Shirley Jackson wrote a variety of works that reflect women`s lives in the 1950s and 60s, when every woman was expected to fulfill herself only through being a housewife-mother. Jackson`s domestic chronicles and her Gothic house novels present different pictures of the housewife-mother figure in mid-century America. In her domestic stories published in women`s magazines, Jackson presents herself as a typical white middle-class housewife-mother, almost suppressing her professional self. The bright picture of family life covers up all of the guilt and anxiety that she experienced as a housewife-mother-writer. Jackson`s Gothic novels betray what Jackson strives to hide in her family stories. In the novels, "bad" mothers who conspire with fathers are killed by their daughters, while "good" mothers who devote themselves become agoraphobic and entrapped in the house. These novels show Jackson`s understanding that even when a woman escapes the father`s/husband`s house, she would still remain entrapped because there is no outside of patriarchy in a society that dictates all women to be housewife-mothers. This essay investigates Jackson`s performance of "good" motherhood in her domestic stories and reads the Castle as a work written in the tradition of the American Female Gothic tradition.