‘Unhomely Moments’: Reading and Writing Nation in Welsh Female Gothic

Abstract

Castles, houses and ruins are paradigmatic tropes of Gothic writing, ubiquitous and multivalent signifiers from its inception to the present. Family, ‘race’ and nation are evoked by the sense of the word house meaning ‘lineage’, making houses emblematic of nation. Houses are also used figuratively in Female Gothic writing to encode and deconstruct the female body and psyche. If houses have traditionally symbolised imprisoning structures of patriarchy by which women are confined and from which they must escape, the house is a potentially troubling and problematic Gothic trope of nation for those reading or writing female nationhood. One of the aims of this essay will be to consider how ideas of nation(hood) and gender intersect and complicate each other in twentieth-century Anglophone Welsh Female Gothic. A second aim is to indicate some common organising features, in addition to houses, that might be associated with ‘the Welsh Female Gothic’; this essay will suggest ruined buildings, fire, disease and mental illness as prominent images which express gender and cultural crisis.

[I]ssues of suppression in a stateless national culture can find a mode of expression which has much to do with the Gothic, and [the study of this writing] can help us to illuminate some key points about Gothic as a mode of telling, and remembering, of history.

(David Punter)¹

By making visible the forgetting of the ‘unhomely’ moment in civil society, feminism specifies the patriarchal, gendered nature of civil society and disturbs the symmetry of private and public which is now shadowed, or uncannily doubled, by the difference of genders which does not neatly map on to the private and the public, but becomes disturbingly supplementary to them. This results in redrawing the domestic space … the personal-is-the political; the world-in-the-home.

(Homi Bhabha)²