If you should ever have cause to keep the company of small children with any regularity, it is likely that you’ll pass some of your time together in front of the television watching all manner of inane cartoons and animated movies. It was precisely this enriching pastime in which I was engaged on a recent evening with my boyfriend and his seven-year old daughter, unwinding on the couch after dinner watching one of Disney’s latest releases, Encanto.
For those without kids (or Disney obsessed grown adult friends), the movie tells the story of the Madrigal family, gifted with magical talents, and one of its youngest members, Mirabel’s, journey into coming into her own abilities and her efforts to bring together the family’s sometimes competing personalities and talents. At the center, one character holds everyone together and protects the Madrigal candle, the source of the family’s power. This character is not a member of, advisor for, or even friendly talking animal belonging to the family. It is the house itself, Casa Madrigal, or Casita. As a sentient being, it looks out for and helps members of the household by physically manipulating the built environment and the furniture inside, sliding floor tiles and wood planks to transport people around, opening wardrobes and kitchen cabinets to help the characters get dressed or make breakfast.
In a scene towards the end of the movie – spoilers ahead – the house literally cracks under the familial strife. As jagged fissures jolt up the walls, the roof gives way and stone crumbles down all around the Madrigals, who make a desperate attempt to reach the candle and keep its flame from being snuffed out. Once the situation becomes too dangerous for the family to remain inside, the house forcefully ushers them out through the front door, all save Mirabel. As she continues her scramble to the second story window where the candle sputters, the house comes to her aid, breaking off a section of railing to use as a ladder, cascading rows of roof tiles that Mirabel rides like a wave, and finally, as the entire structure comes down around her, gathering an assortment of furniture and debris to shield her body from the worst of the collapse.
While I watched, this most helpful house, functioning as both an extension and a member of the family, I found myself thinking about a book that I’m currently reading. It’s not a children’s book or a fantasy novel, as you might expect, but a work by the twentieth century French scientist and philosopher, Gaston Bachelard. Writing in the niche, if not completely esoteric tradition of historical epistemology, Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space is a meandering meditation on human habitation, from the disembodied inhabiting of the mind in dreams and poems to the material homes in which we reside and down to the cupboards in which we house our possessions.
At its heart is an exploration of the home – how we experience and imagine a domestic structure and the various meanings and values it holds for us. Bachelard has a word for this – topoanalysis – which he defines as, “the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives.” To understand what Bachelard means by this, and why the house, as he puts it, is a choice “instrument of topoanalysis,” it is useful to begin with the following passage:
“…a house is first and foremost a geometrical object, one which we are tempted to analyze rationally. Its prime reality is visible and tangible, made of well hewn solids and well fitted framework. It is dominated by straight lines, the plumbline having marked it with its discipline and balance. A geometrical object of this kind ought to resist metaphors that welcome the human body and the human soul. But transposition to the human plane takes place immediately whenever a house is considered as space for cheer and intimacy, space that is supposed to condense and defend intimacy. Independent of all rationality, the dream world beckons.”
By virtue of its very purpose as shelter and setting in which our lives unfold, the house transcends its practical, bodily reality and enters the realm of consciousness, of symbols. It is the site of our birth, growth, and death and it plays host to our most intimate relationships, hopes, and dreams. In this way the house is not a cold, inert thing, but a vital, dynamic entity, ripe for our exploration in sates of both wakefulness and reverie.
The number of films in existence that center around the haunted house trope should alone be enough to assure anyone of the symbolic power of the house in our collective unconscious. But while this idea of the possessed house would be an interesting foray, it is not one which Bachelard considers here, declaring that his research is instead, “devoted to the domain of intimacy… [for] there does not exist a real intimacy that is repellent. All the spaces of intimacy are designated by an attraction. Their being is well-being. In these conditions, topoanalysis bears the stamp of a topophilia, and shelters and rooms will be studied in the sense of this valorization.”
While I’m sure that an argument can be made against the position that intimacy is always designated by attraction, it is not one that I will pursue at this time. For our reading of Bachelard here, we’ll take this pronouncement at face value. With this in mind, we can think about how the places of our habitation engender within us a sense of trust and comfort that is positive – they attract, not repel – and conducive to fostering intimacy between ourselves and our spaces, our relationships, and our own minds.
Applied to the world of Encanto, we can begin to unpack all the layers of intimacy that reside within the walls of Casa Madrigal. There are the family members’ bedrooms, magical spaces with illuminated, carved doors that open to whole microworlds suited to each individual’s magical gifts. At the next level, we see how each character’s role and position in the family informs his or her interactions with others in the household. These dynamics take place in the private rooms, courtyard, and shared spaces of the house and change depending on the relationship between the characters and where they are interacting.
We experience the broadest level of intimacy when the Madrigals invite the whole town to their home to share in celebrations. The sense of awe, wonder, and trepidation that the townspeople feel within Casa Madrigal can be ascertained both by their reactions to and the ways in which they interact with the house. At all these varying levels of intimacy, the characters experience the house in a variety of nuanced ways and form different types of connections to its spaces.
For Mirabel, her bedroom, which is actually the nursery – a room she shares with her youngest cousin until he is bestowed a magical gift and his own room on his fifth birthday – is a constant reminder of her otherness. Having failed as a child to receive a gift of her own, she is forced to watch the rest of her family blossom into their gifts while she remains stuck with a toddler in a room she was supposed to outgrow. Yet out of this co-habitation, this intimacy, comes a strong, confiding bond between Madrigal and her younger cousin. The trust between them plays a critical role in unearthing the secret that will ultimately save the Madrigal’s faltering magic. But as I have already alluded, this revelation comes too late to save Casa Madrigal.
Bachelard too speaks of houses undergoing catastrophic events (these of course being more meteorological than magical in nature). At one point he quotes extensively from French writer Henri Bosco’s Malicroix. In this passage the narrator recounts a violent storm that besieges the rugged island upon which his house is built. Gusts of wind batter every side of the structure, but the house weathers the beating:
“From the very beginning of the storm, snarling winds had been taking the roof to task, trying to pull it off, to break its back, tear it into shreds, suck it off. But it only hunched over further and clung to the old rafters. Then other winds, rushing along close to the ground, charged against the wall. Everything swayed under the shock of this blow, but the flexible house stood up to the beast… The house clung to me, like a she-wolf, and at times, I could smell her odor penetrating maternally to my very heart. That night she really was my mother.”
Leave it to a French poet to wax lyrical about the comforting lupine scent of a piece of architecture. Yet, if we were to imagine ourselves caught alone in a hurricane on a remote island with nothing between us and the raging storm but a few inches of wall that could at any point be uprooted and blown to bits, we might see that the metaphor of a wolf mother is an apt one, if not perhaps overwrought. It is a feeling to which anyone who has ever taken shelter from a storm can relate – a sense of relief and gratitude to have a roof over our heads and a wall to our backs while outside the skies open.
For Bachelard, the symbol of a house standing against elemental forces goes beyond mere personification whereby, “the house’s virtues of protection and resistance are transposed into human virtues. The house acquires the physical and moral energy of a human body.” He goes as far as to say that the house that “girds its loins” against the storm is a house that,
“invites mankind to heroism of cosmic proportions. It is an instrument with which to confront the cosmos. And the metaphysical systems according to which man is ‘cast into the world’ might meditate concretely upon the house that is cast into the hurricane, defying the anger of heaven itself. Come what may the house helps us to say: I will be an inhabitant of the world, in spite of the world.”
It is as though the house is an extension of ourselves, a physical embodiment of our will to make a place for ourselves and survive in the world. This virtuous house takes on a real form in Encanto. Casita actively strives to shelter, provide for, and safeguard its inhabitants, but it also provides a more subtle kind of protection. It gives solidity to the Madrigal family’s magic by not only housing its source, but also standing as a symbol of the Madrigal’s power and position in the community as kind but powerful benefactor.
Anyone can look upon the house and know what is says about the people who live inside it. For the Madrigals, the house is proof that they are blessed. But this blessing comes with the responsibility to use their talents to help others and keep their community safe. For the townspeople, the house is a display of the Madrigal fortune – the chosen favored with fantastic abilities who must use their powers for the benefit of all.
Like a king in his castle, the Madrigal’s both owe and are able to maintain their position in the community to the fact that they live in the house that they do. It supplies real, tangible protection in the form of walls and roof, but it also projects a narrative that holds the Madrigal family apart from the village as something different and special – benign but still to be held at a kind of awed distance.
Of course, outside of the movies, Casa Madrigal doesn’t exist. Unfortunately, not one of us lives in a house that will help whip up some cupcakes, decorate for a party, or disassemble itself to protect you. And yet the homes we live in, those ordinary houses of wood or brick or stone, do hold a little magic inside of them.
Bachelard speaks about revisiting the spaces of our past, of returning to the house of our childhood in dreams. And in these recollections, our memories are happy: “In the past, the attic may have seemed too small, it may have seemed cold in winter and hot in summer. Now, however, in memory recaptured through daydreams, it is hard to say through what syncretism the attic is at once small and large, warm and cool, always comforting.”
In dreaming, this Goldilocks house takes on the magical ability to live in two opposing states at once, inhabiting both extremes to create an impossible equilibrium. In our dreams and fond memories, the places in which we have lived and loved hold a power over us. It is this feeling of home that we are always, in one way or another, trying to create and recreate everywhere we go for our whole lives. And when we’ve found it somewhere, we know instinctively that it’s a place worth defending.
