The Horror has an address

domestic space and feminine violence in Latin American gothic

Abstract

This article proposes a comparative reading of "El pecado mortal", by Argentine writer Silvina Ocampo, and "El huésped", by Mexican writer Amparo Dávila, based on a common axis: the domestic space as narrative argument and mechanism of violence against the feminine. It is argued that, in both short stories, the architecture of the house does not function as a backdrop, but as a structure that distributes visibility and invisibility, organizes complicity, and keeps violence within the register of the unspeakable. To support this reading, the article draws on Gaston Bachelard's poetics of space — particularly his analysis of the verticality of the house and the notion of topoanalysis —, the gothic conventions read by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who demonstrated how spatial imprisonment is constitutively linked to the feminine condition, and Julio Cortázar's concepts of tension and significance. The genealogy of domestic horror is traced back to Edgar Allan Poe, whose requirement of a closed circumscription of space inaugurates the confinement that both authors resignify as patriarchal prison. The gender dimension is not treated as a separate layer, but as constitutive of the architectural argument itself: it is because the bodies in question are feminine that the distribution of space functions as the distribution of power.