Women’s “Domestic” Ghost Stories: A Study of Three Texts

Abstract

From the late 19th century onwards women have made significant contribution to the genre of "domestic" ghost story, a Ghotic mode that has served as the most suitable vehicle for women to express their fears within the patriarchal society of their time. Women found themselves deprived of their individuality, excluded from the public sphere, and confined to their homes and domestic duties. Metaphors of imprisionment have been widely used in this genre to depict what happens 'when you force all women, by denying them civil and political rights, to remain immured in their families groping in the dark' (M. Wollstonecraft, 1792). Deprived of their identity and possessions within marriage and pressured into motherhood, women had to address their main struggles by means of alternative and metaphorical strategies. Female writers started to project ghosts and haunting figures in their stories to indirectly denounce how they were being oppressed, disempowered and silenced. This dissertation aims to explore the social and historical context of the late 19th and early 20th centuries from a gender perspective, and to study how women expressed their most intimate anxieties by means of ghost story. The main objective is to analyse how these circumstances, along with the characteristics of the genre, are reflected in the three stories selected, "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Shadowy Thrid" (1916) by Ellen Glasgow and "The Shadow Thrid" (1923) by Elizabeth Bowen. In these stories, the haunting of a woman by a ghostly figure is the central trope, serving as the metaphor that unveils their hidden fears and the ways in which patriarchal authorities exerted control over women. The ghost serves as the catalyst that deploys women's psychological distress, a consequence of the immense challenges of motherhood and marriage that they, like many other women of their time, had to endure