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.
