Abstract:
This thesis is a comparative study of haunted house fiction written by women in Spain and the United States from around 1900 onwards. It focuses on the aspect of sentience in buildings, establishing a connection between women's sociocultural history and transformations in the trope of the haunted house. This study highlights the vague presence of the haunted house in Spanish fiction when compared to American literature, and presents two reasons that might account for this circumstance. The first seems to be an overall discouragement of horror and fantasy in Spain that can be traced back at least to the times of the Spanish Empire. The second, which stands as the more important, is the particular situation of women in Spain, where a confluence of sociocultural factors upheld the values of domesticity for longer than in the United States, notably the repression enforced by the Franco dictatorship until 1975. I posit that the presence of the house in horror fiction grows in relation to women's envisioning of the home as the source of their oppression, and that this process is further nourished by underlying inherited anxieties resulting from women's legacy of domesticity. In particular, this study maintains that the sentient house is consolidated in literature the moment that women's primeval need for home enters into conflict with a rejection of domesticity. In order to illustrate this theory, I review work by American writers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Elia W. Peattie, Shirley Jackson and Anne Rivers Siddons, and compare their narratives to those of Emilia Pardo Bazán, Carmen de Burgos, Mercè Rodoreda, Carmen Martín Gaite, Pilar Pedraza and Cristina Fernández Cubas in Spain. This thesis contends that Spanish horror literature presents belated but parallel transformations in the trope of the sentient house, which confirm the intertwining of this trope with women's culture across time and space.