Shirley Jackson's Posthumanist Ghosts: Revisiting Spectrality and Trauma in The Haunting of Hill House

Abstract:In her 1959 gothic tour de force, The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson engages spectrality as a means to grapple with the traumas inflicted by mid-century American ideologies that codify identity under the rubric of anthropocentric humanism. By inviting the reader into the consciousness of a traumatized subject, Jackson reveals how the mind vulnerable enough to be haunted opens itself to the ethical possibilities that become available when one abandons the human as a valid ontological construct. Jackson's traumatized subject is a ghostly consciousness that negotiates a mesh of bodies, historical moments, and social identities while retaining some semblance of individual personhood. Trapping this spectral trans-subject within an archive of ghost stories, Jackson stages the painful and oppressive interactions between the traumatized subject and the social world that attempts to defer, package, and expunge her experiences as an effort to retain the hegemony of the human.