Author to (re)read: Shirley Jackson

“Poor strangers,” I said. “They have so much to be afraid of.”

In the works of Shirley Jackson, everyone has something to be afraid of: losing that year’s lottery and being stoned to death by local townsfolk; succumbing to the supernatural presence felt in an old house; or, perhaps most terrifying of all, becoming trapped in one’s own mind and its cancerous imaginings. While Jackson’s last work, and my favorite, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, concludes with our protagonists pitying the outside, fearful world of the “strangers,” Jackson was at her best when she was writing about the internal states of her own characters. Like Patricia Highsmith and Henry James, Jackson understood that external forces were not always the most terrifying. While serial killers, grotesque creatures, and gore for gore’s sake, may frighten some, one’s own mind and its workings can be an equally fertile source of discomfort.

A coworker of mine recently complained that “there are no truly scary books anymore.” An avid reader, of all genres, he was dismayed by the number of horror and science fiction books being published that were both boring and complacent. While these books feature weird and disgusting things, none of them have the true capacity to unsettle you or – as he put it – make “your stomach jump into your throat and stay there.” Unlike the ‘complacent’ books my coworker was railing against, Jackson’s work is far creepier than it has a right to be. None of her work is plot heavy, nor is it dominated by descriptions of ghostly happenings or horrifying sights. In fact, the plot of most of her work can be summed up in a few brief sentences. What makes these stories and novels terrifying is not the facts of the case, what does and does not happen and to whom, but where the minds of her characters go and how easily sanity can disintegrate into madness. To read Shirley Jackson  is to enter the fragile mind of an individual or, as in the case of The Lottery, a community, and to watch how civilized behavior falls away. The horror stems not from what a few isolated ‘bad’ people enact, but from what normal people and normal societies are capable of on any given day.

“The typical Jackson protagonist is a social misfit, a young woman not beautiful enough, charming enough, or articulate enough to get along with other people.” (Rubenstein, Roberta. "House Mothers and Haunted Daughters: Shirley Jackson and Female Gothic." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. 15.2 (Fall 1996): 309-331).  She is alone, and vividly experiences the outside world as hostile to her and her survival. Some critics have felt that Jackson’s focus on female outsiders was an explicit critique of patriarchy, of woman as other on the broader social scale. Whether or not one agrees with this viewpoint – I find it quite persuasive – Jackson’s characters are constrained both internally and externally: the outside world pities or despises them; and their internal self has been shaped and molded by the shame, guilt, and fear of being an outcast. They are, to incorporate a bad reference to an Almodovar film, women on the verge of nervous breakdowns (and/or psychosis). The aura of unease that permeates Jackson’s fiction stems from watching these protagonists try to navigate their world and remain psychologically intact; whether they can do so is never certain.

Jackson clearly identified with her protagonists, experiencing much of the internal shame and inferiority that they felt. As she stated: “why am i less, why am i inferior, why am i put down?” Jackson saw her stories and novels as reflective of her own internal woes: “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. if i am cured and well and oh glorious alive then my books should be different. who wants to write about anxiety from a place of safety?” (Carpenter, Lynette. "The Establishment and Preservation of Female Power in Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle." Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. 8.1 ( 1984): 32-38). The fear that Jackson felt in her own life, and replicated in her artistic work, was not, ultimately, a fear of the external world and its forces but a fear of the self and its potential:

We are afraid of being someone else and doing the things someone else wants us to do and of being taken and used by someone else, some other guilt-ridden conscience that lives on and on in our minds, something we build ourselves and never recognize, but this is fear, not a named sin. Then it is fear itself, fear of self that I am writing about ... fear and guilt and their destruction of identity.

(Judy Oppenheimer, Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1988) p. 223.)

Much has been written about Jackson’s background and about the mental breakdown she experienced after completing her last novel. Although Jackson was reticent to discuss her personal life, and her childhood, some authors have delved into the details that do exist in an attempt to understand the ‘origins’ of her instability and her art.

One author stresses that Jackson’s relationship with her mother was difficult; Jackson struggled with her weight throughout her life and her mother was prone to frequent, disparaging remarks on the subject. After the publication of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, her mother wrote: “Why oh why do you allow the magazines to print such awful pictures of you? ... I have been so sad all morning about what you have allowed yourself to look like." (Judy Oppenheimer, Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1988) p. 245-46.) After a lifetime of such comments, and of receiving corsets in the mail as gifts, it is not entirely surprising that Jackson saw humanity as a disparaging and destabilizing force. The world outside was hostile and, try as she might, she was terrified by the idea that this world had come inside to become a part of who she was and how she thought. These fears dominate Jackson’s work, turning stories that are – ostensibly – about haunted houses or children who kill into stories that are truly about how we construct and maintain our sense of self.

Perhaps the real mystery about Jackson’s fiction is how she was able to combine this all encompassing aura of fear with passages of such exquisite beauty and humor. Merricat, the narrator of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, wakes up after a night spent avoiding her cousin Charles to note that:

"[m]ists were wandering lightly along the creek, curling around my face and touching me. I lay there laughing, feeling the almost imaginary brush of the mist across my eyes, and looking up into the trees."

The world may be hostile, and one’s own sanity may be questionable, but there is, simultaneously, the possibility for beauty, magic, and imagination. In reality, you may be huddled in a half burned ‘castle’ with your cat and your sister, but in your mind you are on the moon experiencing its ways and its customs. It is only the strangers, left on earth, who have so much to be afraid of.