White is for Witching is a complex and complicated novel that contains enough fodder for scholarly analysis that it has already produced academic papers which have been published in journals and republished in books. As the books becomes more well-known through an expansion of readership, it is absolutely certain that many thousands of words will be expended upon close scrutiny of the many different potential subjects at hand. The book is ripe for interpretations examining the novel as an example of gothic horror, xenophobia as an extension of the occult, reinterpretation of vampire myths, postmodern terror, and even eating disorders. Many things can accurately said about Helen Oyeyemi’s groundbreaking third novel, but if there is one thing that can be stated irrefutably about the text, it is that it is a haunted house story.
This is a story told by a house that is haunted. At least, in part. As part of that postmodern analysis, one would have to focus on the multiple narrators, but one of those narrators at admits at one point, “I suppose I am frightening.” And that narrator is the house which occupies 29 Barton Road. It has been observed by many that the Overlook Hotel in Stephen King’s The Shining actually is elevated to the level of a character itself. The same was been said much longer, of course, about Shirley Jackson’s Hill House which is the scene of that famous haunting. It is true, to be completely honest, that a great many stories about haunted houses are written in such a way that the house itself does seem to take on a character of its own. But in most if not all of those cases, that life is dependent—one could even describe the relationship as symbiotic—upon the residents. It is Jack Torrance and his family which makes the Overlook seem to come to life. In the case of the haunted domicile found at 29 Barton Road, it is a character in the truest sense of the word: it narrates it own tale. Of course, like the other narrators, it may not be entirely reliable, but why should a house be any trustworthy than the flesh and blood people who become the victims of its haunted aspect?
The haunted house is as much a genre-identifying trope of the horror story as ghosts and vampires. It is nothing less than the very essence of gothic horror. Situate your detective within a creepy mansion a mystery novel instantly becomes a gothic mystery. Place a war story within the relic of a partially bombed-out aristocratic manor and—boom!—its now a gothic war story. Such is the power of the haunted house. Let there be no doubt that Oyeyemi has accomplished a great deal worth exploring and analyzing in White is for Witching, but let it also be stated with a certain authoritarian finality that her novel also stands a turning point for the haunted house (building) story in all its forms. Shirley Jackson broke new ground in much the same way when the opening lines of her novel described Hill House as “not sane.”
By extricating a unifying element of the haunted house trope from the strictly metaphorical to the absolutely literal, potential has been unleashed. The fact that the author could have chosen to write the entire novel from the point of view of house itself and resisted the temptation is reason enough to celebrate her novel because under those limited narrative conditions so much else of what makes the novel extraordinary would have had to be jettisoned. This decision on her part also had the subsequent consequence of setting the stage for the perfect haunted house story to be told entirely from the perspective of the house itself. Not to mention all the various permutations of perfect vehicles for giving haunted buildings of all kinds, at least, their own voice.
