Browsing by Subject "women"

In my thesis, I study how two women’s deteriorating mental health is portrayed through an unreliable narrator and how these women’s mental stability is reflected in the degree of unreliability in their narration. The aim of this thesis is to study if a homodiegetic narrator’s unreliability can reflect their underlying issues with mental health, which may not always be noticed without a detailed character analysis. To study this topic, I have chosen two stories with unreliable female narrators who have occasionally been labelled as mad women due to their unreliability but are actually suffering mentally. These two stories are Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw (1898) and Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House (1959). To study this topic, I use narrative theory to analyse the two unreliable narrators and to discover the reasons behind their unreliability. By using the narrative theory, I am able to define the type of unreliable narrators these two women are as well as to show how the unreliability of the narration is evident in the text. To support my argument that these women are unreliable, because of their mental instability, I will show that reasons why they have become mentally unstable can be found from the texts. The study was done by using the method of close reading. My study shows that the mental health of both women in these stories has started to deteriorate. The governess is stressed about her job as a governess, and because of her stress, she starts seeing ghosts who are after the children for whom she is responsible. Eleanor Vance, on the other hand, is mentally unstable because of her long-term trauma, which has affected her personality. My study shows how the narrators of The Turn of the Screw and The Haunting of Hill House are unreliable because their mental health is affected by something that makes them imagine hauntings that may not actually be occurring.