Date of Award
12-15-2014
Document Type
Open Access Thesis
Department
English Language and Literatures
First Advisor
Brian Glavey
Abstract
In my thesis, I concentrate on Shirley Jackson, her novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and women’s place in post-World War II American society. To start, I introduce Jackson and her role in literary history, the housewife writer in the 1950s and 60s, and magazine culture. Then I move to a historical perspective of the 1950s and propaganda during the atomic war era. I focus my attention on how government literature worked to contain women in the home and control sexuality and gender roles. Following my discussion of domesticity, I concentrate on the history of the Gothic novel and how the genre’s components act as to define femininity and women in the home. In the final chapter, I offer an interpretive reading of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I investigate the relationship between gender and the home – both the domestic relationship and the body's relationship to the physical structure. I also examine how the protagonist manipulates the home and separation of spheres in order to express herself and develop a new domestic order without male figures at the helm or even in the realm of the house.
Rights
© 2014, Leslie Dennis
Recommended Citation
Dennis, L.(2014). Living on the Moon: Women, Home Making, and the House after World War II in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. (Master's thesis). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/3039