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Books


THE HAUNTED MIND OF SHIRLEY JACKSON

A new biography explores one of the twentieth century’s most tortured writers.
By Zoë Heller
October 10, 2016
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A new biography argues that Jackson’s books should be seen as
proto-feminist.Illustration by Cristiana Couceiro; Source: Frances Benjamin
Johnston / Library of Congress (House)

Here’s how not to be taken seriously as a woman writer: Use demons and ghosts
and other gothic paraphernalia in your fiction. Describe yourself publicly as “a
practicing amateur witch” and boast about the hexes you have placed on prominent
publishers. Contribute comic essays to women’s magazines about your hectic life
as a housewife and mother.

Shirley Jackson did all of these things, and, during her lifetime, was largely
dismissed as a talented purveyor of high-toned horror stories—“Virginia
Werewoolf,” as one critic put it. For most of the fifty-one years since her
death, that reputation has stuck. Today, “The Lottery,” her story of ritual
human sacrifice in a New England village (first published in this magazine, in
1948), has become a staple of eighth-grade reading lists, and her novel “The
Haunting of Hill House” (1959) is often mentioned as one of the best ghost
stories of all time. But most of her substantial body of work—including her
masterpiece, the beautifully weird novel “We Have Always Lived in the Castle”
(1962)—is not widely read. In recent years, there have been signs of renewed
interest in Jackson’s work. Various writers, including Neil Gaiman, Jonathan
Lethem, and A. M. Homes, have praised her idiosyncratic talent, and new editions
of her work have appeared. But these attempts to reclaim Jackson have had a
mixed response. In 2010, when the Library of America published an edition of
Jackson’s selected works, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, a critic at Newsweek
protested that it was an exercise in barrel-scraping: “Shirley Jackson? A writer
mostly famous for one short story, ‘The Lottery.’ Is LOA about to jump the
shark?”


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In a new, meticulously researched biography, “A Rather Haunted Life,” Ruth
Franklin sets out to rescue Jackson from the sexists and the genre snobs who
have consigned her to a dungeon of kooky, spooky middlebrow-ness. Franklin’s aim
is to establish Jackson as both a major figure in the American Gothic tradition
and a significant, proto-feminist chronicler of mid-twentieth-century women’s
lives. In contrast to Jackson’s first biographer, Judy Oppenheimer, whose 1988
book, “Private Demons,” somewhat played up Jackson’s alleged occult powers,
Franklin argues that Jackson’s sorceress persona was mostly shtick: a fun way to
tease interviewers and to sell books. Jackson was interested in witchcraft, she
writes, less as a “practical method for influencing the world” than as “a way of
embracing and channeling female power at a time when women in America often had
little control over their lives.” Similarly, Jackson used supernatural elements
in her work not to deliver cheap thrills but, in the manner of Poe or James, “to
plumb the depths of the human condition,” or, more particularly, to explore the
“psychic damage to which women are especially prone.”

Jackson was born in San Francisco in 1916 and brought up, with a younger
brother, in one of the city’s affluent suburbs. Her parents were conservative
country-club people, who regarded their high-strung child with some perplexity.
Jackson identified herself early on as an outsider and as a writer. “When i
first used to write stories and hide them away in my desk,” she later wrote in
an unpublished essay, “i used to think that no one had ever been so lonely as i
was and i used to write about people all alone. . . . i thought i was insane and
i would write about how the only sane people are the ones who are condemned as
mad and how the whole world is cruel and foolish and afraid of people who are
different.”

The chief representative of the cruel and foolish world during Jackson’s
childhood was her mother, Geraldine, an elegant, rather vapid woman, who was
disappointed by her daughter and who made it clear that she would have preferred
a prettier, more pliable one. She told Jackson that she was the product of a
failed abortion and harangued her constantly about her bad hair, her weight, and
her “willful” refusal to cultivate feminine charm. Long after Jackson had grown
up and moved away, Geraldine continued to send letters criticizing her “helter
skelter way of living,” her “repetitious” fiction, and her appearance: “I have
been so sad all morning about what you have allowed yourself to look like.”
Quotations from the correspondence of the awful Geraldine are a source of guilty
entertainment throughout Franklin’s biography.



Jackson’s adult life was ostensibly a rebellion against her mother and her
mother’s values. She became a writer; she grew fat; she married a Jewish
intellectual, Stanley Edgar Hyman, and ran a bohemian household in which she
dyed the mashed potatoes green when she felt like it. But she never quite shook
Geraldine’s tentacular grip, or ceased to be tormented by her disapproval. And
in her marriage to Hyman she found a person with whom to replicate the abusive
relationship.

Jackson and Hyman met at Syracuse University; he sought her out after reading
her first published story, “Janice,” in a college magazine and deciding that she
was the girl he was going to marry. To Jackson, who had already begun to
experience the anxiety, depression, and “fears of people” that plagued her
throughout her life, Hyman seemed a savior: a brilliant man who didn’t think she
was ugly, who understood her and loved her, who believed in her promise as a
writer. His main drawback was his principled insistence on sleeping with other
women. He also expected Jackson to listen good-naturedly to accounts of his
sexual adventures. On a few occasions during the early stages of their
relationship, Hyman’s behavior drove Jackson into such paroxysms of anguish that
he worried she might be mentally ill. But he refused to compromise his integrity
on the issue. “If it turns you queasy, you are a fool,” he told her. Jackson,
whom Franklin describes as having been primed by her mother’s criticisms “to
accept a relationship with a man who treated her disrespectfully and shamed her
for legitimate and rational desires,” reluctantly went along with his terms.

They married—in the face of determined opposition from both sets of
parents—shortly after graduating, and moved to New York. During the next couple
of years, both of them began contributing to The New Yorker, she as a fiction
writer and he as a contributor to The Talk of the Town and, later, as a staff
writer. In 1945, after their first child was born, they settled in Vermont,
where Hyman had been offered a post on the literature faculty at Bennington
College. Here, in a rambling, crooked house in North Bennington, they raised
four children and became the center of a social set that included Howard
Nemerov, Ralph Ellison, Bernard Malamud, and Walter Bernstein. Their domestic
life, as described in the comic dispatches that Jackson wrote for Good
Housekeeping and Woman’s Home Companion, was raucous and warm. But Jackson was
miserable a good deal of the time, as indicated by her increasing reliance on
alcohol, tranquillizers, and amphetamines. She felt patronized in her role as a
faculty wife and frozen out by the townspeople of North Bennington. (She took
her revenge by using them as the model for the barbaric villagers in “The
Lottery.”) Most of all, she felt oppressed by her husband.

Hyman’s lordly expectations of what he was due as the family patriarch were
retrograde, even by the standards of the time. Jackson did the cooking, the
cleaning, the grocery shopping, and the child-rearing; he sat at his desk,
pondering the state of American letters and occasionally yelling at his wife to
come and refill the ink in his pen. (His brother Arthur once commented that
Hyman’s views on the domestic division of labor were the only aspects of his
traditional Jewish upbringing that he had retained.) Long after Jackson became
the chief breadwinner in the marriage, Hyman continued to control the family’s
finances, meting out portions of Jackson’s earnings to her as he saw fit.
Although he always encouraged Jackson’s writing, in part because it was her
writing that kept the family afloat, he came to resent how completely her career
had eclipsed his. His major published works—“The Armed Vision” (1948), a
comparative study of modern methods of literary criticism, and “The Tangled
Bank” (1962), on the literary strategies of Marx, Freud, Darwin, and Sir James
Frazer—were grand projects of intellectual synthesis, and both had taken on a
dusty, doomed, Casaubonish quality by the time he completed them. He took solace
in characterizing Jackson to their friends as a sort of gifted idiot, who
composed her fiction in a trance state of automatic writing and had to take it
to him to have it explained. He also continued to be chronically, blithely
unfaithful, mostly with former students.

The motif of a lonely woman setting out to escape a miserable family or a grimly
claustrophobic community and ending up “lost” recurs throughout Jackson’s
stories. Sometimes a woman comes to a place of apparent refuge—a house that
seems to offer security and love—only to discover, once she is there, creeping
menace or hidden evil. Sometimes, as in several of the stories included in
Jackson’s first published collection, “The Lottery; or, The Adventures of James
Harris” (1949), a woman encounters a romantic, chimerical figure, a “daemon
lover,” who promises to rescue her and then vanishes, leaving her alone and on
the brink of madness, in a frightening, alien landscape. Always, the hope of an
alternative, happier life proves illusory.

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If these stories allude to the disappointment of Jackson’s marriage—the escape
from her mother’s house which proved to be no escape at all—they also suggest
the nature of the anxieties that prevented her from ever leaving Hyman. She was
full of rage toward him, and she expressed this not only in the portraits of
insufferably pompous men that she smuggled into her fiction but also in strange
revenge-fantasy cartoons that showed her serving Hyman entrails for dinner, or
creeping up behind him with a hatchet. She once wrote Hyman a six-page letter
explaining why she would eventually divorce him: “I used to think . . . with
considerable bitter amusement about the elaborate painstaking buildup you would
have to endure before getting [one] of your new york dates into bed . . . they
had been sought out, even telephoned, spoken to and listened to, treated as real
people, and they had the unutterable blessing of being able to go home
afterward. . . . i would have changed place with any of them.” Yet fear always
inhibited her ability to act on her anger. However intense the miseries of life
inside her house, they were, in the end, less vivid to her than the imagined
horrors lurking outside it.

Jackson’s fiction is a sort of serial investigation of the malevolent,
imprisoning power of her own fears. Her mother, in a letter, once reproached her
for the excess of “demented girls” in her stories—which was both an excellent
Geraldinism and a not entirely unjustified complaint. Eventually, Jackson
herself came to lament the narrowness of her thematic range: “I wrote of
neuroses and fear and I think all my books laid end to end would be one long
documentation of anxiety.”

Video From The New Yorker

Critics at Large Live, featuring Julio Torres



While her early stories are often about people being oppressed and persecuted by
closed-minded communities, in her later work she focussed increasingly on the
“demon of the mind”—the evil that afflicts its victims from within. In “The
Lottery,” a woman is stoned to death by her neighbors and family; in “The
Haunting of Hill House,” written eleven years later, the stones that rain down
on the childhood home of the protagonist, Eleanor, have a more ambiguous source.
Eleanor’s mother thinks vicious neighbors are responsible; Eleanor and her
sister blame each other; but the strongest suggestion is that the stones are the
work of Eleanor’s poltergeist, a paranormal manifestation of her rage and
unhappiness. At Hill House, where the adult Eleanor has been invited to assist
in an investigation of psychic phenomena, she imagines that she is being ganged
up on by the other people at the house and that its spirits have singled her out
as their target. But what tortures her and ultimately drives her to insanity is
her own complex of childhood fear and guilt. The leader of the paranormal
investigation assures his assistants that if they ever become too scared they
can always run away from the house: “It can’t follow us, can it?” But the horror
for Eleanor is that she can’t run away from what haunts her.




The persona that Jackson presented to the world was powerful, witty, even
imposing. She could be sharp and aggressive with fey Bennington girls and
salesclerks and people who interrupted her writing. Her letters are filled with
tartly funny observations. Describing the bewildered response of New Yorker
readers to “The Lottery,” she notes, “The number of people who expected Mrs.
Hutchinson to win a Bendix washing machine at the end would amaze you.” Of
Katinka De Vries, the wife of the novelist Peter De Vries, she writes that she
found it difficult “to spend the day with someone named Katinka, even though she
is very nice.”

Some of the women in her novels speak with this sort of confident humor. They
often function as the alter egos of her fragile, insecure protagonists,
representing the boldness and the freedom that they can never achieve. In “The
Haunting of Hill House,” one of Eleanor’s fellow-assistants is the self-assured,
ironic Theodora. In “Hangsaman” (1951), Natalie, a lonely college freshman, has
a daring imaginary friend named Tony. In “The Bird’s Nest” (1954), Elizabeth, a
shy clerical worker, develops three other personalities: the charming Beth; the
vain, frivolous Bess; and the monstrous Betsy, who promises, “Someday I am going
to get my eyes open all the time and then I will eat you and Lizzie both.” In
“We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” it is the protagonist, Merricat, who is
the courageous, adventurous figure and her sister, Constance, who is the
domestic, gentle partner.

Jackson described Merricat and Constance as “two halves of the same person,” and
it’s possible to see all of her female couples as depictions of the two
contradictory halves of her own personality: the potent, angry woman, whom she
characterized in her letters as Snarly Shirley, or Sharly, and the cowed woman
who felt trapped inside her house. Franklin argues that Jackson’s portraits of
“split” women anticipate Betty Friedan’s description of the nineteen-fifties
housewife as a “virtual schizophrenic”—a woman, as Franklin puts it, “pressured
by the media and the commercial culture to deny her personal and intellectual
interests and subsume her identity into her husband’s.” All of Jackson’s work,
Franklin writes, is animated by the tension she felt between her socially
sanctioned role as a happy homemaker and her vocation as a writer. As such, it
“constitutes nothing less than the secret history of American women of her era.”

The tension between socially acceptable housewifery and creative ambition is
certainly easy to find in Jackson’s life, but it’s rather harder to locate in
her fiction. There’s no question that, in her books, the house is a deeply
ambiguous symbol—a place of warmth and security and also one of imprisonment and
catastrophe. But the evil that lurks in Jackson’s fair-seeming homes is not
housework; it’s other people—husbands, neighbors, mothers, hellbent on squashing
and consuming those they profess to care for. And what keeps women inside these
ghastly places is not societal pressure, or a patriarchal jailer, but the demon
in their own minds. In this sense, Jackson’s work is less an anticipation of
second-wave feminism than a conversation with her female forebears in the gothic
tradition. Her stories take the figure of the imprisoned “madwoman,” as found in
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” or Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane
Eyre,” and make her the warder of her own jail.

If there is an animating tension in Jackson’s fiction, it is surely the tension
between wanting to get out and being too frightened to go, or between longing
for a home and knowing that in all homes one person inevitably ends up
swallowing the other. (As Elizabeth’s psychiatrist in “The Bird’s Nest”
observes, “Each life, I think . . . asks the devouring of other lives for its
continuance.”) The problem with hunting for signs of nascent feminist sentiment
in Jackson’s stories is that doing so tends to shut down, rather than open up,
what is most interesting in them. It empties the haunted air and installs a
simmering housewife to fill the vacuum. You can, I suppose, seize on the fact
that the villager who is stoned to death in “The Lottery” is a woman, and read
the story, as Franklin does, as “a parable for the ways in which women are
forced to sacrifice themselves: if not their lives, then their energies and
ambitions.” But only if you ignore the fact that the lottery is an
equal-opportunity selection process—as likely to pick a man as a woman—and
therefore a rather weak metaphor for patriarchal oppression.

In making the case for Jackson as a herald of Friedan and others, Franklin
doesn’t say much about Jackson’s humor—which is a pity, because one of her most
distinctive and appealing characteristics is a tendency to interleave unheimlich
atmospheres and dark portraits of psychological breakdown with bursts of spry
drawing-room comedy, droll Mitfordian dialogue, and the odd joke about eating
children. (Jackson is sometimes compared to Muriel Spark or to Flannery
O’Connor, but the writer with whom she has more in common—and whose influence
she worried lay too heavily on her work—is Ivy Compton Burnett.) “We Have Always
Lived in the Castle” perfectly demonstrates her talent for mixing creepiness
with wit. The sisters Merricat and Constance finally achieve a fairy-tale
ending, by killing off the other members of their family and barricading their
house against all intruders. They retreat into a cheerfully mad, private world,
not unlike the one created by Big Edie and Little Edie in the Maysles brothers’
documentary “Grey Gardens.”




Shortly after the publication of “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” in
September, 1962, Jackson suffered a nervous breakdown and a prolonged bout of
acute agoraphobia that prevented her going outside for half a year. “I have
written myself into the house,” she said. It took her two years to recover
completely, during which time she was unable to write. Toward the end of this
period, when she was beginning to recover, she tried to coax herself back into
producing fiction by starting a journal. In it, she looked forward to a future
in which she would be free from fear, and able, finally, to leave her
husband—“to be separate, to be alone, to stand and walk alone, not to be
different and weak and helpless and degraded.” This new, liberated person, she
speculated, would have to find a new subject, a new style, for her writing:

> if i am cured and well and oh glorious alive then my books should be
> different. who wants to write about anxiety from a place of safety? although i
> suppose i would never be entirely safe since i cannot completely reconstruct
> my mind. but what conflict is there to write about then? i keep thinking
> vaguely about husbands and wives, perhaps in suburbia, but i do not really
> think this is my kind of thing. perhaps a funny book. a happy book. . . .
> plots will come flooding when i get the rubbish cleared away from my mind.

Jackson did eventually begin a new novel—a funny, happy novel, in which a
recently widowed woman abandons her old name, calling herself Angela Motorman,
and embarks on a new life in a boarding house, unencumbered by pets, address
books, souvenirs, or even friends. She is alone but confident that she can
provide her own “fine high gleefulness.” Jackson was seventy-five pages into
this novel when she died in her sleep, of heart failure, at the age of
forty-eight.

She never found out whether this style was going to work, or whether she would
ever really be capable of living alone. But the last words in her journal,
written six months before she died, suggest a woman heroically trying to
persuade herself into optimism: “I am the captain of my fate. Laughter is
possible laughter is possible laughter is possible.” ♦




Published in the print edition of the October 17, 2016, issue, with the headline
“Haunted Houses.”
Zoë Heller has written the novels “Notes on a Scandal,” “The Believers,” and
“Everything You Know.”

More:BiographiesBooksDomesticityRuth FranklinShirley JacksonShort
StoriesSupernaturalThe LotteryThe New YorkerWomenWriters


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