Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure”, she maps out “our” options on a given day in the format of a Choose Your Own Adventure book – if you keep reading the book linearly, you will reach “a page where you shouldn’t be. It is impossible to find your way here naturally; you can only do so by cheating.” The chapter echoes the structure of a video game, that we are given certain options, the illusion of control – we can explore, but only within the bounds of what artists have rendered and writers have written. We can reject the choice in front of us – we can refuse to choose one of the options, and keep reading, but we will be caught out, admonished as cheaters. The only way to beat the game – here, the “game” of being abused – is to exit the game, stop reading the book, leave your abuser.

You walk through your own memory palace – so many things long-forgotten, or repressed. So many things you wish had been forgotten, irrepressible things. But remember, there’s no way out. No exit. Keep moving, keep breathing.

The detritus of your teenage years is scattered throughout the house – mix CDs, band posters, a grotesquely cute make-up bag with kittens on it that you thought was lost forever. So many remnants of the person you were, and all the people you could have become.

Each text is, in a way, haunted. Time echoes through each house, compounding the present moment – the past, the future, both haunt the moment of writing, or the moment of reading/playing. As we work through the text, we find ourselves returning again and again to the same places, or the same moments in time – as Munt argues, we constitute ourselves as we move through space over time – both dimensions are vital to the experience. Ghosts, too, refract through the texts – whether real or not, there is an explicit engagement with the idea of ghosts and the ghostly in each text. They are inescapable, they will not rest – as much as we try to leave the past behind, their function is to remind us that this is impossible.

Your childhood house is preserved, in all its glory. It’s a very old house – before you moved in, it had been an antique shop, a vet surgery, the country home of a Duke. A book, written and self-published by the town’s historical society, alleges that a scientist once blew himself up in what you think was your bedroom when you were at uni – apparently his arm was found in the fire grate.

  As a child, you were convinced it – your house – was haunted: the floorboards creaked, the wind blew through the eaves, there were bats and a convoluted attic system. One night, you went to the toilet and thought you saw – or felt? – a ghost. The memory has ossified now – you don’t remember the experience itself, only what you told yourself about it.

Each narrative layers timelines. Different Carmens exist – Carmen the author, who knows how the story ends, who controls our engagement with it; Carmen the character, trapped in an abusive relationship (in the stage musical of Fun Home, we see three Alisons on stage simultaneously – child, teen, and adult/author). Identity is unreliable, shifting, refracted – Carmen is sometimes “I” and sometimes “you”; sometimes the narrator in charge of our experience, trapping us in a Choose Your Own Adventure game, and sometimes the hapless victim who can’t escape. In “Dream House as Haunted Mansion”, Machado interrogates what it means “for something to be haunted”: “It means that metaphors abound; that space exists in four dimensions [...]; that the past never leaves us.” The question of who or what is doing the haunting is blurry: it seems obvious that the abusive girlfriend is the monster hiding in the house, but is that the same as a ghost? 

Machado claims to be “unaccountably haunted by the specter of the lunatic lesbian”, frustrated by the fact that badly behaved lesbians are giving the rest of us a bad rep; but she also writes that, “it occurs to you one day, standing in the living room, that you are this house’s ghost: you are the one wandering from room to room with no purpose, gaping at the moving boxes that are never unpacked, never certain what you’re supposed to do.” Considering that in “Dream House as Not a Metaphor”, she also writes that, “The inhabitant gives the room its purpose. Your actions are mightier than any architect’s intentions,” what might her purpose-less habitation of the house signify? What does this haunting mean?

For as long as you can remember, you’ve been preoccupied with time, both the idea of it and the experience of being in it. You’re always thinking about looking ahead and looking back, countless versions of yourself occupying the same space at different times. Every room in the house contains you, a million times over.

Gone Home, too, explicitly tackles the question of what “haunting” means: when you first arrive at the dark, seemingly abandoned house, it’s difficult not to immediately think in terms of horror tropes. The game’s artwork shows the house – almost a mansion, large and run-down – with all the lights but one turned off:

Early in the game, you enter a sitting room where the TV is running a weather report on the storm outside, and a book on poltergeists and hauntings is among the couch cushions on the floor. As you play, it becomes increasingly clear that this is not a “scary” game, and that it is instead much quieter and more intimate. What looks like a scene out of a horror movie – red splatters in the bathtub – turns out to be the remnants of Sam dying her friend Lonnie’s hair, a pivotal moment in their burgeoning relationship.

You’re fourteen, or fifteen, and you’re in the back of a car with your best friend and you’re looking at her and it’s not that you want to kiss her you’re just thinking about it, but not in that way, it’s like it’s at a remove, like you’re thinking about thinking about it, what that would mean. You tie yourself in knots thinking about thinking about it.

Ghosts are a way of facing up to our fears, a direct and embodied manifestation of the thing we are afraid of – in mainstream straight culture, the ghost is queerness; if the house is queer culture, then queer abuse is the ghost that haunts it. Each of these stories is about confronting those ghosts, reckoning with the spectres that hover on the fringes of our culture, that threaten our self-perception. In all of them, the reader/player is encouraged to participate in the construction of the story – to witness both the self being constituted in front of us, and the ghosts that cling to it. All we can do is agree to join in, to be brave enough to explore, to stay in the story for as long as it takes to get to the end.

You’re twenty-three and thinking about kissing someone; twenty-four and still thinking about kissing them; you just turned twenty-five and the two of you are lying outside under the stars and you kiss them.