One of the profound things that adults forget too easily is how magical hiding places are. In the chapter on "Drawers, Chests and Wardrobes" in The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard reminds us of how to access that magic through image. "Wardrobes with their shelves, desks with their drawers, and chests with their false bottoms are veritable organs of the secret psychological life. Indeed without these 'objects' and a few others in equally high favor, our intimate life would lack a model of intimacy." Hence the immense, extraordinary fascination with C.S. Lewis's magical wardrobe ("Does there exist a single dreamer of words who does not respond to the word wardrobe?..."), or the tiny house of Mary Norton's borrowers, snugly hidden under the floorboards, or Mad-Eye Moody's trunk, which with a slight turn of the key reveals entirely different insides each time one opens it. There are mysterious suitcases, like the bag in which Mary Poppins keeps a roomful of furniture or the one in which Merlin holds a library, or Hermione Granger's beaded bag, with everything, from books of magic to an expandable tent, needed to defeat an evil wizard. In L.M. Montgomery's work, a blue hope chest, full of the memories of a dead love, floats, tantilizingly, through more than one story and novel, and the four little women close up their happy girlhoods in four little trunks, lined up in a row in the attic. One couldn't play at Little Red Riding Hood without a basket, its contents (whether they exist or not) covered by a kerchief, and genies do not appear out of nowhere, but from a lamp.
The magic of enclosed spaces is easily forgotten, or worse, too determinedly psychologized. King Louis XVI is notorious for his naive fascination with locks and the sexual metaphor that, according to legend, finally convinced him to consummate his marriage with Marie Antoinette. But the real magic of such spaces, especially if they can be locked, lies in a combination of their potential - "what good things are being kept in reserve in the locked wardrobe?" - and their secretiveness - "every secret has its little casket."
Though Bachelard was no feminist, it is no great leap to connect these insights with Virginia Woolf's, in A Room of One's Own, that the woman writer needs a room of her own that she can lock behind her, a space that no one can enter unless she permits, where she can dream up her books. There is something, however, even more profound here, beyond the intense power of poetry or the pragmatic needs of the artist. In illuminating the dark little corner of the mind where this truth gets forgotten, Bachelard reminds us that at the heart of any creative endeavor there is a core of secrecy, secrecy that radiates possibility, but dies quickly if too totally revealed. A wardrobe with its door taken off loses its magic, a lamp scrubbed and laid out to dry in pieces on a rack holds no genie. Total revelation, complete revelation, demystifies, but we are sadly deceived if we believe, we rational citizens of the world, that demystification enriches our lives. The childish schoolyard rhyme was utterly wrong: Secrets, secrets, are only fun, if they aren't shared with anyone.
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