“The Postmodern Family Gothic: Bodies of Narrative”, analyzes postmodern novels that use feminist-gothic narrative strategies to disrupt ideologies of family. Within the context of late twentieth and ...early twenty-first century laments over the “broken” family, I argue that ideological manifestations of family security, the home and financial stability in particular, actually damage family health from the inside out. Novels such as Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Jeffery Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides all demonstrate how family dysfunction is temporal, specifically because in attempting to conform to the ideal Family, who lives in a house and is economically stable, families disavow past trauma, which only comes to haunt the structures of security. Using the sociological and historical work of authors such as Judith Stacey and Susan Faludi, I argue that the popular conception of the “ideal” family is always founded on some rejection of trauma that continues to haunt families through bodily traces, as seen in novels such as Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop and Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love. Healing from trauma requires a disruption, not to family, but rather to the narrative structures that promise freedom from past pain. Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters, and Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible present healing from past family trauma as a commitment to flexible storytelling, metaphorized in the family road trip and performed in family spiritual ritual. Gothic tropes such as haunting, monstrosity, and the grotesque are used to manifest the significance of the past and become less traumatizing as the family narrative shifts from linear to constellatory. The disruption to family narrative also makes for an uncanny reading experience as the forms of the novels unsettle linearity and exposition, ultimately incorporating the reader into the literary drama. In drawing together cultural histories of objects, like the car and the home, economic theories of family, and feminist critiques of readership and the body, I challenge the typical focus on postmodern literature’s emphasis on the individual and abstraction.
The American literary tradition and especially the gothic tradition are founded upon the violence inherent to the founding and expansion of the United States. This thesis attempts to locate an ...appropriation of the largely male-authored violence of the nineteenth century into postwar feminist works, namely Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque and Bellefleur by Joyce Carol Oates and Hangsaman and We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. Grappling with women's issues such as pregnancy (both planned and unplanned) and childbirth, domestic violence, and sexual abuse, these works resituate violence into a feminist framework, illuminating the ways in which women can resist victimization, and overpower patriarchal oppression in the domestic space (both literal and ideological).
Hague explores subjectivity in the works of Shirley Jackson, whose work dramatizes the concerns and fears of the 1950s. Jackson's unveiling of this era's dark corners is not limited to one gender, ...for her apocalyptic consciousness, sinister children, and scathing portraits of nuclear families and their suburban environments, her depiction of a quotidian and predictable world that can suddenly metamorphose into the terrifying and the bizzare, reveal her character's reactions to a culture of repression, containment, and paranoia.
Tale and myth have a long history of reinforcing, commenting on, and often subverting the ideologies at work in the society where the stories are being told. This research explores the ways three ...American novels, Eudora Welty’s The Robber Bridegroom, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, all incorporate variants of the fairytale Bluebeard: a fairytale which centers on domestic trauma. All three novels also re-vocalize the myth of Demeter and Persephone, and this re-vocalization serves to empower the female characters and subvert the dominant patriarchal paradigm. The subversion of white masculine ideology in these novels reflects a changing social structure during the thirty year span in which these three novels were published. Looking at the texts holistically while considering the ways the tale and myth interweave in each offers insight into the way these social changes for women were being narrated and explored. The question of interpretation is central to this research, which explores both feminine and masculine lenses in story. Particularly the ways a woman’s sexual agency, decision not to marry, or even inability to escape are narrated and interpreted by the community around her. These fictional communities and the issues explored in the realm of tale reflect the larger society and ideological currents surrounding novels themselves. All three novels incorporate the Bluebeard tale, reject the masculine reading of women in that tale, and work to subvert not just patriarchal ideology but the flat literary trope and ways of writing and reading women.
Neighbor Plots: The Ethics of Strangeness in the Modern Gothic argues that the figure of neighbor, and the attendant concept of neighbor-love, occupies a space in the Gothic fiction of Robert Louis ...Stevenson and Shirley Jackson. Because these authors use the Gothic mode for rather un-Gothic effects, their fiction not only reveals the instability of the traditional dichotomy of self and other, but it also plots the potential site of a modern ethics of neighborliness. In order to envision what such a neighbor praxis might look like, I read Stevenson’s and Jackson’s Gothic narratives alongside the ethical philosophies of modern thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, and Luce Irigaray.In the first section of this dissertation, I enlist “Thrawn Janet” (1881), “The Body Snatcher” (1884), and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) to argue that Stevenson’s innovative Gothic fiction can be viewed as a testing ground for the central thesis he presents in Lay Morals, an unfinished treatise on ethics he drafted in the late 1870s—namely, that an ethical relation to the other begins by discerning the voice of the neighbor within. With each successive neighbor plot, Stevenson introduces an increasingly isolated and violently self-serving protagonist, and ultimately, Stevenson’s fiction suggests that ethical subjectivity can only be initiated by looking out.In Shirley Jackson’s Gothic neighbor plots, the exclusionary practices of what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the operative community endanger the potential of a neighbor praxis from the very start. From the previously unpublished short story “The Man in the Woods” (2014) to The Road Through the Wall (1948) and The Lottery or, The Adventure of James Harris (1949), Jackson is engaged in interrupting the myth of community. In We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), Jackson’s final completed novel, she offers the story of two sisters who have the audacity to dwell in a radical alternative, and it is on the threshold of Merricat and Constance’s “castle” that the possibility of neighbor-love and an ethics of hospitality begin to emerge.
Madness as a Way of Life examines T.V. Reed's concept of politerature as a means to read fiction with a mind towards its utilization in social justice movements for the mentally ill. Through the lens ...of the Freudian uncanny, Johan Galtung's three-tiered systems of violence, and Gaston Bachelard's conception of spatiality, this dissertation examines four novels as case studies for a new way of reading the literature of madness. Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House unveils the accusation of female madness that lay at the heart of a woman's dissatisfaction with domestic space in the 1950s, while Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island offers a more complicated illustration of both post-traumatic stress syndrome and post-partum depression. Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain and Curtis White's America Magic Mountain challenge our socially-accepted dichotomy of reason and madness whereby their antagonists give up success in favor of isolation and illness. While these texts span chronology and geography, each can be read in a way that allows us to become more empathetic to the mentally ill and reduce stigma in order to effect change. This project begins with an introduction to several social justice movements for the mentally ill, as well as a summary of the movement over time. The case studies that follow illustrate how the uncanny and the spatial may effect the psyche and how forms of direct, structural, and cultural violence work together in order to create madness where it may not have existed at all or where it is considered a detriment when it is merely another way of living. The madhouses in the texts examined herein, and the novels from which they come, offer a way to teach us how to enact change on behalf of a community who still suffers from discrimination today.
This thesis uses the Defense of Marriage Act as a lens through which to view the formation and disruption of gay and lesbian identity in three texts: Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick series, Patricia ...Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. Beyond its immediate legal effects, the Act formulates a code of estoppel that prevents the formation of a gay or lesbian legal subject. The comparison of these texts to the Act reveals that they share a common aesthetic: each of these texts depicts the gay or lesbian as an individual that struggles but fails to achieve an identity and treats this paradox as its chief marker. The comparison also shows how these writers all treat gender and sexuality as contingent, a feature especially surprising in Alger's texts. Lastly, the comparison illuminates the strategies Highsmith and Jackson use to represent same-sex desire.
This article reports and discusses the findings of an initial inquiry into secondary school students' comprehension strategy use during small‐group, peer‐led discussions of literary text. One ...classroom of ninth‐grade English students in the midwestern United States participated in the inquiry. Data consisted of the verbatim transcripts of four small groups of students in the class who engaged in discussions. Two research questions were explored:
1
Is there evidence of comprehension strategy use during students' small‐group, peer‐led discussions of text?
2
If so, what is the nature of students' comprehension strategy use?
The transcripts were coded with an instrument derived from research‐validated comprehension strategies cited in the literature. The data revealed evidence of students' use of multiple comprehension strategies.
My dissertation examines the afterlife of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic aesthetics in twentieth and twenty-first century texts by women. Through close readings and attention to aesthetics ...and conventions that govern the Gothic, I excavate connections across nation, race, and historical period to engage critically with Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, 1959; Angela Carter’s “The Lady of the House of Love,” 1979; Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night, 1996; and Toni Morrison’s Love, 2003. These authors consciously employ such aesthetics to highlight and critique the power of patriarchy and imperialism, the continued exclusion of others and othered ways of knowing, loving, and being, and the consequences of oppressing, ignoring, or rebuking these peoples, realities, and systems of meaning. Such injustices bear evidence to the effects of transatlantic commerce fueled by the slave trade and the appropriation and conquering of lands and peoples that still exert a powerful oppressive force over contemporary era peoples, especially women and social minorities. This oppression occurs in ways similar to the perils endured by early Gothic characters. Yet, that subjugating power is not all-consuming. Despite the cruelty and violence, trampled aspirations, and tragic finales prevalent in Gothic narratives, another reality remains: women authors still use the Gothic form to push for a reality where women and other minorities can be treated fairly and achieve a state of being that is the result of their own fashioning. The Gothic is therefore irrevocably chained to issues of gender and sexuality. Jackson, Carter, Mootoo, and Morrison are a diverse group of writers. Though the texts I examine are related thematically as they all bear evidence of Gothic conventions, the authors’ styles, socio-historical backgrounds, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and professional affiliations are relatively disparate. Yet, taken together, their texts attest to the afterlife of the Gothic—the persistence of the genre’s defining characteristics into our contemporary period. These authors engage purposefully with less-acknowledged, non-rational truths that disrupt the grand narrative of positivism and create space for transformation. Finally, my comparative approach situates these authors within transnational, transhistorical, and intercultural contexts and opens up new ways of reading their texts.
According to one of her biographers, Judy Oppenheimer, Jackson's later works clearly demonstrate that she was no feminist: "She had no interest in other women's problems ... Murphy explains that one ...of the reasons why Jackson's work has been ignored by critics for so long is precisely because Jackson is so difficult to categorise - she appealed to both literary and popular audiences and apparently was simultaneously both proto- and anti-feminist. ...it is likely that the academic neglect of her work arose from the fact that, for critics looking to write smooth narratives of literary history, she was an awkward figure to assimilate.
