Haunted Women: Time, Memory, and Gender in Women’s Gothic Novels

Though the themes of time and memory are commonplace in the Gothic, particularly in the ghost story, a feminist reading of time, memory, and haunting in women throughout women’s gothic novels is largely absent from current scholarship. The primary goal of “Haunted Women” is to bridge this gap in scholarship through a discussion of literary haunting in women’s gothic novels, which weaves together issues of time, memory, and gender, speaking to the unique experiences and preoccupations of women in the patriarchal haunted house. Drawing from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic (2020), “Haunted Women” works toward an understanding of how time and memory operate in women’s gothic novels, revealing how haunting, under the right circumstances, may act as both a method of communing with women of the past, present, and future and grant women autonomy under patriarchal power structures.