Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of the Hill House" has been widely praised as one of the most frightening tales ever written. Schneider discusses Robert Wise's screen adaptation of the book.
The literary double, which dates back to the German romantic period, is mostly used for the materialization of our unconscious desires, needs, and wishes in the embodiment of a second, twin or ...multiple self. In classical works, the double shows itself as a symbol for the duality inherent in human nature, particularly the split between good and evil forces. On a broader level, it articulates the everlasting conflict between the repressed impulses of the individual and the social restrictions. Being the personification of all that is suppressed by the hegemonic value system, the double threatens the order at its foundation, and its subversive function allows the writer to show his/her discontent with the established norms.The use of the double figure as a manifestation of individual desires that stand in contradiction with social norms can also be detected in Shirley Jackson’s fiction. Like many of her contemporaries who suffered from being a woman writer in a patriarchal culture, Shirley Jackson illustrates the psychological and social barriers that are erected against women who are struggling for their individual freedom. The female doppelganger in Jackson’s three novels, The Bird’s Nest (1954), The Haunting of Hill House (1959), and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), emerges as a result of such struggle and serves as an outlet for women’s repressed desires, yearnings and needs. Confined to the realm of the unconscious, the marginalized female self in Jackson’s gothic fiction seeks liberation through the persona of the double. In the light of classical psychoanalysis, feminist literary criticism, and the theories of the double, this study aims to explore the significance of the female double figure in Shirley Jackson’s works.
Shirley Jackson's "The Sundial" comments upon contemporary social issues and delusions and explores their implications for the nation. Pascal examines the tenets of utopianism that are at work in the ...novel.
The ghost figure in twentieth-century fictions perfectly embodies the inclusion and normalization of formerly monstrous others that results from the loss of referents, questioning of boundaries, and ...destabilization of the self in the postmodern era. In an era of gross commodification, with all foundational truths under constant scrutiny, we adjust our self-constructs, unable to impose labels and meanings with certainty and, as recent depictions of spectres illustrate, supposed others become more of a daily presence. With identification and interpretation possible only in context, the beholder's hesitation is a space that contains the ghost. Dubiety regarding phantoms is lessening because uncertainty about former adversaries is increasingly giving way to an understanding of multiplicity in supposed others. This thesis shows the ghost figure shifting from fearful other to nearly human. Chapter One explains the theory behind this dissertation. Chapter Two discusses the simultaneous absence and presence of a ghost in both Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. Chapter Three explores how two 1970s novels, Stephen King's The Shining and Peter Straub's Ghost Story, cast ghosts as both independent and specular at once. Chapter Four focuses exclusively on Toni Morrison's Beloved in which the ghost is normalized almost instantaneously. Chapter Five analyzes Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride and Michael Ondaatje's Anil 's Ghost to show just how ubiquitous, elusive, and specular the ghost figure has become. Ultimately, the distinction between ghost and human has become so tenuous that the only productive response is to accept that the ghost and human, however different, are one.
Central to Jackson's originality is her capacity to turn ordinary situations into extraordinary crises and make these crises seem inevitable. This dissertation explores this aspect of Jackson's ...power, by considering the design, narrator, and protagonist of her texts from the perspective of Rhetorical and Reader-Response Criticism. Through this strategy this study hopes to see the source of Jackson's prototypical fictional situation and the private truths mythicized there. The introductory chapter, "The Search for Critical Questions," reviews Jackson's career. Part II of this chapter establishes the appropriateness of Rhetorical and Reader-Response criticism to the phenomenological approach of this study. Chapter II, "The Search for Design," looks at the organization of Jackson's work in eight short stories and traces the relevance of design to meaning. The stories are "The Dummy," "The Lottery," "The Tooth," "Pillar of Salt," "The Villager," "Like Mother Used to Make," "Colloquy," and "Seven Types of Ambiguity." Chapter III, "The Search for the Protagonist," considers The Haunting of Hill House. In Chapter IV, "The Search for the Narrator," an analysis of the reader's perceptions of the voice of Mary Katherine of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, is undertaken. Here the universality of the Jackson narrator and the interiorized nature of her point of view is defined. The search for design yields the conclusion that Jackson's fiction is inspired by the emotions of anxiety and fear. Second, the search for the Jackson narrator and protagonist leads to the conclusion that Jackson's major theme is not madness, but the familiar elements of female psychological experience: punishment, invisibility, disguise, and denial. These are the private truths she mythicizes in story. Finally, the search for the real author in the text, as opposed to the "implied author," leads to the conclusion that Jackson perceives herself in her narrator and in her feminized everyman protagonist, and that the intensity of this perception of self through fictional constructs constitutes the power which is the magic of her work.
By exploring two stories among them--"The Daemon Lover" and "Trial by Combat"--Chen unveils the embryonic lesbian desires and repairs the overlooked queer lacunae lurking within the familiar. "The ...Daemon Lover" has a simple plot. The unnamed protagonist--a woman in her thirties--wakes up on the day of her wedding, and drinks coffee while expecting the return of her fiance, James Harris. While Harris remains indistinct, the daemon lover in "Trial by Combat" has a more substantial presence. It centers on a cat-and-mouse game between two women living in a rooming house during WWII.
