My article " 'Only One Antagonist': The Demon Lover and the Feminine Experience in the Work of Shirley Jackson" is in the latest issue of Gothic Studies. Here is the abstract:
One of the most prominent tropes in Shirley Jackson's work is that of
the ‘demon lover’ who seduces a woman from her home with promises of
riches and ultimately destroys her. Jackson uses the demon lover to
figure a jouissance excluded by the Symbolic order, which,
because of its repression, returns with a destructive force. Jackson's
demon lover tales, including ‘The Daemon Lover’, ‘The Beautiful
Stranger’, and ‘The Tooth’, narrate a woman's gradual realization of her
subjection to a demonic male figure, whose claim on her dispossesses
her of both home and self. Women in these stories are offered an
impossible choice: either conform to a passive position within rigidly
defined gender roles or be abjected into a permanent state of anxiety,
insecurity, and even madness outside of the Symbolic order. Jackson's
second novel Hangsaman (1951), more than any other of Jackson's
works, attempts to chart a path for feminine jouissance by imagining
writing as a kind of witchcraft.
