Haunted houses, haunted selves – feminist readings of uncanny domesticity
The aesthetic phenomenon of the uncanny in literature and art is a spatial and gendered aesthetic concept, which is expressed in the spatial characteristics of a literary or photographic narrative. The intention of this thesis is to evaluate the entanglement of the uncanny, space, domesticity and femininity in the context of Gothic literature and photography. These four objects can only be read in their interplay with each other and how they each function as structural principles in the framework of Gothic fiction and photography. The literary texts, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892) and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lovely House” (1950) and The Haunting of Hill House (1959) as well as Francesca Woodman’s self-portraits that will be discussed further share one particular quality; they use the haunted house motif to express the protagonist’s psychological state by transferring mental hauntings onto the narrative’s spatial layer. The establishment of a connection between the concepts at hand, the uncanny, domesticity, spatiality and femininity, is the basis for the first half of the thesis. What follows is an overview of how domestic politics and gendered perceptions of and behaviors in spaces are expressed in the Gothic mode in particular. In the literary analysis two ways in which the Freudian uncanny constitutes itself in the haunted house narrative, first the house as the site of repetition and second the house as a stand-in for the maternal body, are examined. Drawing from Gernot Böhme’s and Martina Löw’s theoretic work on space and atmosphere the thesis focuses on the different aesthetic strategies that produce the uncanny atmosphere associated with the Gothic haunted house. The female subjects at the narratives’ center are in the ambiguous process of disappearing or becoming, this (dis)appearing act is facilitated by their haunted surroundings. In the case of the unnamed narrator in “Wall-Paper” her suppressed rage at her husband is mirrored in the strangled woman trapped inside the yellow wallpaper. Once she recognizes her doppelganger the union of her two selves takes place in the short story’s dramatic climax. In Shirley Jackson’s literary works the haunted houses, protagonists in themselves, entrap, transform, and ultimately devour their female daughter-victims. The haunted houses are symbols, means and places of the continuous tradition of female entrapment within the domestic sphere, be it as wives, mothers or daughters. In Francesca Woodman’s self-portraits the themes of creation/destruction and becoming/disappearing within the ruinous (post)domestic sphere are acted out by the fragmented and blurry female figure who intriguingly oscillates between self-empowerment and submission to destruction.
gothic, uncanny, haunted house, domesticity, separate spheres, doppelganger, haunting, space, Shirley Jackson, Francesca Woodman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Heimsuchung, unheimlich, Raum, Fotografie
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations