House as a Metaphor in Literature - Term Paper Example

Sur House as a Metaphor in Literature In many literary works, the human house and living in it evolve as focal human experiences. In other words, it often appears that the metaphor of the house takes the major position in man’s thinking and speech. It is used to speak about religious, cultural, political, psychological and sexual contexts. Indeed, house evolves as the simplest and easy-to-reach centre of human life, its major condition, and its key statute. Hence the house-metaphor penetrates many areas of human thought, which is well demonstrated by its use in the literary works of today and of the past alike. The goal of this essay is to explore the meanings of metaphors of house and used by a range of prominent American authors. William Faulkner, known for his sophisticated method of encoding his intended meaning in specific imagery and metaphors, is particularly keen on using house metaphors. Their meanings differ from one work to another, yet some tendencies may be distinguished. Analysis of the house metaphor in Absalom! Absalom!, William Faulkner’s most famous novel, provides insight into how the author perceives the house metaphorically. In Absalom! Absalom!, the image of a haunted house is clearly metaphorical. It is the dark pretentious house of the novel’s protagonist Sutpen that works as a metaphor of the “dark” South – obsessed with racial inequality and accumulation of wealth in dynasty. Thomas Sutpen, who was once born in poverty, comes to a town in Mississippi to purchase land, build a house on it, and start his dynasty. The overall sad story of Sutpen’s house is a metaphor for the South. Just as Sutpen and his son Henry despise black people and repudiate them, the white-dominated South does. Just as Thomas and Henry Sutpen lose their lives as obvious pay for their hatred and desire of “purity”, with their grandiose house set ruins by fire, the South, which hosted the oppressors and the oppressed, gets burnt down for inhumane treatment of its black children. Similarly to how Sutpen’s son Charles, who was born out of wedlock from a mother who had a small proportion of black blood, is murdered at the gates of the mansion, hundreds of black people are made to work to death or lynched on the basis of their skin colour difference. It is this injustice in combination with lack of humanity and excessive self-pride that have led the South to its destruction in the war and has literally set it ablaze. The house and its conceited owner Sutpen together with his “dynasty” are doomed to fall due to their inherent flaws, as the place where slavery blooms (i.e., the house) and as the source of inequality and racial hatred (i.e., Thomas Sutpen).Thus, house stands for a part of American land, the South, and has a range of negative connotations as a place of racial inequality, injustice, gloom, and decay. It also evolves as a symbol of doomed Southern worldview: anti-slavery, inhumane aims are doomed for ruination. In Tony Morrison’s novel Beloved, house evolves as a metaphor of environment that is supposed to be nurturing and liberating. It also comes as a metaphor of an unfulfilled dream of being free from slavery and safe. In addition, house represents a place where people summon their strength and create their strategies. Also, the house may stand for a hero/heroine’s soul and body, more likely to represent the inner state of the protagonist, though. It is also a symbol of freedom and safety. In the paragraphs to follow, these claims will be explained and supported by the evidence from the novel. In Beloved, home becomes the focus of quest by the novel’s protagonist young black woman Sethe. Sethe, as her life chronologically unfolds in the novel, finds herself constantly swaying back and forth between slavery, humiliation, danger, which may be referred to as her house of jeopardy; and freedom, safety, and dignified/happy living in a black community, which is perceived as her home. Sweet Home, the house of Mr and Mrs Garner, is perceived by Sethe as her first desired home. This is explained by the fact the Garners differed from their neighbors by practicing liberal slavery: i.e. in their house black males were “allowed, encouraged to correct Garner, even defy him. To invent ways of doing things; to see what was needed and attack it without permission. To buy a mother, choose a horse or a wife, handle guns, even learn reading if they wanted to” (Morrison 147). Once she finds herself in the Garner’s possession, Sethe feels she has found a real home: in this mansion, freedom and safety seem to fill her life. Indeed, Sethe is not made to sleep with any of the men in Sweet Home so that she could “produce” more slaves. Rather, the Garners allow Sethe to fall in love with one of their men, get married to him, and begin her own family (Morrison 165). At the same time, this liberating image of Sweet Home appears to vanish with time. Looking back, Sethe realizes that Sweet Home was not sweet in reality and was not a home. The humanity of the Garners went only to a certain extent, and slavery still imposed its grave restrictions on Sethe, for whom home seems to associate with freedom above of all. As Halle, her husband, once said: “It don’t matter, Sethe. What they say is the same. Loud or soft” (Morris 231). Once old Mr Garner dies, Sethe loses her “sweet home” as Garner’s brother-in-law, a schoolteacher, comes to manage the farm. Sethe finds herself in a house of jeopardies - humiliated as the schoolteacher and his pupils treat her worse than an animal once even milking her as if she were a cow and making fun of her. So she decides to find her sweet home, her house free from jeopardies by fleeing from the farm together with her husband and a few other black men. Surprisingly, she manages to escape and finds a safe place to live in the house of Babby Suggs, Halle’s mother. Yet, Sugg’s house is not simply a building for Sethe, it is a metaphor for peaceful, dignified, and liberated existence, surrounded by the black community. This is source of security, warmth, and support. So this house becomes Sethe’s liberation. Further in the novel, as Sethe has to struggle with various hardships on her way, she finds herself either in a house of jeopardies full of lost hopes, despair, regret, pain, misunderstanding, scorn, and unhappiness, or regaining her sweet home, i.e. metaphorically becoming secure (loved, supported, and understood, as in case with Paul D) again. The fact that Sethe murdered her daughter Beloved only to save her from slavery places Sethe inside a house with barren walls (metaphorically), ruins her once large family (and thus the foundation of her home), and forces Sethe to spend eighteen years in jail aloof from her community. To the end, Sethe regains her sweet home by learning to live in that same house by the address 124 Bluestone Road. Interestingly, the fact that the house in the novel all the time changes personifies it as a certain living force: the house hosts everything and everybody, and covers whatever happens, including what happens to Beloved. Also, the house evolves as the centre of the black community – a place where black folk can come, talk, and even eat. It is a source of support and love. At the same time, when the community backs away from the house and ceases to communicate with its inhabitants, the house becomes the place of gloom and isolation. Importantly, house serves the metaphor of Sethe’s inside world: some spaces get hardened at certain times, others get softer allowing for people’s getting together. Thus, it may be said that the metaphor of the house reflects Sethe’s inner world, too: her sufferings, her relief, and her almost insane condition. In Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the metaphor of house serves various purposes. It is used to convey the state of decay, both in the material and spiritual lives of people in Arkansas. By metaphorically describing these townspeople as idle, sloppy, and narrow-minded through portraying their stores, homes, and buildings as old, decrepit, shackly, and without paint, Twain exposes the nature of these houses’ owners. To illustrate, “The stores and houses was most all old, shackly, dried up frame concerns that hadn’t ever been painted” (Twain 138). This state of houses’ condition also serves a metaphor for people’s apathetic attitude to their lives and what will happen to them, their defeat and unwillingness to alter how they live. Also, the decrepitude of people’s homes reflects their general indifference and inability to take care of themselves. One more house-metaphor in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the home of Widow Douglass. This household seems to epitomize the whole society. Indeed, it is in the Widow’s house that Huckleberry is made to dress in civilized garments, act and eat in civilized way, and speak in civilized manner. Widow Douglass’s home evolves as a symbol of civilization from which the protagonist of the novel flees. Next, Grangerford House serves a metaphor, too, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It is a metaphor of the so-called materialistic aristocracy. Twain’s description of the house itself and of the people who live there allows concluding that the house and its inhabitants represent the upper class. This upper-class people are portrayed as living in a world which is completely different from the one Huckleberry lives in. Also, the floating house metaphor, which is commonly referred to as the “House of Death” is related to houses and homes. While critics argue about the meaning of this ghastly house image in the novel, their views ranging from deadly to humorous interpretations, some of them argue that the house is a metaphor of Huckleberry’s initiation into adult life. For instance, a parallel may be drawn with some puberty ceremonies common for island societies, e.g. Fijian people, which imitate death and resurrection. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, no resurrection, of course, happens, but the house itself is evidently a brothel, which makes the idea of initiation plausible. Besides, among a multitude of scattered greasy things, such as empty bottles, “masks made out of black cloth”, etc, which apparently convey the idea of decay and ruination, the protagonist finds “a bottle that had milk in it…a rag stopper for a baby to suck.” (Twain 250). This is a metaphorical representation of new birth, new life. Furthermore, in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, one may find an interesting metaphor of house as a representation of a failed American dream. In the minds of millions of Americans, gaining wealth has always been their coveted dream. The opulent mansion owned by Gatsby, which impresses his numerous guests, is a metaphor of this wealth-based American dream which, as Fitzgerald shows, is empty inside despite the seeming attractiveness of its affluence. Indeed, a character in The Great Gatsby draws a parallel of this pretentious house with a house of cards saying that “if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse”; also, this mansion is referred to as “that huge incoherent failure of a house” (Fitzgerald 42; Fitzgerald 146). The house is a metaphor for emptiness of the very lifestyle where earning money by all possible means in order to sustain lavish life is the sense of existence. It seems representative of the emptiness of the human soul in which money takes the first place. In Hemingway’s collection of short stories In Our Time, the house-metaphor may be found in the story Cat in the Rain. Here house is the metaphor of happy family life – something that the woman is explicitly devoid of. The woman dreams of performing her traditional domestic feminine duties such as rearing children, running the house, etc. The comfort of family life is associated with candles and silver; the woman envisions herself with a kitten on her knees and with “a big knot at the back” (Hemingway). This metaphorical representation of family happiness in the form of a house is juxtaposed to the representation of the seemingly ideal apartment in an Italian hotel. Finally, Abraham Lincoln’s use of the house metaphor implies the meaning of the nation. In his speech “House Divided”, Lincoln says, “A house divided against itself cannot stand” (Lincoln, “House Divided”). Interpreting these words in the historical context of his time, one will reveal that this refers to the necessity to maintain the unity of the nation, i.e. unite the country so that it stops being divided against itself: the South with its slavery and cotton plantations versus the industrial North. In conclusion, the metaphor of the house was employed by various writers to convey a range of states of being. Faulkner’s house is a metaphor of the South with its racial oppression, injustice, and decay; Morrison associates the house with liberation from slavery and with safety; Twain’s houses are metaphorical representations of the society’s decay and society’s norms, as well as of a hope for a new life amidst overall darkness; Fitzgerald’s house is a metaphoric representation of emptiness of the American dream obsessed with gaining wealth for the sake of wealth; Hemingway’s house is a metaphor of happy family life and of happiness, too; Lincoln’s use of the house metaphor leads us to understand the house as the nation. Works Cited Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Interactive Media, 2012. Print. Hemingway, Ernest. Cat in the rain. In In Our Time. New York: Boni & Liveright. Reprinted in London: Granada, 1977. Print. Lincoln, Abraham. “House divided”, Abraham Lincoln Online, n.d. Web. 15 May 2013. Morrison, Tony. Beloved. N.d. Web. 15 May 2013. Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Complete. Montecristo Publishing LLC, 2012. Print. Read More