This thesis examines the representation of domesticity in the psychological and physical lives of women in literature. The interpretive question of the argument asks, how does the haunting of ...domesticity affect and create meaning in the lives of female characters? Domesticity is an idea that has been used to as a means of submission by a domineering other. The idea of domesticity is a catalyst that is used to help Hulga Hopewell from Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” and Eleanor Vance from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House to break away from oppressive influences; by examining these feminist narratives we will see how two women attempt to survive the physical and mental hauntings of domesticity and its effects on their minds and bodies as they try to preserve the self. Hulga and Eleanor are women who are not following the expectations of family nor society, as they choose to take different paths in life, they face judgment and criticism for not following societal norms. These women will struggle against the domesticity that has been passed down for generations through their mothers. Hulga is forced to move back home, where she tries everything to avoid her mother’s brand of domesticity, and Eleanor runs away trying to escape the bonds of domesticity. Both women come face to face with their deepest fears when they confront this haunting; and ultimately will be physically and mentally traumatized.
Silver comments on Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Jackson's work is often described as gothic or psychological horror, and though it can be argued that categories are instances ...of people's collective need to reduce culture to its barest schematics, these genre assignments are apt--if one assumes that filaments of dread are woven into the fabric of even the happiest lives. The book opens with a stunning bit of writing, which establishes Jackson's tone and sets the reader immediately off-balance.
The Safety of Home Talbird, John Duncan
The Literary review (Teaneck),
06/2014, Letnik:
57, Številka:
3
Journal Article, Magazine Article
"Nothing wrong," says the husband near the end of Shirley Jackson's story "Paranoia." But like the couples in David Lynch's Lost Highway or Michael Haneke's Cache, who keep being delivered ...surveillance VHSs-tapes in which, first their homes and then they themselves are the subject--his sneaking suspicions have real consequences. He thinks he's in the comfort of his own home at the end of a nightmarish evening, one where everyone seems to be out to get him, and his wife locks him in the living room. Analyzing the movie, and the discussing the dread in home invasions, Talbird comments that like any narrative artist who understands the nature of dread, Jackson knows how to use the negative space outside the frame of the story.
El Clima en Casas Norteñas may seem to have overly complex structure and an ambitious theoretical framework, but that is the text demands. The text that I present in the following pages is a first ...approach at this novel, which in subsequent drafts will be streamlined thematically through more rigorous research and polished aesthetically as I continue to grow and mature as a writer with the tools given to me in this graduate program. In the story of the H family I found a way to exercise a narrative that has concerned me for as long as I have had memory, which is the fluidity of identity in a place that sits on the edge of two nations: regional politics at the mercy of geopolitical caprices that never considers them. This novel has allowed me to explore a medium in way that I can exploit characteristics that are exclusive to the modern novel, proving (if at the very least only to myself) the validity of the genre in contemporary discourse. The project I present here is a living and moving text which in its fluidity implies a strong level of commitment that I am willing to take on. I take on this responsibility not only because of the challenge it demands of me as a writer but also because of the ethical challenge the project requires from me as a citizen of the region. Thinking globally while acting locally isn’t much of a choice for those of us who inhabit the US-Mexico borderlands and yet the region is often misunderstood as a simple byproduct of its context. The ultimate goal of this project is to assert a regional identity not only for its own sake but for the sake of the discourse of which it is usually left out, using a medium that assures its permanence within that discourse.
One of the most prominent tropes in Shirley Jackson‘s work is that of the ‘demon lover’ who seduces a woman from her home with promises of riches and ultimately destroys her. Jackson uses the demon ...lover to figure a jouissance excluded by the Symbolic order, which, because of its repression, returns with a destructive force. Jackson‘s demon lover tales, including ‘The Daemon Lover’, ‘The Beautiful Stranger’, and ‘The Tooth’, narrate a womans gradual realization of her subjection to a demonic male figure whose claim on her dispossesses her of both home and self. Women in these stories are offered an impossible choice: either conform to a passive position within rigidly defined gender roles or be abjected into a permanent state of anxiety, insecurity, and even madness outside of the Symbolic order. Jackson‘s second novel Hangsaman (1951), more than any other of Jacksons works, attempts to chart a path for feminine jouissance by imagining writing as a kind of witchcraft.
In my thesis, I concentrate on Shirley Jackson, her novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and women's place in post-World War II American society. To start, I introduce Jackson and her role in ...literary history, the housewife writer in the 1950s and 60s, and magazine culture. Then I move to a historical perspective of the 1950s and propaganda during the atomic war era. I focus my attention on how government literature worked to contain women in the home and control sexuality and gender roles. Following my discussion of domesticity, I concentrate on the history of the Gothic novel and how the genre's components act as to define femininity and women in the home. In the final chapter, I offer an interpretive reading of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I investigate the relationship between gender and the home – both the domestic relationship and the body's relationship to the physical structure. I also examine how the protagonist manipulates the home and separation of spheres in order to express herself and develop a new domestic order without male figures at the helm or even in the realm of the house.
By having no last name, Tony is thereby somewhat outside, not merely of the gender system but also the society. ...her configuration in society presents possibilities outside of gender constructions. ...Theo has no last name: "I'm Theodora. ...Theo is open and concrete, not veiled and ghostly.\n When hailed by interpellation during her early subject formation, Eleanor misrecognised her place in ideology, and the ghostly voice of the disembodied child reminds her of that fact. ...the archaeology of the subject in The Haunting of Hill House recalls the archaeology of the subject in The Bird's Nest, the protagonist of which is a multiple personality who has misheard the call multiple times.
This study examines the psyches of the female protagonists from three of Shirley Jackson's Gothic novels: Eleanor Vance in The Haunting of Hill House, Aunt Fanny Halloran in The Sundial, and Merricat ...Blackwood in We Have Always Lived in the Castle. A psychoanalytic and feminist reading is applied to the texts to elucidate the characters' rejection of the Symbolic Order and regression to the Imaginary Order, and Lacan's theories of the Desire of the Mother and objet petit a are also applied to the texts to further delineate this regression. Julia Kristeva's work regarding the lost object of the mother is drawn upon as well in exploring the characters' desires for their mothers underscoring their position within the Imaginary. Finally, the protagonists' utilization of stories in establishing psychosocial boundaries is argued as an additional means by which these women usher themselves into fantasies removed from reality.
Over the past few decades, people have come to understand that amputee victims of war can fall victim to such an extreme state of depression that it renders them all but helpless to confront their ...wartime demons. A version of that illness is also at the heart of Shirley Jackson's and Tony Morrison's works. It is not a missing limb that those authors explore to find meaning. Instead, their focus is on a part of the body that is rather small in size and thus, one might assume, would be the least of the body parts that could render any significant pronouncements about the human condition. Jackson's story was published in 1949, Morrison's novel in 1970, and at first glance, it seems that the two works have not very much in common, except that they each have a character who loses a tooth. Here, Saunders discusses Shirley Jackson's "The Tooth" and Toni Morisson's "The Bluest Eye."
Letters to author Shirley Jackson from fans of her domestic-humor literature offer important new evidence about the complexities and contradictions of gender norms in the post-World War II era. They ...bolster scholarship that acknowledges the power of postwar domestic and gender ideology, but also locates the sites where women, however tentatively, questioned the limitations of Betty Friedan's feminine mystique. This article demonstrates that women read such domestic-humor literature as Jackson's in contradictory ways. On the one hand, these letters support, at least in part, Friedan's assertion that the so-called housewife writer and domestic-humor literature reinforced domestic gender norms. On the other hand, these letters also demonstrate that the figure of the housewife writer represented a very specific strategic response to the rigid gender norms of the feminine mystique. The housewife writer blurred and subverted the line between the work of the "housewife" and that of the writer. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
