Abstract:

This article analyzes Shirley Jackson’s last completed novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), in the context of the genre of the “Female Gothic,” a term coined by Ellen Moers in Literary Women (1976) to refer to literary works written by women in the Gothic mode since the eighteenth century. Incorporating fear and horror into the stories of alienated female characters in uncanny Gothic settings, “Female Gothic” has articulated women’s struggles to move outside the constrictive domestic sphere and gender codes. The Gothic motifs and symbols in Shirley Jackson’s novels blur the lines between the self and the Gothic landscape/setting, the past and the present, and the real and the fantastic, and can either bring about self-destruction or enable resistance to and subversion of socio-cultural limitations and undesirable outside realities. In Jackson’s last novel, the home as a Gothic symbol has a paradoxical quality, since it appears both as a symbol of domestic confinement and imprisonment and as a sort of refuge (from socio-cultural violence), in which female characters, as haunting “witches,” can disrupt patriarchy from within and establish a new order based on sisterhood.

Keywords: