Weird fiction is an inherently difficult narrative mode to define, but in general the weird is an affective and aesthetic mode that narrates encounters with ecological or mystical entities that exceed direct human perception. Historical and theoretical explorations of the weird have long presumed that the weird became dormant during the period spanning from roughly 1940-1980. I argue that this presumed dearth indicates an inattention to weird texts written by women during this period, and that a reappraisal of texts that have been labelled “domestic fiction” reveals, rather than a dearth, an abundance of weird fiction that explores the interplay between the weird and the domestic. Using a material feminist lens, I develop a framework called weird domesticity, which takes heteropatriarchal blueprints for kinship as the starting point for estrangement. Domestic space during this period became a site in which both “deviant” forms of sexuality and the muck of messy materiality were foreclosed, and it was the archetypal figure of “the housewife” who was expected to keep the home free of more-than-human materialities. This dissertation explores the works of three writers—Barbara Comyns, Shirley Jackson, and Rachel Ingalls—whose narratives of weird domesticity explore the perspective of the housewife in order to reclaim modes of relationality and intimacy that press beyond the heteronormative strictures of “the home” and the bounded self.
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