Shirley Jackson: Essays on a Literary Legacy

Abstract

According to one of her biographers, Judy Oppenheimer, Jackson's later works clearly demonstrate that she was no feminist: "She had no interest in other women's problems ... Murphy explains that one of the reasons why Jackson's work has been ignored by critics for so long is precisely because Jackson is so difficult to categorise - she appealed to both literary and popular audiences and apparently was simultaneously both proto- and anti-feminist. [...]it is likely that the academic neglect of her work arose from the fact that, for critics looking to write smooth narratives of literary history, she was an awkward figure to assimilate.

Bernice M. Murphy, ed. Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2005

From certain angles, the preoccupations of mid-twentieth century America could be seen as uncannily prescient of similar concerns in the America of today. The rhetoric of conformity and political correctness silenced open debate. A growing recognition of a military and industrial power elite made people feel that their individual votes were subsumed amid a powerless mass at the polls, at the same time that "democracy" and "freedom" were celebrated at home and defended on other continents. Enemies were dehumanised as "evil" and Americans accepted that a war against a hydra-headed enemy needed to last for an "indefinite" period into the future. Everyone feared weapons of mass destruction, and yet this fear was mixed with apathy. A sprawl of homogenised suburbs was touted as having everything but seemed to be lacking something. Many people felt they never had it so good; while unequal class, gender, and race relations left others literally dispossessed. And the world looked on, as Alan Valentine notes in his 1954 book The Age of Conformity, "alternately hopeful that American freedom [would] continue to flourish and expand, and fearful that their own cultures [would] become too like that of America," (Valentine, 1954).

These were the anxieties of the age that made writer, Shirley Jackson, feel that indeed something was askew in her world. This homologous relation to our own time makes studying how Jackson expressed her unease in an inimitable, ostensibly apolitical and downright wacky style particularly timely and a rich area for scholars and general readers alike to consider.

Bernice M. Murphy's newly assembled book of essays on Jackson compiles in one volume some of the best-known essays in Jackson scholarship along with some fresh perspectives from newer voices. This is the first time a multi-authored collection of Jackson criticism has ever been produced. Its principal focus is to widen the scope of Jackson scholarship taking in a field of work that encompasses more than just Jackson's two most famous works, "The Lottery" (1948), a "horrifying tale of conformity" and The Haunting of Hill House (1959), her novel about supernatural hauntings, madness, and being different. Murphy's book includes essays on Jackson's lesser known, though by no means inferior, novels, stories, and family chronicles; and demonstrates the extent to which both those familiar with and those new to her work recognise that there is clearly more that is culturally and aesthetically valuable in Jackson's oeuvre. The volume also contains an index of Jackson's complete works, along with their original publication dates, which is very useful to historicist scholars interested in observing how the author makes oblique references to the above-noted sources of 1950s malaise.

Many of the essays consider how Jackson manipulates Gothic forms in order to reflect some of these contemporary fears and anxieties. John Parks and Diane Long Hoeveler individually consider Jackson's use of Gothic codes. Joan Wylie Hall examines suburbia as a fallen Eden in The Road through the Wall (1948). Rich Pascal discusses The Sundial (1958) and the retreat toward the American miniature as emblematic of the post-war tendency to "think small and look inward". Marta Caminero-Santangelo looks at post-war representations of female multiple personality in The Bird's Nest (1954). Murphy's own essay evaluates Jackson's work as cohering into a distinctive New England Gothic, one which reflects the author's own uneasy attitudes about the region and its inhabitants. Roberta Rubenstein, Tricia Lootens, Judie Newman and Lynette Carpenter approach Jackson's fiction from psychoanalytic and second-wave feminist standpoints. Dara Downey and Darryl Jones examine Jackson's influence on horror titan Stephen King, while Darryl Hattenhauer reconsiders the David Self 1999 film adaptation of Hill House produced by Stephen Spielberg. James Egan examines the way narrative modes as diverse as the comic, the satiric, the fantastic, and the Gothic are made to interact in Jackson's work. And S.T. Joshi looks at her domestic fiction to show how Jackson so adroitly straddles multiple genres forcing readers to question the appropriateness of genre boundaries, and recognising that a loose label of "weird" is about the broadest and best epithet for a writer like Jackson.

But Shirley Jackson resisted labels, either in a genuine effort to maintain her privacy and artistic integrity, or in the service of a clever manipulation of her persona, which she, her husband and her publisher astutely marketed - she was a mother, a housewife, a witch and a writer. She wrote challenging novels and stories for highbrow literary journals as well as material for her children's school plays, a book on witchcraft and prolific contributions to popular women's magazines, which enabled her to act as breadwinner for her family.

Was Jackson a feminist? It's hard to say. Betty Friedan devotes part of a chapter in The Feminine Mystique (1963) to explaining how Jackson's work quite frankly offends in its popularising of traditional gender roles. However, as Murphy's introduction and the contributions of the volume's four feminist critics discuss, Jackson did focus on female anxieties and the reappropriation of female power, and so, she would seem ripe for feminist scholars looking to rediscover marginialised writers with a subversive message. But Jackson never prided herself on being tidy. According to one of her biographers, Judy Oppenheimer, Jackson's later works clearly demonstrate that she was no feminist: "She had no interest in other women's problems ... [Jackson] had a definite disdain for the sort of young mother who would read her work in Good Housekeeping or Woman's Home Companion and think she had found a soulmate ..."; she "did not need a political movement to tell her that women were capable of exercising power," (Oppenheimer, 1988).

Murphy explains that one of the reasons why Jackson's work has been ignored by critics for so long is precisely because Jackson is so difficult to categorise - she appealed to both literary and popular audiences and apparently was simultaneously both proto- and anti-feminist. Thus, it is likely that the academic neglect of her work arose from the fact that, for critics looking to write smooth narratives of literary history, she was an awkward figure to assimilate. Another reason for the lack of critical attention is the perception that Jackson was somehow a minor writer. From the point of view of Jackson's other biographer, Fenemaja Friedman, this is an accurate assessment, since, in her opinion, Jackson does not "deal directly with the essential problems of love, death, war, disease poverty and insanity in its most ugly aspects," (Friedman, 1975).

Future critics may decide that these perceived weaknesses in Jackson actually combine to produce the author's creative method. As Jackson is re-evaluated from historicist and post-feminist points of view, readers may begin to appreciate that her many stories about the possibility of evil within the everyday (and especially inside the houses, lives and minds of one's next-door neighbours) may actually offer clues that the uncanny or weird aspects in Jackson's writing were used by her, as she says herself, as a "convenient shorthand" for describing all that she regarded as disturbing in the world (Oppenheimer, 1988).

We'll never know the definitive answer to the question that Murphy and others feel compelled to ask - who was Shirley Jackson? - but Jackson's tendency to only ever present the reader with certain, limited perspectives is perhaps one of the pleasures of reading this author. Reading this volume of essays, as a companion to Jackson's complete works, will help readers to decide for themselves.

ANN L. PATTEN