Outsider Theory Lockdown Literature with Tim Abrahams
May 10, 2023
Tim Abrahams, an architecture writer and publisher of Machine Books, explores why the real literature of lockdown may come from older weird fiction. They discuss uncanny homes, domestic confinement, Freud, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Algernon Blackwood, Maupassant, O. Henry, and Mark Fisher. The conversation connects isolation, work, technology, invisible threats, and political unease to the forthcoming anthology The Machine Book of Weird.
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The Yellow Wallpaper Exposes Safety’s Perils
- The Yellow Wallpaper connects feminist literary history with lockdown’s enforced domestic confinement.
- Its rest-cure protagonist demonstrates how a treatment intended to create safety can intensify the condition it claims to cure.
Domestic Safety Can Become Psychological Entrapment
- Gilman’s stories portray enclosure as psychologically destabilizing rather than protective.
- The wallpaper becomes a membrane between inner and outer worlds, while her other ghost story turns shared rooms into sites of fixation and jealousy.
Freud Made Home Both Familiar And Uncanny
- Freud’s unheimlich means both unfamiliar and unhomely, linking terror to what feels intimate and concealed.
- The home therefore mirrors the psyche, and uncovering hidden rooms or symptoms resembles confronting the unconscious.
