“House on the Moon”: Female Isolation and Sisterhood in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)
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
Gothic, Female Gothic, Shirley Jackson, Alienation, Gothic Setting
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