Blowing Up the Nuclear Family: Shirley Jackson’s Queer Girls in Postwar US Culture
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12795/REN.2021.i25.02Keywords:
Afro-Latina, racism, gender, body, slam poetry, sexual desire, embodied discourse, self-representationAbstract
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 the national identity are configured around the ideal of a safe domestic space in US postwar culture, the paper explores cultural anxieties about teenage girls who refuse to conform to normative femininity, following Lee Edelman’s theory of the Child as the future of the nation (2004). 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 of the nation.
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Accepted 2020-12-11
Published 2021-03-05
