Psychoanalysis and the Gendering of Architecture in Robert Westall’s The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral

Reading Westall’s horror fantasy through Lacanian psychoanalysis, especially concepts like the Name and Law of the Father, and the gaze, to interrogate the narrative’s principle architecture – a cathedral tower – this essay argues that the gender references associated with this building are fundamentally ambiguous and unstable. As the tower’s signifier shifts from male to female over the course of the narrative as the result of becoming possessed by an evil entity, it gradually betrays the protagonist’s – a steeplejack – sense of masculine prerogative, which is dependent on the conquest of height and subjecting stones to his will.