“I Think I’m Gonna Die in This House:” Women, Belonging, and Domestic Space in Haunted House Narratives

Abstract

“Journeys end in lovers meeting,” declares Eleanor Vance in Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House, evoking Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night, yet in Gothic fiction arrival at the house rarely leads to comfort or union but toward a more unsettling encounter between one’s self and the spaces one inhabits. This theme is commonly attributed to the Female Gothic, a subgenre that focuses on women’s anxieties about domestic entrapment and the ways in which their fears and desires are expressed through supernatural interactions with interior spaces. My paper contributes to this field by arguing that domestic space, specifically that of haunted houses, provides the necessary setting for the psychological exploration of female protagonists in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959). My project brings together Gothic studies with spatial and feminist theory, drawing on Gaston Bachelard’s concept of home in The Poetics of Space and Virginia Woolf’s argument about the importance of personal space for women in her well-known essay A Room of One’s Own. I will proceed through close readings and textual analysis of the two novels, focusing on how specific places inside the house, such as bedrooms, libraries and corridors, shape women’s experiences. In The Haunting of Hill House, haunting takes the form of an increasingly close relationship between the female protagonist, Eleanor, and the house, which draws her to itself, inward. Eleanor’s imagination transforms the house from a hostile “place of despair” into a home imbued with a surprisingly intimate presence that responds to her emotional needs. In Rebecca, Manderley functions as a haunted domestic space that is already marked by and reproduces the presence of the absent Rebecca, the dead wife of the narrator’s husband. The house preserves and maintains a specific domestic order that the second Mrs. de Winter cannot alter or claim, which facilitates her failure to inhabit it on her own terms and forces her to define herself in relation to another woman. This leads me to the central finding of this paper, which is that both novels portray the house as a space where women’s identity is not secure or safe but constantly shaped and even threatened by external structures and influences. Journeys end in meeting, but not between lovers; they end in meeting between a woman and a house.