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Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy, edited by Bernice M.Murphy (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2005), ISBN: 0-7864-2312-9. 296pp., $35 [www.mcfarlandpub.com; 800-253-2187].
About a decade ago, the coldly irate parent of a college student confronted me, the English Department chair, with 'I knew that some day I would have to face this nightmare.' Trying to imagine what assignment had so upset this well-dressed, well-coiffed, suburban matron - maybe Lolita, maybe Lady Chatterley's Lover, maybe Ulysses - I braced myself for what literary catastrophe I would have to defend. Girding her loins in righteousness, the aggrieved mother spat out, 'The Lottery'.
At the time, I felt a sanctimonious intellectual superiority, but there is a way in which, perhaps, that mother was right. Bernice M.Murphy's very rich and rewarding collection of essays on the works and, on occasion, the life of Shirley Jackson explores tangents and congruencies with Gothic, supernatural, horror, the weird, and with personal and social psychological trauma, terror, and tragedy that are so well and amply demonstrated in this author's productions. So nightmare might well be the most apposite category for Shirley Jackson's literary legacy, though certainly the censorship this small-minded mother desired is not what the essays in this book over and over characterize as true to Jackson's life and times and world.We can know ourselves, in many ways, by knowing Shirley Jackson, and this collection admirably shows the ways. As the editor asserts, 'Her writing provides a fascinating portrait of American womanhood during a period of significant change. She excelled at dramatizing the anxiety and claustrophobia experienced by so many (particularly middle-class) American women during the postwar period' (19). There is much truth in that, as the collection reveals. Maybe my visitor was afraid that Shirley Jackson would reveal to her daughter an unsettling, unpleasant reality behind the curtains of their assuredly splendid domestic McMansion, as Jackson's work so frequently does for the inhabitants of its domiciles.
Dr Murphy, besides contributing an introduction which I intuit is...