Date of Award
5-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
College/School
College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Department/Program
English
Thesis Sponsor/Dissertation Chair/Project Chair
Monika Elbert
Committee Member
Jonathan Greenberg
Committee Member
Jeffrey Gonzalez
Abstract
Shirley Jackson is a name that may be known by most people for her famous short story “The Lottery,” which details a brutal townwide tradition in an otherwise “normal” midcentury American town. While “The Lottery” only scratches the surface of Jackson’s work, it accurately portrays a larger picture of her oeuvre. Jackson often writes about midcentury suburbia, and the underlying feelings of alienation and confinement that come with it, particularly for women, wives, and mothers. Her final two novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle brings those underlying feelings to the foreground, as she writes about two women—Hill House’s Eleanor and Castle’s Merricat—who not only cannot meet domestic expectations, but actively try to remain children to avoid the seemingly inevitable next step in their lives (the fulfillment of the maternal role). In these stories, Jackson’s protagonists are alienated not only from others, but specifically from other women, suggesting that domestic and societal expectations alienate all women from each other. This is amplified for Eleanor and Merricat—whose childlike natures already isolates them—leading them to have destructive behaviors that hurt both themselves and others. Jackson’s female characters attempt to escape the inescapable: the female body and the expectation to therefore be a maternal body. But these attempts are fruitless, and they are left with two options: to either be living ghosts in the domestic house, or to die.
File Format
Recommended Citation
Mautone, Nicole, ""Whatever Walked There, Walked Alone": Inescapable Domesticity in Shirley Jackson's Gothic" (2026). Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects. 1677.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/etd/1677