Enchanted home, enchanted world: inhabiting Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi and George MacDonald’s Lilith

Both George MacDonald’s novel Lilith (1895) and Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi (2020) depict protagonists who discover fantastic, supernatural realities within the setting of a house. In Lilith, Mr. Vane travels to another ‘region’ via mirrors and doorways in his home. Yet once there he is told that, actually, he has not ‘left [his] house’. Instead, it seems it is Vane’s ‘horizon’ that has been ‘widen[ed]’ to include what was formerly imperceivable. In Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, a displaced narrator inhabits a seemingly endless house filled with a seemingly infinite sea. Here, his world is the house and the house is his world: they are ‘for all practical purposes identical’. In this houseworld—whose ‘Beauty is immeasurable’—the narrator perceives an extra-material meaning and presence in all things.

In this conference paper, I explore the ways in which the housebound journeys in Lilith and Piranesi interrogate ideas of (re-)enchanted perception via their (re-)enchanted domestic settings. Viewing the respective journey in each text as one that culminates in the protagonist’s recovery of a mode of perception that has been dulled by modernity, I argue that the homes in these texts function as a metonym of what can be called an enchanted or (re-)enchanted world. In this, these houses—and the texts that convey them—offer a heuristic that helps readers develop a perception of the world and our being-in-it as ‘subsist[ing] or participat[ing]’ in hidden depths, helping us imaginatively inhabit these conditions in turn.

Using the theoretical lenses of Charles Taylor and Owen Barfield, I argue that Clarke and MacDonald’s metonymic representation of home challenges materialist interpretations of reality, showcasing alternate ways to inhabit the ‘immanent frame’ of modernity, resisting the related bifurcation of transcendence from the physical world. And in depicting a domestic frame—and in turn, a world structure—that is suffused with transcendent presence, and showcasing the way fantastic realities are enmeshed with everyday existence, these texts give shape to what C.S. Lewis described as ‘our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside’—and the possibilities of inhabiting this reunion in part, as we await its culmination in full.