All Houses Are Haunted (By Heterosexuality)
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #192. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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Interfacing in the millennium.
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In both Sarah Waters’ The Paying Guests and Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep, the lesbian main character keeps a neat, controlled house in lieu of a more traditional home life with a husband, and in both books circumstances outside the main character’s control lead to the introduction of a secondary female figure into this regulated space that leads to disruption, jealousy and eventually an illicit affair. In both books, the female intruder tears away the focus of the main character from her socially-sanctioned priority, which in these books is not a husband or male lover but the house itself, which shelters, protects and gives legitimacy to the historically-suspicious character of the single woman. These secondary female characters appear like hauntings, ghosts of the lives the lesbian main characters haven’t chosen and a dangerous – and somewhat frightening – disruption of the orderly lives the women have made for themselves.
In The Paying Guests, Frances is a single woman in her mid-twenties in interwar Britain who lives with her mother, the family structure shattered by the death of her brothers in the war and her father shortly after, and the discovery of her father’s massive debt. To help with bills, Frances and her mother take on tenants, young couple Leonard and his wife Lilian. At first, Frances can focus only on her role as landlady, on her responsibility for chores that would more appropriately be done by the servants she can no longer afford, and on the disconcerting feeling of sharing a space that had belonged to herself and her family with two strangers. Later, as she and Lilian begin an affair, the house becomes both a shelter (when Leonard is away) and a cage (when Leonard is present), and later in the book a crime scene, when Leonard is bludgeoned to death behind the house and the women must navigate the secrets they have kept and the guilt they feel about the crime.
Frances is a forthright and practical character. The book reveals that she spent her younger years living as a lesbian in the city, and her serious affair with another woman was only aborted when she was arrested for political agitation and exposed to her mother. After the death of her father and brothers, she made a conscious trade-off, choosing her life in the house with her mother – a legitimate, if undesirable, life for a single woman – over attempting to return to the life of queer uncertainty and danger she was living before. The house she cares for keeps her safe at the cost of a part of herself, and she is conscious of what she sacrificed to keep the lifestyle she lives.
In The Safekeep, Isabel is also a single woman in her mid-twenties, living by herself in her family home in the rural Netherlands in the early sixties. She is left mostly alone to her lifestyle after the death of her parents, but her older brother, to whom the house was actually left, sends her his flighty girlfriend, Eva, to stay with her while he leaves the country on business. Isabel chose her home and her life only out of a lack of other options, and instead of the calm control and watchfulness of Frances over her home when Lilian intrudes, Eva’s arrival in Isabel’s home becomes immediately stressful and disruptive, as the house turns on a dime from refuge and controllable space to a cage in which both women are trapped alone with each other.
Isabel is a taut, repressed character whose internal monologue and personal life is a series of careful avoidances. Instead of having Frances’ knowledge of her own self to calm her and elucidate her experiences when Eva arrives in her home, she is caught in a cycle of self-denial and fear that manifests in an overbearing strictness about the order of her house, which becomes even more acute when her brother’s imposition of Eva emphasizes that the house is not actually hers. Eva’s arrival is an outlet for her repressed sexuality, but she’s also an element of danger and uncertainty in Isabel’s carefully controlled life, and Isabel’s reactions to her swing violently between desire and disgust.
In both books, the precarious position of the women and the reason the intruders become so disruptive is because of the house’s role as the sole place in which, in these historical time periods, a woman is allowed to exist without a husband. However, the house as a physical property that must be owned, managed and financially supported makes it a double-edged sword: in The Paying Guests Frances’ fathers debt endangers her and her mother’s claim to the house, and in The Safekeep Isabel’s brother’s legal ownership of her house makes it subject to his whims. In both books the women’s control of their own destiny, as manifested by the house that shelters and protects them, is in danger because of their singleness and their refusal to participate in traditional society, via heterosexual marriage, and gain the legitimacy and security it would bring.
In this way, Lilian and Eva play the role less of guests and more of ghosts. As women who are participating in society traditionally, either married or heterosexually partnered, they appear to Frances and Isabel not just as love interests but as manifestations of the lives they haven’t chosen. Frances and Isabel must exist in the homes that had previously comforted them with the presence of these women as a constant, unignorable reminder not just of their own desire but of the consequences said desire has had for their lives. Frances and Isabel had created lives for themselves, however limited, that granted them freedom and safety without the necessity to participate in the heterosexual project; Lilian and Eva appear within these lives, within the walls of their home, their sanctum, as physical manifestations of the path not taken.
In this way, Frances and Isabel’s homes lose their safety and comfort. They become haunted by the precarity of queer desire and the persistence of the heterosexual norm. As Frances and Isabel fall in love with Lilian and Eva, they are confronted with their lover’s fear of the unknown and their hesitancy to break away from their dissatisfying yet comfortable heterosexual lives, a choice both other women had already made – consciously on Frances’ part and unconsciously on Isabel’s, but with both characters understanding they would rather be alone and limited in their choices than engage in the lies and self-denial that a heterosexual life would require from them. This conflict takes place in these homes, from which the women cannot escape. Trapped together, connected in love and desire but separated by fear, they become haunted by the specters of each other.
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Maddi Chilton is an internet artifact from St. Louis, Missouri. Follow her on Bluesky.
