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Abstract
One of the most prominent tropes in Shirley Jackson's work is that of the 'demon lover' who seduces a woman from her home with promises of riches and ulti- mately destroys her. Jackson uses the demon lover to figure a jouissance excluded by the Symbolic order, which, because of its repression, returns with a destructive force. Jackson's demon lover tales, including 'The Daemon Lover', 'The Beautiful Stranger', and 'The Tooth', narrate a woman's gradual realization of her sub- jection to a demonic male figure, whose claim on her dispossesses her of both home and self. Women in these stories are offered an impossible choice: either conform to a passive position within rigidly defined gender roles or be abjected into a permanent state of anxiety, insecurity, and even madness outside of the Symbolic order. Jackson's second novel Hangsaman (1951), more than any other of Jackson's works, attempts to chart a path for feminine jouissance by imagining writing as a kind of witchcraft.
Keywords: Das Ding (The Thing), Demon Lover, jouissance, schizophrenia, Uncanny, witchcraft
Toward the end of her life, looking back on her work, Shirley Jackson wrote in her journal, 'Insecure, uncontrolled, I wrote of neuroses and fear and I think all my books laid end to end would be one long documentation of anxiety'.2 In Jackson's novels and short stories, anxiety is made Gothic: the psychological experience of insecurity finds its objective correlatives in haunted houses, spectral presences, and demonic visitation, all of which suggest the violent irruption of the unknown into the known, the unconscious into consciousness. At the same time, Jackson's narrative technique keeps closely to the subjective experiences of her mostly female protagonists, making the line between the imaginary and the real ambigu- ous. It is often difficult to tell whether the events in her texts are manifestations of supernatural forces, projections of her characters' unconscious drives, or evidence of madness. Jackson's work gives the impression of an 'evil' in her characters' lives that is both actually existent and indeterminate, which not only makes her work a convincing document of anxiety but also produces the effects of anxiety in her readers. Readers of Jackson's work are led into a world in which no space is secure and the supports of...