The mirror house: writing the uncanny into the Australian suburban home

摘要

This thesis explores the role of the uncanny as a means of situating a gothic haunted house story in a contemporary Australian suburban home. In Volume One, the exegesis, I discuss the way Freud’s concept of the uncanny can work within a haunted house text, both as a means of transcending conventional clichés and as a way of ensuring contemporary relevance. I examine the uncanny with reference to ‘haunted’ structures, beginning with the original gothic castles. I then discuss the literary representation of the uncanny house in the Australian post-colonial context, using Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth as an example. Moving from direct colonial references into contemporary time and space, I argue that modern suburbs are uncanny places, and thus a natural site for a modern ‘haunted’ story. The uncanny, then, can be seen as a point of nexus between genre, history, place and individual through which my novel was created. The second volume of the thesis comprises this novel, The Mirror House. The main protagonist, Lora, is a single mother with a young daughter Cloudy. Evicted from her flat, she takes up an offer by her partner, Neil, whom she has known for less than a year, to move in with him into a grand new house in an outer suburb of a distant, unnamed, city. When she arrives she is unsettled to see an identical house across the lake, and learns it was the scene of a double death, possibly murder-suicide. A second strand of narrative follows a mysterious young man who also haunts the suburb, and the two narratives move towards each other until they intertwine. After an accident, Lora’s sense of identity becomes fragile and distinctions between the two houses, their inhabitants, and the past and the present, begin to blur until Lora and the young man are drawn to meet in the Mirror House. The novel explores ideas of home and homelessness, image and identity, and the haunting of the new.