Please support the speaker if you can. You can choose the amount of the donation.

Mid-twentieth-century US writer Shirley Jackson has left behind a body of work that is

arguably dominated by the interior spaces through which her characters move – or fail to

move. Her female protagonists in particular often find themselves sheltered and caged

(often simultaneously) by anonymous urban apartments, cosy but isolated cottages,

rambling mansions, and cluttered family homes, as well as by department stores, dentists’

and psychiatrists’ offices, workspaces, and hotels.

As I outline in this talk, Jackson’s oeuvre is notably sensitive to the varied constraints and

demands on her protagonists’ behaviour and emotions in these spaces, where the socio-

cultural, the personal, and the architectural converge and indeed clash. The houses, offices,

and apartment buildings in her writing do more than simply frame the narrative action –

they actively shape it, in supernatural and more realist texts alike, but in ways that

consistently align with Gothic depictions of entrapment and illusory safety. While The

Haunting of Hill House is, for many, Jackson’s best-known exploration of the effect of

architectural wrongness and tyranny, this talk examines a range of novels and short stories

where the physical and ideological influence of the built environment takes centre stage,

including The Bird’s Nest, The Sundial, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, “The Lovely

House,” “A Visit,” and “The Story We Used to Tell.” In doing so, I also examine the ways in

which, far from being personal, psychological fantasies of deviance and maladjustment,

Jackson’s writings dramatise, navigate, and gothicise the wider social and cultural structures

that prevailed in mid-century America.

Bio: Dara Downey lectures in English in University College Dublin, Trinity College Dublin, and

Dublin City University. She is the author of American Women’s Ghost Stories in the Gilded

Age (2014), editor of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, and co-editor (with Ian

Kinane and Elizabeth Parker) of Landscapes of Liminality: Between Space and Place (2016).

She is currently working on a literary biography of Shirley Jackson for Palgrave Macmillan’s

Literary Lives series, and is also researching the depiction of domestic servants in American

Gothic.