House-Body Equation

Definition

The house-body equation names the trope — and its political operation — by which a woman is "described or imagined as" a house: the female body assigned the structure, function and ownership-conditions of the domestic interior. Gilbert and Gubar's formulation: "Women themselves have often, of course, been described or imagined as houses. Most recently Erik Erikson advanced his controversial theory of female 'inner space' in an effort to account for little girls' interest in domestic enclosures" — with the medieval Madonna statues that open to reveal the Holy Family in "the Virgin's inner space" and the womb as "always and everywhere… a child's first and most satisfying house" as the trope's deep genealogy (pp. 121–122). The equation's operation is not metaphorical decoration but confinement in three moves: (1) objectification — "conditioned to believe that as a house she is herself owned (and ought to be inhabited) by a man," the woman "see[s] herself as inescapably an object… defined simply by her purely biological usefulness to her species" (p. 122); (2) denial of transcendence — "To become literally a house, after all, is to be denied the hope of that spiritual transcendence of the body which, as Simone de Beauvoir has argued, is what makes humanity distinctively human," so that "the confinement of pregnancy replicates the confinement of society" (p. 122); (3) reversal into the trope itself — the equation "does not just 'place' her in a glass coffin, it transforms her into a version of the glass coffin herself": "not only a prisoner but a monster" (p. 122). The concept is the deepest form of the identification of women with the domestic interior that gender and the interior theorizes: not a cultural association but a total conflation in which the woman is the interior — and the interior's enclosure anxiety becomes hers.

Key Thinkers

• Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar — the equation's theorist-critics: the three-move analysis (owned object → denied transcendence → glass-coffin reversal) and its literary archive (Mary Shelley's maternity/creativity conflation; Dickinson's "womb into tomb"; Gilman's woman-in-the-room).
• Beverly Gordon — the equation's social historian: the industrial-age material-culture archive showing the equation operating as everyday cultural system (advice literature, fiction, painting, fashion), with the Lakoff & Johnson structural-metaphor frame ("a simile… transformed into a synonym") and the ownership ground — woman and house both "adorned to testify to his success" (1996/2006).
• Erik Erikson — the equation's psychoanalytic codifier: the theory of female "inner space" accounting for little girls' interest in domestic enclosures; cited by Gilbert and Gubar as the contemporary form of the ancient symbolism (not yet paged — see log).
• Anne Troutman — the equation's psychological, mirror-form register: the relationship stated bidirectionally — "we dwell in the home and the home dwells in us" (editors' headnote, 1997/2006) — as "This Freudian connection, dividing and connecting inner and outer selves"; the house as "a portrait of the inner life" and "a map of the conscious and unconscious."
• Simone de Beauvoir — the philosophical stake: transcendence of the body as "what makes humanity distinctively human"; the house-woman denied it (not yet paged — see log).

Related Concepts

• Gender and the Interior — the wider identification of women with the domestic interior as a discourse of power; the equation is its total, bodily form.
• Interiority — the equation colonizes innerness itself: the woman's "inner space" is pre-assigned as womb/house, leaving what Plath called "a self to recover."
• Enclosure — the equation's spatial form: the woman enclosed in rooms as she is enclosed in the trope; confinement in pregnancy "replicat[ing] the confinement of society."
• Separate Spheres — the institutional arrangement that makes the equation actionable: the woman assigned to the domestic interior she is said to be.
• Felicitous Space — the equation's counter-reading target: Bachelard's "protective asylum" presumes a relation to the house the woman-as-house cannot have.
• The Madwoman — the equation's rebel figure: the woman who "peels off" the enclosing surfaces and creeps out.
• Woman as Decoration — the equation's display-system surface: the woman fitted to the room as its ornament and "actual piece" (Von Falke, Burbank), the equation made visible in décor and painting.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Towards a Feminist Poetics: Infection in the Sentence (Gilbert & Gubar 1979/2006) — the concept's source: "described or imagined as houses" (p. 121); the womb as first house and Madonna statues (pp. 121–122); owned/ined/transcendence-denial/glass-coffin (p. 122); Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper as the equation's narrative (pp. 122–124).
• Woman's Domestic Body (Gordon 1996/2006) — the concept's material-culture twin: the conflation as Lakoff & Johnson structural metaphor — "a simile – women and interiors were like one another – was transformed into a synonym," the woman "the embodiment of the home," the home "an extension of both her corporeal and spiritual self," most strongly c. 1875–1925 (p. 127); the bidirectional overlay — Stowe's "Her home is the new impersonation of herself" (home as the woman, "almost like another body," p. 127) against Wharton's rooms that took "possession" of women, leaving them "tantamount to self-annihilation" (p. 128); the everyday proof-cases — Margaret "literally became one with" the room she fixed ("By 'fixing' her house, she had fixed herself," p. 126), the school project's "boys built an actual house, while the girls designed its interior" (p. 128), and the ownership economy beneath: woman and dwelling both "bore the name, literally and legally, of the man who 'owned' them" (p. 131). See woman-as-decoration, Power and Space (Position Q).
• Toward the immaterial interior (Jacobus 2018) — the equation's monumental, pre-domestic register: the temple as a god's body. "The form and proportion of the Greek temple stood for the body of the god that was its dedication. For example, the temple of Zeus was the body of Zeus; the temple of Athena was the body of Athena. As an embodiment of the gods, and through its form, sculpture, and inscriptions, each temple became a chronicle of a particular aspect of Greek culture. In this way, the Parthenon is the body of Athena, but it is also the book of Athens." Where Gilbert and Gubar's and Gordon's equation conflates a woman with a house to confine her, the temple register conflates building and divine body in the opposite direction: the house-body equation's sacred prehistory, in which the interior's embodiment of a person is the culture's highest act of signification rather than a woman's confinement. See cultural-registers, narrative-space.
• To dwell means to leave traces (Downey 2018) — the equation's gender-neutral, modern-subject generalization: Downey grounds the famous-person house museum in "the modern conception (explored by Walter Benjamin, among others) that the domestic interior is both an extension and a representation of the modern individual" — the person/house conflation here extended to every modern individual, male or female, as the premise on which the musealized home can stand for its occupant ("a kind of double modernist text"). The chapter thus shows the equation's two careers: the gendered, coercive form (Gilbert and Gubar's woman-as-house) and the general modern form (Benjamin's interior as the individual's extension) — with the museum case raising the question of what happens when the general form is applied to men: the master's house read as the master's body, and the reading subverted by the same corporeal traces (Yvonne's pillow, Gaudí's prie dieu) that the equation's women's-version always implied. See self-fashioning, house-museum, trace.
• Architecture and Interior: A Roam of One's Own (Taylor 2001/2006) — the equation's theoretical deepening, the room as the mind's metaphor and the discipline's own bodily formation: "The room as a metaphor for the mind is sometimes full and occupied, but what if it is locked or even empty" (p. 342) — the room/mind equation stated through Woolf (via C. Ruth Miller) with the empty room's endurance against the body's absence; and the equation transposed to architecture itself — "architecture in disavowing this maternal debt has left the interior in dereliction, homeless; it has touched itself from the outside (the city) in order to homogenise and recapture the sensation of the inside of a body; it has hollowed out its own 'interiors' and projected them outward and now requires interiors as supports for this hollowed space" (p. 343). Where Gilbert and Gubar's equation assigns the woman the house as her body, Taylor's transposition assigns architecture the body it hollowed: the canonical tradition's interiors as "supports for this hollowed space," the discipline's relation to the interior constituted by a disavowed bodily debt. The concept's widest form: not only is the house read as a body — the body's sensation is what architecture's hollowed interiors are built to recapture. See inside-outside-dialectic, refuge, gender-and-the-interior.
• Inside Fear: Secret Places and Hidden Spaces in Dwellings (Troutman 1997/2006) — the equation's psychological, mirror-form and unconscious-extending register. The mirror stated bidirectionally: "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" (editors' headnote, p. 356) — the house/person conflation as a Freudian structure of inner and outer, not (as in Gilbert and Gubar's archive) a gendered imposition alone. The house as "a collision of dream, nightmare, and circumstance, a portrait of the inner life" whose "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" (p. 356) — the equation here runs deep into the psyche's topography: the house maps not just a life (the biography-reading) but its conscious/unconscious split, room by room. See hidden-spaces, interiority, psychoanalysis.

Open Questions

• Is the equation a discourse (a way of imagining women) or a structure (ownership, law, medicine) that the discourse merely narrates? Gilbert and Gubar move between both registers — does the concept need both?
• The equation makes the domestic interior the woman's body; the decorator's profession (de Wolfe) makes it her project. Are these two relations to the same conflation — and does professionalizing the interior (the woman as the interior's governor) dissolve the equation or perfect it?
• The equation's reversal — "a version of the glass coffin herself" — suggests the trope recoils on its users: the man who inhabits a woman-house dwells in his own prison-imaginary. What does the equation do to male dwelling (Benjamin's interior sustaining "him in his illusions")?
• Erikson's "inner space" is cited as the theory Gilbert and Gubar contest; the wiki's Ardener line treats 'inner' as a cross-cultural mapping criterion. Can a feminist theory of interiority keep inner space (the self to recover) while refusing the house-body assignment of it?
• Gordon's archive shows the equation running in both directions — the home as the woman's "new impersonation" and the rooms taking "possession" of the woman — while Gilbert and Gubar's three moves all run one way (onto the woman). Does the bidirectional overlay mean the equation is a reciprocal structure (each term makes the other) rather than a one-way trope — and does Wharton's possessive interior name the structure's truth that the discourse-only version misses?