The female body as spatial
In many of the fictions of the Marquis De Sade, there are rooms and antechambers to which we do not have access; spaces in which predominantly women, are both enjoyed and destroyed. For Sigmund Freud, rooms are themselves feminine spaces, noting that the polite German expression, “Frauenzimmer”, used to denote woman, or rather, lady; literally translates to “woman’s room”. In the symbolic geography of sex mapped out in the dreams of Freud’s notorious case study of Dora, a box, a receptacle, a hollow space, is naturally feminine. Thus, from a Freudian perspective, one might say that the spatial and the feminine are already conceptually and geographically linked. The female body, in art and in society, has long been imprisoned within secret spaces, but this body is also itself the locus of the secret; both desired, and essentially, forbidden territory. The woman’s genitals are both obviously spatial and a “place,” representing paradoxically both “home” and a “no-man’s land” according to Freud, whose very character, is absence.
In his 1919 paper, Freud describes “the uncanny” as “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of, old and long familiar,” and “which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.” In this essay, Freud demonstrated that the unexpected equation of the apparent contraries, heimlich (homely, familiar) and, its negation, unheimlich (the uncanny) in the German language, provided an instrument whereby he could penetrate the meaning of unusual literary texts.
What from the perspective of the one who is “at home” is familiar, is to the outsider, the stranger, the very definition of the unfamiliar. The term heimlich thus embodies the dialectic of “privacy” and “intimacy” that is inherent in bourgeois ideology. Therefore Freud can associate it with the “private parts,” the parts of the body that are the most “intimate” and that are simultaneously those parts subject to the most concealment. In freud’s thesis, the ‘unheimlich, the uncanny’ is a revelation of what is private and concealed, of what is hidden, hidden not only from others, but also from the self.
The uncanny we might say, begins in the home, and so does, as history tell us, the female body. The image of the feminine, has more often than not, been aligned with the house and the home, as both a site of emotion and irrationality, and a site of sanctuary and protection. it is therefore, the very figure of the “heimlich” and “unheimlich.” In freudian and surrealist discourse, the home provided a series of interconnected structures, symbolic of both psychic and physical scenarios. Freud’s interpretation of a room as a woman fused the psychological and the corporeal, never moreso than in his work, Mae West’s face which may be used as a surrealist apartment 1934-35. What is perhaps the best known image of a surrealist home, explored the interior as a complex interchange between public and private life, defamiliarizing the domestic and the public together; to uncanny effect.
For me, Yayoi Kusama and Francesca Woodman offer two examples of the experience of the uncanny. A de-personalization that is characterized by spatial and temporal disorientation, in which the person has the sensation that “I know where I am, but I don’t feel like i am at the spot where i find myself.” It’s the feeling of jet lag in De Chirico’s Enigma of the Day, the non-place of the Andreas Gursky, the abandoned house in Woodman, and the obliterating pattern of Kusama. For individuals in these conditions, space becomes a “devouring force” that pursues them, encircles them, digests them finally, “it replaces them.” Once is absorbed by space, and one is homesick no more.
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