Swallowing Castles and Houses With Stomachs: Dwelling as a Digestive Movement in Literature

Abstract

There is a rich literary tradition of depicting human-dwelling places (usually houses) as living bodies, stretching from the Middle Ages to contemporary fiction. On several occasions, the interaction between the characters in these works and the house-body entity described has taken the form of a digestive journey. Rooms come to symbolise mouths, kitchens and even bowels, and sometimes the human body and mind are gradually incorporated into the external architectural space. This chapter examines two literary works in which this occurs – the ‘House of Temperance’ in Spencer's The Faerie Queene (1590) and Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House (1959). These two examples, from two very different literary traditions (Renaissance allegorical and modern Gothic horror respectively) show the fine line between revelation and horror, how spatial materiality and meaning are flexible and how a building may transform the character within it both psychologically and physically.

Citation

Batchelor, E. (2022), "Swallowing Castles and Houses With Stomachs: Dwelling as a Digestive Movement in Literature", Boonstra, B., Cutler-Broyles, T. and Rozzoni, S. (Ed.) Moving Spaces and Places (Emerald Interdisciplinary Connexions), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 9-26. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80071-226-320221002