“The Infinitude of the Shrieking Abysses”: Rooms, Wombs, Tombs, and the Hysterical Female Gothic in “The Dreams in the Witch-House”

Abstract

Set against his earlier epic and sprawling examples of cosmic horror, H. P. Lovecraft’s claustrophobic “The Dreams in the Witch-House” (1933)¹ has been thought of as unsuccessful, with S. T. Joshi describing the story as “one of his poorest later efforts” (2001 335), and Steven Mariconda condemning it as “Lovecraft’s magnificent failure” (192). It is this comparative claustrophobia that lends the story of how Walter Gilman meets his maker to a Female Gothic reading, as he takes on the role of the hysterical Female Gothic heroine, pursuing his “lost mother,” Keziah Mason, through the uncanny Gothic wombspace to a fatal end. “The Dreams in the Witch-House” is an intriguing example of Lovecraft’s work, relocating his anxieties about the devastating sense of “lostness” created by the “endless time and space” of the universe (Selected Letters, II 357) inside the “crazily-angled”architecture of Gilman’s room in the Witch-House. This leads to the forbidden loft “where Keziah was held to have practised her spells” (320), an interstitial space that consumes him in his pursuit of understanding its geometry, as his “absorption in the irregular wall and ceiling of his room” evokes the Female Gothic archetype of the house as devouring maternal body (328, 320).

It often happens that neurotic men state that to them there is something uncanny about the female genitals. But what they find uncanny [“unhomely”] is actually the entrance to man’s old “home,” the place where everyone once lived. (Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” 151)