Abstract
Mary Wilkins Freeman and Shirley Jackson, though writing in different time periods, are both invested in recuperating domesticity and using their work to imagine what domesticity removed from the context of marriage and children can offer single women. Both authors assert that emplacement within domestic enclosure is essential to securing feminine subjectivity, but their haunted house narratives undermine that very emplacement. Freeman’s stories, “The Southwest Chamber” and “The Hall Bedroom” anticipate Jackson’s more well-known The Haunting of Hill House in the way that unruly domesticity threatens the female character’s emplacement. Their haunted house narratives show that neither Freeman nor Jackson, for all that they are subversive in some ways, wants to dissolve the traditional ideological constructs of domesticity; instead, they want these ideologies to work in the culturally promised patriarchal fashion. Reading their haunted house narratives together reveals the dynamics and tensions of a domesticity that is fluid, entangled, and vibrant and the feminist potential such sites engender, even if the characters and texts in question cannot fully realize that potential.
Highlights
IntroductionWriting nearly sixty years apart and in dramatically different cultural landscapes, Mary Wilkins
Writing nearly sixty years apart and in dramatically different cultural landscapes, Mary WilkinsFreeman and Shirley Jackson share the conviction that it is essential for women to be able to shape their own spaces, just as they are shaped by those spaces
Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), despite the progress made by First Wave feminism and -nascent Second Wave feminism, demonstrates that though material conditions may have changed, independent domesticity is no more available to her protagonist than it was for Freeman’s
Summary
Writing nearly sixty years apart and in dramatically different cultural landscapes, Mary Wilkins. Freeman and Jackson depart from this tradition by focusing their narratives on what haunts the spaces of spinsters, women who have potentially escaped some of the most restrictive aspects of patriarchy These two women writers recognize the limitations of environmental determinism and the separate spheres doctrine, but they try to harness tendrils of subversive potential within these concepts.. Freeman’s stories chart out the material barriers to home for single women, while Jackson’s novel suggests that the barriers to independent identity and domesticity are primarily interior and psychological For both of these authors, in other words, a blissful and independent domesticity is deeply desired, but their haunted house works demonstrate an anxiety that the promises of domesticity are false and that escaping heterosexual unions does not mean that one can escape the oppressiveness of patriarchy. Reading their haunted house narratives together reveals the dynamics and tensions of this domesticity and the feminist potential such sites engender, even if the characters in question cannot fully realize that potential.
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