The Gothic Genre In Shirley Jackson's The Haunting Of Hill House

335 Words2 Pages
The Gothic genre was often used to respond to trauma, social anxieties and dominant cultural issues. Social anxieties and fears can be highlighted in Gothic texts through the portrayal of psychological trauma as a result of social oppression, social conformities and contemporary social issues. The Gothic suggests that psychological trauma is often a result of social anxieties as ‘Psychoanalysis and the Gothic are cognate historical strands made up of the same human hopes and anxieties and then woven into particular patterns by the movement of sociocultural change’ (Punter, 2015, 309). In the novel The Haunting of Hill House, author Shirley Jackson ‘reconfigured the stock devices and settings of Gothic form in order to skilfully reflect