“No Way Out”

The “haunted house formula” is a central component in every Female Gothic narrative from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Typically, it revolves around a heroine trapped in a gloomy mansion, seeking to escape a male villain. This trope, which covertly explores feminine anxieties such as domestic confinement and familial oppression, recurs multiple times in Shirley Jackson’s “house trilogy” as well, namely The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. However, as noted by many critics, while Female Gothic narratives usually conclude with the protagonist’s successful escape and her marriage to the male hero, in Jackson’s fiction, there is “no way out”. Her protagonists remain confined within the domestic space. This essay explores Jackson’s reappropriation of the haunted house trope as a symbol of the paranoia experienced by women in 1950s suburban America. The analysis begins by outlining the theme in traditional Female Gothic fiction, followed by an account of the sociohistorical context in which Jackson operated, without dismissing the significancy of her personal life experiences as well. Jackson’s “house trilogy” will then be examined, paying particular attention to the ways in which the haunted house formula is subverted to function not as an escape narrative, but as a metaphor for modern women’s inescapable confinement

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Literature · Psychoanalysis · Crime and Detective Fiction Studies · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Psychology

• Perils of the Night

  Eugenia C Delamotte•Perils of the night•1990

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• Shirley Jackson's American Gothic

  Darryl Hattenhauer•Shirley Jackson's American Gothic•2003

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• A New Companion to the Gothic

  Open Access•David Punter•New Companion to the Gothic•2012

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• The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction

  Open Access•E J Clery, Robert Miles et al.•The Cambridge companion to gothic…•2002

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• "The Establishment and Preservation of Female Power in Shirley Jackson's "We Have Always Lived in the Castle

  Lynette Carpenter•Frontiers A Journal of Women…•1984

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