{"title":"Poisonous Progress: Dark Fantasy, Violence, and the Fear of Change in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Espido Freire’s Irlanda","authors":"Heidi Backes","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2024.0186","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This article examines Spanish author Espido Freire’s Irlanda (1998) and American author Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) as parallel narratives that make full use of gothic transgression to highlight the trauma of progress in the lives of the young narrators. The teenage protagonists of both texts create realms of dark childhood fantasy for themselves and their sisters, using violence and witchcraft against their cousins (representatives of capitalistic, heteronormative values) as a reaction to their profound fear of change – a symptom of their liminal state between the progress that is expected of them and the stasis that they prefer. The pairing of these two novels showcases the gothic obsession with the subversion of linearity, demonstrating the trauma that results from societal insistence on continual growth according to traditional social and gender norms.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Gothic Studies","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2024.0186","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"N/A","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This article examines Spanish author Espido Freire’s Irlanda (1998) and American author Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) as parallel narratives that make full use of gothic transgression to highlight the trauma of progress in the lives of the young narrators. The teenage protagonists of both texts create realms of dark childhood fantasy for themselves and their sisters, using violence and witchcraft against their cousins (representatives of capitalistic, heteronormative values) as a reaction to their profound fear of change – a symptom of their liminal state between the progress that is expected of them and the stasis that they prefer. The pairing of these two novels showcases the gothic obsession with the subversion of linearity, demonstrating the trauma that results from societal insistence on continual growth according to traditional social and gender norms.
期刊介绍:
The official journal of the International Gothic Association considers the field of Gothic studies from the eighteenth century to the present day. Gothic Studies opens a forum for dialogue and cultural criticism, and provides a specialist journal for scholars working in a field which is today taught or researched in academic institutions around the globe. The journal invites contributions from scholars working within any period of the Gothic; interdisciplinary scholarship is especially welcome, as are studies of works across the range of media, beyond the written word.