If you’re ever looking for a literary drinking game, you could do no worse than picking up a number of books, articles and essays on Shirley Jackson, and taking a shot each time someone mentions how little Shirley Jackson is written about. You will not last long.
Yet as pervasive as this assertion may be, it does accurately reflect Jackson’s long and unjustified marginalisation. There are two primary reasons for the critical eschewal of Jackson’s work the first is Jackson being a woman/‘women’s writer,’ and the second is her status as a ‘Gothic’ writer.
I will start by talking about Jackson’s status as a woman/‘women’s writer.’ By this, I do not merely mean that Jackson was marginalised because she was a woman. This was, to be clear, certainly the case. In the various magazines she published in, she would often be paid less than male writers, even after The Haunting of Hill House made her a household name. Jackson was married to the literary critic and professor, Stanley Edgar Hyman, and they typically lived near the colleges where he taught. Jackson would often face opposition from faculty wives or the (exclusively female) students of Hyman who believed that her primary, if not sole, role should be as a wife to him. Jackson once recounted an infamous incident, when checking into a hospital, where the registrar listed her profession as ‘housewife.’ When Jackson clarified that she was a writer, the registrar responded, ‘I’ll just put down housewife.’
However, in addition to this sexism, there was also a more specific reason Jackson’s fiction has long been dismissed. It is what I refer to when I describe Jackson as being seen as a ‘women’s writer.’ While Jackson was a professional writer, she was also a housewife to Hyman and their four children. Jackson would often have to balance housework with her writing, and find little pockets of time to write in, noting how she only had ‘at most a few hours a day to spend at the typewriter.’ With her typical sardonic humour, she once joked that the benefit of having adolescent children was that they were ‘so easily offended’ that she could rely on them storming off to their rooms following a ‘stray comment,’ leaving her time to write. Jackson’s role as a housewife continued into her writing career, and even when her earning power exceeded that of her husband. (It was a source of long resentment to Hyman that his wife was both more critically and financially successful than he was.)
Jackson either reported or fictionalised much of the incidents in her home life, selling them to magazines such as Good Housekeeping. (For ease of reference, I will subsequently refer to these as ‘GH stories,’ even though they were released in other publications too.) She would later collect these GH stories in her two non-fiction works Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. The mining of her family’s lives for content (something which is addressed by her son Laurence in his introduction to her collected letters), is passim throughout these GH stories. ‘Charles’ is based on an incident that happened to Laurence when he was at school, and he would spend much of his life being asked about it (including receiving letters from an entire fifth-grade class who had been studying the story). Her daughter Sarah (Sally), often the troublemaker of the family, would recount how she would sometimes get teased at school by other kids when they had read of one of her exploits in a GH story.
As much as they are reflective of her love of writing, her family, and her prolificness, there is another more practical reason for the existence of these works: financial. Even with her income as a writer, and Stanley’s both as a critic and a professor, they were always on the periphery of financial difficulties. Her letters are redolent with tales of selling stories and the money being used to buy a new washing machine or pay a bill, etc. In one oft-recounted anecdote, Stanley bought her a dishwasher after working out that it was costing the family more money per hour to have her washing dishes than writing stories. She also relied on money from her parents far into her adult life.
This latter must have been particularly difficult as her mother, Geraldine, was a thoroughly unpleasant person, who often chided Jackson—or her behaviour, choice of husband, appearance, and even writing—throughout her life. Aside from one unsent letter following her mother harshly criticising her looks after a book tour in New York (and this at a time when such a trip was highly difficult for the clinically anxious and agoraphobic Jackson), Jackson never expressed her feelings towards her mother. However, many critics have noted the striking number of her works which involve matricide or absent mothers, and Hill House’s Eleanor continues to be haunted by the memory of caring for her tyrannically ill mother long after her death.
That the GH stories were effectively written on commission—Jackson was typically contracted to write a certain number of stories, rather than selling stories individually—means that, admittedly, not all of them are of the highest order, and there is a sense in which many of them can be so resonant with each other to the point of repetition. However, as George Orwell has pointed out, the ‘unwillingness of the public to spend money on books’ makes it ‘necessary for nearly every writer to earn part of his living by hackwork.’ To be clear, I am not calling these GH stories ‘hackwork.’ I am merely illustrating the fact that it would be unfair to judge Jackson by her lesser works, and were one to do so with all writers, barely any would remain standing.
In addition to the perceived lack of quality of these works, there was also the sense that, because they were to do with the family and the home, they were therefore ‘women’s stories’ and thus not worthy of critical attention.
A number of factors, discussed with necessary brevity here, have contrived to counteract this assessment. The first is the idea of the ‘personal is political,’ as evinced by second-wave feminism, and related Civil Rights movements, in the 1960s. Literarily-speaking, works by women writers, and specifically works that were unjustly maligned due to their perception of their pertaining to ‘women’s issues,’ were resurfaced and reassessed. The culmination of this being the creation of Virago Press in 1973, which resurrected many forgotten works by female writers.
The second is the recognition that Jackson stands in a long tradition of women writers in New England (including Charlotte Perkins Gillman, F. Marion Crawford and Edith Wharton) who have utilised weird/genre fiction as a method of problematising the idea of the home and the nuclear family as a locus of love and serenity, and exposing its often cloistering effects and the Puritanical underpinning of it and the institution of marriage. (The most notable example of this all being, of course, Gilman’s celebrated story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’)
Finally, and speaking more intratextually, there is Jacksons’ adept characterisation, sardonic humour, and sharp eye for life that makes her works so rich and impossible to dismiss.
But as much as sexism has played a role in Jackson’s ostracization, and as important as elucidating and amending this is, what very few critics talk about is a reason that I believe is arguably just as significant in people’s eschewal of her—her status, or perception, as a ‘Gothic’ writer.
The term ‘Gothic,’ of course, is a notably spectral and illusory one. While it can encompass works that are more readily and avowedly Gothic (Ann Radcliffe, Horace Walpole, Edgar Allan Poe etc.), it also casts a wide net in including more literary authors such as Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, Milan Kundera, etc. This is, to my mind, one of the more problematic aspects of the term ‘Gothic.’ That is, it at once strives to inclusivity by inviting the much-maligned genre of horror/weird fiction into the house of academia, while simultaneously propping up already respectable authors within literary genres at the exclusion of deserving genre writers such as Poppy Z. Brite, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Ramsey Campbell, and Thomas Ligotti, etc. There are also definitional problems with what precisely and specifically the term ‘Gothic’ connotes. However, in the same way that I deployed ‘GH stories’ earlier, I am merely using ‘Gothic’ here as a shorthand for works of Jackson’s that cannot readily be described as GH or literary/mainstream.
Before exploring Jackson’s ‘Gothic’ writing, it is worth talking more about her life, as the two are inexorably interwoven. Jackson was a known self-mythologiser. Until relatively recently, even her actual birthdate was not known, as she stated that she was three years younger than she actually was on her wedding certificate so as not to embarrass Hyman, three years her junior. She spoke of her house being actively haunted, and said that objects would often disappear without warning, only to show up later in different places. She claimed to have found the house that Hill House was based on after being gifted a series of postcards of houses by Hyman, one of which was particularly creepy-looking and, as her mother later told her, was in fact built by Shirley’s great-grandfather. When preparing to write Hill House, she said that she was struggling to come up with the name for the second female protagonist, and woke one morning to find the following note written on her typewriter:
Oh no oh no Shirley not dead Theodora Theodora.
She concludes this by saying:
Now, incidentally, you can see why a writer might be reluctant to explain where ideas for books come from. Who would ever believe it?
Well, indeed. As much as I admire Shirley Jackson both as a writer and person, it is frankly very difficult at times to know what to make of her ‘non-fiction’ writing or her various ‘factual’ statements. In one of her letters, after being taken to dinner by prospective makers of a Hill House film, Jackson said how ‘i had two cocktails and probably said a lot about hill house that wasn’t true.’ (Jackson often wrote letters in lower case, a habit borrowed from her husband who in turn had borrowed it from the poet e.e. cummings.) One wonders how much of what she said generally on Hill House and her other fiction was fictitious.
Her best-known association with the supernatural, though, was her association with witches. Her library of books on witchcraft and mythology was legendary. She wrote a children’s book on the Salem Witch Trials for adolescent readers (The Witchcraft of Salem Village). She would often conduct tarot readings for friends and colleagues of Hyman, jokingly claimed that she had been responsible for the leg break of publisher Alfred A Knopf in a skiing accident, and would sometimes exhibit odd behaviour such as dying mashed potatoes green when serving them to guests. She also repeated a joke, initially penned by Hyman for an author profile of her for a new publisher, that she was ‘the only practicing amateur witch in New England.’
However, like many people who attempt to cultivate an image for themselves, Jackson sometimes found this portrayal escaping her control. At times, rather than ensconcing her in a kind of intriguing mystique, it led to her being seen as a not entirely serious figure, and even a figure of fun. One critic referred to her as the ‘Virginia Werewoolf’ of fiction.
Then, there is the ‘Gothic’ fiction itself. Hill House stands as one of the most remarkable supernatural novels of all time. Its occasionally oneiric prose, sharp psychological acuity, and seamless interweaving of Jackson’s vast research into ghostly phenomena ahead of the book, make it a staple of weird literature. Even the construction of Hill House, outlined in Jackson’s essay/talk ‘Garlic in Fiction’ is fascinating and should constitute required reading for any writer of weird fiction. (Jackson, an avowed gourmand, uses ‘garlic’, or seasoning generally, as a metaphor for the use of imagery in fiction; as she says at one point: ‘sometimes one can use too much garlic.’) In it, she details how early incidents (such as the celebrated ‘Cup of Stars’ scene) were deliberately and consciously crafted to acclimatise the reader to the more overt supernaturalism to come.
However, as I have stated, the supernatural genre is often much maligned. Henry James, in talking about his seminal novella The Turn of the Screw to H. G. Wells, referred to it as ‘essentially a potboiler.’ (Being snobbish about his own work has to be peak Henry James.) Jackson’s biographer Ruth Franklin said that she was first attracted to Jackson through reading Hill House, where she was impressed by the ‘literary sophistication and emotional depth Jackson brought to what otherwise might have been a hoary ghost story.’ [My italics.] Jackson herself says how ‘all i really want to write is another ghost story and you simply can’t write two.’
Given that these three statements all come from people who have either written or liked a particular supernatural tale, it makes sense that people in the wider literary field would be inclined to dismiss work that is perceived as supernatural or ‘Gothic’ etc. Even certain horror authors will disavow the description of them or their work as horror/weird. Ramsey Campbell, who arguably stands as one of the greatest living horror writers, has often spoken about how he self-identifies as a horror writer as an attempt to remedy this, and will introduce talks by saying some variation of: ‘My name is Ramsey Campbell. I write horror.’ Campbell has even recalled an amusing interview with an obviously unprepared host who began by saying, ‘Mr Campbell, you don’t like being called a writer of horror fiction, do you?’ While this is attributable to a lack of research on the part of the interviewer, the fact that he simply assumed this would be an accurate thing to say is telling. Campbell has even pointed out how horror can be maligned by other genre authors, citing an incident where he was asked derisively by an (unnamed) science-fiction writer why he would choose to write such stories:
One might have assumed she would have remembered the decades during which science fiction was regarded with such contempt.
There is a final point to be made here. However one defines the term ‘Gothic,’ or whatever may or may not connote genre/supernatural fiction etc., it is interesting that, in terms of proportion, very little of Jackson’s work can be called avowedly ‘Gothic.’ Hill House is, unmistakably, a ghost story. (If we ignore for now the question about whether what is witnessed in the house is attributable to a haunting or mental illness.) We Have Always Lived in the Castle is, at least in terms of its fairy tale atmospherics, and ‘Gothic’ setting, at least marginally attributable as a weird story. ‘The Lottery’—whose infamous backlash many people have cited as being as interesting as the story itself—is mythic not only in terms of its fabrication of a non-existent human sacrifice, but as an exhibition of Jackson’s known misanthropy. There is also the post-hoc interpolation of the mythic ‘Deamon Lover’ figure of James Harris who flits in and out of the various stories in her first collection, The Lottery and Other Stories (not present in the stories’ original iterations).
Yet if Jackson had never written Hill House, and if she did not play so much on her reputation as a ‘witch,’ it might seem highly unlikely that anyone would consider her a ‘Gothic’ author. Indeed, the vast majority of Jackson’s work could be more readily classified as literary, mainstream etc. Classified, that is, if it can be classified at all.
Because arguably the greatest impediment to Jackson’s reputation has been the indeterminacy of much of her fiction. S.T. Joshi has pointed out how, ‘[b]ecause she was not firmly ensconced in either mainstream fiction or weird fiction, critics tend to ignore her.’ He perspicaciously cites the aforementioned story, ‘Charles’ as exemplary of this. ‘Charles’ relates to a fictionalisation (although it is not clear how much) of an event that happened to her son Laurence (‘Laurie’). In it, Laurie recounts incidents of classmate Charles being increasingly naughty, beginning with him being ‘fresh’ with the teacher, to forcing a young girl to say a word so bad Laurie will not tell it to his mother aloud, and culminating with him hitting the teacher and kicking her friend. When the mother visits the school and asks about Charles, she is told ‘We don’t have any Charles in the kindergarten.’
This story was initially a GH story (specifically, published in Mademoiselle) and then included as part of Life Among the Savages, before it was collected in Lottery. Joshi has noted:
[w]hat a remarkably different atmosphere this story has when it is buried in the genial confines of Life Among the Savages [or in Mademoiselle]: there the tale simply comes off as simply another prank by her cute yet headstrong son. In [The Lottery], though, one has the strong sensation that her son may well have serious problems of adjustment.
If one puts oneself into this mindset, it really is fascinating how different the exact same story reads. The final line can either be seen as a hilarious reveal or horrifically allusive.
But this speaks to wider issues about much of Jackson’s work. As much as genre snobbery and sexism can and should be argued as attributable to her marginalisation, this indeterminacy is also a significant factor. This played a part even in her life. At the time when ‘The Lottery’ was published in it, The New Yorker did not stipulate which pieces were fiction or non-fiction in a given issue. As well as the furious backlash the tale received, many people were convinced that the story was real and such practices continued in small New England towns. (Indeed, many people in Jackson’s hometown of North Bennington, Vermont, were deeply upset by the story, believing that Jackson, who had moved there from New York, was looking down her nose on the town and portraying them as a bunch of backward, superstitious hicks. However, while Jackson was, for all her virtues, a known snob, and didn’t always have the best opinion of her Vermonter neighbours, the story was in fact inspired by her and Hyman’s unhappy brief and unhappy time in New Hampshire.)
That people just didn’t/don’t know what to make of Jackson’s work, that she is not readily definable as a particular kind of author, has led to her neglect. However, and fortunately, the tide on this has, and continues, to turn.
In recent years, two adaptations of her works (The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle) have been made, even if Netflix’s Hill House, as wonderful as it is, is only marginally based on its source material. There are numerous academic papers on her, as well as whole books dedicated to the study of her work (such as Routledge’s highly informative Shirley Jackson: Influences and Confluences.) The journal Shirley Jackson Studies is currently soliciting for its third issue. The author Elizabeth Hand recently released an estate-authorised sequel to Hill House—A Haunting on the Hill. The Shirley Jackson Awards exist to ‘[recognise] the legacy of Shirley Jackson’s writing’ by commemorating ‘outstanding achievement in the literature of horror, the dark fantastic, and psychological suspense.’ The film Shirley, based on the novel of the same name by Susan Scarf Merrell, sees Elizabeth Moss portray Jackson. Her works are heavily influential in those of many authors, including Stephen King, who from his novel Carrie on (where Carrie causes stones to fall on her house) has borrowed heavily from her—his underappreciated film Rose Red is an obvious and avowed homage to Hill House. Her work has received arguably the ultimate canonisation with its inclusion in the Library of America. In the years to come, I imagine that this will continue apace, and justifiably so. Jackson is a fine writer, who deserves much attention, and will almost certainly continue to attract more. Indeed, there may well come a time where the drinking game will have to be amended—a shot taken every time someone mentions that Jackson is mentioned too much!