Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Josie Torres Barth (McGill University)

Ed. by Kerry Myler, Birmingham Newman University
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1962

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

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Recommended Reading

Shirley Jackson’s final completed novel,

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

(1962), builds on the Gothic conventions in her previous book,

The Haunting of Hill House

(1959). Like

Hill House

Castle

is a postwar variation on the Female Gothic, which is traditionally characterized by the following motifs: a woman's entrapment within domestic space; subjection to patriarchal authority; and the transgressive and dangerous attempts to subvert and escape such restriction. As is common in Gothic texts, the home metaphorically represents the psychology of its inhabitants and the state of their relationships. Through such tropes as families haunted by past secrets, conflicts between (masculine) reason and (feminine) intuition, obsession with boundaries, and (possibly) mad narrators, the Gothic…

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Citation: Torres Barth, Josie. "We Have Always Lived in the Castle". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 27 September 2017 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8707, accessed 27 November 2024.]

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Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

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