Between the Oneiric House and Heterotopias: Polly Crosby’s The Illustrated Child through Bachelardian and Foucauldian Lenses

Abstract

The present reflections on the treatment of place and space in the debut novel by a contemporary English author, Polly Crosby (b. 1980), The Illustrated Child (2020), are mostly inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s topoanalysis, mentioned in his Poetics of Space, which ascribes the house a crucial role in the life of a child. The combination of the youthful protagonist and the setting of the novel, Braër, an old solitary farmhouse amid the Suffolk countryside, provides fertile ground for the consideration of multiple phenomenological notions of this French philosopher, who has recently become of interest again to artists, architects and academics. In addition to the house itself, special attention is paid to his conception of the attic and of the casket in confrontation with how they are presented in the novel. This initial kinship of the setting with Bachelard’s writing is further reinforced by the significance of water in the narrative, which resonates well with his treatment of the imagination of matter, namely in his book Water and Dreams. In the latter part of this paper, the focus shifts to the novel’s specific secondary locations tracing the protagonist’s rare but significant journeys from the intimacy of home to the outside world. These destinations, among which the most important are the circus and the nursing home, recall and offer confrontation with the concept of heterotopias introduced by Michel Foucault in his seminal essay “Of Other Spaces”.