The House and the Outsider:The Site of Narration in Contemporary Theory

The paired images of The House and the Outsider form an archetype of English narrative fiction, as the example of Beowulf shows with the celebration of the construction of the Hall Heorot waking the monster Grendel who would destroy the house of social order. Many houses and many outsiders follow this paradigmatic pattern, from Lovelace and Harlowe Place to Heathcliff and Thrushcross Grange to Kinbote with his “window-framed opportunities” to spy on John Shade, and then to invade and occupy his work, Pale Fire. As this last example indicates, in the formal self-consciousness of the novel the symbolic field of the house-outsider comes to include the reader in relation to the house of fiction. When Henry James describes the house of fiction as having “not one window but a million” which were “mere holes in a dead wall, disconnected, perched aloft,” he images the reader as the solitary outsider to narrative form, an inhabitant of the house of the outsider. In the post-1950 period, cultural, linguistic and critical theory have further described the “architectural capacity” of printed narrative and the place of the reader as outsider. Outsider, house, door, window, mirror-these psychological and archetypal image-concepts help us to understand and apply the critical writings of Sartre, Lacan, Barthes, Iser, deMan, and Silverman. Lacan’s net of language “over the totality of the real,” seen through the mirror, becomes Jameson’s prison-house of language; yet the reader can still observe from without. This study will reveal how these psychoanalytic and post-structural critics and theorists express the formal and thematic interchange of the archetypal pattern, revealing the reader of the novel to be, like the monster in Frankenstein, “the demon at the casement,” observing the creation and destruction of the other who would give him community and entering the house only to destroy.