Hauntological Engagements With the Haunting House Motif in Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and Helen Oyeyemi's White Is for Witching

Date

2023-6-05

Author

Kolsal, Yağmur Su

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

352
views

655
downloads

Cite This

This thesis analyzes the construction of the motif of “the haunting house” and the characters’ responses to the haunting in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching (2009) in light of Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology. In doing a hauntological reading of these novels, thesis proposes that the haunting house motif can be read as a specter in the sense that Derrida introduces in his Specters of Marx (1993) and the characters’ responses to the spectral haunting house vary in their adherence to the hauntology’s main requirements for speaking with the specter. These readings have the purpose of illustrating that while The Haunting of Hill House portrays an unsuccessful communication with the haunting house as a specter, White Is for Witching features genuine hauntological engagement as an achievable possibility. By taking the novels’ timeframes and cultural background into consideration, this thesis proposes that “the haunting house” motif in Gothic literature has been used to convey greater concerns about the social issues of the past and the present in a way that aligns with the hauntology’s precepts.

Subject Keywords

gothic, hauntology, haunted house, Shirley Jackson, Helen Oyeyemi

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/104187

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis