Home conjures images of safety, security and sanctuary, a united front against the tyrannies of the outside world. In White is for Witching, The Bone People, and Her Sister’s Eye contend with domestic space as a site of conflict and antagonism, breaking down notions of familiarity, tolerance, and protection. This essay will argue that Oyeyemi, Cleven, and Hulme use domestic space to explore unspeakable acts that result from a colonial past remaining in a postcolonial present. This will be demonstrated through the persistence of history, inner disharmony resulting in violent acts, and the home as a place of fracture and resistance, and how each author employs Gothic conventions to convey the unhomeliness of the home. Domestic space is closely linked to the postcolonial Gothic through its manifestation as a traditional Gothic trope (ancestral homes, for example) appropriated to convey anxieties in the postcolonial present. In “The ‘postcolonial Gothic’: absent histories, present
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Kerewin Holmes’s tower in The Bone People constitutes both a physical manifestation of her isolation from the world and its spiral staircase becomes a representation of the whirling gyre that consumes her former selfhood. Hulme describes the construction of the tower as “A concrete skeleton, wooden ribs and girdle, skin of stone, grey and slateblue and heavy honey-coloured” creating the uncanny connection between an artificial man-made structure and the organic human frame (8). Kerewin is literally creating a “prison” that cages her true self from the world and protects her from the ravages of emotional connection. She locks herself away in her tower, inverting the classic Gothic damsel-in-need-of-rescuing trope by committing self-imposed exile. This is not a liberating act however, as the introduction of Joe and Simon shows how isolated Kerewin has become since the break with her
Kerewin Holmes’s tower in The Bone People constitutes both a physical manifestation of her isolation from the world and its spiral staircase becomes a representation of the whirling gyre that consumes her former selfhood. Hulme describes the construction of the tower as “A concrete skeleton, wooden ribs and girdle, skin of stone, grey and slateblue and heavy honey-coloured” creating the uncanny connection between an artificial man-made structure and the organic human frame (8). Kerewin is literally creating a “prison” that cages her true self from the world and protects her from the ravages of emotional connection. She locks herself away in her tower, inverting the classic Gothic damsel-in-need-of-rescuing trope by committing self-imposed exile. This is not a liberating act however, as the introduction of Joe and Simon shows how isolated Kerewin has become since the break with her