Enclosures, Suffocating and Sheltering.

In poetry and in folklore, in modern psychology and modern ornithology, [Gaston] Bachelard finds the bits and pieces of evidence he weaves into his argument that the house is a nest for dreaming, a shelter for imagining.

John R. Stilgoe, 'Foreword to the 1994 Edition' in Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994, viii.

Storm makes sense of shelter, and if the shelter is sound, the shelter makes the surrounding storm good, enjoyable, recreational . . .

John R. Stilgoe, 'Foreword to the 1994 Edition' in Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994, viii.

Is it not strange that Jonah expresses his willingness to return to the Temple, [2:9] especially when there is no mention of his repentance or willingness to go to Ninevah? . . . To what extent is the story aligning the Temple with the ship's hold and the fish's belly?

James S.Ackerman, "Jonah" in The Literary Guide to the Bible, edited by Robert Alter & Frank Kermode, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1987), p. 238.




But devotees of the abject, she as well as he, do not cease looking, within what flows from the other's 'innermost being,' for the desirable and terrifying, nourishing and murderous, fascinating and abject inside of the maternal body.

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, cited in Barbara Creed's The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, (London & New York: Routledge, 1993), p.43.



Horror films that depict monstrous births play on the inside/outside distinction in order to point to the inherently monstrous nature of the womb as well as the impossibility of ever completely banishng the abject from the human domain. The concept of inside/outside suggests two surfaces that fold in on each other; the task of separating inside from outside seems impossible as each surface constitutes the 'other' side of its opposite. . . . The womb represents the utmost in abjection for it contains a new life form which will pass from inside to outside bringing with it traces of its contamination-blood, afterbirth, faeces.

Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, (London & New York: Routledge, 1993), p.49.




The archaic mother is present in all horror films as the blackness of extinction-death. The desire and fears invoked by the image of the archaic mother, as a force that threatens to reincorporate what it once gave birth to, are always there in the horror text- all pervasive, all encompassing-because of the constant presence of death. The desire to return to the original oneness of things, to return to the mother/womb, is primarily a desire for non-differentiation. If, as George Bataille argues in Death and Sensuality, life signifies discontinuity and separateness, and death signifies continuity and non-differentiation, then the desire for and attraction of death suggests also a desire to return to the state of original oneness with the mother. As this desire to merge occurs after differentiation, that is after the subject has developed as separate, autonomous self, it is experienced as a form of psychic death.

Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, (London & New York: Routledge, 1993), p.28.