Inside Fear: Secret Places and Hidden Spaces in Dwellings

from Intumus: Interior Design Reader Edited by Mark Taylor and Juleanna Preston 2006 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Anne Troutman

In this semi-autobiographical account of childhood spaces, Anne Troutman suggests that dwelling holds an intimate, mirror-like relationship so that we dwell in the home and the home dwells in us. This Freudian connection, dividing and connecting inner and outer selves, gathers hidden spaces with visible house, and cloaks the visual with other senses such as fear, terror, fright and anxiety. Discussed this way the storyteller's relived world is contingent on conscious and unconscious associations that redefine the interior through psychological space.

I do not believe the house is a safe place. For me, it is a collision of dream, nightmare, and circumstance, a portrait of the inner life. The primal shelter is also the site of primal fears. Its interiors are a map of the conscious and unconscious, with conscious securities and insecurities visible in the main rooms, and unconscious ones lurking in smaller, peripheral spaces. There is danger in the house. Though I passionately wish for calm nourishing warmth and spaciousness, 'the promise of home,' I am irredeemably caught in the house Edgar Allan Poe built: the one in which someone has been buried behind the wall, alive.

In the middle of the middle of the middle of the night … in the middle of the middle of the middle of the room … in the middle of the middle of the middle of your mind …

In the middle of the land rises the fortification; in the middle of the fortification, the town; in the middle of the town, the castle keep; within the keep, stone walls, the tower; within the tower, walls, attic, eaves; within the walls, stairs and chambers, passages, panels, cabinets, a locked cabinet; within the cabinet … Within the fortress walls, we believe ourselves safe from whatever lies without, but what of what lies within those walls – what is within the locked cabinet?

Closets, hallways, stairways, doors and windows, attics, basements, eaves, and cabinets expand and contract with fear and desire. They are the night side of the house, in which the identity and security of domestic life is symbolically tested. Incorporated within the

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house, they form another realm where daily life is displaced, condensed, fragmented.

Disturbing dreams and repressed fears transform surface into cavity, large into minute, the miniature into the overwhelming. These curious places become the refuge of the half-realized. Wishes, dreams, fantasies, fears, desires are the inhabitants of the internal boundaries of our everyday environment: the place of the other, the imagined, the double, the dream.

To get in or out of the back bedroom we have to pass through the linen hall. Narrowed by cabinets that reached upwards along one side, it seems longer than its fourteen feet. The high ceiling disappears in gloom. Only one cabinet towards the end, reserved for linens, smells sweetly of lavender. The rest of the cabinets are filled with old things in boxes and various containers that smell of metal, wood, and oil. The hallway contains a small vertical shaft for an old dumbwaiter that has long since fallen into disuse. The empty shaft, dark and smelling of dust and rope, is the locus of lost things, never to be recovered. It is in these long dusky hallways and cabinets with box latches that my memories of the losses and loneliness of late childhood resonate.

A parallel world inhabits the borders of my waking life. This parallel world is one of refuge and passage, quiet places in which to nest and dream, dark places in which to hide or from which to flee. They are the spaces behind, between and through which I enter the larger 'rooms' of my daily life. They are spaces in which I am usually alone or on the way to somewhere else: the hall, the stairs, the closet, the attic. These spaces, internal to the house's structure yet external to its principal rooms, are the expanded boundaries of the house and my consciousness. They are condensed spaces, tight spaces, often storage spaces, repositories of the activities and memories just beyond and within the main episodes of my life. Without them, I am uncomfortably fastened to the present, limited to the surface.

In my brother's closet there is a small rounded door, no taller than a small child. It is hidden behind all the clothes that are hung on the rack in front of it. The door sticks slightly when pulled and opens into the dark recesses of the eaves where we have our club. We set up our table and benches (old boxes) and store the necessary things to the right, along the length of the eaves as they stretch toward and behind my parents' bedroom, from which there is another small door, like our own, but one that we never use.

As a child, I explore these hidden spaces in order to explore my fears. From within the safety of the house, I can venture to its edges, its perimeters, and, undetected, experiment with facing my fears of the dark, of the adults, of a large noisy world. In the eaves I escape, I huddle, I frighten myself, I cry and whisper and laugh and plot. In this hollow between the self I know and see and the one I do not know and cannot yet see, but sense,

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I test my own limits and learn my own secrets. In these hollow walls dwells the unknown, the in-between, the impossible, the unseen. Exploring them, I am hero and master of the unknown; I stare fear in the face and survive. (… p 147)

As a natural extension of the primal need for protection and nurture, the dwelling is also a defense against the primal fear of loss of protection. Occupying the territory between reality and illusion, the dwelling could be considered a creative 'space' that defends the individual against the anxiety of being alone.¹ My experience of dwelling in dreams and in reality both reflects and mitigates this anxiety. The house is a transitional space – a combination of inner and outer, open and closed, celestial and temporal. It has an 'illusory,' malleable, adaptive character that assimilates unexpressed and unacknowledged anxieties and feelings of loss.

I am inside a small old house. It is picturesque, the kind that you would find in an English countryside village – a comfortable slouch of thatch and wood and stucco. As I explore it, I realize that it is empty, abandoned, and feel the emptiness of the rooms as a cold pressure drawing me deeper inside. I flee out the door and stand on the threshold, my gaze fastened on the door, feeling in its solid dark thickness the shape of foreboding.

Long hallways, dark staircases, and chimney flues are sometimes also the stage of this primal anxiety. Freud distinguished anxiety from fear (Furcht). Anxiety is a reaction to a perception of danger; fear requires a definite object of which one is afraid. He defined anxiety as an adaptive function – essential in humans and animals to their survival – in response to the flooding of psychic apparati with stimuli. He considered birth the first experience of anxiety, later the absence of the mother, whose presence is essential to the gratification of instinctual demands.

I am climbing upward through an endless series of rooms. The rooms become smaller, tighter, darker until finally I am within a wall, climbing an old staircase. It twists and winds and sometimes levels off, but always become tighter and more uncomfortable, until I can barely fit my shoulders through the next opening. Disheartened and afraid, I rest on the landing. (… p 151)

Sensuous detailing within the skin of a dwelling has always been an emblem of security in my life, making comprehensible even the grandest spaces to my senses. I think the security of detail stems from the period of early childhood, when the child, beginning to distinguish itself from 'mother,' relies on the acquisition of increased physical capacities to bring the external world into grasp and focus. Houses that I remember with texture and detail in their structure – window, floor, door, walls – feel safe to me; inhabited by smells, sounds, textures, and detail, they mitigate the anxiety of the outside world and hone my focus and insight, giving me a sense of comfort.

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I am sitting on a horse-hair pillow covered in green velvet, inside the window. I can smell the dusty scent of the old velvet and feel the coolness of the small-paned leaded window on my cheek. I study the soft joints of the solder. We slept in an old bed that sank in the middle and whose headboard was filled with ancient National Geographics that we used to pore over after our parents said goodnight (oh spears and large dangling breasts!) There are two old pump organs in the room with foot pedals for air and hundreds of ivory knobs promising exotic sounds and combinations … tympanum, flute, voice … at the foot of the bed is an old tallboy; in the drawers are thousands of treasures: poker chips, golf tees, polished stones.

In counterpoint to the safety of detail and things experienced as near are the dream spaces of terror and fright that are claustrophobic: spaces diminishing abnormally or spiraling endlessly, creating a sense of distance and emptiness, endlessness, unreachableness – an unfriendly confusion of inside and outside.

The back bedroom is the only room in the apartment except the kitchen that is directly connected to the back stair and thus to the basement sixteen stories below. A large heavy metal door with two locks, a bolt, and a chain divides this dark room from the back hall. The wind whistles through the shaft, and we hear strange noises at all hours.

Like the storyteller's hypnotic suggestion to enter the space of his story at more and more intimate scales until the voice seems to come from within, we daily recreate within our dwellings the intimate internal landscape of our fantasies, the spaces of our primal needs and fears. Consciously and unconsciously, we assign meaning to every surface, every cavity, visible and invisible until certain types of spaces become associated with specific feelings and begin to form pockets or sites for the contents of our inner lives. From within these pockets we may occasionally glimpse our hopes and desires or sense our fears and anxieties. (… p 156)

Note

1 'The capacity to create such an illusion [of transitional phenomena] defends the child against the anxiety of being alone, without the mother', Laurie Adams, Art and Psychoanalysis, Harper Collins (New York), 1993, p 178.

Anne Troutman, 'Inside Fear: Secret Places and Hidden Spaces in Dwellings', Nan Ellin (ed), Architecture of Fear, Princeton Architectural Press (New York), 1997.

(Excerpts pp 143–56)

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