‘ALL DESIGNED FROM THE OUTSIDE’

Abstract

This essay explores the interpretative potential of the architectural image mentioned in the title of William Gaddis's novel Carpenter's Gothic. The Gothic tradition offers an apposite artistic and ideological framework for the expression of the author's concern with domestic and global violence. The house image works as a metaphor for the narrative technique Gaddis uses, as well as a symbolic space in which the private and public realms are inextricably linked through an inside‐outside dialectics. The author's analysis of the dialogic structure of the text relates the symbolic role played by the house to the social relationships portrayed in the novel, illustrating how the consequences of unsuccessful communicative events within the realm of the domestic can extend to outer circles with disastrous consequences.

Keywords:

• Gothic
• Gaddis
• house
• communication
• dialogue
• community
• violence

Notes

1 The research for this paper was conducted in the framework of the research project ‘Community and Immunity in Contemporary Fiction in English’, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (grant reference FFI2009-13244).

2 In the American tradition, the tension between internal and external forces for which the image of the house works as crucible can be traced from Poe's ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839) to Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987). Poe's story bears witness to ‘the perfect keeping of the character of the premises with the accredited character of the people’ (1982: 232). The correspondence is acknowledged in Carpenter's Gothic when one of the characters compares the house to its owner: ‘[i]t's like the inside of your head McCandless' (Gaddis, 1999: 228). In The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Nathaniel Hawthorne extends the anthropomorphic image of the house: ‘[t]he aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward storm and sunshine, but expressive also, of the long lapse of mortal life, and accompanying vicissitudes that have passed within’ (1986: 5).