“I am tired of writing dainty little biographical things that pretend I am a trim little housewife [….] I live in a dank old place with a ghost.”
American writer Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) was a self-proclaimed witch with a certain impulse for the murky and magical. She died of heart failure at just 48 after living a chiefly domestic existence, facing obesity, alcoholism, depression, and agoraphobia. Her difficult life provides an insight into the disturbed tendencies of her writing.
Subject to constant, gnawing abuse, Jackson’s strained relationship with her mother influenced her writing, stating: “The first book is the book you have to write to get back at your parents.” This attitude conceived The Road Through the Wall (1948), a novel exposing the cruelties of suburban life. She stages the subtle drama on a single street, zooming in and out of uniform homes to observe the goings on beneath the facades. Jackson highlights the way in which prejudices, like faces, are passed from parent to child.
Jackson’s maternal relationship also showed itself in her writing in stranger, more shadowy ways. In The Haunting of Hill House (1959), protagonist Eleanor Vance arrives at the home following the death of her abusive invalid mother. All the hauntings hold some connection to motherhood: the chilled entrance to the nursery, the sound of crying children, her mother’s smell, supernatural hand holding, and a bloody message calling her to “COME HOME.” The house offers itself as a new mother to Eleanor. After initial fright, she gives in, stating that she is “disappearing inch by inch into this house.” By the novel’s close, Eleanor is absorbed into the home, like a child in the womb, its walls answering her desperate pleas for “Mother?”
As her agoraphobia worsened, the scope of Jackson’s writing constricted. She became entirely concerned with the domestic. Including The Haunting of Hill House, her final three novels navigate this tense relationship between women and the home. Her first “house novel,” The Sundial (1948), is a more comic tale of a family who believe themselves to be chosen as survivors of a coming apocalypse. Jackson’s witty tone masks nagging discomfort as, under their commanding matriarch, her characters become increasingly estranged from life beyond the domestic: “Nothing out there is real.”
Her final and greatest novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) completes this set. Jackson introduces two sisters, Merricat and Constance, living in harmony after the sudden death of their family. Like Jackson herself, the sisters are almost entirely isolated from the outside world, operating according to domestic ritual. When their precarious way of life begins to unravel, Jackson invites the reader to question whether the home is the refuge Merricat insists it to be, closing the novel with her fragile assertion: “Oh Constance [….] We are so happy.”
Far from a middling writer of cheap, feminine horror, Shirley Jackson had a striking talent for revealing the dark, cruel corners of life that she had made her housemates.
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