Felicitous Space

Definition

Felicitous space is Bachelard's name — and, in Gilbert and Gubar's counter-reading, his blind spot — for the space of the intimate imagination: the house, nest, shell and wardrobe in which daydream finds protection, the "topography of our inmost being" whose sheltering value makes dwelling a felicity. Gilbert and Gubar quote the famous preface line — "the house image would appear to have become the topography of our inmost being" (The Poetics of Space, p. xxxii) — and grant the phenomenology, then turn it: "What is significant from our point of view, however, is the extraordinary discrepancy between the almost consistently 'felicitous space' he discusses and the negative space we have found." Bachelard's "protective asylum of the house is closely associated with its maternal features" (following Freud's dream symbolism and Erikson's female inner space) — but "such symbolism must inevitably have very different implications for male critics and for female authors": the woman writer's archive records the negative space — enclosure anxiety, the womb that becomes tomb, the room that imprisons — because for the woman who is imagined as the house, the felicity is someone else's. The concept thus names both the positive pole (Bachelard's intimate, protective, valorized interior — the wiki's dwelling and inside/outside dialectic material) and the critical operation that exposes it as gendered: felicity attributed to whose dwelling, protection for whom, and at whose enclosure?

Key Thinkers

• Gaston Bachelard — the concept's positive pole: the house as the "oneiric house," "felicitous space," the intimate topology of the inmost being (via The Poetics of Space, 1958).
• Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar — the concept's critique: the "extraordinary discrepancy" between Bachelard's almost consistently felicitous space and the negative space of women's writing; the gendering of the house's symbolism ("very different implications for male critics and for female authors," 1979/2006).
• Anthony Vidler — the architectural-theoretical companion: the "unheimlich" as the counter-tradition to the oneiric house; the unhomely as a representation of a mental state of projection rather than a property of buildings. See uncanny.

Related Concepts

• The Dialectics of Outside and Inside — the phenomenological machinery Bachelard uses to establish the intimate's value; the concept that felicitous space names the tonality of.
• Dwelling — the positive pole: the house as shelter of reverie and protection; what the counter-reading problematizes.
• House-Body Equation — the reason the felicity fails: for the woman-as-house, the "protective asylum" is the instrument of confinement.
• The Uncanny — the negative pole: the unhomely double of the homely dwelling (Vidler); the archive of negative space that haunts the felicitous tradition.
• Domestic Interior — the site at stake: the room whose felicity is celebrated (Bachelard) and whose enclosure is recorded (Gilman via Gilbert & Gubar).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Dialectics of Outside and Inside (Bachelard 1958/2006) — the positive pole: the cell guarded "more by the whiteness of the lime-wash than by the strong walls" ("stronger than all geometry"); inner space "where everything is commensurate with inner being"; the exterior as "an old intimacy lost in the shadow of memory" (pp. 22–25).
• Towards a Feminist Poetics: Infection in the Sentence (Gilbert & Gubar 1979/2006) — the critique: "the extraordinary discrepancy between the almost consistently 'felicitous space' he discusses and the negative space we have found" (p. 121); the maternal association and its differential implications (p. 121); Gilman's room and wallpaper as the negative space in narrative (pp. 122–124).
• Woman's Domestic Body (Gordon 1996/2006) — the felicity-doctrine's social history: the culture that promised the house's felicity to its women, and recorded both poles. The positive pole stated as period common sense: the room's repair as the self's repair — Margaret's "Why I feel almost well" ("By 'fixing' her house, she had fixed herself," p. 126), the home "part and parcel of one great whole" whose beautifying "forms us into beautiful fashion" (pp. 127–128). The negative pole is the same doctrine's reverse: Wharton's rooms that took "possession" of women, whose leaving would be "tantamount to self-annihilation" (p. 128). The source shows the felicity of the house was not an innocent phenomenology but a gendered cultural promise — "Don't I look nice!" as the felicity-script the industrial age taught its women — with the discrepancy between promise and possession already inside the period's own fiction. See house-body-equation, the-madwoman, domestic-interior.
• Notes on Digital Nesting (Goulthorpe 2002/2006) — the felicity transferred to digital form-generation, as a condition rather than a description: the shell's inversion ("one must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in!") would be "a recipe for a genetic architecture, on condition that its secretions are unselfconscious and 'felicitous,' obeying an internal law" (p. 134) — felicity as what generated form must attain to escape being "an aborted genetic process" (p. 135). The essay's closing project makes felicity the digital programme's criterion: "I am eager to implicate the felicity of Bachelard's thought into an emergent digital praxis" (p. 136). Where Gilbert and Gubar test the felicity claim socially (for whom?), Goulthorpe tests it generatively (can a computed form be felicitous, or does unselfconsciousness exclude computation by definition?). See function-of-inhabiting, evolutionary-architecture, forms-of-absence.
• Inside Fear: Secret Places and Hidden Spaces in Dwellings (Troutman 1997/2006) — the felicity-claim's fear-register limit, stated from inside the house rather than from feminist criticism: "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" (p. 356) — the felicitous promise and its uncanny double held co-present in one inhabitant, not distributed between critics and authors; and "There is danger in the house. … The primal shelter is also the site of primal fears" (p. 356). Where Gilbert and Gubar locate the discrepancy between Bachelard's felicity and women's negative space, Troutman locates it within a single dwelling — the same rooms promising home and housing the buried-alive fear. The concept's sharpened question: not whose house is felicitous, but whether any house's felicity is ever unmixed. See fear, hidden-spaces, uncanny.

Open Questions

• Is felicity a property of the imagination's space (Bachelard: the cell guarded by whiteness) or of the social arrangement of dwelling — in which case the discrepancy Gilbert and Gubar find is not a refutation but a class-and-gender index of who gets to daydream?
• Can the poetics be extended rather than opposed — a "felicitous space" account of Gilman's escape (the road, the cloud shadow, the open country) that keeps Bachelard's imagery of motion and immensity without the enclosure?
• The wiki's Bachelard tradition (dwelling, poetic image, intimate immensity) is built almost entirely on the felicitous register; Gilbert and Gubar's note is the first wiki source to name its cost. Does Dwelling now need a standing "negative space" caveat — and what would the criterion be for when enclosure protects and when it imprisons?
• Goulthorpe makes felicity the condition a generated form must meet ("its secretions are unselfconscious and 'felicitous,' obeying an internal law") — can unselfconsciousness be designed, or does any deliberately specified internal law disqualify its products as felicitous? Is "felicity" here an aesthetic standard, a cybernetic one (self-organization), or — after Gilbert and Gubar — a privilege disguised as a law?