Blowing Up the Nuclear Family: Shirley Jackson’s Queer Girls in Postwar US Culture
This paper intends to analyze the representation of girlhood as a liminal space in three novels by Shirley Jackson: The Bird’s Nest(1954), The Haunting of Hill House(1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle(1962). Bearing in mind how nuclear fears and national identity are configured around the...
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2021 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universidad de Sevilla (US) |
| Repositorio: | idUS. Depósito de Investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:idus.us.es:11441/151502 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://hdl.handle.net/11441/151502 https://doi.org/10.12795/REN.2021.i25.02 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Shirley Jackson Postwar US fiction Nuclear power Gender studies Girlhood studies Ficción estadounidense de la posguerra Energía nuclear Estudios de género Adolescencia femenina |
| Sumario: | This paper intends to analyze the representation of girlhood as a liminal space in three novels by Shirley Jackson: The Bird’s Nest(1954), The Haunting of Hill House(1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle(1962). Bearing in mind how nuclear fears and national identity are configured around the ideal of a safe domestic space in US postwar culture, the paper explores cultural anxieties aboutteenage girls who refuse to conform to normative femininity, following Teresa de Lauretis’s conception of women’s coming-of-age as “consenting to femininity” (1984).I will argue that Jackson criticizes the rigid possibilities for women at this time, and I will show how her representations of deviant femininity refuse and subvert the discourse ofthe nuclear familyand, therefore, of the nation. |
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