The Haunted House of Kinship: Miscegenation, Homosexuality, and Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!

Haunting is always the haunting of a house. And it is not just that some houses are haunted. A house is only a house inasmuch as it is haunted.

—Mark Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction

Any house is a far too complicated, clumsy, fussy, mechanical counterfeit of the human body. . . .

—Frank Lloyd Wright, "The Cardboard House," 1931

Emily Dickinson's "one need not be a chamber to be haunted" begins by posing the phenomenon of haunting as the excess of any structure of containment. While Dickinson's language does not deny the possibility that haunting might be interiorized, its interiorization is deemed inessential and perhaps even secondary to the haunting itself. Chambers, houses, and other such enclosures mark the conventional spaces in which the haunting that is peculiar to the Gothic tends to get contained. In the dynamic of haunting that Dickinson suggests here, however, haunting is imagined as "surpassing Material Place—" (Dickinson 1961, 333). Haunting is uncontainable and generalizable.

Yet, in the lines that follow, Dickinson moves away from this assertion of haunting's uncontainability toward another set of enclosures—the corridors of the brain—which suggests that her opening gesture performs something perhaps less radical than it might first appear. Given that these corridors are understood to exceed "Material Place—," they appear to figure the brain as something like an interior psyche or mind, rather than a material organ. The movement beyond material place thus retains the trope of containment, despite having denied the brain its materiality. How are we to understand these immaterial corridors of the mind? What ensures their continued coherence once their materiality has been denied? Indeed, what nonmaterial walls hold this interiority in place? If such psychic interiority surpasses material place, it does so only by retaining a sense of (en)closure that affirms the materiality that it displaces. What is meant by a place without materiality—or, for that matter, a materiality without place? What happens to our sense of place once the materiality of place has been put into question?

While Mark Wigley (1993) reminds us that the term "'haunting' is etymologically bound to that of 'house,'" this linguistic yoking of haunting to containment may demonstrate that all houses are haunted; but it does not follow that all "haunting is always the haunting of a house," indeed, that haunting is always housed (163). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the derivation of the verb form "haunt" is of uncertain origin: "It is not clear whether the earliest sense in French and English was to practice habitually (an action etc.) or to frequent habitually (a place)."¹ If the latter formulation ties haunting to place, the former exceeds any structure of containment. To claim that haunting is irreducible to house is to understand haunting as anterior rather than interior to those structures that are conventionally thought to contain it. The haunting is the originary possibility of the house. The haunting comes first.

Such questions of materiality, place, and containment are central to any consideration of American slavery and its aftermath in Reconstruction. It is the figure of the house, after all, that Lincoln invoked in his famous 1858 acceptance speech on the occasion of his Republican senatorial nomination. Insisting that "this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free," Lincoln borrowed a phrase from Matthew 12: "'A house divided against itself cannot stand'" (Lincoln 1958, 3). Although Lincoln intended this metaphor to connote the impossibility of sustaining a nation divided along the question of slavery, this division of North and South, as Eric Sundquist (1983) observes, "concealed a further division between white and black, one that was paradoxically evident in their literal, physical union and one that, far from being dissolved by a reunion of the warring sections and an abolition of slavery, could only be made more prominently explosive...