“A tangle of conventions”. Riflessioni sulla fedeltà alla casa nella Haunted House Story e nel Detective Novel novecenteschi

Abstract

Starting from Mary Douglas’s essay “The Idea of a Home: A Kind of Space”, the article attempts to formulate the notion of allegiance to a given household, and to investigate how the question of a fictional character’s allegiance may be connected to typical narrative functions in highly-codified literary genres such as the haunted house story and the 1920s detective novel. The article discusses Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1921), and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), focusing on figures that are marginal to the households in question, namely the domestic servant and the detective.