I often dream about my childhood home, and my mother’s family home. When I close my eyes, I can still see every room, every piece of furniture, the dust glimmering in a beam of light coming through my grandmother’s lace curtains. I see the silver mirror on her vanity cabinet in the upstairs
bedroom, a mirror that once belonged to her mother, Anna, and that now sits on a bookshelf in my flat in Oslo. Vibrant strings bind us together across time and space, as embodied by that handheld mirror, its gleaming silver decorations of roses and leaves, the fact that the mirror once reflected the face of my great-grandmother, as it has returned the gaze of my grandmother, my mother and me. The mirror has belonged to a series of spaces – a late 19th-century apartment building in Oslo, the quiet, separate bedrooms of my grandparents in the suburbs, through life stages in flats and moving boxes, and now in my home. The mirror reflects four generations of women, our appearances, our cultural norms of beauty and vanity; it is a gendered object of female practice spanning more than a century, and it binds us, our bodies and our intimate spaces together.
I am not alone in dreaming about the remembered houses of childhood, spaces where we learn about the world, go through rites of passage and are transformed (Hall 1983, 82–83). Across philosophy, psychology and architecture, it is widely acknowledged that the house can be deeply entwined with the self, with being (e.g. Jung 1963; Heidegger 1971; Marcus 1995 [1971]). Yet, I argue the house is not merely an abstract, passive metaphor for the self or the person – it is a material part of its transformations (Carsten 2018). Because the home is the primary arena for childhood development, earliest memories and identity formation,
it becomes inextricably linked with household relations, group and power dynamics, and self-narrative. Paraphrasing Gaston Bachelard, exploring the poetics of space, we carry these houses with us throughout our lives (Bachelard 1994 [1964]). And, indeed, that also means that we may dream of them (e.g. Hall 1951). So, the question becomes: did the longhouse-dwellers of the Late Iron Age dream of houses, too? And, if so, did their dreams of houses relate to the self?
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