She introduces themes such as ghost hunting, extrasensory perception, and the strange paradoxes investigated by Charles Fort to a mainstream literary audience from their origins in narrow technical literature, enabling them to become mainstays of modern popular literature, film, and television. The Haunting of Hill House also grew out of extensive research that Jackson conducted into the pseudoscientific world of parapsychology. The Haunting of Hill House is heavily indebted not only to the gothic tradition-going back to novels like The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole-but also to first-wave feminist literature like The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, from which Jackson found inspiration for much of her plot and theme, reading the horror-story tradition as an allegory for women's lives in a male-dominated society. But to classify the novel simply as horror is to undervalue it as genre fiction, rather than literary fiction, where its complexity and quality more naturally place it. The novel is satirical, subverting the restricted lives of housewives in prefeminist America as much as the gothic genre itself. Shirley Jackson's 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House is an emblematic modern ghost story that resuscitated an abandoned genre and provided a framework for new gothic novels by authors ranging from Joyce Carol Oates to Stephen King.
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