In Providence, Rhode Island, in 1885, a woman bore a child and suffered from postpartum depression. Her artist husband suggested treatment with the “rest cure” championed by then-famous doctor and novelist S. Weir Mitchell: “Never to touch pen, brush or pencil again” and live a “normal” domestic life (Gilman, “Why” 348). Three months of following this prescription sent her from depression to “the border line of utter mental ruin” (349). The experience inspired her story “The Yellow Wall-paper” (1892); the writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman became famous as a feminist and author of non-fiction, poetry, and stories—some of which are Gothic—including a more traditional ghost story “The Giant Wistaria” (1891), whose Puritan adulteress recalls Hester Prynne. She and her dead baby haunt a site that has been doubly crushed by the patriarchy, immolated within a covered well in a house strangled by the titular wistaria vine.

In the mid-1940s, a California-born woman moved with her professor husband to a small town in Vermont, where they were treated with suspicion by the residents. Later, she would claim that they pelted her with stones when she went on errands in the village. This experience was one inspiration for “The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson's most famous story.

These brilliant short stories exemplify several strands of New England's Gothic fiction: psychological breakdown and immurement, the haunted house, and folk horror, with its survival of rituals performed in isolated backwaters though their significance has been lost. Among the most frequently anthologized and assigned in secondary schools and colleges, “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “The Lottery” feature female protagonists who are literally or figuratively crushed by the patriarchal order. This chapter deploys the term “Domestic Gothic” for this tradition, emphasizing the contrast with the “Frontier Gothic” of Chapter 2. Rather than fearing attacks by wild beasts or savage men, the female protagonists of the Domestic Gothic fear those who share their homes—they fear being walled up in interior spaces with the walls closing in. Rather than celebrating or lamenting the loss of the native peoples or sublime landscapes, other female protagonists welcome or mourn for the apparitions of beloved mates and children.