Browsing by Subject "British Literature"
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Item Towards a Hauntology of the "Not Sane" House: Domesticity as "Différance" in Female Gothic Literature(2023-04) Lacy, MadisonThis thesis investigates the recurrence of haunted houses in nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first-century Female Gothic literature. My guiding question is, why do female authors and, by proxy, their female protagonists keep returning to the haunted house-- a famous site of patriarchal oppression? This question is addressed over three chapters: the first is about Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca, the second is about Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper and Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, and the final chapter is about Daisy Johnson's Sisters. In all three chapters, I apply a deconstructive framework of my own creation, which incorporates the theories of Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Hélène Cixous. Ultimately, I argue that that when read through my deconstructive framework, these female-authored haunted houses provided alternative routes to meaning beneath the patriarchal trappings of the home. Thus, the Female Gothic haunted house is a crucial, centuries-old site in the hauntology of female writing, as it provides a concrete point of entry for female authors to continually unearth and deconstruct their own anxieties about femininity.