• DOI:10.1080/10436920590946859
• Corpus ID: 162245270

Haunted Housekeeping: Fatal Attractions of Servant and Mistress in Twentieth-Century Female Gothic Literature

@article{Blackford2005HauntedHF,
  title={Haunted Housekeeping: Fatal Attractions of Servant and Mistress in Twentieth-Century Female Gothic Literature},
  author={Holly Virginia Blackford},
  journal={Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory},
  year={2005},
  volume={16},
  pages={233 - 261}
}

• H. Blackford
• Published 1 April 2005
• Art
• Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory

In two of Edith Wharton’s ghost stories, ‘‘The Lady’s Maid’s Bell’’ (1902) and ‘‘Mr. Jones’’ (1928), dead servants, despite being dead, refuse to relinquish their positions in their households. In these stories and Wharton’s ‘‘All Souls’ ’’ (1937), servants refuse to allow female newcomers authority in the houses they serve. This narrative situation recurs in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938). The head housekeeper of Manderley, Mrs. Danvers, literally serves the dead by continuing to serve her late mistress Rebecca de Winter. This only exacerbates the feelings of the second Mrs. de Winter, who believes herself an inauthentic mistress. Like in Wharton’s fiction, the servant of Rebecca refuses the ascendancy of the female newcomer, who, after all, comes from a lower-class background. In Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), the protagonist Eleanor projects her desires for a home onto a house that, unfortunately for her, ‘‘walks alone’’ and will not have her. She is repeatedly frustrated by an