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House of Horrors: Shirley Jackson and the Perils of the Domestic in American Literature, 1945-1965.

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	House of Horrors: Shirley Jackson and the Perils of the Domestic in American Literature, 1945-1965./
Author:	DeMichiel, AnnMarie.
Published:	Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, : 2024,
Description:	261 p.
Notes:	Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 85-11, Section: A.
Contained By:	Dissertations Abstracts International85-11A.
Subject:	American literature. -
Online resource:	https://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=30994784
ISBN:	9798382718255

House of Horrors: Shirley Jackson and the Perils of the Domestic in American Literature, 1945-1965.
DeMichiel, AnnMarie.

House of Horrors: Shirley Jackson and the Perils of the Domestic in American Literature, 1945-1965. - Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2024 - 261 p.

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 85-11, Section: A.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Rhode Island, 2024.

Recent years have seen a slight rise in academic and popular interest in the works of author Shirley Jackson (1916-1965). Jackson's novella The Haunting of Hill House (1959) was adapted into a Netflix series in 2018, while Ruth Franklin's 2016 biography of Jackson brought previously unknown or overlooked details of Jackson's life to the attention of scholars and general readers alike. Scholarly treatments of Jackson's work are steadily increasing, and the focus of such treatments remains consistent and somewhat narrow: interpretations include attention to homosocial and possible homosexual relationships in Jackson's fiction; her fiction's placement in the lineage of gothic literature; feminism and female power (or lack thereof); alienation and othering; and magical or supernatural elements. All of these elements appear in Jackson's work, and they indeed provide seemingly endless fodder for scholarly discussion; however, not enough attention has been paid to the complex relationship between Jackson's female characters and the domestic spaces they inhabit, and even less to the way those relationships are constructed through the domestic spaces themselves and the personal objects and mementos therein.This dissertation explores the functions and meanings of domesticity and domestic spaces in Shirley Jackson's fiction. Jackson is an author whose work both interrogates and inscribes the conditions and concerns of the post-WWII era in America, with special attention to the position of middle-class wives and mothers. Her domestic memoirs, Life Among the Savages (1952) and Raising Demons (1957) present a caricature of the harried-yet-dedicated suburban New England housewife trying to keep her husband happy, her children fed, and her home clean all while maintaining her own sanity. In this dissertation I argue that domesticity is a complex and difficult concept in Jackson's fiction, and domesticity itself is represented through the materiality of the house or dwelling; for Jackson, a domestic space may represent a safe refuge from a hostile world, a site of isolation and alienation, and a reflection of a character's identity-often, all of these things are true simultaneously. This engagement with domesticity draws upon concepts and concerns expressed in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963), and Jackson's fiction has an undeniably feminist slant; however, Jackson never explicitly aligned herself or her work with the burgeoning second-wave feminist movement in the United States.Instead, Jackson's fiction (and her memoirs, although this dissertation attends specifically to the former) engages coyly with feminist issues, highlighting the overlap between issues of gender and manifestations of the gothic or the uncanny, a move that may at first feel jarring, but which builds naturally upon the literary history of domestic spaces; in literature, gothic, uncanny, or haunted spaces are often domestic spaces-personal and private rather than publicly accessible-and domestic spaces are frequently aligned with women's labor and women's identities. Jackson's domestic spaces are often twentieth-century variations on the traditional gothic castle, complete with labyrinthine spaces and metaphorical halls of mirrors. Two of the novellas discussed in this dissertation, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) and The Haunting of Hill House, engage quite directly with such gothic spaces, as female characters find themselves faced with the "ghosts" of those who inhabited their homes before they. The short stories discussed in this dissertation, "Like Mother Used to Make" (1949), "What a Thought" (1996, posthumous), "The Beautiful Stranger" (1968, posthumous), and "Trial by Combat" (1944), feature characters whose homes are made uncanny and unsettling by the violation of their boundaries-the safety afforded by a domestic space is compromised, resulting in the destabilization, disidentification, or "desubjectification" of those characters.Finally, it is my determination that said destabilization manifests not merely through the interactions of Jackson's characters, not merely through those characters' perceptions, but rather through their interactions with the material world, spaces, and items around them. In her fiction, Jackson draws readers' attention to the "stuff" that populates domestic spaces, not simply to create a more immersive story, but instead to demonstrate the power and importance of the material and materiality in her stories. This is shown explicitly I We Have Always Lived in the Castle, "Trial by Combat," "Like Mother Used to Make," and "What a Thought," and highlighted through the introduction of the spectral or immaterial in The Haunting of Hill House and "The Beautiful Stranger.".

ISBN: 9798382718255Subjects--Topical Terms:

523234
American literature.
Subjects--Index Terms:

Feminism

House of Horrors: Shirley Jackson and the Perils of the Domestic in American Literature, 1945-1965.
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502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Rhode Island, 2024.
520 $a Recent years have seen a slight rise in academic and popular interest in the works of author Shirley Jackson (1916-1965). Jackson's novella The Haunting of Hill House (1959) was adapted into a Netflix series in 2018, while Ruth Franklin's 2016 biography of Jackson brought previously unknown or overlooked details of Jackson's life to the attention of scholars and general readers alike. Scholarly treatments of Jackson's work are steadily increasing, and the focus of such treatments remains consistent and somewhat narrow: interpretations include attention to homosocial and possible homosexual relationships in Jackson's fiction; her fiction's placement in the lineage of gothic literature; feminism and female power (or lack thereof); alienation and othering; and magical or supernatural elements. All of these elements appear in Jackson's work, and they indeed provide seemingly endless fodder for scholarly discussion; however, not enough attention has been paid to the complex relationship between Jackson's female characters and the domestic spaces they inhabit, and even less to the way those relationships are constructed through the domestic spaces themselves and the personal objects and mementos therein.This dissertation explores the functions and meanings of domesticity and domestic spaces in Shirley Jackson's fiction. Jackson is an author whose work both interrogates and inscribes the conditions and concerns of the post-WWII era in America, with special attention to the position of middle-class wives and mothers. Her domestic memoirs, Life Among the Savages (1952) and Raising Demons (1957) present a caricature of the harried-yet-dedicated suburban New England housewife trying to keep her husband happy, her children fed, and her home clean all while maintaining her own sanity. In this dissertation I argue that domesticity is a complex and difficult concept in Jackson's fiction, and domesticity itself is represented through the materiality of the house or dwelling; for Jackson, a domestic space may represent a safe refuge from a hostile world, a site of isolation and alienation, and a reflection of a character's identity-often, all of these things are true simultaneously. This engagement with domesticity draws upon concepts and concerns expressed in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963), and Jackson's fiction has an undeniably feminist slant; however, Jackson never explicitly aligned herself or her work with the burgeoning second-wave feminist movement in the United States.Instead, Jackson's fiction (and her memoirs, although this dissertation attends specifically to the former) engages coyly with feminist issues, highlighting the overlap between issues of gender and manifestations of the gothic or the uncanny, a move that may at first feel jarring, but which builds naturally upon the literary history of domestic spaces; in literature, gothic, uncanny, or haunted spaces are often domestic spaces-personal and private rather than publicly accessible-and domestic spaces are frequently aligned with women's labor and women's identities. Jackson's domestic spaces are often twentieth-century variations on the traditional gothic castle, complete with labyrinthine spaces and metaphorical halls of mirrors. Two of the novellas discussed in this dissertation, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) and The Haunting of Hill House, engage quite directly with such gothic spaces, as female characters find themselves faced with the "ghosts" of those who inhabited their homes before they. The short stories discussed in this dissertation, "Like Mother Used to Make" (1949), "What a Thought" (1996, posthumous), "The Beautiful Stranger" (1968, posthumous), and "Trial by Combat" (1944), feature characters whose homes are made uncanny and unsettling by the violation of their boundaries-the safety afforded by a domestic space is compromised, resulting in the destabilization, disidentification, or "desubjectification" of those characters.Finally, it is my determination that said destabilization manifests not merely through the interactions of Jackson's characters, not merely through those characters' perceptions, but rather through their interactions with the material world, spaces, and items around them. In her fiction, Jackson draws readers' attention to the "stuff" that populates domestic spaces, not simply to create a more immersive story, but instead to demonstrate the power and importance of the material and materiality in her stories. This is shown explicitly I We Have Always Lived in the Castle, "Trial by Combat," "Like Mother Used to Make," and "What a Thought," and highlighted through the introduction of the spectral or immaterial in The Haunting of Hill House and "The Beautiful Stranger.".
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650 4 $a Womens studies. $3 2122688
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653 $a Gothic
653 $a New materialisms
653 $a Jackson, Shirley
653 $a Uncanny
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