The female uncanny? : A historicised reading of the uncanny fiction of Edith Wharton, Shirley Jackson & Joyce Carol Oates

Abstract

This study evaluates whether it is appropriate to consider the work of three women writers of uncanny fiction as evidence of a distinctive female sub-genre in the uncanny. A literature review of certain second-wave feminist critical perspectives in the area of female sub-genres demonstrates an established reading position, which suggests that female authors of uncanny fiction necessarily foreground either (1) the unique aspects of female experience; (2) a subversive statement against patriarchy, or (3) a narrowly-defined psychoanalytic drive, such as an unresolved mother- daughter conflict. The post-feminist position of this thesis argues for a more open approach that allows the fiction to suggest other meanings. By referring to the uncanny short stories of three women writers, who each had (or have) an ambiguous relationship to feminism, this study concludes that it is more appropriate to consider the uncanny fiction of Wharton, Jackson and Oates as the work of women writers who were influenced by their social and cultural construction as female authors, but not circumscribed by it. This subject position often involves the writers drawing on aspects of female experience for material, but also features material which is not limited to gender-specific concerns.