Consider the first few chapters of Hill House. Jackson begins her novel with one of the most famous and haunting lines in gothic literature: “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream” (1). Many gothic novels hover along the line between reality and non-reality (that is, dreams, or the supernatural). Our heroine, Eleanor, is introduced as a rather dreamy young woman who, unlike Gilman’s narrator, who avoids “romantic felicity,” cannot help but fantasize and imagine other lives for herself. In at least 300 words, perform a close reading of a passage in relation to ‘absolute reality’ and the conditions of the Female Gothic outlined by Davison.
Your goals are to:
- Generate an arguable and rhetorically-focused claim – the more original and complex, the better;
- Select, quote, and analyze productive evidence from your primary source;
- Select, quote, and analyze productive ideas from your secondary source (Davison);
- Organize your ideas in a logical and persuasive order;
- Craft clear and sophisticated prose, appropriate for an academic context.
Your response must be at least 300 words.
Haunting of hill house:
http://themiltondoddreaders.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/8/1/10819822/jackson_-_the_haunting_of_hill_house.pdf
the yellow wallpaper:
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/theliteratureofprescription/exhibitionAssets/digitalDocs/The-Yellow-Wall-Paper.pdf
Davison
https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.ntu.edu.sg/dist/6/2252/files/2017/08/SS2-Davison-Haunted-House-23t66g5.pdf
