The Demon Behind the Angel in the House: An Analytical Comparison Between Shirley Jackson’s Domestic Writings and Her Gothic/Horror Fiction

As pointed out by Ellen Moers (1976), women-authored Gothic works are often the expression of anxieties over the domestic sphere. Although Moers’ approach embraced especially eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts, it might still hold true for twentieth-century women-authored Gothic works: a crucial trope of this type of literature is, for instance, the haunted house, which permeates Shirley Jackson’s production. Her narratives often revolve around anti-heroines trapped in gloomy mansions, trying to escape the aggressive demands of a patriarchal society: suffice it to think of some of her most famous works, such as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Therefore, it is particularly significant how Jackson also wrote plenty of humoristic sketches based on her own domestic daily life as a wife and mother: despite their cheerful tone, these anecdotal recollections feature some of the themes explored in her more disturbing fiction. In this paper, I will try and account for these two narratological trends, by discussing excerpts of Jackson’s domestic writings and comparing them with pieces of her fiction. My hope is to show how these apparently irreconcilable tendencies are actually a perfect example of the painful duality inherent to “Female Gothic”.