| Panic Rooms explores the relationship between New York City's domestic architecture and its fiction, from the rise of the apartment building to the fall of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. I argue that the apartment house transformed not only actual urban interiors, but also the moral and aesthetic criteria on which American ideals of "home" had been based. Instead of insulating their inhabitants, I propose that New York's new houses encoded the city's social and political clashes while at the same time transforming its domestic spheres from safe, family-centered spaces into sites of fragmentation, betrayal and loss. Fictions about New York thus return repeatedly to seemingly-opposite themes such as incursion and entombment, exposure and incarceration, and affinity and monstrosity.; New Yorkers' anxiety about how to inhabit an unpredictable city gave rise to a phenomenon I call the urban uncanny, a category of panic that responds to the instability of traditional ideas of home in an urban environment, the permeability of the city's domestic spaces, and the difficulty of maintaining a clear distinction between the house and the street. The urban uncanny, I argue, is manifested in literature and film through images and tropes reminiscent of the Gothic genre, an aesthetic category that historically engages both architecture and fiction. This juxtaposition of literary and architectural forms demonstrates how the Gothic is employed by twentieth-century authors and filmmakers as a means of evading, illustrating, or deconstructing New York's "actual" and social architecture. In this dissertation, I examine literary depictions of disturbed urban domesticity such as Henry James's "The Jolly Corner," Edith Wharton's "The Bolted Door," John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer, and The Street by Ann Petry, as well as two films, Rosemary's Baby and Panic Room, architecture criticism and theory, urban planning texts, and histories of New York's neighborhoods. Ultimately, Panic Rooms provides a floor plan for New York's architectural anxieties, from the ambivalent space of the apartment house to the haunted site of the Freedom Tower. |
