Locked Doors and Fondled Doorknobs: Gothic Domesticity and Deviant Sexuality of 1950s America in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House

Abstract

Abstract: Shirley Jackson’s fame during her lifetime as a writer of both Gothic horror stories and domestic humor for mainstream women’s publications demonstrates her use of Gothic conventions to illuminate the quotidian horrors of women in the American midcentury. Her work uniquely foregrounds the nation’s preoccupation with normativity, deviance, and female sexuality in the 1950s. Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House (1959) resists the binaries of normative/deviant or normal/monstrous by demonstrating how perversity lies not in the Gothic sensuality of Hill House bur rather within narratives of female sexual license in mainstream American society. The sexual pathologies and liberations of Eleanor Vance position the house itself as the agent of transgressive female sexuality, exploring the liminal normativity/deviance of the erotics of touch to rewrite master narratives about the coalescing intimacy and authority upon which the family home’s stability depends.