Unsettling Spaces & Walls that Whisper: The Gothic Realm of Domestic Noir in American and Arabic Short Stories

Abstract

This study is a comparative analysis of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (19th-century America) and Alifa Rifaat’s My World of the Unknown (20th-century rural Egypt) through the prism of domestic noir, a subgenre of psychological fiction in which the house or intimate spaces become the locus of terror. Domestic noir arises from a long-standing gothic tradition where familial discord engenders psychic rupture and physical torment, retaining relevance with contemporary literary discourse. 

Despite their different chronotopes, Gilman’s and Rifaat’s stories examine female isolation at home and the negative impact of patriarchy. They do this by using key elements of domestic noir, including the unsettling mix of intimacy and threat, blurred lines between reality and illusion, and gaslighting that shakes one’s sense of sanity. The stories feature immersive first-person female narrators and take place in peculiar, isolated homes, reflecting Gothic themes. These themes include mad women, unclear endings, and a sense of eerie dread. Gilman criticizes 19th-century medical and social restrictions, while Rifaat combines feminist critique with Egyptian mysticism. Both stories culminate in a symbolic dénouement invoking the leitmotif of the doppelgänger, manifested in supernatural female figures behind walls. Evoking Freud’s Unheimlich, where the familiar becomes terrifying, both novels transform the domestic sphere into a locus of terror and subversive self-recognition, framed through gothic, feminist, narrative, and spatial theoretical lenses.

This study bridges Western and Arab literary traditions, extending the concept of domestic noir to articulate a transnational discourse of female experience and resistance.