“Help Eleanor Come Home”: Monstrous Maternity in Shirley Jackson’sThe Haunting of Hill House

Abstract

This article argues that Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) employs Freudian theories of maternity to interrogate the subject position of mother within psychoanalysis itself. In the context of a mid-twentieth-century popularization of psychoanalysis, maternity in Hill House challenges the heteronormative foundations of a post-Freudian America.