Idea Post -- Home/Gothic Fiction -- 2.4

DEFINITION

 home [hohm] - noun: 

1. a house, apartment, or shelter that is the usual residence of a person, family, or household
2. the place in which one's domestic affections are centered
3. any place of residence or refuge: a heavenly home

Home is a concept that has always seemed foreign to me.  I've never quite related to the idea of a space, a sanctuary type of place where no harm can come to me. Perhaps this is because at any place that I've ever called home, I've experienced some sort of betrayal, in a sense. Rather than the typical depiction of a home as related in the image above, I feel as though my understanding of a home more closely identifies with the idea of a home as found in gothic literature.


The home in gothic literature is architecture, a dwelling, and it is as corrupt and crumbling as the characters that find residence inside of its walls.  Horace Walpole is said to be the author to birth the movement with the novel the Castle of Otranto -- rife with melodrama, parody, and decay. None of the inhabitants are sound of mind and the evil that snakes through the stories is not a physical ugly creature -- no Frankenstein, no Dracula -- but rather a psychological malice or disease that consumes the player that it is found in. The house itself is typically in some sort of disrepair or in the process of decaying which represents the irreparable state(s) of its inhabitants.


While I can't say that my experience has been to such an extreme, it felt as though my life were in such a state of shamble. My childhood home was always in various stages of being "fixed up" which lead to splintered floors, stray nails, and other precarious circumstances that needed to be navigated around.  Family matters were no better and persisted even after the divorce of my mother and step-dad. My own mind was ravaged by the aftermath of various encounters with my step-father and that weight was a lot to deal with and still carries with me now. 


I hadn't quite made a connection between this and my work before, I knew the events which have really fueled my work, but the home aspect hadn't really made itself apparent to me and now I'm interested to see how this realization will impact my creations for this semester.