Domestic horror in Amparo Dávila and Shirley Jackson´s short stories

Abstract

This paper proposes a comparative analysis about the short stories “El huésped” and “Tina Reyes”, written by the mexican author Amparo Dávila, and “The tooth” and “Charles”, by the american writer Shirley Jackson, which highlights intersection and digression between them. Both women´s writing is focused in domestic space and the private sphere during the decades of 1950 and 1960, respectively. Jackson and Dávila´s narrative is written during a parallel period of time; they both portray family life, bringing forward a new perspective of the social role played by women, enounced from feminine speech that shows horror emerged from family life and inside this context. Ficcional speech articulates internal fears and exposes uneasiness, violence, harassment and despair through gloomy atmospheres and the characters´nightmarish perception of the ambience. The aim of the analysis is to explore fear emerging from daily life, appealing the articulation of a speech based on the rupture of reality and the deepening of the characters structure, who express an ineffable horror seen as madness by those who surround them. Likewise, I aim to compare Mexican and American speech which, despite their cultural differences, coincide in stylistic traits and social problems which we will see here below.