The Uncanny Tapestry of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lovely House”

Abstract

The essay discusses Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lovely House” (1952), in which uncanny architecture and supernatural elements combine to express the writer’s concerns about very real horrors of domesticity and femininity in mid-century America. In Jackson’s story it is the idealization of domesticity, its power to entrap as well as the idea of selfhood established by domestic fictions, which are the greatest sources of anxiety experienced by many American housewives, ideally immobilized and isolated in their lovely suburban homes. The paper argues that Jackson’s story not only continues the tradition of the Female Gothic but also complicates the idea of patriarchal domination by showing women as prisoners of domestic fictions woven by themselves.