Hidden spaces: cavities, attics and cellars - morbid secrets and threatening discoveries

Histories of rooms, artefacts and spaces of the domestic interior tend to include patterns of inhabitation, the public/private divide and gendered readings of the inhabitants and their spatial arrangements. Many Victorian treatises on domestic architecture characterized women as the arbiters of taste, creating a neat, comfortable home for the returning male. Bound by a set of abstract moral codes, the home was argued as a refuge and place of repose for the family, a nurturing environment for children, and a safe place for visitors. This chapter discusses occasions when the domestic environment breaks this code, becoming the site for murder and the location for concealing bodies. The macabre spectacle of home as mortuary, characterized by violence, terror and the killer's physical and psychological interaction with the interior, shares a number of similarities with realist novels and gothic fiction that engaged hauntings, spectres, ghosts and the paranormal, indicating that the domestic interior can be examined as a psychological and topographical encounter, and a place where the inanimate is made animate. Within this genre, the ordinariness of everyday life and modes of inhabitation are unfolded as horror stories that include hidden rooms and secret passages that reflect the lair of the protagonist's mind. This chapter examines this relationship by initially discussing house and room as metaphors of the mind and their subsequent mirroring in physical space. Within these metaphors are notions of secrecy, particularly the places where things are hidden, and the structures necessary for exposure. The identification of the mind with space is further examined through the self-exploratory literary devices of nineteenth-century novelists including Honore de Balzac and Charlotte Bronte. These authors are selected because of their particular observational accounts of life and the use of metaphor, homology and reciprocal relationships between people and their environment. The final section focuses on several situations where Victorian moral characteristics of home are questioned, and any reciprocal relationship is profoundly disturbing. In these examples where inhabitants are murdered and hidden in the home, the domestic ideology of self-sacrificing women and protective males no longer applies. Within an overcrowded urban environment, the home as lodging house with its itinerant occupants is also the private space of female danger