Walled up alive: The Uncanny and Gender haunted spaces in Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House

Abstract

Gothic literature is frequented by haunted texts particularly outlining a ruinous spatial relationship between the female and the haunted spaces. Using Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House as primary text, this paper studies how haunting spaces, underlying anxieties, and prejudices against women manifest the dark atmosphere that threatens and eventually engulfs the female. Chapter by chapter, the spatial hauntings are coupled with supporting ideas of the uncanny. The article explores how the uncanny exhibits itself in a haunted space and how gender is connected to suppressed fears in women. The conclusion drawn lays emphasis on the recognition of reasons backing gendered hauntings and how women extract fears from their repressed past and embed them within domestic borders. Though the hauntings that happen around women are not untrue, this article argues how women are more likely to suffer from hauntings due to repressed traumas and fears.

Keywords

• gothic literature
• gendered hauntings
• uncanny
• feminism