UNIVERSITY OF GHANA, LEGON DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH THE COMPOUND HOUSE IN GHANAIAN FILM AND FICTION BY BETTY ADU-GYAMFI (10336477) THIS THESIS/DESSERTATION IS SUBMITTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF GHANA, LEGON IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENT FOR THE AWARD OF MPHIL ENGLISH DEGREE University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh ii DECLARATION I declare that this thesis is the product of my original research, and it has not been published or presented, in whole or part, for the award of a degree anywhere in the world, and that all references to other works have been duly acknowledged. Betty Adu-Gyamfi (10336477) Date…07/09/22. Date…07/09/22. Date…07/09/22. Dr. Victoria Osei Bonsu (for) Dr. Augustina Edem Dzregah (Principal Supervisor) (Co-supervisor) University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh iii DEDICATION I dedicate this work to my mother, Deaconess Joyce Nana Ghartey, who on her deathbed assured me of a successful education. University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I thank God for seeing me through my journey in Graduate school. I am also grateful to my supervisors, Dr. Victoria Osei-Bonsu and Dr. Augustina Edem Dzregah for the guidance they have given me in writing this thesis. I am grateful to them for their criticisms and comments that helped me shape this work as it is now. I thank Dr. Kwabena Opoku-Agyeman of the University of Ghana Department of English, Prof. Cristina Ruotolo of San Francisco State University, and Professor Ato Quayson, Head of English Department at Stanford University, for introducing me to Spatial studies in Postcolonial literature. I am overwhelmed by the kindness shown to me by Dr. Augustina Edem Dzregah, Head of the Department of English. I appreciate her motherly love and care. University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh v TABLE OF CONTENT DECLARATION ............................................................................................................................ ii DEDICATION ............................................................................................................................... iii TABLE OF CONTENT .................................................................................................................. v ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 ......................................................................................................................................... 2 1.1 Introduction and Background to the Study ........................................................................... 2 1.2 Why Film and Fiction? ......................................................................................................... 4 1.3 Statement of the Problem ...................................................................................................... 6 1.4 How the Compound House will be studied .......................................................................... 7 1.5 Theoretical Framework ......................................................................................................... 8 2.1 Home, Space, and Identity .................................................................................................. 14 2.1.2 The House as a Chronotope.......................................................................................... 27 2.2 The Compound House on screen..................................................................................... 42 2.2.1 The House of Many Stories .......................................................................................... 45 Chapter 3: House of Many Faces. ................................................................................................ 49 3.1 The Compound House in Ama Darko’s Faceless ............................................................... 49 3.2 The Compound House as a Threshold Chronotope ............................................................ 54 3.3 The Threshold Curse ........................................................................................................... 57 3.4 A place of Choices, Decisions, Indecisiveness and a Break in Life. .................................. 61 3.5 The Issue of Ontological Security/Insecurity of the Compound House ............................. 66 3.6 Opposition and Inclusion of other Chronotopes and Spaces .............................................. 72 3.6.1 The Slum ...................................................................................................................... 72 3.6.2 Kabria’s Home ............................................................................................................. 76 3.6.3 The Salon and The Drinking Spot .............................................................................. 79 3.6.4 Kwei’s House and The Brothel .................................................................................... 84 3.7. The Compound House and The Church in Asoreba ......................................................... 86 3.7.1 Domestic Violence, Conflict and Ontological Security in Asoreba. ............................ 92 Chapter 4: The Uncanny Home .................................................................................................... 94 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh vi 4.1.1. The Compound House in Boasiako ................................................................................ 94 4.1.2 How the Compound House Chronotope Transposes into A Place of Terror in The Film ............................................................................................................................................... 96 4.1.3 The Security of an Uncanny Home ............................................................................ 100 Chapter 5 ..................................................................................................................................... 104 5.1 Findings and Conclusion ................................................................................................... 104 5.1.1 Images of the Ghanaian Compound House. ............................................................... 105 5.1.2 Bringing Everything Together.................................................................................... 107 5.2 Findings in the Texts. ........................................................................................................ 109 5.3 Recommendations ............................................................................................................. 112 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 1 ABSTRACT The compound house is one of the most popular urban and traditional types of housing in Ghana. The house is a prominent setting in many locally produced films in Ghana. However, due to its rich features, other literary texts have adopted it to tell their stories. This essay will be spatial analysis of the house and its representation in Amma Darko’s Faceless, Samuel Nyamekye’s Asoreba, and Paul Gee’s Boasiako. The compound house has a memorable presence in the two films and novels. Faceless, a novel, addresses the social issues of poverty, streetism, bad parenting, rape, and defilement. Asoreba is concerned with domestic violence, and Boasiako is woven around spiritual issues bedeviling an extended family. The three texts have the compound house as the main set. The study will focus on the different roles it plays in contributing to the lives of the characters and the development of the plot. By doing an in-depth analysis, I argue that beyond its functions as a shelter, it is a Bakhtinian chronotope that takes center stage in narratives while being responsible for the security and memories of its inhabitants. Thus, by using Giddens’ ontological security theory and Bachelard’s topoanalysis to read the house, the research will delve into the connection between physical spaces and the psychology of its inhabitants, bringing out psycho-social issues in the texts. These two concepts have an intrinsic relationship with the house chronotope that automatically pops up. Keywords: compound house, chronotope, ontological security, topoanalysis, Kumawood. University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 2 Chapter 1 1.1 Introduction and Background to the Study The modern phenomenon of space studies encourages a critical examination of the physical and psychological areas that define one's existence and construct identities. Every house, regardless of its form, shape, or capacity, is a type of space or contains spaces that are amenable to academic research in the field of literature. In this light, a prominent space such as the compound house compels one to critically examine how it is represented in Ghana's two very distinct forms of art, namely film and fiction. Amma Darko's use of a compound house in her novel Faceless can be interpreted as a deliberate effort to create major physical and psychosocial spaces that sparingly define and reveal the complexities of the underlying issues that shaped the narrative and the lives of her characters. Similarly, a critical examination of the compound houses used in the Kumawood films, Asoreba and Boasiako, reveals the critical roles that the family compound house plays in bringing out the film's treatment of conflicts and insecurities in domestic households. As a result, the use of these compound houses in films and novels helps one to think about or see different spatial concepts that we might not notice otherwise. For example, with space-time fusing distinctively in these works, the two components become responsible for shaping the narrative at different historical levels and significantly bringing a new form of reading meaning into geographical settings and surroundings (Krogstad, 2). These settings can also go a long way in providing security or posing a threat to a character's existence or mental condition. It is undeniable that the two genres of studies here have University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 3 underlying structures that distinguish them from one another; however, this study will focus on some highlighted spatial concepts, examining Compound houses in these texts using Mikhail Bakhtin's literary chronotope theory, Gaston Bachelard's topoanalysis, and Anthony Giddens' theory of ontological security. The definitive structure of the compound house is a very popular sight that one may come across while exploring various local Ghanaian settlements. The compound house's predominance in both urban and rural Ghanaian settings demonstrates how this housing has become a symbol of communal living and a family's heritage. In contrast to modern villas, it is often a one-story construction with a sequence of rooms encircling a square courtyard (Korboe). A typical Ghanaian compound house, which can be found in most urban and rural locations, may encompass an area of over 100m2 and have about 10-15 rooms occupied by various people. The idea of communal for the tenants extends beyond the shared courtyard to include the shared bathing space, kitchen, and latrine (Willis and Tipple, 1706). These homes are typically rented out to outsiders or occupied by descendants of the same family. When the original house owner dies, the house becomes freely available to close relatives and descendants, who then opt to live in it themselves or rent out the rooms to tenants at a very low price. This is, nonetheless, one of Ghana's most affordable housings. People prefer compound dwellings to the traditional lifestyle of sharing living quarters with relatives. It is typically rent-free or very affordable for family members (Sinai, 100). In Ghanaian tradition, the compound house is more than just a common style of shelter. For some Ghanaians, this form of dwelling may be the only kind of "home" they ever know. This house is responsible for forming their memories, upbringing, and instilling a sense of belonging in them. The inquiry "whose family are you from?" is frequently answered by pointing to a compound house University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 4 in popular Ghanaian sayings. This means that this type of home is in charge of establishing identities and representing the face and name of a family. 1.2 Why Film and Fiction? "By staging personal life dramas, novels may be the major arena in which places can take on a symbolic resonance for a larger group," Bertram claims, adding that "novels are carriers of memories" and a mirror that reflects the broader world (171). They can transpose imaginaries to realities by developing stories around realistic elements, even though they are fictitious. In novels, the house is a significant setting that gives spaces for the creation, imagination, and development of characters, as well as the shaping of a story's plot. This unique genre of fiction explores the influence of culture on the psyche of the youngster Florian in Pater's Child in the House (Sackey). Pater represents an aspect of this culture through the house, its spaces, colors, and patterns. Furthermore, in Great Expectations, Dickens' Satis House is used to match Miss Havisham's character and reputation (98). Miss Havisham's life is represented by the mansion, which is dusty, moldy, and tattered. The metaphorical meaning of "Satis" as enough is that the owner of the residence will have all he or she desires. Despite its dreadful state, it appeared to be "adequate" for Miss Havisham's indefinite imprisonment. In these novels, the house is not just a refuge or a backdrop where the authors purposefully place their characters; rather, the spaces of these houses are purposefully chosen to fit into the plot, to form a very essential aspect of the characters' lives that is equally important to the story. In Faceless, Darko provides the readers with a mental picture of possible events that could happen in the house. Due to its status as the most frequent type of domestic family in most Ghanaian communities, the compound house is a favorite setting in most Kumawood video films. In addition, the stories in University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 5 these movies focus on scenarios or tragedies driven by the compound house's erratic roles and traits. Kumawood is known for portraying a typical Ghanaian community's lifestyle; hence the utilization of compound dwellings helps to express the type of communal living prevalent in these homes. As a result, the films provide an audiovisual depiction of the house's activities. Kumawood has come to embody what is mediocre, vulgar, and obscene in the Ghanaian film industry, according to scholars like Adjei (63). This argument supports Tsitsi Dangaremba's assessment of African video films as “brazenly incompetent and profit-driven,” as stated in Garritano's introduction to “African video films and Global Desires, a Ghanaian history”. She claims they promoted stereotypical and highly negative images of Africa, influenced by Hollywood (4). However, in recent years, the distinctions between African popular videos and African films have faded, and video films are receiving equal scholarly attention (Garritano, 6). As a result, the locally produced films effectively explain important concerns to their audiences as well as become an academic field of study. Examining the depictions and usage of the compound house in these films an excellent place to start. The uses and representations of houses in films and cinema are equally as important as the presence of the characters. A good example is the house in classic Hollywood horror movies that usually presents a haunted house or a home invasion concept which involves a breached domestic setting by spiritual or physical forces. Usually, characters are put in these houses to experience psychological and spiritual torment, or to violently defend it against intruders. During this time, the human strengths and weaknesses are exposed as they deal with unexpected elements that threaten their security. With the house as a symbol and icon of a haven, these kinds of film however lay down the numerous factors that can make a home dangerous to its inhabitants. The two films University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 6 chosen for the study individually tackle compound house issues. Whilst Asoreba, deals with the insecurities caused by domestic violence in the house, Boasiako reveals the insecurities caused by uncanny elements in the family home. The two films allow the study to touch on the dynamics of insecurities in the home. 1.3 Statement of the Problem The Ghanaian compound house is well-known as a research element in the fields of sociology, housing, and planning. Though it is seen in films and some texts in Ghanaian literature, it is rarely capitalized on in the context of literary discourse. As a result, because it is not often employed in literary texts, and Kumawood pop culture focuses on theme and characters, thus, the depiction of situations as they occur in society, there is a hazy focus on its literariness. It is most prevalent in Kumawood than any literary genre in Ghana. However, Kumawood itself is sidelined as pop culture and invites more criticism on its aesthetics than its concern with space. It is not merely the presence of it in these texts and films that necessitates academic investigation, but also its significant contribution to the narrative and its ability to exhibit similar spatial properties that can be addressed in these two distinct genres. Beyond its functions as a shelter, it is a Bakhtinian chronotope that takes center stage in narratives while being responsible for the security and memories of its inhabitants. University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 7 1.4 How the Compound House will be studied A lived-in house goes beyond the stereotypes of a lifeless box (Stilgoe). It becomes a part of humanity and, as such, cannot just be a geographical location or a geometric plane. The house’s worth extends beyond architecture. The study will look at the abstract aspects of the compound house. Thus, it will include a psychological and psychosocial examination of it. The compound house will be thoroughly examined utilizing ideas such as the chronotope, topoanalysis, and ontological security. This method is consistent with how recent literary spatial studies have prioritized the intriguing roles that the house performs in modern literature. While some scholars saw it as a self- representation, others saw it as a new type of Bakhtinian chronotope. Krogstad and Kneale have portrayed the family residence as a chronotope on its own, drawing influence from the castle and threshold chronotopes. Without a topoanalysis, the study will be incomplete. Bachelard's interest in domestic and intimate places gives sufficient material for a philosophical vision of the house. He describes the house in an extraordinary approach that exposes the impact of human living on a geometrical form and vice versa. The research will take place in the compound house's corners, rooms, and open areas, locations where memories are born, and fears are conceived. The third chapter will discuss how domestic violence affects both the compound house chronotopes in Faceless and Asoreba. The final chapter of the study will take into consideration the subject of the uncanny home in the film, Boasiako, identifying other causes of insecurity in the home. University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 8 1.5 Theoretical Framework Bakhtin adopted the term chronotope as a metaphor for literary criticism after borrowing it from the worlds of science and mathematics (84). Although scholars such as Holquist have noted that the chronotope idea "remains a Gordian knot of ambiguities" and may not provide a definite definition (19), Bakhtin describes it as the fundamental connectivity of temporal and geographical relationships that are artistically conveyed in literature (85). Bakhtin's main goal was to define the spatiotemporal links in literature, and he sees the chronotope as a process of introducing real historical time into literature (84). Thus, he says that what matters is that it conveys the inseparability of space and time (85). He applies this term to literary text locations and settings where space and time intersect in a unique and meaningful way (Krogstad,3). As a result, a chronotope is a spatial element of the text that encompasses time and temporality (Quayson). According to Quayson, all the novel's abstract elements-philosophical and sociological generalizations, concepts, and studies of cause and effect- migrate towards the chronotope, and via it, take on flesh and blood, allowing the imaging power of artwork. According to Bakhtin, time takes on flesh, becomes artistically apparent; similarly, space becomes charged and responsive to the motions of time, plot, and history (84). To create imaginary locations, fictional tales always converse with real time-spaces (Macapagal,13). The chronotope, according to Johnston, "focuses on how we live in space and time and the kinds of modes of existence we choose: either passive and closed or open to change, growth, and learning‖. As a result, the chronotope serves as "the primary means of materializing time in space" and "emerges as a center for concretizing representation" (140). The chronotope, to some extent, determines the picture of a man and creates genres and generic distinctions in literature (85). University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 9 Several scholars have extended and developed the meaning of the idea over the years. Bakhtin had previously studied certain chronotopes or time and space situations that he deemed chronotopes. For example, he discusses adventure time in Greek and chivalric romance. He investigates chronotopes such as the encounter, the road, and the public square. He argued that the representation of time and place in the early novels contributed to their concurrent existence in the literature of phenomena taken from widely disparate periods, which substantially complicates the historico-literary process (86). While he focuses on time and space in literature, which may not be applicable or relatable in modern times and may lack tangible references, modern literature appears to focus on chronotopes, which were not identified as "major" (244) in his essay. In literature, the chronotopes of the castle, the salon, and the threshold have been used in many ways. These tiny chronotopes appear to thrive in contemporary literature. This could be because Bakhtin's study was simply a window into the world of endless possibilities for discovering new chronotopes. He concedes that the definition of the notion is incomplete and imprecise (85). Macapagal also states that because the chronotope has not been given a precise definition, it has been used as a theoretical tool beyond literature (14). Because of Bakhtin's essays' lack of analytic clarity, Bemong and Borghart claim that there has been a profusion of varied chronotopic approaches to literature and culture (5). In his analysis of the threshold chronotope, he states that: it can be combined with the motif of encounter, but its most fundamental instance is as the chronotope of crisis and break in a life. The word "threshold" itself already has a metaphorical meaning in everyday usage (together with its literal meaning), and is connected with the breaking point of a life, the moment of crisis, the decision that changes a life (or the indecisiveness that fails to change a life, the fear to step over the threshold). In literature, the chronotope of the threshold is University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 10 always metaphorical and symbolic, sometimes openly but more often implicitly) In Dostoevsky, for example, the threshold and related chronotopes- those of the staircase, the front hall and corridor, as well as the chronotopes of the street and square that extend those spaces into the open air are the main places of action in his works, places where crisis events occur, the falls, resurrections, renewals, epiphanies, decisions that determine the whole life of a man (248). The threshold can also be a metaphor for the house. It is charged with the same emotions and values as the house. These breaks and crises, epiphanies, and decisions are crucial moments encapsulated within the confines of homes or houses in literature. It is of no surprise that the house has recently popped up as another form of literary chronotope. In some works, the family home is a new form or modification of the gothic castle identified as a chronotope by Bakhtin. He refers to it as a location drenched with a historical time in the past (Bakhtin, 246). Because of its affinity to domestic areas at home, American writers began to substitute the medieval European castle with the domestic spaces of the house (Kneale, 5). According to Renolds, the quintessential Gothic plot can be traced back to the fate of a house (92). The research will give birth to yet another new chronotope intimately related to the basic concept of the house, the threshold chronotope, and the castle chronotope from these chronotope conceptions. Bakhtin's description of how the threshold chronotope is crucial in a man's life corresponds to the importance of the compound house in both film and novel. In this light, the research will employ such theory to analyze social and cultural spaces such as the Ghanaian compound house. The discussed chronotope qualities would serve as general characteristics of both compound houses in fiction and film. University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 11 Bachelard's topoanalysis is a theory for critically assessing spaces in the house or home. In his book, The Poetics of Space, he refers to the house and discusses the functions it plays in memory and daydreams. He calls the house "a privileged entity for a phenomenological exploration of the intimate values of interior space" (3). He provides a psychological reading of the house and defines topoanalysis as "the systematic psychological examinations of our personal life's places" (8). He is accurate with the meaning of domestic spaces (Stilgoe, vii). The house, according to Bachelard, is not only a religiously designed geometrical plane structure, but it also has aspects that embrace human complexities, eccentricities and adapt to residents. Thus, “the house is the first universe for its young children and its space shapes all subsequent knowledge of other spaces” (4). He claims that a home guarantee dreams and that where you grow up captures your imagination (daydream). Those different areas of the house may allow daydreaming (Quayson). It is a haven for fantasies and fancies. The home is also considered a "felicitous space" (xxv). In other words, there are specific memories associated with the services that each space serves, and they are typically happy ones that one would like to revisit. In his work, we learn about the psychological intricacies of a house, particularly one filled with memories. A unique house, such as the one in which we were born, makes an unforgettable impact on our life. Faceless will investigate such a house and its impact on various generations of residents. According to Bachelard: The house we were born in is an inhabited house. In it the values of intimacy are scattered, they are not easily stabilized, they are subjected to dialectics. In how many tales of childhood-if tales of childhood were sincere-we should be told of a child that, lacking a room, went and sulked in his corner (14). University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 12 Quayson's thesis argues that different portions of the house may likewise hold horror. In the case of Faceless, we observe how one room gradually transforms from a site of birth to a place of abuse and then to a place of refuge for the traumatized. Using Bachelard's notion, the research will expand its investigation of the house and such spaces. The ontological security concept, which originated in psychoanalysis and sociology, is concerned with how environments affect people's existence, identity, and mental state. We are dealing with the concept of “the home” once we begin to address the psychological side of the house. In most cases, the home connotes a haven and is viewed as a safe. According to Dupius and Thorns, the house provides a sense of ontological security. Ontological security, according to Giddens, is "the confidence that most human beings have in the continuity of their self-identity and in the consistency of their social and material circumstances." A sense of the reliability of people and things is fundamental to having ontological security (27). They apply the idea to examine the various meanings of home. Thus, the home as a location of stability in the environment, as a spatial context in which daily routines are performed, as a site free of inference, and as a secure premise where identities are established (24). Hiscock et al. investigate the extent to which homeowners benefit from their homes in terms of psychosocial well-being. They also claim that the ontological security concept implies that, in addition to adequate sustenance and shelter where people can live happily and fulfill, a secure base is required to return to in the event of trouble or fatigue (50). In Giddens' essay, he specifies that the idea is an emotive one anchored in the unconscious, and in phenomenology has to do with "being in the world" (92). As a result, the ontological security concept will be applied in studying how the compound house spaces affect, provide, and threaten the characters' psychological well-being. We can explain the cause of any ontological security or insecurity by delving into characters' past lives to extract University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 13 terrible and noteworthy experiences from their home. Because of the compound house's complicated nature and its number of occupants, security concerns may differ from one occupant to the next. For example, Hiscock et al. mention Saunders and claim that "house owners would derive more ontological security than renters, and this has been contested in the housing studies literature since the early 1980s. Some have claimed that "owner-occupation is related with greater ontological security" (51). According to Rosenberg et al., ontological insecurity is one of the health issues confronting previously imprisoned people (2). This concept will delve deeper into the characters' existential concerns, classified as mental health or psychological issues. These challenges may be in the form of anxieties and fear bedeviling characters after a history of traumatic experience in the home. The question of whether the home has failed to provide any sort of security will be answered. University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 14 Chapter 2: Literature Review 2.1 Home, Space, and Identity Merzei and Briganti’s literary analysis on the house and the novel sets the pace for the views of the house as a mirrored version of the novel. Referring to Bachelard and Bordieu, they state how the two “invoke literary practices to interpret the significance of houses” (837). The analysis examines the relationship between houses and novels, and how it has evolved in the literary world over time. The house has been used in analogs and metaphors in literature as a nouvelle form of representation for the novel on different levels. Thus, in critical discourse, the novel has been equated to the architecture of the house, “Ellen Eve Frank outlines how this habit of comparison between architecture and literature extends from Plato to Samuel Beckett and discovers particular expression in the late nineteenth and onto the twentieth century” (838). They argued that as society saw a rise in aspiring bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century, it coincided with the new genre of the novel. The themes in the novel reflected the bourgeoisie’s principal achievements that were domesticity, privacy, and comfort (838). Most English novelists used the house as the center stage for issues bedeviling domesticity, privacy, and gender. According to Merzei and Briganti, “The comparatively recent notion of privacy resonates in this new literary form that explores intimate, private spaces of the mind and society often set within a middle-classed and home” (839). The literature that deals with houses as a principal set usually delves into the private lives of characters that are closed off to the world. Once a reader enters the house, it ensures an automatic entry into a character's mind, thoughts, and psyche. The house itself provides a room and space for these thoughts to belong: University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 15 Our imagination, our consciousness, needs to locate itself in a particular space, to find a home, to articulate its homelessness, its longing for home, its sickness for home (nostalgia). Thus, novels and houses furnish a dwelling place—a spatial construct—that invites the exploration and expression of private and intimate relations and thoughts (Merzei and Briganti, 839). Also, Merzei and Briganti claim that the house goes beyond its duties as a geographical set in canonical and popular literature. In quoting Chandler, they assert that the house “constitute a unifying symbolic structure that represents and defines the relationship of the central characters to one another, to themselves, to the world” (839). It is inside the house that relationships between characters are defined. It also serves as the space for conflicts, both internal and external, and a space for resolutions. As seen in Darko’s Beyond the Horizon, the novel commences with the protagonist in a room in a Brothel (a house). The thoughts that come through her mind send readers on a journey to discover her identity. The physical appearance of a house is also known to serve as a “semiotic system” that shows status and class to convey meanings to people or observers (840). The House is a more obvious way of determining a person’s class or status in society. Homemakers and owners can be obsessed with leaving their imprints on the spaces they occupy. Thus, personality can affect the appearance of a house. In the same way, “the spaces of domesticity and fiction shape the people who inhabit them” (840). From various feminist works, the house has been criticized for oppressing its female members. Despite the maternal presence in homes, the structure and systems have been associated with patriarchy and masculinity. Merzei and Briganti re-define domestic spaces as “the everyday, the University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 16 rituals of domesticity in their cyclical, repetitive ordinariness” and call on feminists to “rethink” the place of the woman in the domestic space (842). In Bertram's treatment of the "Turkish House", she posits that the memory of the "Turkish house" has become a carrier of group meaning and the carrier of specific emotions that needed a place to reside during a tumultuous period of Turkish history (165). Here, she puts the traditional Turkish/ ottoman type of housing in a situation where a simple house metamorphoses into an immortalized and abstract symbol shared by a group of people. She further posits that “the Turkish House”, both in text and in the way that it was depicted visually, emerged as a sign that encoded what was felt to be at risk in this changing universe. Thus, it became a memory-image charged with carrying old, outdated, or even forbidden ideas into the present, and even into the future (166). Likewise, the compound house leaves a remarkable imprint in the lives of people who grow up there. They also regarded it as a sort of “family totem”. In comparison, the compound house and Turkish House are both contributors to autobiographical, shared, and collective memories. Because these houses are memorable, they register as a relatable reference to people who may have or may not have experienced them. In referring to Davidson and Leung, Stock stipulates: Memories, both personal and collective, form the frame of reference we all use to meaningfully interpret our past and present experiences to orient ourselves towards the future. This means that Migrants’ perception and dreams of Home and belonging are fueled by memories of prior homes by notions of where we came from ( Davidson 2008: 26, Leung: 2008: 164). Memory however cannot be seen as direct, if partial, knowledge of past experiences. The act of remembering is always contextual, a continuous process of recalling, interpreting and reconstructing the past in terms of the present and in the light anticipated future. (Stock) University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 17 Stock is looking at the house as a powerful generator or propeller of collective memory, dreams, and giver of identity. These memories come within a particular context. This phenomenon of shared memories is like how the compound house and Turkish house may have functioned in the past life of an individual. Memories of these houses may be recalled at different times and mean different things in the remembering. The compound house may represent different things to its past and present inhabitants. Due to their place in culture and history, their presence, images, and essences are evocative. However, even though the Compound house is rooted in the Ghanaian culture and is significantly a cultural artifact, it is not tied to a specific religious or spiritual memory like the Turkish house. The compound house evolution relieves any meanings of fixation that may have been associated with it in the past. With Bertram focusing on the Turkish houses in Peyami Safa's novel, Fatih Habiye, there is a discourse on the image and representation of the old house to a people who were transposing from the Ottoman traditional values to the new westernized Turkish views. The Turkish house was a structure that represented conservative and traditional systems. It was also an aspect of the past that was in danger and needed protection against the westernized forces. The Turkish house, noted by Bertram, is a "treasury of ideas” (182). She identifies the house as a space for positive associations and influences that, together with the father figure, the protagonist resolved her identity crises. Here, Bertram indirectly addresses the issue of ontological security, as the memories and stories of the house made the protagonist feel a sense of belonging and reconcile with her heritage. She also argued that memory and emotion gave the Turkish house its iconic value, and it represented a spiritual value that was real and resonated emotionally and served as a marker of spirituality (171). University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 18 In Dominguez's treatment of Beloved’s 124, she presents it as not just a haunted house but a character, a house that comes alive, a prominent protagonist whose presence in the novel is essential to the meaning of slavery and freedom. Dominguez writes: There is no denying in the protagonism of Sethe’s house, 124 Bluestone Road in Morrison’s Beloved (1987). Firstly, each of the three sections of the novel opens with a reference to 124, thus recording the evolution of the drama of its inhabitants: at the beginning it’s spiteful and full of venom (3) then loud (169) and eventually quiet (239). Secondly, and since the building is the site of ESP phenomena, it exhibits human traits and modes of behavior it could not possibly have otherwise: it commits insults at its owners, it shakes, it looks back at them, etc. (35). The home itself becomes an essential aspect of the plot, and as time passes, its mood shifts, and more emphasis is placed on how it interacts with its people. The article once again discusses how the house emphasizes slavery and liberation in the lives of African Americans. The house signified different things to different personalities at different eras after being passed down from the Bodwins, a white family, to Sethe, a freed slave. 124 to Edward Bodwin, according to Dominguez, brought back recollections of his childhood and the deaths of the Bodwin women. Once again, the idea of the house as a memory stimulant is evident. In Bodwin's memories, 124 evokes the picture of death and the burying of valuable belongings, foreshadowing Sethe's agony and her attempt to murder her children (35). Thus, Dominguez makes this analogy to draw out some similarities the essence of 124 had on both characters. For Baby Suggs, who was the first free slave to occupy the house, it represented freedom and a newfound self and identity: As Baby Suggs moves into the house, it comes to stand for her newly acquired freedom, and the changes she introduces, like boarding up the back door and University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 19 cooking inside instead of outside project her rejection of her previous mode of life as a slave (207). 124 also becomes the embodiment of her generosity and openness, her reputed "big heart;" as such, the house is turned into a sort of community shelter, a safe harbour, a place for comfort, both physical and psychological (87-8). During this period then, the house is the embodiment of Baby Suggs' self, the inner self she did not even know she had while still a slave at Sweet Home (36). Dominguez, on the other hand, claims that, while the house was a strong representation of freedom, the events in the episode of “Misery” do not rule out the invasion and entrance of white oppressors in the house. In the house, Paul D and Denver also get their fair share of experiences. For Paul D, 124 was a refuge with a brighter future than previous shelters. At one point, it symbolizes liberty. With the arrival of Beloved at the mansion, he was thrown back into slavery (38). Dominguez not only states what the house signifies to the older generation, but he also delves into Denver's sentiments about the house. The mansion represented slavery to her, which was paradoxical given that she was a first-generation free black child. Denver's stay in the house is akin to Baby Sugg's stay at Sweet home. She is completely closed off from the outside world, lives in solitude, and is terrified of her mother. The house forbids her from expressing herself. She finds privacy, though, in a small room Dominguez refers to as "a symbolic womb into which she crawls again" (40). For her, leaving 124 meant regaining the independence her grandmother had when she originally bought the house. Dominguez does not just talk about 124 but also about Sweet home and compares the two. Sweet home, ironically, symbolizes slavery and contrasts with 124 for characters such as Baby Suggs and Sethe. Despite Morrison's portrayal of it as a house with "mild slavery treatment," Dominguez University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 20 refers to it as "a parody of freedom" (36). Dominguez's emphasis on 124 and Sweet home underscores the critical functions that the house or home plays in developing identity. In addition, Geoff Hart's piece on the house is likely a significant forerunner. It focuses on issues that are connected to the study's point of view. He divides the house into physical, psychological, and symbolic dimensions, focusing on each and developing a connection in which these elements encroach and build upon each other. He explores the multifaceted status of the house and how it impacts the people and the plot by mentioning popular films such as Gone with the Wind and The Money Pit. Writers have chosen the physical house as a new stage and "living space" to develop their characters. He underlines that describing the physical look of a house includes describing the people who live in it. Hart addresses the topic of identity, being, and image with the house. In our study of the compound house, we will discover other works that resonate with Hart's assertions. He implies that the character's interests and choices reflect the kind of house they live in in a novel or film. Psychologically, the house goes beyond its concrete four walls. Returning to it often reassures its status as a home and a giver of ontological security: It represents a home, which is a substantially more subtle and resonant concept. A home is the place you return to, and where you can escape or withdraw from the everyday world, with its myriad stresses, to be master of your own domain - at least until the alarm clock rings and you must return to that outside world again. It's the place where, when you arrive, you are always welcome - or, much more darkly, where they can't (or grudgingly won't) turn you away. That makes the house the source of a very powerful feeling of belonging, whether in the traditional and immediately familiar sense of family, or a more metaphorical expression of belonging to a group (par.10). University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 21 He mentions ontological security as a fundamental element of the house or home. As we tour the house, we will encounter issues of security and instability, particularly in a complicated structure such as the compound house. Though Hart's argument reiterates a frequent and well-known element of the home, it may also be claimed that for some people, the house can become a source of horror. Scholars such as Clare Cooper have also stated how important the house is in symbolism and self- representation. She confesses that her prior research on people's sociological reactions to the house was only "scratching the surface" of the underlying meaning of the house. She proceeds to depict the house from a different perspective after studying the Jungian idea of collective unconsciousness. "Man also frequently selects the house, the basic protector of his internal environment (beyond skin and clothing), to depict and symbolize what is tantalizingly unrepresentable," she claims (169). Cooper compares the enclosed and excluded spaces of the house to the human self. She believes that the house represents both the interior and exterior of the self. The interior of the house reflects the intimate part of the self, while the exterior is visible to the public. This comparison reflects the idea of the house as a person or a character in various literary works. It is not a strange conception for people to bond with their homes. Presenting the house in such a manner makes it inseparable from the self or the individual: It seems as though the personal space bubble which we carry with us and which is an almost tangible extension of our self, expands to embrace the house we have designated as ours. As we become accustomed to, and lay claim to, this little niche in the world, we project something of ourselves onto its physical fabric. The furniture we install, the way we arrange it, the pictures we hang, the plants we buy and tend, all are expressions of our image of ourselves. Thus the house might be University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 22 viewed as both an avowal of the self- that is the psychic messages are moving from self to the objective symbol of self- as a revelation of the nature of self; that is the messages are moving from objective symbol back to the self ( 169). Cooper, who still pounds on the idea that the house represents the self, cites examples of how modern Californians and San Franciscans chose their residences. For them, the residence must meet or reflect their social standing. The house is deeply ingrained in American culture and values as a symbol of the self. For many, the concept of the house is "a free-standing, square detached, single-family residence and yard" (170). As a result, their ideal house is defined by family, seclusion, and some ownership of land or territorial rights. She contends that for some people, a house is no longer a place of refuge but rather a place for an expression of self and family. As a result, individuals are more concerned with how their homes and rooms may express their identity rather than viewing them as a fortress that must be protected. Her arguments and various examples are evidence of how her research had led her to explore deeper meanings of the house. Cooper further plunges into Jung’s autobiography where he describes a dream of himself as a house: Jung describes here the house with many levels seen as the symbol-of-self with its many levels of consciousness; the decent downward into lesser known realms of unconscious is represented by the ground floor, cellar and vault beneath it. A final descent leads to a cave cut into bedrock, a part of the house rooted into the very earth itself. This seems very clearly to be a symbol of the collective conscious, part of the self-house and yet too part of the universal bedrock of humanity (171). University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 23 Cooper’s main focus was on describing how the house may symbolize the human self, and touching on Jung’s personal experiences, highlights her arguments and solidifies her claim. However, the bedrock of most of her argument is from a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst’s point of view. What she doesn’t mention is how the house, as a symbol of self and family, is strongly represented in fiction. In Carsten and Hugh-Jones’ introduction to About the house; Levi Strauss and beyond, they “take a sympathetic but critical look at Levi Strauss’s idea of the house as a specific form of social organization in Southeast Asia and Low land South America” (1). The study extended Strauss' concept of "house societies" by drawing on his discussion of houses. One of Carsten and Hugh- Jones' concerns was determining the value of Strauss' theories in terms of holistic anthropology of architecture. They also attempted to create a new language of the house that dealt with unorthodox analysis, as opposed to the limited ones that concentrated on the supposed priority of kinship and economy (2). Their work differs from the mainstream image and ignores the social meaning of the house as defined by anthropologists. In their piece, they highlight some of these indications. To them, the house is inextricably linked to the human body. There is a continuous interwoven relationship between the house and the body: The house and the body are intimately linked. The house is an extension of the person; like an extra skin, carapace or second layer of clothes, it serves as much to reveal and display as it does to hide and to protect. House, body and mind are in continuous interaction, the physical structure, furnishing, social constructions and mental images of the house, at once, enabling, molding, informing and constraining the activities and ideas which unfolds with its bounds (Carsten and Hug-Jones, 2). University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 24 Here, there is an extension of its significance beyond architecture that transcends the physical. Once again, the house emerges as a character, a synonym to the self and an extension of a personality. The environment, the atmosphere, the lived-in experiences, the components and elements, and its being as loci of interactions between humans and other things, renders it a prime agent of socialization. By quoting Bordieu’s description of the house as “the principal locus for the objectification of generative schemes” and equating it to a book of the vision and structure of society, they draw out the relationship between the body and the house as a reader and his/her mnemonic. Carsten and Hugh-Jones reiterate Cooper’s arguments of how the house is linked to the self: If people construct houses and make them in their own image, so also do they use these houses and house-images to construct themselves as individuals and as groups. At some level or other, the notion that houses are people is one of the universals of architecture. If the house is an extension of a person, it is also an extension of the self (3). Further, the work tackles how the house is taken for granted and neglected in the study of anthropology. As a commonplace, the house has escaped any in-depth analysis linked to Anthropology. Another reason given for this neglect is attributed to institutional divisions and specialization. Thus, studies of demography and Economic anthropology focuses on the house, family, and consumption causing some fragmentations when it comes to the ideal discipline for the subject of the house. In the domain of architecture, emphasis is given to the material aspect of dwellings, whiles the social organization of the people who live in these dwellings is neglected. Carsten and Hugh Jones, in the premier part of the introduction, talk about the loopholes in how anthropology and Architecture have neglected the deeper essence of the house. University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 25 Quilling takes on the analysis of the homes of three Filipino films. He views the house as space for the character’s consciousness and considers it a familiar image in Filipino films (85). According to him, the houses in these films enhance the movements of characters and narratives. His work analyses the influence of domestic spaces and characteristics of home and how it has thrived in Filipino cinema. In his definition of home, he sticks to Ozaki and Bachelard’s concept and defines it as a place of refuge and residence (88). Thus, he posits that Ozaki claims the design of a house reflects its inhabitants. As he outlines the evolution of Filipino cinema, he maintains his stands on how the Filipino types of housing and the lifestyle of the people across the years have become major influencers for the cinema. He argues that the homes in the films represent the different social classes and ideologies. He also talks about time, place, space, and memory as elements in the films that intersect. The space, which is a place that gives value, is the characters’ home. As time passes and characters go through experiences, they begin to form memories they can revisit, In this study, the sense of place is directed to domestic spaces, wherein houses or any inhabited space has an essence of home (Bachelard 5). While permanence is relative in time and space, memory-making takes place within the two elements (89). The films he discussed mirrored three different decades under the Marcos rule, illustrating actual historical times. In Oro, Plata, Mata, he discusses the movement of a family’s Mansion lifestyle to the derogatory hut living. Thus, the film begins in a mansion and depicts the house’s ability to provide security and for all the needs of its inhabitants. However, when members of the household were hit by the war, they quickly moved from the mansion to the hut. Quilling describes this University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 26 situation as a spatial dislocation. This situation alters their lives because the hut becomes a place of torture where the families become vulnerable to home invasions and violence. The families’ experiences in the hut which was in the forest caused some changes in the lives of its members: For Miguel, the family’s relocation is a relevant period where a significant change in his character takes place. From being a docile son in the mansion, he becomes more assertive during their stay in the forest lodge (94). By the end, though the characters return to a mini-mansion, the hut experience leaves an indelible impact. Quilling discusses how their living experiences in both settlements made them a part of the two. The second film he discussed, Hellow, Soldier, was set in post-war Manilla and brings to light the slum and the shanties of the city. The protagonist, a young slum dweller, dreams of escaping the hard life to the luxurious life of the State. Here, Quilling argues that the Tondo slums represent an ideal setting for the never-ending struggle to rise from poverty. The shanty in which she lived with her mother was where she kept various posters and American paraphernalia that indicated her dreams to escape her current situation. These reflected her past and prospects, and the Shanty became a structure that embodied her dreams (96). Also, Quilling pays attention to the movements in the small Shanty: Their movement throughout the house is unobstructed by doors, and there are only curtains to serve as a partition between the rooms. This indicates the lack of privacy in cramped spaces. In the nature of slums, everything seems to be out in the open, because living quarters are either stacked upon each other or situated extremely close, sometimes, even sharing a piece of wall (96). University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 27 This description gives a clear picture of the shanty. Despite the nature of the house, the protagonist and her mother build a strong bond and attachment. The attachment and the fear of loneliness hinders her from leaving with her father to States. She eventually settles in, still holding on to the hopes of escaping the house. In the film, Kisapmata, he analyses the family Bungalow. He gives insight into a home with “corroded steel gates, cement walls” and strict rules. He claims that the overprotective and dismal nature of the house reflects the unspoken terror of the domestic lives of its people (98). The father, who is the cause of all the conflict in the film, has claimed all other extra spaces in the house to indulge in his own personal activities that serve no purpose to the home. It is revealed later that he indulges in incest with his daughter. His strict rules become uncomfortable for his daughter and her husband, who eventually plans on escaping from the house. The father’s attachment to the house as a place that shields his abominations and protects his dubious interests leads him to murder his family when they plan to escape and commit suicide. Thus, he could not envision losing the things that made the home mattered to him. In these three films Quilling has shown how spaces like the home, whether Mansion, hut, shanty or bungalow, can influence one’s attachment, being it conscious or unconscious. 2.1.2 The House as a Chronotope Krogstad explores the fantasy, idyll, and threshold experience in three Scandinavian picture books by Gro Dahle and Svein Nyhus. The family home is a key theme in these picture books. Krogstad addresses some of the fears that a child may experience in the home by evaluating the three books. He illustrates how the family house chronotope played a crucial role in the lives of the children in University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 28 the early years of the twenty-first century by using Bakhtin's chronotope to determine the "conceptions of time and space" within and outside the house. He aimed to investigate the existential problems that influenced the psychological health of children in the Norwegian community (2). He argues that: The inner struggles of the child protagonist take place in the geographic and psychological sphere of the family house. The child has to break through physical and psychological borders to get free and conquer a significant place for her/his own. The family house, as a psychological space, is broken down and reconstructed as a recurrent narrative, and the selected picture books explore what type of being in the world is possible for the child living in the house (1). Krogstad dwells on the chronotope theory by Bakhtin to serve as a framework for his spatial analysis of the family homes. He quotes Bakhtin and other scholars who apply the concept and provides substantial evidence on why the family house can be classified as one of Bakhtin’s chronotopes. Thus, he also uses Falconer’s explanation of the chronotopes as “representations of time and space, which frame and enable their characters to live and act in a certain way” (3). He regards the picture book narratives as threshold narratives, in which the threshold symbolizes decisions, crises, and breaks in life. The family house chronotope, therefore, becomes the type of chronotope that co-exists with other chronotopes. The reference of the threshold recalls the threshold chronotope, which was originally one of Bakhtin's chronotopes. When analyzing the family house, it is appropriate to consider the threshold chronotope because the house functions as a threshold for its members. Life-changing decisions and choices are made within this threshold chronotope. Every house has a threshold, and while it physically ushers people in and out of houses and rooms, it also represents a new era in life. These are the places where existential crises are University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 29 encountered and experienced. In Krogstad's perspective, he confines these issues to children and childhood. In addition to the family house and threshold chronotopes, Krogstad mentions other chronotopes like the childhood and Idyllic chronotopes. He describes the childhood space in the three picture books as not always a safe and protective place for children, but often a place of alienation and psychological crises because of insecurity and loss of contact with parents (3). In other words, an unsafe childhood denotes a problematic family home. Often, children are found in a shell of their worlds outside that of their own physical and familiar environments. According to Krogstad, the post-war era saw the family home becoming a place where children are transformed from “inhuman” to human, preparing them for responsibilities in society. Though they are yet to be considered adults, they were still active consumers. This renders the childhood state ambiguous. The Idyllic chronotope in the picture book contrasts the modern and materialistic nature of the house that offers less attention to the psychological development of the child. He writes: The times pace outside the house has elements of what Bakhtin defines as the idyllic chronotope, including a life close to nature, animals, flowers, trees, and a cyclical time following the seasons of nature. Being outside, in the idyllic time space, seems to give strength and bodily empowerment to the child protagonists in the books (3). This contrasting chronotope, the idyllic chronotope, seems to provide a utopic atmosphere where the child’s psychological needs are met. However, he argues that with the Family house still in the picture, it renders the idyllic family scene “a frozen moment” and the family house may still be in the future to threaten the child’s ontological security (5). The psychological atmosphere in the family house is characterized by modern preoccupied parents who have little or no time for the children. The inside may be chaotic, and the only place that offers stability and peace for the child University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 30 is the idyllic chronotope outside the house. His analysis of The Greedy Child touches on these aspects. Here the child is dissatisfied with all the house offers and faces existential challenges. Ase, the child protagonist, is in search of more from her parents and her home. The feeling of loneliness and the craving for attention drives her to behave awkwardly. The other child protagonists also suffer existential issues of identity and loneliness that are automatically connected to the family home. According to Krogstad, the family-house chronotope represents a crucial part of the child’s world in all three picture books (9). Characters like Ase in the Greedy Child, Mumme in Behind Mumme lives Moni, and Lussi in What a Girl are victims of a home that could not meet their emotional needs. However, their stories end on a promising note after self-made efforts resolve their conflicted selves. Thus, the family house chronotope in the picture books was not a place of refuge for the protagonists, and their quest for finding any refuge laid in their abilities: Nevertheless, the picture books of Dahle and Nyhus show the possibility of finding a refuge from insecurity, but this sanctuary has to be found in the child itself. The three picture books express a strong confidence in the strength and ideals of modern Scandinavian childhood. These ideals include the construction of the vital, imaginative, and autonomous child and the possibility for this both vulnerable and strong child to, in a decisive moment, gather the courage to find its own way (10). While Krosgstad tackles the issue of space or the home and infancy, Kneale looks at the home as a gender-specific space. She explores the relationship between women and spatiality in New England Gothic literature from the 19th century to the mid-20th. The Gothic castle in the center of the Gothic narrative is described as the “arena for family horror and domestic terror” (5). She focuses her essay on the diachronic development or change of the Gothic castle to a more privatized space or home and explores how feminine heroines of the narrative are connected to the spaces. The chronotope University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 31 of the Gothic home, therefore, is viewed as the “organizing device for heroine-centered Gothic literature” (1) and defines it as “a more private and intimate reimagining of the chronotope of the castle” (23). Quoting Reynolds, she posits that the Gothic castle has the house as its origins (5). The house is seen again as a domestic space that has been attached to the feminine figure. This type of chronotope provides insight into the private lives of people who inhabit it. Thus, the chronotope of the Gothic home opens a window into a whole new world of deplorable private lives (24). The Gothic narrative of the home revolves around the horrors of a house and a female protagonist who struggles to deal with the spaces of terror. According to Kneale, the Gothic narrative has its heroine as “a persecuted heroine who is figuratively or imprisoned in her own home by a male villain” (5). She selects three Gothic works; Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and makes a case that space, and time can be subversive elements or device for the women in these works of literature: It becomes the task of the Gothic heroines in all of these works to navigate the domestic space of the home, which is typically gendered as a female sphere, when it is not idyllic, but dysfunctional and threatening. In doing so, they reveal the underbelly of normative constructions of domesticity and homeliness and show that the Gothic home can be seen not only as a negative space of terror and imprisonment for women, but also as a site of resistance where patriarchal discourses and domestic ideologies are exposed, confronted and subverted (6). For a long time, women in fiction have been subjected to domesticity. Fictitious women were frequently installed in the home's confined spaces. Kneale confirms Gilbert and Gubar’s findings that dwellings in nineteenth-century women's fiction signified female confinement in a male University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 32 dominated society (11). Women are not only domesticated in Gothic literature, but they also play the role of helpless prey. She refutes the claim that the Gothic heroine's vulnerability stems from her gender. Thus, even though the woman's gender has subjected her to socio-cultural conventions of domesticity, the home does not determine her strengths and limitations, as found in some Gothic novels. She closes by alluding to Young's phenomenological theory, “Young shows that the gendering of space does not only result in women being excluded from certain social activities and their associated places, but also in differences between the very way in which men and women perceive spatiality and comport themselves in relation to the world” (14). Kneale draws out some similarities and differences between Bachelard’s oneiric home and the Gothic home. From his book Poetics of Space, topoanalysis is introduced by Bachelard and linked to the house as an oneiric space. The house is a location of dreams and a place to create memories. Similar to the Gothic home, Bachelard offers the house as an archetypal representation of the home. They are both burdened with memories and drenched with prior events, particularly childhood memories (16). Like the oneiric house, the Gothic home can create and recreate events experienced on different levels by the people who inhabit them. Memory is bestowed upon the Gothic home basements, walls, and chambers. While Bachelard describes his oneiric home as a sanctuary of serenity, tranquility, independence, and security that one would always want to return to, a Gothic home is a realm of the female characters' nightmares (16). As other scholars have noted, the house is a place of oppression for women, and in Krogstad's case, children, Bachelard’s concept seems to rule out how the home can infringe on rights to freedom. His view of home stands in contrast with the feminist one. Here, the Gothic home tackles that aspect. The Gothic home turns homely into unhomely (17) so that dreams are frightening nightmares, freedom is entrapment, and beauty is horror. University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 33 By equating the oneiric house to the woman’s body, Bachelard proposes the concept of identifying the felicitous space with the female maternal body (19). Kneale, however, points out that this concept only objectifies the woman’s body. She claims that “while being embodied is simply a fact of life, becoming a house roots the body in a passive existence and depersonalizes it by making it an object to be owned and inhabited by someone else” (19). Kneale’s take on Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables falls in place on the dominancy of the Gothic homes in the lives of the feminine characters. Based on history, the house is presented as a masculine dominating edifice that ties in with aristocratic privileges over space, place, and time (37). With its history of greed and injustice, thus the land as stolen property from Mathew Maule by Colonel Pyncheon, the house becomes a “repository of ancestral guilt” for the Pyncheon descendants. Furthermore, Mathew Maule's cures and the horrible events surrounding Colonel Pyncheon's death contribute to the Gothic state of the mansion. After Maule's death, the land that had previously had an idyllic ambiance transforms into a gloomy and sinister environment. As the centuries pass, the lingering effects of shame and gloom persist, as descendants struggle with feeling out of place in their own homes. The house is characterized as the "desolate, rotting, windy, rusty, old house of the Pyncheon family" (45). Kneale claims that the status of the mansion depicts the ancient disintegrating Aristocratic system. Hephzibah, the present inhabitant of the house, is a lady whose life has been influenced by the dismal and antiquated system of the places in which she has found herself: Unlike the prototypical Gothic heroine, exemplified by Wood’s Julia Vallace, Hephzibah has not been confined to the House of the Seven Gables by any individual male villain. Instead, she is anchored to the house by out-dated patriarchal conceptions of femininity which have caused her to fuse with her University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 34 ancestral home to the point where she is nearly dehumanised: the “creaking joints of her stiffened knees” echo the creaking of the floorboards; the “rigid and rusty frame” of her body resembles the frame of the house; her “forbidding scowl” is akin to the “impending brow of the second story”; and “her very brain was impregnated with the dry-rot of its timbers” (Hawthorne 30, 34, 27, 59) Essentially, her identification as a lady has reduced Hepzibah to an object in the patriarchal household (46). Once again, we fall back to Cooper’s theory of the house as a representation of the self. Hephzibah’s image reflected her home. Isolated and cut off from the town, she becomes another image of the old house of seven gables. Phoebe, on the other hand, is depicted in a different light. She contrasts Hephzibah and the Gothic household chronotope as someone familiar with the idyllic chronotope (52). Her arrival at the Gothic mansion changes everything for Hephzibah and adds an exciting twist to the story. Simple things like her smile were "reflected on the faces of those she bestows it upon, she fills the House of Seven Gables with her light instead of being absorbed into its darkness” (53). Phoebe’s image and presence are so strong that she begins to leave impressions on her new Gothic home. According to Kneale, Phoebe “is not frightened or alienated by her new surroundings, however. Instead, her presence at the house is naturalized by her association with the sun” (52). She brings a touch of domesticity and the idyllic atmosphere to the contrasting Gothic home. She considers her the Angel and heroine of the novel as she is the one who dispels Maule’s curse (52). In analyzing Gilman’s The Yellow Wall Paper, Kneale continues to read architecture with a gender approach. By addressing the issue of the woman’s mental health in domestic spaces, she adopts a short story that is also based on Gilman’s real-life experience. As she recounts Gilman’s personal University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 35 experience with mental illness and the rest cure of living a domestic life (61), she points out that masculine figures in health sectors tie in simultaneously with the oppressive masculine figure of the home. This experience impacted the development of the chronotope of the Gothic home (62). In making an analogy to Hawthorne’s Hephzibah whose oppression was the old patriarchal norms that kept her confined in an old home (63), Gilman’s character is “confined to the home by sexual politics”. Her chronotope of the Gothic home intensifies the situation found in Hawthorne’s Chronotope. Kneale argues that “Gilman’s feminist criticism is primarily directed at the contemporary sexual politics in the home, but as Lockwood suggests, her choice of setting indicates that those politics are inseparable from the historical oppression of women in the home” (67). The 19th-century text deals directly with issues of women’s mental health in the home that were not being tackled. Gilman’s prescriptive cure of remaining in the domestic space and not involving in anything creative rendered her in a more deplorable state than the disease itself. Her character in the short story experiences a similar ordeal. This approach to domesticity reveals the ugly side of the effect domestic spaces can have on women. In the unnamed character’s case, her husband, who is also her psychiatrist and doctor at home, makes her experience a domestic environment “doubly powerless by the husband”. Thus, Gilman is interested in “showing how the medical establishment is another aspect of the patriarchal system, how the two intertwines in the domestic ideology of the late 19th century, and how this directly impacts women’s way of being in the home by transforming it into an uncanny insane asylum where male authorities – doctors who may also be husbands and brothers “rule supreme” (63). According to Kneale, the unnamed character who was later given the generic name “Jane” represents all women (64). She represents all women who are automatically marginalized as University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 36 domestic beings. Unlike Hawthorne’s concentration on the history and background of his Gothic home, Gilman focuses on the small things that make up the interior like the wallpaper and how uncanny they could be. Kneale asserts that by describing the house as “ancestral halls”, “colonial mansion”, and “a hereditary estate”, the narrator creates the image of the house as a patriarchal edifice (66). This same image was present in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, a different era from Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper yet, the impact of masculinity on architecture and place is still felt. In both cases, there is a history of imprisoning women in the chronotope of the gothic home: To put the same point in chronotopic terms; the mansion can be seen as a physical manifestation of a historical time and its inherent power structures, and as a chronotope it therefore shapes the plot into an uncanny repetition of that time in the present. Unlike Hawthorne who suggests that only women who cling to the past, like Hepzibah, suffer from stagnating confinement in the home, Gilman shows that the history of imprisoning women in houses is still very much alive in the present (67). Kneale also addresses spaces related to the chronotope of the gothic home by addressing the rooms in the novel. She quotes Virginia Woolf that Gilman's protagonist desired her room (69). Her favorite room, as indicated in the story, was the downstairs room that mirrored Bachelard's felicitous room. She wanted a smaller but more lively, old-fashioned, healthier environment. She may connect with nature, be comfortable, and possibly look forward to recovering in that room. Her husband, on the other hand, chooses a different room for her. A room she has no connection to. Thus, in her quest for comfort and relaxation, she is given a room that makes her more depressed. Kneale calls it an “extension of the spatiotemporal control over the house to her body” University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 37 (70). Gilman’s yellow wallpapered room becomes a gothic version of Woolf’s room, which signifies freedom. By choosing a room that does not please the narrator, she is robbed of autonomy, freedom, and independence (71). As a creative person, Gilman’s protagonist is more inclined to poetry, nature, and art. This puts her in contrast with Jennie, her sister-in-law. Jennie’s relationship with the spaces of the house makes her a representation of the traditional woman as a homemaker. The narrator is different from this kind of woman. She wants to be close to nature and art, elements that validate freedom and independence. The yellow wallpapered room is many things, especially its strangeness and connection to the home. Kneale speculates on the likelihood that the room was originally used as an asylum or nursery. They were both regarded uncannily in any circumstance. The prior usage of the chamber as an asylum enhances the narrator's sense of being cut off from the things she loves and forced into a regimented way of life. It is also a representation of the masculine figures in her life who condemned her to insanity. The fact that the space was once a nursery makes no difference. The room transports her back to her childhood or an earlier developmental stage (73). While the wallpaper emits pictures of "saturated urine," she is infantilized and reduced to the state of a child (73). The contribution of the yellow wallpapered room to the chronotope of the Gothic home justifies "spaces as a physical representation of insanity" (77) Finally, in The Haunting of the Hill House, Kneale associates the mother image to the house. She posits that just like Bachelard’s depiction of the maternal house, the house as a womb, the image of the mother, and the house are united (78). This house, however, is not the same as Bachelard’s motherly home filled with love and dreams. The Hill House is an image of tyrannical motherhood. University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 38 Though it has a “motherly” figure and image, it is still linked to a phallocratic culture due to certain features like the tower. According to Kneale, the story was written at a time when there was a strong emphasis on family and homemaking. Thus, after the Second World War, the return of the GIs increased childbirth, and domestic life was prioritized (80). As a result, motherhood and housewife chores became a woman's primary aim. These responsibilities, while putting women on the radar, did not guarantee or allow for a matriarchal hold on society. They were nonetheless carried out with a "patriarchal mentality" (81). During that era, the home once again became a prison for women. This produced domineering, tyrannical, overprotective super mothers whose personal lives were filled with “anxiety, emptiness and disparation” (81). Kneale argues that “Super mother’s dark double, the domineering mother, is not the initiator of a new, liberating matriarchy, but a monster bred by the patriarchy” (81). One of the house's most notable aspects is its potential to reflect a specific period in history and socio- cultural ideas. The house as a chronotope focuses on every aspect of the house, including its history, socio-cultural backdrop, architecture, and people's lived-in experience. It has literal as well as symbolic connotations. In this scenario, lifestyle in the 1950s provides a solid framework with documented evidence for Jackson to establish her characters and reproduce the entire 1950s housing situation. Jackson's story emphasizes the importance of tackling the issue of postmodern women's confinement to the home. There has not been much improvement since the modern woman’s time in Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, and Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables. The chronotope of the Hill house, which is an image of maternal dominance, is a response to socio-cultural systems. The house, just like Colonel Pyncheon’s, was meant to display wealth and University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 39 a patriarchal dynasty (41). However, Kneale states that it is “a physical manifestation of an oppressive, dehumanizing and alienating aspect of motherhood” (82). Also, the house was a manifestation of the feelings of emptiness and disillusion. It was a place where people and dreams were crushed, an unhomely place with “unmothering” mothers (84) and a place “saturated with a vile diseased energy” (93). Physically, the house is given anthropomorphic features. Aside from the fact that Kneale claims its appearance is alive, the poltergeist nature (87) of the house only makes it another character in the novel. For people like Eleanor, staying in a house like the Hill House was reminiscent of her prior residence. Eleanor is portrayed and analyzed as a victim of the houses she lived in from childhood till her death. She is overshadowed as a young lady by her mother and sister's oppressive representation of parenting. She is bound to domesticity, like Hephzibah in The House of Seven Gables. She has no friends, no love, and low self-esteem. Her departure from her old house to the road chronotope is viewed as the only limited time and space for her freedom. Entering the hill house begins yet another journey of confinement. Kneale's claims on how the home has treated Eleanor corroborate that it is inseparable from the individual. Eleanor feels strangely attached to her new Hill house, and despite its paranormal occurrences, she is unable to leave. Eleanora is so influenced by the mansion that she would choose to commit suicide than leave it. Kneale's study brings readers to a fresh perspective on the Gothic homes in these three novels. While the houses exemplified antiquated patriarchal dominance, there were women in these houses who suffered greatly. These houses were also given attributes, which harmed the mental health of some of the heroines. University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 40 Balaa proposes that the chronotope of the house plays a role in matrilineage in her treatment of Nada Awar Jarrar's Somewhere Home (70). Her analysis shifts to a new angle of spatial analysis in the novel. She claims that despite its popularity, the novel has not been subjected to several literary critiques. As a result, she investigates other areas, such as the chronotope of the house. This area is associated with the matrilineal concept in the story. In terms of literary criticism, she intends to go beyond the scope of the book's limitations. She claims that the image of the house is "a helpful spatial tool to combine the synchronic and diachronic planes of matrilineal" by using Cosslett's two-time frames of feminist matrilineal and Bakhtin's theory of the chronotope (73). She reiterates Cosslett’s explanation of her theory as while the synchronic plane refers to the relationship between women of different generations, the diachronic plane “goes back and forward in time” (72). She believes that the house enacts and enforces these relationships and connections. Balaa mentions the chronotope of the threshold as another manifestation in the novel. Bakhtin defines the chronotope of the threshold as a place of a break in life, crises, and decision making. According to Balaa, places like the garden and Maysa’s grandmother’s room were threshold chronotopes: this is where most epiphanies, transformations and births occur, as Bakhtin suggests, such as the birth of her daughter and that of the renovated garden. This representation of time–space shapes Maysa’s actions and thoughts. The stories do not follow the normal course of biographical time, but the female protagonist undergoes growth and development. Maysa is at a threshold, between the past and the present, the place where she has her epiphanies. It is at the house/her grandmother’s bedroom where she reaches her turning point. Being able to cope University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 41 with her present and future, she is able to cross the threshold and become a new, stronger person than before (75). The house chronotope in the novel is a place of crises and at the same time, a comfortable place where relationships like the mother-daughter one is generated. The house was where Maysa, who belonged to a different generation, experienced a synchronic relationship with other women (73). The fact that one house is mentioned throughout the novel demonstrates some permanency in the ever-changing lives of its inhabitants (75). She asserts that because Maysa goes back into her grandmother’s house to recover memories of her foremothers, recovery becomes a theme in the novel. Even though Balaa agrees with Kneale that houses and castles are symbols of the “Patrilinear dynasty”, she also makes the case that the house in the novel is maternal and symbolizes nurturing (76). The house of Maysa’s foremothers, described as old, dilapidated, and a former castle, is a place where she goes back to find herself and explain her present circumstances. Her ability to feel their presence in the home is a valuable sentiment for Maysa. Balaa argues that: The protagonist feels that they are with her and she can draw on their power anytime she wants. Their past lives are very much alive in this house, not just through their stories and memories but also through their objects and belongings in the house, such as a Persian carpet which belonged to her mother and her grandmother’s oak dressing table (81). Balaa concludes that, by returning to the ancestral home to recover memories and write about her foremothers and making synchronized relationships with people like her daughter, Maysa continues a tradition that enforces the theme of matrilinealism. University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 42 2.2 The Compound House on Screen The history of Kumawood dates to the late 1990s, and as a cultural artifact, it reflects and mirrors the society or community as popular entertainment and may function as a powerful tool for ridiculing certain behaviors in the community. As part of its unsung accomplishments, Kumawood brings on-screen imaginaries of diverse narratives focusing on the general and common cultural background of its major consumers. Before its emergence, the early local industry had laid foundations to serve as a palimpsest for the new video film wave. Tamakleo mentions that with the birth of the video film format came a paradigm shift in Ghanaian cinema that led to new genres like the Kumawood. According to Adjei, Kumawood came into existence due to the popularity of the staged theater called the concert party, and “Kumawood” originated from the name Kumasi, an Akan city in the Ashanti region (62). Not only did it become an extension of an already known cultural entertainment, but it also took flight with some of the biggest names on the screens. They were the main characters in the Akan dramas, Concert parties, Obra and Cantata, the then game changers of the industry. This paper is not concerned with the general aesthetics and quality of films produced by the industry. However, it is important to mention how the industry has been received by consumers. Kumawood, despite its efforts to be considered a salutary genre, and an improvement of the previous pop cultures, has still received enormous criticisms on the quality of their films. These films are usually produced in low quality with a low budget, choosing Twi as their means of communication. Over the years, there have been arguments over the performances of characters by Ghanaians. Put side by side with other functional film industries like Hollywood and Nollywood, Kumawood seems not to appeal to the taste and pleasure of some Ghanaians. University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 43 However, for most people in Kumasi and its surroundings, Kumawood has won their hearts. And this could be because of their medium of communication. The presentations on what is real are relatable and precise to its main consumers. Thus, using a more convenient language, their films seem to have gained a sonorous effect on their consumers, gradually winning their way into homes and almost obliterating the thirst for its competitions, Ghallywood and Nollywood. Ghallywood, the other Ghanaian film industry designed for the consumption of the elites, is unable to reach out to the people because the English language creates borders and does not bring out the Ghanaian attitude as the local language does. English, since it is not a native language, may sometimes restrict the expressions of the Ghallywood actors. Kumawood is not the first Ghanaian popular culture to adopt Twi as its medium of communication. In the past years, there have been other TV shows that appealed to the masses through the Twi language. But Kumawood does more than use language successfully. Their narratives are framed through the lenses of a perceived Akan culture and practices, syncretized with contemporary imaginary concepts that dialogue with emerging research fields. According to Asare, “although there are varying genres such as melodrama, comedy, satire, musical, adventure and horror employed by the film producers, they all draw attention to topical vices bedeviling the society. Some of these problems highlighted in the films discuss privacy and confidentiality that would have been extremely difficult if not impossible to reveal off-screen or in real life” (70). Meyer also states her views on these video films as: It would be inadequate to approach video-films as artistic products to be viewed in their own right, from the perspective of the distant spectator. Rather it has to be taken as a point of departure that these films impinge on everyday life as much as they claim to represent it. In the video-film industry... the cinema and TV screens University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 44 do not function as window through which spectators look at the world from distance. In the same way, those who make the film perceive what happens in front of the camera as to be fully entangled with real life, rather than occurring in a virtual space, within the safe confines of artistic production. Ghana popular cinema, with regard to production as well as consumption, blurs the boundary between everyday life and its representation (213). When observed closely, the issues of homes and spaces take center stage in their narratives. These films ground themselves firmly in the already existing concepts of family and home. Responsible for demonstrating domestic cultures, Kumawood draws their inspirations from family-based events, creating spaces already in existence as places of bonds and relationships. A popular set where their stories assume reality is the family home. After exhausting all types and possibilities of family homes, the compound house is revisited, rendering it a landmark feature in these films. Even though the presence of the compound house accurately reflects the ones in the communities, it also brings to screen the cached dramas, experiences, and realities that may be individually unique. Thus, the compound house has been used so rampantly that it may have touched on relatable experiences as many as possible. It cuts across both the urban and rural experiences. While we may not still be developing new ways of presenting these practices on paper, prose or fiction does not do much justice to the representations of compound houses in general. Even though less attention is given to space in their narratives, Kumawood has successfully represented these houses. This chapter will explore how the compound house in Kumawood films has been assigned a chronotopic significance that adds value to its already existing importance. University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 45 2.2.1 The House of Many Stories The compound house may seem like a simple building enclosed and characterized by mini rooms and shared facilities or as defined by Ibukun as “mini complexes of houses group around shaded courtyards, set back from the streets”. However, In Kumawood, it goes beyond a simple structure or mini-complexes. Its significance transcends its physical make-up. It impersonates a character playing different roles in different cinematic sketches. Lynley correctly puts it as “an outworking of the characters who live inside. Sometimes in fiction, the house seems to come alive in its own right”. It has ownership over a particular space in these films, and its presence emits a multi-faceted phenomenon. Thus, it displays undisputed versatility on screen. When transposed into the Kumawood world, the space-time confederations of the house are so profound that it obliterates the simple notion of a set of a structure and takes on the complex role of a chronotope. It becomes a place we have lived before, a place we may live, and a place we have known to produce most of our human relations and associations. The representation of the spatial properties of the house is intertwined with temporalities. At different times and different historical levels, the compound house may be used to represent numerous things. As mentioned before, Kumawood has represented the compound house well and may translate to us bringing on-screen the true nature and realities of that space, something that has not well been represented by the individual compound houses of the screen. They do not tell stories familiar to the experiences of one home but usher the audience into a realm of countless experiences creating a limitless perception of the house. To understand the notion of the versatility of the compound house chronotope, I will put it side by side the castle chronotope (from which the chronotope of the gothic house is developed) that is also University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 46 represented as a domestic space. Unlike the compound house, certain chronotopes in western literature like the chronotope of the castle are mostly associated with the gothic. The gothic gives a foreboding feeling of uncanny, weird, and horror. Such chronotopes tell preconceived stories. The castle’s qualities are not only in its grandeur physique and intriguing architecture but also in its ability to hold and tell stories of the past. They are historical monuments. Within its thick walls and high roofing lie the history of centuries. Bakhtin identifies it as “the castle has its origins in the distant past; its orientation is towards the past. The traces of time in the castle do bear a somewhat antiquated museum-like character” (246). Though it served as homes and fortresses for rulers and servants, its representation over time in literature connotes something different. Thus, it became a domestic space with gloominess and obscurities where characters and readers equally imagined uncanny activities. According to Kneale: Despite the sublime grandeur of the imposing, crumbling castles that abound in early Gothic romances, literary Gothic buildings have always been connected to the domestic space of the home: Horace Walpole, author of the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764), not only started a fad among the English aristocracy for turning their