Publicación: Shirley Jackson's Female Gothic: Unveiling Invisible Systemic Violence
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2022-03-15
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Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 4.0 Internacional
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Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (España). Facultad de Filología
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This paper offers an analysis of eleven short stories by American writer Shirley Jackson through the concepts of symbolic and psychological violence and within the frame of the Female Gothic. The major purpose of the research is to uncover, explain and illustrate the type of violence which lies behind Jackson’s Female Gothic, a violence suffered by women because of their female condition and invisible due to its naturalisation and its dissolution under the spell of the feminine mystique. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence as the kind of surreptitious violence exercised through everyday actions permeates Jackson’s Female Gothic. This genre, which has been traditionally used to defy the hegemonic patriarchal discourse, is used by the author to highlight the terrifying about the ordinary and to expose the oppression felt by the middle-class woman of the 40s and 50s. With this aim, Jackson draws on classic conventions, which she adapts to the context of the post-war America, where women’s fulfilment was defined by the feminine mystique which Betty Friedan exposed years later. However, she also creates new ones, such as the trope of the demon lover, recurrent in Jackson’s fiction. This thesis analyses the use of the tropes and connects them to the notion of symbolic violence proposed by Bourdieu. In the works analysed, this violence has been recognised as mockery, belittling, disregard, denigration, silencing, complicity, condescension, value judgements, social pressure and even metaphorical killing through erasure. In addition to Bourdieu’s principles, Marie-France Hirigoyen’s paradigm about psychological violence have been employed to illustrate the inclusion of this type of violence in some of the tales. Finally, all the female characters are divided according to their reactions to masculine domination. In one group, the protagonists accept their role and the consequent passivity and submission. The alternative response is to live outside the symbolic order in a permanent distressful state. However, whichever path they take, all of them are portrayed by Jackson in a final state of alienation and anxiety.
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Shirley Jackson, Female Gothic, symbolic violence, masculine domination, demon lover, feminine mystique
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Facultades y escuelas::Facultad de Filología
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