Diana Wynne Jones: Howl's Moving Castle

            The magical castle in Howl’s Moving Castle must be one of my favorite meaningful houses of all of fiction. It’s powered by a captive demon and has a door that opens onto four different locations, depending on which blob of paint on the doorknob is turned downward. The upstairs bedroom looks out into a yard in Wales, while the rest of the castle trundles around the countryside in a sort of fairy tale land called Ingary, whose inhabitants know nothing about our world. Howl himself is an actual wizard, but comes from our world. And Sophie, the main character, barges into the castle one day when she has suddenly been turned ninety years old by a passing witch who feels threatened by Sophie’s accidentally magical hats.

            It’s complicated, even more so than anyone in the story knows. And the castle is the heart of it all. The wizard, Howl, keeps the castle moving to avoid a witch who is after him. Of all the gothic houses I’ve read so far, nobody else has had one that could actually physically escape; nor have they had exits into four different locations. In one particularly harrowing sequence, Howl and his assistant uproot those four exits and relocate the castle into Sophie’s old hat shop, fixing the door so that it now exits into different locations. It’s the least locatable building there can be.

            Location generally plays a crucial role in the gothic house, isolating our heroine. When girl meets house, it’s usually essential that she is cut off from everyone and everything else. Distance works, but also impassable forests, mountains, moats, and every variety of monster, up to and including dragons. The gothic house has to be hard to get to and hard to get away from. Now I’m wondering whether we ever see them in cities, but one immediately comes to mind, in Maureen Johnson’s Shades of London series. The terrifying antagonists of the later novels, Sid and Sadie, live (and occasionally die) in a big old house in London, with neighbors all around peering at them from behind the blinds. Drugged food and their cadre of creepy acolytes make the house impossible for the heroine to escape, though. So it’s the boundaries and limitations of access that make the house forbidding and confining, not just the physical surroundings, however atmospheric.

            Sophie suffers from a spell cast by the same witch who is after Howl, but she also suffers from narrative inevitability brought on by reading too many fairy tales. She knows she will never amount to anything because she’s only the oldest sister of three—it’s as purely narrative-based as that. That belief locks her down and makes her give up on any hope of a real life, even before the witch’s spell, so that she works herself to the bone making hats and accepts a narrow, dull life. When she is suddenly turned ninety years old, it’s merely the fulfillment of how she already feels and acts. But somehow that’s the impetus she needs to step outside that confining life and experience the rest of the world outside the hat shop. Even then, it’s only being caught out on a bare hillside with night approaching that makes Sophie brave enough to tackle the moving castle and insist that it stop for her, when she was terrified of walking to the bakery the day before.

            Sophie’s transformation, from helpless old woman to powerful young witch, is profoundly tied up with the castle itself, to the point where this novel has me questioning important traits in the modern gothic itself. How does the gothic house always give the impetus the characters need to move forward and through their essential changes? Gothic houses seem to be high pressure zones of transformation, like the proofers we had in a bakery where I worked. These were big warm rooms where racks of bread would be rolled in and left to rise, or proof the yeast. As I’m thinking back over every book I’ve read so far this semester (and in all of recorded time, to be honest!) I keep coming to that conclusion. The gothic house is where our characters go through hell and come out transformed. It’s a rite of passage made physical. Girl meets house indeed.

            Howl’s Moving Castle features all sorts of complicated ways that people are not wholly themselves but get put back together in the course of the story. A man has been transformed into a dog, who lives with Howl and Sophie and Michael, Howl’s assistant, as a dog. Another man has been divided up into pieces and scattered about, his skull left on Michael’s workbench, another part living in a scarecrow that keeps chasing the castle, and so on. Sophie’s sisters are pretending to be each other and her stepmother has remarried and reinvented herself completely. Howl himself is full of lies and wickedness until having Sophie living in the castle straightens him out.

            Is every narrative about transformation, or is it just gothics? I just read Northanger Abbey, and for all my irritation with the novel, it follows exactly this pattern, a heroine bumbling around idiotically until she gets to the gothic house, where she transforms into a better, truer version of herself. It will take more investigation to see whether this holds true across the genre.