Shirley Jackson's The Haunting Of Hill House

As men left America to fight overseas during World War II, the US government called upon women to assume the jobs that men had left behind, targeting married women who had never done anything outside domestic work (McEuen 3). Post-WWII, when men returned from war, women found that they were cast back into the domestic sphere, being expected to once again remain in the home and take care of household duties. However, gender roles had been tested and women did not want to give up their newfound independence and return to being confined to the domestic sphere. Some feared that independent women would erode the traditional family structure and believed that the it was necessary to support the US in the event of an atomic bomb attack (May 89). For

Like other novels of the female gothic, The Haunting of Hill House explores American women’s “ambivalent relationship to contemporary domestic ideology” (Davison 48). During 1950s, when the novel was written, the contemporary domestic ideology held that women should only be concerned with “her husband, her children, [and] her home” (Friedan 18). Considering the rapid change post-WWII for many American women from independence to a subordinate role in the domestic sphere, it is easy to recognize why so many women felt unfulfilled and unsatisfied, despite adhering to domestic ideology of the time period, as Jackson would explain in the

Theodora is the antithesis of Eleanor: she is lively, outgoing, confident, and most importantly, independent. Theodora’s character provides an important contrast to draw upon in comparison to Eleanor and the other characters in the novel. Whereas Eleanor had been trapped in domesticity by her family for the better part of her adult life, Theodora has no obligations or family mentioned in the novel, even being the only character without a last name. As Betty Friedan noted in The Feminine Mystique, girls in the 1950s were dating as young as 12 or 13 years old, a result of the pressure to conform to the contemporary domestic ideology (Friedan 16). Addressing this, Jackson uses Theodora to exemplify how being an independent woman free of family obligations is not a bad thing, as many women feared, but could actually be a more fulfilling lifestyle as opposed to that of a woman trapped in domesticity, restricted by the family (Friedan 31). Theodora is crucial not only to making a comparison with Eleanor, but the rest of the characters in the novel as well. In the novel, all characters are controlled one way or another by their family. Through Theodora, as the only character with no family, Jackson highlights the effects of conforming to the traditional family structure which takes away their autonomy and