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Shirley Jackson, Influences

and Confluences
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The popularity of such widely known works as “The Lottery” and The Haunting
of Hill House has tended to obscure the extent of Shirley Jackson’s literary output,
which includes six novels, a prodigious number of short stories, and two volumes
of domestic sketches. Organized around the themes of influence and intertextuality,
this collection places Jackson firmly within the literary cohort of the 1950s. The
contributors investigate the work that informed her own fiction and discuss how
Jackson inspired writers of literature and film. The collection begins with essays
that tease out what Jackson’s writing owes to the weird tale, detective fiction, the
supernatural tradition, and folklore, among other influences. The focus then shifts
to Jackson’s place in American literature and the impact of her work on women’s
writing, campus literature, and the graphic novelist Alison Bechdel. The final two
essays examine adaptations of The Haunting of Hill House and Jackson’s influ-
ence on contemporary American horror cinema. Taken together, the essays offer
convincing evidence that half a century following her death, readers and writers
alike are still finding value in Jackson’s words.

Melanie R. Anderson is Instructional Assistant Professor of American Literature

at the University of Mississippi, USA.

Lisa Kröger is an independent scholar in the USA.

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 Shirley Jackson, Influences
and Confluences
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Edited by
Melanie R. Anderson and Lisa Kröger
 First published 2016
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2016 selection and editorial matter, Melanie R. Anderson and Lisa
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Kröger; individual chapters, the contributors

The right of Melanie R. Anderson and Lisa Kröger to be identified as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Anderson, Melanie, editor. | Kröger, Lisa, editor.
Title: Shirley Jackson, influences and confluences / edited by
Melanie R. Anderson and Lisa Kröger.
Description: Burlington, VT : Ashgate, 2016. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015045577 (print) | LCCN 2016006396 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781472481894 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
Subjects: LCSH: Jackson, Shirley, 1916–1965—Criticism and interpretation. |
Women and literature—United States—History—20th century.
Classification: LCC PS3519.A392 Z89 2016 (print) |
LCC PS3519.A392 (ebook) | DDC 818/.5409—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015045577
ISBN: 978-1-472-48189-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-60902-7 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Apex CoVantage, LLC
 Contents
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List of figures vii

Editors and contributors viii
Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1
M E L A N I E R . A N DE RS ON AND L I S A KRÖGE R

1 “We know only names, so far”: Samuel Richardson, Shirley

Jackson, and exploration of the precarious self 7
J E N N I F E R P R E STON WI L S ON AND MI CHAE L T. WILSO N

2 A failed experiment: Family and humanity in The Sundial 25

S . T. J O S H I

3 Perception, supernatural detection, and gender in

The Haunting of Hill House 35
M E L A N I E R . A N DE RS ON

4 Speaking of magic: Folk narrative in Hangsaman and We Have

Always Lived in the Castle 54
S H E L L E Y I N G RAM

5 The Road Through the Wall and Shirley Jackson’s America 76

R I C H A R D PA S C AL

6 “Laughing through the words”: Recovering housewife humor

in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle 97
ANDREA KRAFFT

7 “Listening to what she had almost said”: Containment and

duality in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle 111
A S H L E I G H H A RDI N
 vi Contents
8 Knowing and narration: Shirley Jackson and the campus novel 123
J A M E S E . D OBS ON

9 The haunting of Fun Home: Shirley Jackson and Alison Bechdel’s

queer Gothic neodomesticity 142
J I L L E . A N D E RS ON
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10 The tower or the nursery? Paternal and maternal re-visions

of Hill House on film 160
S H A R I H O D G E S HOLT

11 Girl anachronism: We Have Always Lived in the Castle and

the depiction of adolescent psychosis in Excision (2012)
and Stoker (2013) 183
B E R N I C E M . MURP HY

Index 201
 Figures
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10.1 The low-angle perspective of exterior shots of Hill House

emphasizes the structure’s power over its occupants 162
10.2 Robert Wise typically photographs the inhabitants of Hill House
from a high angle. Dr. Markway, Luke, Theo, and Eleanor (from
left to right) climb the main staircase, one of the house’s many
phallic structures 163
10.3 A striking dissolve transition foreshadows Eleanor’s eventual
spectralization and assimilation by the haunted house 163
10.4 The phallic tower of Hill House attracts Eleanor’s gaze just prior
to a ghostly sexual assault 163
10.5 The mise-en-scène of interior scenes frequently parallels Eleanor
with images of female immobility and imprisonment 164
10.6 In Jan De Bont’s adaptation, an empowered Eleanor prepares for
her confrontation with Hugh Crain atop the phallic staircase 175
10.7 Christian iconography transforms Eleanor into a female messiah
who sacrifices herself to defeat the patriarch 175
10.8 As psychic detective, Eleanor relies on technologies such as
photography to communicate with the dead. The flipping pages of
a photo album bring still photographs to life, allowing Eleanor’s
great-great-grandmother to reveal stories of patriarchal abuse 178
 Editors and contributors
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Jill E. Anderson is an assistant professor of English and women’s studies at

Tennessee State University. She is currently at work on a book manuscript
on queer ecocriticism and Cold War culture, which examines how Cold War
novels, film, and comics challenge the dominant iterations of nature at the
intersection of sexuality and environmentalism. Her work has appeared in
Ecozon@, Margaret Atwood Studies, The Journal of Ecocriticism, and various
essay collections, including the forthcoming This Book Is an Action: Feminist
Print Culture and Activist Aesthetics.
Melanie R. Anderson is an instructional assistant professor of English at the
University of Mississippi, where she teaches courses in American literature.
Her research interests are in supernatural literature and American Gothic. She is
the author of Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison (2013), and she coed-
ited (with Lisa Kröger) The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film:
Spectral Identities (2013). Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison was a
finalist for a 2014 Ohioana Library Association Award and won the 2014 South
Central MLA Book Prize.
James E. Dobson is a lecturer of English at Dartmouth College. He has published
critical essays on major figures, including Mark Twain, Lucy Larcom, and
Ambrose Bierce, and on the digital humanities and computational methods.
Ashleigh Hardin is a doctoral candidate at the University of Kentucky. Her dis-
sertation, “The Age of Intervention: Addiction, Culture, and Narrative Dur-
ing the War on Drugs,” focuses on narratives of addiction and recovery in
late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century fiction, television, and film. She
has presented her research at meetings of the American Literature Association,
the International Society for the Study of Narrative, and the Cultural Studies
Association.
Shari Hodges Holt is an instructional assistant professor of English at the Univer-
sity of Mississippi, where she teaches courses in literature and film studies. She
has authored articles on Charles Dickens, Gothic fiction, and film adaptations
of literature, and she is the coauthor of Ouida the Phenomenon (University of
Delaware Press, 2008).
 Editors and contributors ix
Shelley Ingram is an assistant professor of English at the University of Loui-
siana at Lafayette. Her major research interests include folklore and cultural
theory, twentieth-century American literature, Southern literature, and critical
race theory.
S. T. Joshi is the author of The Weird Tale (1990), The Modern Weird Tale (2001),
and Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012). His award-
winning biography, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996), was later expanded as I Am
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Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (2010). He is a two-time

winner of the World Fantasy Award, and has also won the Bram Stoker Award,
the British Fantasy Award, and the International Horror Guild Award.
Andrea Krafft is Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute
of Technology’s School of Literature, Media, and Communication. She com-
pleted her PhD in English at the University of Florida in August of 2015. Her
research interests include twentieth-century American literature, speculative
fiction, domesticity, humor writing, and advertising studies.
Lisa Kröger holds a doctorate in English literature and languages from the Uni-
versity of Mississippi. Her academic interests include Gothic and horror lit-
erature, specifically works by British women writers of the late eighteenth
through the early nineteenth centuries. Along with Melanie R. Anderson,
Kröger has edited the essay collection The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Lit-
erature and Film: Spectral Identities (2013), and her work has appeared in
publications such as S. T. Joshi’s The Encyclopedia of the Vampire: The Living
Dead in Myth, Legend, and Popular Culture (2011) and the essay collection
EcoGothic, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes (2013). She works
as a freelance writer and editor, when she’s not living life among the savages.
Bernice M. Murphy is a lecturer in popular literature at the School of English,
Trinity College Dublin. She edited the 2005 collection Shirley Jackson: Essays
on the Literary Legacy and has published several previous articles on her work.
Her recent publications include The Highway Horror Film (2014) and The
Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture (2013). She is currently writing a
guide to Key Concepts in Contemporary Popular Fiction for Edinburgh Uni-
versity Press, and coediting (with Elizabeth McCarthy) the collection Lost
Souls: Essays on Gothic Horror’s Forgotten Writers, Directors, Actors and
Artists for McFarland. She is cofounder and was coeditor (during 2006–12)
of the online Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies and has directed the
Trinity College M.Phil. in Popular Literature since 2009.
Richard Pascal has published several articles on Shirley Jackson. He has held visit-
ing fellowships at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and at the Uni-
versity of New Mexico. Currently he holds the position of visiting fellow at the
Australian National University’s School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics.
Jennifer Preston Wilson, associate professor of English at Appalachian State
University, is coeditor, with Elizabeth Kraft, of Approaches to Teaching the
 x Editors and contributors
Novels of Henry Fielding (2015). Her essays include “Clarissa: The Nation
Misrul’d” (2003), “‘One Has Got All the Goodness, and the Other All the
Appearance of It’: The Development of Darcy in Pride and Prejudice” (2004),
and “On Honor and Consequences: The Duel in The Small House at Allington”
(2012).
Michael T. Wilson is an associate professor of English at Appalachian State Uni-
versity. His most recent publications include “‘You give a damn about so many
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things I don’t’: Hemingway’s Gendered Sentimentalism in ‘The Snows of

Kilimanjaro’ and ‘The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber’” in The Senti-
mental Mode: Essays in Literature, Film and Television (2014) and “‘Absolute
Reality’ and the Role of the Ineffable in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill
House” in The Journal of Popular Culture (2015). He is currently exploring
the depiction of violence in popular American mystery and crime novel series.
 Acknowledgments
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The editors wish to thank the brilliant contributors, who shared our vision and our
love of Shirley Jackson, and without whom there would be no collection. A very
sincere expression of gratitude is due for their hard work and intelligent ideas,
which they so kindly shared with us. Thank you also to the anonymous readers,
as well as to the publishing team, for making sure this manuscript was the best it
could be. To Benjamin F. Fisher, thank you for your years of mentorship.
Melanie R. Anderson cannot name here all of the friends, mentors, and col-
leagues from Thomas More College and the University of Mississippi, who over
the years have been an encouragement on this academic path. Many thanks must
go to her coeditor, Lisa Kröger, with whom it is always a pleasure to pursue these
projects. Additional thanks go to Joan Wylie Hall for the enjoyable and interest-
ing conversations about the work of Shirley Jackson. Last but never least, she
is grateful for the love, support, and patience of her parents, Paul and Deborah
Anderson; her siblings, Justin and Stephanie; her grandparents, Earl and Aline
Beil; and Bobbie, one of the best of man’s best friends.
Lisa Kröger would like to thank her coeditor and friend, Melanie R. Anderson,
with whom writing is always an enjoyable adventure. Here’s to many more joint
projects in the future. She would also like to thank her husband, Robbie, for being
an unending source of encouragement and courage, and her sons, Leo and Eli, for
being an unending source of joy and love, even when the term “raising demons”
seems all too appropriate.
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 Introduction
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On April 28, 2014, the New Yorker published “The Man in the Woods,” at the time
a previously unpublished short story by Shirley Jackson. The story appeared over
sixty years after the New Yorker made Jackson famous when it published “The
Lottery,” a story that garnered a mass of letters from angry readers. In “Biography
of a Story,” Jackson remembered the calm before the sudden storm of commu-
nication: “June 28, 1948 . . . was the last time for months that I was to pick up
the mail without an active feeling of panic” (211). She admitted of the story, “It
was not my first published story, nor my last, but I have been assured over and
over that if it had been the only story I ever wrote or published, there would be
people who would not forget my name” (211). Indeed, nearly seventy years later,
Shirley Jackson’s name is still on the tongues of readers and literary critics alike.
The timing of the appearance of “The Man in the Woods” anticipated forthcom-
ing publications, about and by Jackson. Critic Ruth Franklin is completing a new
biography, and two of Jackson’s children, Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah
Hyman DeWitt, have recently released a collection of their mother’s previously
unpublished work, including the aforementioned story “The Man in the Woods,”
titled Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings. This renewed
interest in Jackson’s fiction is timely, as 2015 marked the fiftieth anniversary of
her death. And, as the publication of “The Man in the Woods” suggests, Jackson’s
allure has only increased among readers in the past decades since “The Lottery”
rocked the literary world and caused readers to cancel their subscriptions to the
New Yorker and complain to Jackson of their anger, confusion, and, sometimes,
gruesome curiosity through loads of mail.
A closer examination of “The Man in the Woods” reveals many of the themes
that permeate Jackson’s body of work. It is a familiar story to readers of her canon:
the story adopts a fairy-tale tone as it follows an outsider who is confronted with
a barbaric ritual in an environment that initially seems to be safe and innocuous.
Christopher, the story’s protagonist, is a lonely wanderer. He, like many of Jack-
son’s main characters, has lost his way, walking simply “because he had nothing
else to do.” The wayward and marginalized outcast finding a place outside of
society is common throughout Jackson’s writings. From Natalie in Hangsaman
to Eleanor in The Haunting of Hill House to Merricat in We Have Always Lived
in the Castle, her protagonists often feel as if they are on the fringes of society,
 2 Introduction
if not completely isolated, and much of their separate journeys involves creating
their own safe place, their own society outside of the mainstream world. Chris-
topher wanders into the woods, a setting that is at once familiar, in its winding
paths, and at the same time uncanny, as evidenced by the cat who joins him,
whose presence the narrator describes as simultaneously surprising and “oddly”
comforting to the wanderer. As the two push deeper into the woods, the story
develops an almost mythical structure. Their destination lands them in a timeless
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setting, among women who have existed “for a long time,” perhaps for eternity,
who exude warmth and a feeling of home that is, at once, comfortable but
possibly magical.
As would be expected of any good fairy tale, Christopher and his cat stumble
upon a quaint cottage in the woods. The house is described as “a comfortable-
looking, settled old house, made of stone,” but like any setting in a fairy tale, this
one has a sinister mood underneath its cozy veneer. Once inside, Christopher finds
a scene of domestic tranquility, as two women are cooking a meal and the home
is filled with “the unbelievable beauty of warmth, light, and the smell of onions.”
Upon the introduction of Mr. Oakes, the man of the house, Christopher begins to
realize that the hospitality he has received might come with a price. Like the ritual
at the heart of Jackson’s short story “The Lottery,” another inexplicably obliga-
tory and violent ritual seems preordained for Mr. Oakes and Christopher to ensure
that this quaint cottage in the woods has a capable and strong caretaker. As with
many of Jackson’s stories, tradition often comes with a steep price. Perhaps this is
at the heart of why her writings remain applicable today: her stories often question
the traditions that society takes for granted and highlight the mindless conformity
and prejudices that exist in the shadows. Her work encourages us to discover the
unfair, and sometimes even barbaric, origins of customs that society has insisted
keep civilization afloat and question whether those very customs are doing more
harm than good, hopefully leading to a repudiation of our darker impulses. As
Judy Oppenheimer suggests, “It was Shirley’s genius to be able to paint homey,
familiar scenes . . . and then imbue them with evil – or, more correctly, allow a
reader to see the evil that had been obvious to her all along” (101). For Oppen-
heimer, Jackson strived to create moments in her stories where “the comforting
limits of the real world . . . dissolved, and the reader was left standing at a misty
crossroads, gazing into an abyss – other worlds, other possibilities, unnamed
terrors” (102).
From the late 1940s until her death in 1965, Jackson produced six novels, one
unfinished novel, two collections of domestic sketches, scores of short stories,
collected and uncollected, and a few children’s books. During her writing career,
she was one of the most well-known and well-connected authors of the Ameri-
can literary scene. Because of her work for literary magazines and the academic
and critical connections of her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Jackson’s social
and professional circles included such luminaries as Malcolm Cowley, Ken-
neth Burke, Ralph Ellison, J. D. Salinger, and numerous figures in the publish-
ing sphere. She churned out reams of short stories that were published in the
New Yorker, Good Housekeeping, and Woman’s Home Companion, among other
 Introduction 3
magazines. Jackson’s work transcended popularity to critical acclaim as well.
Darryl Hattenhauer attests to her many accolades in his study Shirley Jackson’s
American Gothic, noting that she was often anthologized among the best writers
of her day and new writers were often compared to her, in addition to canonical
writers, such as William Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter (2). Angela Hague
also cites Jackson’s achievements:
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During her lifetime Jackson’s work frequently appeared on the New York
Times Book Review’s list of the “Best Fiction” of the year. . . . The Haunting
of Hill House was nominated for the National Book Award in 1960, “Louisa,
Please Come Home” won the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1961, and in 1965
Syracuse University presented Jackson with the Arents Pioneer Medal for
Outstanding Achievement. “The Possibility of Evil,” published in the Satur-
day Evening Post three months after Jackson’s death in August, 1965, won a
posthumous Edgar Allan Poe Award the following year.
(91 note 2)

Despite a successful career, her literary legacy since her death has rested on
“The Lottery” and her supernatural masterpiece The Haunting of Hill House.
Her work has been relegated to the edges of popular culture and a small niche
of literary studies. Alexis Shotwell White observes, “It is notable that almost
all existing scholarship bemoans the lack of sufficient scholarship on Jackson”
(138 note 2). With the exception of two movie adaptations of her 1959 novel
The Haunting of Hill House and a small cadre of scholarly devotees, the pub-
lic and academic critical realms have largely ignored Jackson’s vast influence
on the literature of her contemporary moment and the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries. Illustrating the lasting legacy of The Haunting of Hill
House in the American horror genre, Stephen King has cited Jackson as an
important influence, and she often is considered the godmother of the modern
American Gothic haunted house. Incarnations of Hill House can be seen every-
where, from Richard Matheson’s Hell House (1971), to Ann Rivers Siddons’s
The House Next Door (1978), to Peter Straub’s Ghost Story (1979), to Mark Z.
Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000). Without forgetting this aspect of Jack-
son’s impact on later writers, this collection of essays will build on previous
work and continue to amplify Jackson’s presence in American literature beyond
her influence on the horror genre. To that purpose, these essays are organized
around three categories of influence. The essays in the pages to come address
influence on Jackson’s work and her place as a successor to her literary fore-
bears; they place Jackson more firmly within her cohort and the literary scene
of the 1950s and 1960s; and finally, they address her legacy that is apparent in
more recent literature and films.
The first section of the collection, which intends to look at the authors and
works that influenced Jackson’s writings, includes essays by Jennifer and Michael
Wilson, S. T. Joshi, Melanie R. Anderson, and Shelley Ingram. In their essay “‘We
know only names, so far’: Samuel Richardson, Shirley Jackson, and Exploration
 4 Introduction
of the Precarious Self,” Jennifer and Michael Wilson explore Jackson’s interest
in eighteenth-century fiction, particularly that of Samuel Richardson. They argue
that Richardson’s psychologically fraught narratives of incremental seduction,
abduction, rape, and madness are essential influences on Jackson’s fiction, and
they emphasize the conflicts between each writer’s heroines and societal expecta-
tions and oppressions. Joshi, adding to the scant critical attention paid to The Sun-
dial, examines Jackson’s focus on misanthropy in the novel and traces this theme
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back to satirists like Jonathan Swift and Ambrose Bierce in his essay “A Failed
Experiment: Family and Humanity in The Sundial.” Continuing this work of plac-
ing Jackson’s fiction within a larger literary tradition, in “Perception, Supernatural
Detection, and Gender in The Haunting of Hill House,” Melanie R. Anderson
explores Jackson’s interests in supernatural and mystery fiction and suggests that
she uses tropes of paranormal investigations and occult detective fiction of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to interrogate the place of women and
women’s experience in 1950s America. In “Speaking of Magic: Folk Narrative in
Hangsaman and We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” Shelley Ingram examines
the ways in which Jackson undercuts authenticity and belief through conscious
and playful manipulation of myth, ritual, fairy tale, and legend, focusing on We
Have Always Lived in the Castle and Hangsaman.
For Jackson’s place in her literary cohort and the concerns of 1950s and 1960s
America, there are pieces by Richard Pascal, Andrea Krafft, Ashleigh Hardin,
and James E. Dobson. In his “The Road Through the Wall and Shirley Jackson’s
America,” Pascal posits that Jackson’s later novels all deploy elements of the
Gothic in social criticism in order to steal into the domain of suburban realists,
such as John O’Hara, James Gould Cozzens, and John Cheever. He finds this
suburban realist social commentary in her earlier works as well, focusing on her
first novel and her most famous story to illustrate how social cohesiveness comes
at the expense of punishing difference. Krafft’s “‘Laughing Through the Words’:
Recovering Housewife Humor in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in
the Castle” aims to show how Jackson’s humor works in tandem with her use of
the Gothic to subvert the dominant containment narrative of the 1950s. More-
over, this humor connects her to other women writers of the time who were using
domestic comedy to subvert the status quo. In her essay, “‘Listening to what she
had almost said’: Containment and Duality in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always
Lived in the Castle,” Hardin, looking also at the feminist viewpoint addressed in
Jackson’s works, views her final novel as an indictment of the limited opportuni-
ties women had for writing themselves out of midcentury authoritative narratives
of domestic constraint. Dobson’s piece, “Knowing and Narration: Shirley Jackson
and the Campus Novel,” serves as a transition point by placing Jackson’s novel
Hangsaman in the long tradition of the American campus novel from the turn of
the century up to Donna Tartt.
After Jackson has been examined in various literary traditions and among
her peer groups, the collection turns to a more current examination of her influ-
ence on later fiction and film through essays by Jill E. Anderson, Shari Hodges
Holt, and Bernice M. Murphy. In her essay “The Haunting of Fun Home: Shirley
 Introduction 5
Jackson and Alison Bechdel’s Queer Gothic Neodomesticity,” Jill E. Anderson
traces the ways in which Jackson in The Haunting of Hill House and Alison
Bechdel in her graphic memoir Fun Home use hauntings to disrupt narratives of
domestic normativity, and she suggests that Fun Home revisits aspects of Jack-
son’s earlier novel in order to create a contemporary neodomestic memoir. The
pivot to film adaptation and influence comes in the final two essays. In “The
Tower or the Nursery? Paternal and Maternal Re-visions of Hill House on Film”
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Hodges Holt examines how the two film adaptations of The Haunting of Hill
House demonstrate the novel’s relevance to feminist and postfeminist discourse
and show Jackson’s anticipation of coming feminist movements and redefinitions
of female subjectivity. Lastly, Murphy’s “Girl Anachronism: We Have Always
Lived in the Castle and the Depiction of Adolescent Psychosis in Excision (2012)
and Stoker (2013)” addresses the influence of Merricat Blackwood’s madness for
later incarnations of the “bad child” and dangerous adolescent females in hor-
ror cinema. Through their confused existence in the spaces between reality and
fantasy, these young women challenge repressive male figures in their lives and
often use violence to achieve freedom from familial and social control. Murphy
traces a creative link from Jackson’s final complete novel to the films Excision
(2012) and Stoker (2013).
Read as a whole, this collection of essays introduces readers to Shirley Jack-
son’s work beyond “The Lottery,” The Haunting of Hill House, and even We Have
Always Lived in the Castle. It demonstrates Jackson’s place in the greater canon
of English and American literature, as well as shows her influence upon her peers
and the literature that would follow her brief but productive writing career. After
half a century following her death, readers and writers alike are still finding value
in her words. For a writer as engaged in the American literary landscape of the
late 1940s through the early 1960s as Shirley Jackson, scholarship on her work
has not fully explored the diversity of her oeuvre, the historical connections and
theoretical implications of her fiction, nor the lasting impact of her art. The fol-
lowing essays are offered as a beginning to, and as a critical appeal for, what we
hope will be a resurgence and expansion in Jackson scholarship.
Melanie R. Anderson and Lisa Kröger, editors
September 2015

Works cited
Friedman, Lenemaja. Shirley Jackson. Boston: Twayne, 1975. Print.
Hague, Angela. “‘A Faithful Anatomy of Our Times’: Reassessing Shirley Jackson.” Fron-
tiers: A Journal of Women Studies 26.2 (2005): 73–96. Print.
Hall, Joan Wylie. Shirley Jackson: A Study in Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993.
Print.
Hattenhauer, Darryl. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. Albany: SUNY P, 2003. Print.
Jackson, Shirley. “Biography of a Story.” Come Along with Me: Part of a Novel, Sixteen
Stories, and Three Lectures. 1968. Ed. Stanley Edgar Hyman. New York: Penguin, 1995.
211–24. Print.
 6 Introduction
———. “The Man in the Woods.” Newyorker.com. Condé Nast, 1 Apr. 2014. Web. 6
Apr. 2015.
King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. Updated Ed. New York: Gallery Books, 2010. Print.
Murphy, Bernice M., ed. Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland and Company, 2005. Print.
Oppenheimer, Judy. Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. New York: Putnam,
1988. Print.
Shotwell, Alexis. “‘No Proper Feeling for Her House’: The Relational Formation of White
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Womanliness in Shirley Jackson’s Fiction.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 32.1

(Spring 2013): 119–41. Print.
 1 “We know only names, so far”
Samuel Richardson, Shirley Jackson,
and exploration of the precarious self
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Jennifer Preston Wilson and Michael T. Wilson

Shirley Jackson scholars have occasionally noted her interest in eighteenth-

century English fiction, but they have done so only in passing. Critic Lenemaja
Friedman observes that in The Haunting of Hill House, Dr. Montague, “like Miss
Jackson, is fond of the eighteenth-century novel, for he reads Richardson’s novels
for relaxation before retiring: Pamela, then Clarissa, and later Sir Charles Gran-
dison” (123). Darryl Hattenhauer adds that “Samuel Richardson was a particular
favorite for Jackson, who saw him as ‘an emblem of fairness and love’” (24),
while Dara Downey and Darryl Jones delve a bit deeper to argue that “Dr. Mon-
tague reads Pamela and attempts to read Sir Charles Grandison as a corrective
to the supernatural chaos of the haunted house” (221). Downey and Jones further
contend that “Jackson herself looked back to the eighteenth century for a vision
of social harmony now vanished, for, in her own words ‘an insistence on a pattern
imposed precariously on the chaos of human development’” (221), a quotation
which Judy Oppenheimer repeats in her biography of the writer (125). All of these
critics, however, move on quickly from the idea of a Richardsonian influence and
gloss over the elements of Jackson’s words which we find most interesting: “a pat-
tern imposed precariously on the chaos of human development” (emphasis ours).
Nor do their readings note the extent to which the deeply psychological individual
and familial conflicts inherent in those eighteenth-century novels, rather than their
“vision of social harmony,” are mirrored in Jackson’s fiction.1
In fact, Samuel Richardson’s and Shirley Jackson’s novels deploy psychologi-
cally complex plots of family conflict that are remarkably similar, when stripped
of their extraneous historical effects. Their fictions ask questions about the integra-
tion of the self within Gothically drawn domestic environments and share a strik-
ing repetition of motifs: the use of female character foils to expose fears about the
individual’s ability to assert herself against social conventions, a focus on fraught
child-parent relationships that shape the heroine’s allegiances in conscious and
unconscious ways, and the deliberate staging of conflict within evocative formal
settings, such as the summerhouse, to frame significant trials and transformations.
This essay will study Richardson’s and Jackson’s heroines who struggle with
questions of identity at the most basic psychological levels, including moments
of surreal contemplation of one’s own name and awareness of the power of words
and human reliance on word formulae – mottoes, adages, proverbs, folksongs,
 8 Jennifer P. Wilson and Michael T. Wilson
charms, lists, letters – to define and protect the self. The cumulative effect of
Jackson’s sustained incorporation of Richardsonian tropes suggests that Richard-
son’s influence on Jackson operated at even deeper levels than those of style and
character development. In the end, Jackson, like Richardson, uses these insights
into language to approximate the experience of the traumatized mind.
Jackson followed Richardson at perhaps the broadest level by isolating and
examining the individual as a unique formation of specific familial contexts. In
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Richardson’s novels, which tell the stories of young women in social, physical, and
spiritual peril through the letters those women write and receive, the epistolary form
provides readers a constant reminder of themes of identity and family through the
repetition of the signature line. This refrain reinforces the idea that the exploration
of the heroine’s character is the essence of the plot. When Pamela Andrews signs
off to her parents in her early letters with such phrases as “Your dutiful and honest
daughter” (24), “Your afflicted PAMELA” (27), and “Your distressed daughter”
(64), we already see the endurance under suffering that will define her character
for generations of readers to come.2 Likewise, the signature of “Your once highly
favoured, but now most unhappy, kinswoman, CL. HARLOWE” (252) expresses
the plot of Richardson’s second novel in a nutshell – Clarissa’s tragedy occurs
because the spiritual idealism that distinguishes her ultimately sets her against the
greed and tyranny of her nouveau riche family. In Sir Charles Grandison, Harriet
Byron is a paragon of honesty and frankness. Her most frequent signature, “Your
Harriet Byron” (1.15), conveys her fidelity to those people and principles she has
embraced as her own. Each of these Richardsonian protagonists faces a family
problem that is emblematized in her name, and thus restated with each letter’s
close. For Pamela, the Andrews’ laboring class status prompts Mr. B to pursue her
as a potential mistress rather than court her as a wife; Clarissa’s family disallows
her a choice of marriage partner; meanwhile, Harriet attains symbolic membership
as an honorary “sister” in the Grandison family, but that closeness only furthers
love with her already bespoken “brother.” The emphasis on these women’s names
acts as a constant reminder of these domestic conflicts.
Familial dilemmas and mysteries entwined with issues of naming and identity
also erode the psyches of characters in Jackson’s fiction. The Sundial foregrounds
the formative powers of names from the moment one passes the giant ironwork
“H” on the front gates of the Halloran estate, which proclaims the family’s fading
prominence over the nearby village it once dominated. When the daughter of the
original owner, Aunt Fanny, receives an apparent prophecy, she does so within a
context of repeated family conflict that leaves her vulnerable to uncanny events.
She has been triply traumatized by the recent death of her nephew, an ultimatum
issued by her sister-in-law, and an eerie sense that reality is coming unrooted in
the garden of the Halloran house, a site featuring a hedge maze shaped in the let-
ters of her mother’s name. From this psychologically fraught setting, she hears a
voice calling “FRANCES HALLORAN,” a summons that terrifies her:

This was fear so complete that Aunt Fanny, once Frances Halloran, stood
with nothing but ice to clothe her; was there something there? Something?
 Exploration of the precarious self 9
Then she thought with what seemed shocking clarity: it is worse if it is not
there; somehow it must be real because if it is not real it is in my own head;
unable to move, Aunt Fanny thought: It is real.
(25–26)

Aunt Fanny is positioned precariously between her current identity and her most
essential identity as a child, as young Frances. Ironically, she chooses to believe
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in the call to the child with very self-protective, adult logic. The mature “Aunt
Fanny” reasons that in order to be “not mad” what she senses must have substance –
the voice must be “real”; the reverberating words “Frances Halloran” can make
sense only as a message from someone who knew her in her long-ago past, her
father. This process of an adult mind explaining away a nonrational experience
occurs again when Aunt Fanny ushers her grandniece, Fancy, up to the rooms
housing the furniture of Fanny’s childhood home, an unsettling simulacra of a
house-within-a-house. The elderly aunt explains the rules of how the staged house
functions, but Fancy, her name itself signifying imaginative power, runs off in
boredom (163–64). The closeness apparent in the names of Fanny/Fancy belies
this separation, however, and Jackson shows how the child still lurks under the
surface of the adult façade. We sense the threatening and imminent mental col-
lapse of a mad Aunt Fanny abandoning herself to a perpetual indulgence in her
girlhood space.
In Jackson’s The Bird’s Nest, the name-invoking summons issues in the other
direction, from child to parent, but with the same tone of world-shattering urgency.
Betsy, one of the multiple personalities that manifest in the heroine, Miss Rich-
mond, seeks her mother in New York, quietly chanting her name in a desperate
attempt to stay focused and complete her quest: “‘My mother’s name is Elizabeth
Richmond, and my name is Betsy and my mother always called me Betsy and I
was named after my mother. Betsy Richmond’” (89). The shared name between
mother and daughter is a memento of the affection Betsy remembers from her
past, but it also suggests that until she resolves her relationship with her mother,
she will not be able to supersede the three other personalities within Miss Rich-
mond and develop on her own as an adult. Marta Caminero-Santangelo analyzes
Betsy’s crisis as an attempt to move past the Lacanian mirror stage: “Betsy now
views the whole world or at least everyone she meets in New York, as extensions
of herself, and the dramatic triangle involving Robin [her mother’s love interest],
her mother, and Betsy is replayed again and again” (75). Everything and everyone
Betsy turns to – the dictionary in her suitcase, the phonebook consulted on the
street, commuters on the bus – are all connected with the mother; her mission is
one of memory and language as she confusedly replays the same script, holding
on to her mother’s name as a thread to lead her through the maze.
Betsy’s clutching at names represents a cognitive process that is practiced by
Jackson’s other characters. Her identification with her same-sex parent, “Eliza-
beth Richmond,” most immediately resembles the psychology of Aunt Fanny in
The Sundial, who negotiates the garden maze by imagining the curves of her
mother’s name, Anna, outlined in relief by the hedgerows (95). As a child, Fanny
 10 Jennifer P. Wilson and Michael T. Wilson
worked relentlessly to lose herself in the maze in spite of the fact that she never
could willfully forget its secrets. The primacy of naming rituals and cultivated
memories also figures in The Haunting of Hill House, where names and identi-
ties are understood by difference, highlighting the arbitrary nature of signs. Luke
Sanderson initiates this conversation by reasoning from what he thinks he already
knows. He suggests,
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“shouldn’t we get acquainted? We know only names, so far. I know that it

is Eleanor, here, who is wearing a red sweater, and consequently it must be
Theodora who wears yellow – ”
“Doctor Montague has a beard,” Theodora said, “so you must be Luke.”
“And you are Theodora,” Eleanor said, “because I am Eleanor.”
(43)

This playful sorting of selves later becomes more sinister as the house repeatedly
calls on Eleanor by name. She experiences this appropriation as an assault on the
property of her being and cannot understand why she should be singled out from
the rest of the company.
Jackson’s insistent use of the name as a key to the mysteries of the self repeats
techniques developed centuries earlier by Richardson. In Clarissa, the child is
isolated in resistance to the family’s demands that she marry the rich, yet toad-
like, Mr. Solmes. As she muses over her predicament, she fears that she will never
live up to what she once promised to be, as delineated in her grandfather’s will:
“my dearest and beloved grand-daughter Clarissa Harlowe . . . from infancy a
matchless young creature in her duty to me, and admired by all who knew her as a
very extraordinary child” (53). These reverberating words of praise defining “Cla-
rissa Harlowe” clash with her immediate disobedience to her family. As Margaret
Anne Doody argues, in Clarissa’s resistance to her parents’ choice of Solmes,
“[she] is already bricked up in a family tomb. Her mind runs upon burial alive”
(Natural Passion 191). Moreover, she cannot remain “beloved” and “matchless”
when engaged in secret correspondence with Sir Robert Lovelace, the libertine
nobleman who has fallen out of favor with her relations. Richardson’s Clarissa,
like Jackson’s Aunt Fanny, finds herself in conflict with the very reality surround-
ing her. The Harlowe family’s utter neglect of Lovelace and his suit panics Cla-
rissa into fearing his potential retaliation. Her anxiety takes over so entirely that
she believes she must accommodate his desire to maintain their communications
to prevent bloodshed.
Feeling manipulated into wrongdoing, Clarissa asks her friend Anna Howe,
“can I give a sanction immediately to [Lovelace’s] deluding arts? – can I avoid
being angry with him for tricking me thus, as I may say (and as I have called it
to him), out of myself?” (382). Clarissa is caught in a trap. She implicitly knows
that it is her duty as daughter to decline forbidden correspondence, just as Aunt
Fanny knows that the likeliest explanation of the voice she hears is her own mad-
ness. They both, however, engage in situational thinking to bring about a desired
outcome. Clarissa imagines Lovelace’s threats of violence as reality and reasons
 Exploration of the precarious self 11
that she has no option but to write to him. In this way, she is tricked out of her
full self. Fanny imagines a voice calling to her and reasons she has no option but
to heed it. For Clarissa, the split has tragic consequences. Immediately after her
rape, she loses her sense of reason, constantly writing and tearing up her letters.
In one paper addressed to her “dear honored papa,” she says that “I don’t presume
to think you should receive me – no, indeed – my name is – I don’t know what
my name is! – I never dare to wish to come into your family again!” (890). This
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sense of disintegration continues later when she attributes her declining health to
“inward decay” (1276).
Clarissa’s undoing down to the loss of her own name even more strongly pres-
ages The Haunting of Hill House, when Eleanor reads the large chalk lettering that
materializes on the wall, spelling out “HELP ELEANOR COME HOME” (107).
She feels immediately violated by this appropriation of her identity in a way she
cannot fully explain:

Those letters spelled out my name, and none of you know what that feels
like – it’s so familiar . . . Look. There’s only one of me, and it’s all I’ve got.
I hate seeing myself dissolve and slip and separate so that I’m living in one
half, my mind, and I see the other half of me helpless and frantic and driven
and I can’t stop it.
(118)

Eleanor struggles to describe how the wall’s possession of the visible form of her
name splits her in two, with the material half of her being sliding away and leav-
ing her mind stranded alone. She accuses Hill House of a “divide and conquer”
strategy reminiscent of Lovelace’s plan to destroy Clarissa’s “pride of being cor-
porally inviolate” before gaining full possession of his captive (879). These thefts
of names thus mark a halfway point to complete loss of self, and the fractured
protests of both Clarissa and Eleanor reflect the damage already inflicted.
In the sense that each emphasizes the female struggle to attain and maintain
self-possession, Clarissa and Hill House stage an identical contest on one funda-
mental level: will a woman be brought to consent to her own spiritual destruction,
to sign her name to her own ruin? Lovelace reasons that his attempts on Clarissa’s
virtue will do harm only if she allows her own seduction, while if she happens
to prevail, her virtuous defense will only add to her reputation and glory. This
rationale allows him postpone justice to the wronged lady, while he works to bring
about his ulterior purpose of gaining a mistress who “will be mine upon my own
terms” (886). Eleanor likewise realizes the “game” that Hill House is playing with
her in order to dominate and destroy her, but she is unable to resist its seduction:

in the churning darkness where [Eleanor] fell endlessly nothing was real
except her own hands white around the bedpost . . . It is too much, she
thought, I will relinquish my possession of this self of mine . . . “I’ll come,”
she said aloud.
(150)
 12 Jennifer P. Wilson and Michael T. Wilson
The high-contrast image of Eleanor’s white-knuckled hands desperately cling-
ing amid an infinite fall into darkness signifies her finite capacity for self-
possession capitulating to the House’s seemingly unlimited assault. Hill House
quiets instantly upon Eleanor’s promise, much as Lovelace does when Clarissa
writes to him with a seeming surrender of her earlier unequivocal denial. Cla-
rissa has learned of the depth of Lovelace’s deception and the certainty of his
pursuit. By calculating on his worldly interpretation of her words, she commits
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a slant-lie:

Sir, I have good news to tell you. I am setting out with all diligence for my
father’s house. I am bid to hope that he will receive this poor penitent with a
goodness peculiar to himself . . . So, pray, sir, don’t disturb or interrupt me – I
beseech you don’t – You may in time, possibly, see me at my father’s, at least,
if it be not your own fault.
(1233)

By speaking allegorically of her heavenly father, Clarissa feigns consent and signs
her name to a document that suggests an eventual reconciliation with Lovelace.
This small, strategic shift in her usual prose wards off Lovelace’s pursuit and
thereby allows her time to accept another suitor: Death. Eleanor, trapped in an
even more hostile universe than Clarissa, where death and Hill House are ulti-
mately the same, finds that her own forced consent to the House seals her mortal
and perhaps immortal fates.
Richardson and Jackson often situate this battle between the individual’s
freedom and consent within a polyphonic narrative structure that moves
through mystery, tension, expectation, and release. In The Bird’s Nest, a seem-
ingly simple allusion to a nursery rhyme about names, “Elizabeth, Elspeth,
Betsy, and Bess,” hides a complex plot based on psychoanalytic research into
multiple personality disorder and the Romance trope of reunion with one’s
mother. The reader’s gradual discoveries parallel those of the therapist, Dr.
Wright, as he treats Miss Richmond and the four identifiable aspects of her
self – Lizzie, Beth, Betsy, and Bess. This multivocal technique parallels the
quartet of letter writers in Clarissa – the eponymous heroine, her friend Anna
Howe, the rake Robert Lovelace, and his friend John Belford. Just as we par-
ticipate in Clarissa’s epistolary unfolding, we become acquainted with each of
Miss Richmond’s four voices by its distinctive tone or worldview as it plays
out over time, eventually coming to know all of them so well as to predict their
responses. The clamor of these voices simultaneously serves to emphasize and
obscure the fact that the silent center of The Bird’s Nest is Miss Richmond’s
mother, who died mysteriously six years earlier; her daughter’s conflicted reac-
tion to this loss pushes her differing personalities into complex oppositions and
alliances.
In this sense, Jackson internalizes Richardson’s use of voice-as-conflict by
placing even stronger emphasis on the disintegration of the female protagonist.
At one session with Dr. Wright, “Betsy” schemes with him by answering a few
 Exploration of the precarious self 13
questions about her mother while another personality, “Lizzie,” is asleep. Betsy
whispers,

I know whose mother you mean, old man. The one she – (here she shut her
lips, and grinned mysteriously, and put her finger to her mouth in a childlike
gesture of secrecy) – Talking about Lizzie when her back is turned, my dear!
For shame!
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(67)

In this conspiratorial aside, Betsy, initially the most sinister and malicious of the
personalities, hints that the more externalized Lizzie has some hidden involve-
ment with her mother that she will not release. Jackson pits Lizzie’s repression
against the raucous Betsy, a trickster driven to escape the controlled containment
of the other personalities.
Throughout Jackson’s novels, such maternal loss and trauma unloose the child
into a divisive world of conflicting social edicts, strongly reflecting Richardson’s
own use of this theme in Pamela. Eleanor Vance first approaches Hill House in
a vulnerable state precisely because of her long years caring as an unpaid, fre-
quently criticized nurse for her own domineering mother:

the only person in the world that she genuinely hated, now that her mother
was dead, was her sister . . . her years with her mother had been built up
devotedly around small guilts and small reproaches, constant weariness, and
unending despair.
(3)

In this passage, the stuff of which Eleanor’s life has been “built” includes daily
sniping against a background of infinite service. Her sacrifice makes her at once a
hateful and a devoted daughter. Roberta Rubenstein argues for the centrality of the
mother image in The Sundial as well, observing a “split between the ‘good mother’
[Anna] for whom the daughter longs – protective and idealized, but absent – and
the ‘bad mother’ – the predatory and tyrannical Mrs. Halloran” (134). In Rich-
ardson’s Pamela, the heroine also loses her mother figure, the noblewoman to
whom she is maid and companion, and the narrative of Pamela’s “great Trouble”
originates from this point. As her predatory new Master pursues her, Pamela finds
herself protected – for good or evil – by the housekeepers at his two estates. The
“civil” Mrs. Jervis and the “wicked” Mrs. Jewkes bifurcate the maternal role into
nurturing protection and bawdy corruption (15, 107). As such, they can be inter-
preted as externalized components of Pamela’s reaction to mother-loss.
Pamela’s crisis of female roles manifests in her clothing as she casts off the
fine silk dresses that her Lady had bestowed upon her and takes up a country
garb, mirroring Eleanor’s mental crisis in Hill House and her willful destruction
of the seductive Theodora’s clothes as a means of identity-reformation. Pamela
is conscious of clothing as signifier and yearns for unity between her dress and
her worldly fortune. As she writes to her parents, “I now long to get my Business
 14 Jennifer P. Wilson and Michael T. Wilson
done, and come to my New-Old Lot, again, as I may call it” (38). The awk-
ward wording in this quotation represents the jarring psychological transition
that Pamela faces in erasing her intellectual and fashionable development over
the past few years and returning to the impoverished “Lot” that had been hers
in childhood. These abrupt shifts in identity are even more jarring because they
are largely out of Pamela’s control, reactive to Mr. B’s advances and requiring
constant vigilance. Richardson’s method of “writing to the moment” captures
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the terror of not knowing how to respond or why things are happening, much as
Jackson’s techniques unveil Eleanor’s conflicted feelings at Hill House. Jackson
mimics Richardson’s “to the moment” prose when Eleanor feels both envy and
hatred for Theodora and destroys her clothing: “‘I suppose she’ll have to wear
my clothes’ [Eleanor said] . . . she had never felt such uncontrollable loathing for
a person before” (115–16). In this passage, Eleanor attempts to erase the differ-
ences between herself and the despised Theodora by forcing a crisis where they
will look alike. She acts in a passive-aggressive fashion, setting up a situation
where she will be forced to succumb to Theodora’s needs. This pattern later
repeats in her surrender to Hill House’s demands and echoes her earlier servitude
to her mother: “It is too much, [Eleanor] thought, I will relinquish my posses-
sion of this self of mine, abdicate, give over willingly what I never wanted at all;
whatever [the house] wants of me it can have” (150).
The entanglement of multiple selves, naming, and identity is likewise presented
as a precarious ordeal in Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison and Jackson’s
Hangsaman, where a susceptible heroine finds herself divided amid competition
with more favored peers. The histories of Harriet Byron and Natalie Waite both
begin with an obliquely portrayed scene of rape or violation hurtling them for-
ward into a new environment, where they must function without guardians or
much-needed worldly experience. In this “test” they find themselves shaken down
to the very foundations of identity in their sense of their own names. Richardson’s
novel portrays a violent abduction from a masquerade, after which Harriet reels
in shock, worrying that “I am afraid that I never shall be what I was” (1.159). Her
rescuer, Sir Charles Grandison, encourages her to accept the fate that threatened
her and allow him to intervene; he urges her to “let us turn this evil appearance
into real good. I have two sisters: The world produces not more worthy women.
Let me henceforth boast that I have three” (1.144). His flourish of familial accep-
tance, meant to lighten Harriet’s sense of obligation, actually confuses her further
with its offer of a new identity and reality. Her grateful love for the hero who
saved her must now be shunted aside into sisterly acceptance of a “brother” who
did no more than his duty in saving her honor. Mark Kinkead-Weekes observes
this irony, noting that “The more she loves, the more unsatisfactory will she find
the brothering and sistering she ought to welcome” (301). Harriet’s watchfulness
over her new siblings and speculations about Sir Charles’s personal secrets com-
promise her usual candor. Eventually, though, her new identity as Charles’s third
sister allows Harriet access to his history and opens up her awareness of her dou-
ble and rival, Clementina della Porretta, “the Miss Byron of Italy” (3.53). Lady
Clementina comes from a venerable aristocratic family, has a prior attachment
 Exploration of the precarious self 15
to Sir Charles, and is so simultaneously devoted and devout that she goes mad
in conflict between her love for him and her native religion. When Clementina
exalts herself by choosing Catholicism over a worldly path, Harriet must decide
if she will follow her double’s example and idealistically discard her love for
Sir Charles because he can offer her only the half-heart of a “rejected man.” As
Kinkead-Weekes argues, “It is this insecurity, not only psychologically but mor-
ally, that lies behind her resistance to the pressure of Sir Charles for a quick mar-
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riage” (385). What is a contest of piety for Clementina is one of “delicacy” for
Harriet (3.16), where her pride of self calls on her to be appropriately scrupulous,
but not descend into petty “punctiliousness” (3.78).
Just as Harriet Byron’s fears eventually manifest as Clementina, a more ethe-
real, alluring, and dramatic version of herself, Jackson’s Natalie Waite enters
college filled with a self-doubt that brings her to imagine the companionship of
a more confident friend. When Natalie initially introduces herself to her house-
mates, she lacks a firm sense of self, even wondering,

Is it my name? . . . afraid for a minute that she had appropriated the name of
the next girl, or of someone she had met slightly once and remembered only
in the recesses of her mind which seemed called upon unreasonably to func-
tion now, socially, and without experience.
(55)

Freshman Natalie’s existential unease only increases the longer she is on campus.
The more she questions herself and imagines alternate realities (maybe she is
not real, but only a figment of someone else’s mind), the more she gains interest
in a girl named “Tony,” who may or may not be “real,” and who seems to fit as
poorly as Natalie into the conventional female student world, but remains defiant
rather than cowed by her isolation. Lenemaja Friedman touts Jackson’s precision
in imbuing Tony with just enough material being to make her seem like a legiti-
mate new friend who is actually present in the “real” world of Natalie’s life on
campus (87–89). Because of this convincing portrayal, in the penultimate scene
in the woods, readers find themselves as confused and lost as Natalie becomes.
As Tony becomes more elusive and moves through the trees, “seeming not to put
her feet down,” we are forced to reassess her apparent reality (212). From this
new, unsettled vantage, it seems more likely that Natalie’s self-questioning has
led to an externalization of Tony from within her own psyche; after all, “Natalie”
and “Tony” are both variants on the name Antonia. In summoning up this new
“strange character,” as she calls her, Natalie satisfies her need for someone to
befriend and legitimize her identity, only to find that Tony ultimately turns against
her (138).
Natalie’s story, like that of Harriet Byron, is one where a woman is taken over
by the identity-story of the other; Richardson’s and Jackson’s heroines waste
away and become specter-like followers of their active doubles, who determine
the moves of the game (either through Clementina’s turns of conscience or Tony’s
dealing of the tarot deck). Just as they seem most vulnerable, though, Harriet and
 16 Jennifer P. Wilson and Michael T. Wilson
Natalie surprise themselves by mustering an inner limit that preserves them from
the influences that have been dominating their minds (Hill House’s Eleanor argu-
ably also does so, but too late, immediately before her death). As these women
assert independence, we see how difficult it is to step aside from the reinforce-
ment provided by their doubles. Harriet “justly fears . . . she never shall be able to
make that figure to HERSELF, which is necessary for her own tranquility” (3.77),
Natalie laments that “One is one and all alone and evermore will be so” (214), and
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both are cognizant of the lasting effects of their decisions across time. With this
awareness, they finally reject self-abnegation and servitude to an Other, and move
toward uncertain but self-possessed outcomes.
A key component of Harriet’s and Natalie’s self-possession is their capacity for
narrative. Indeed, a major resemblance between all of Richardson’s and Jackson’s
female protagonists is their tendency to rehearse, reinforce, and question their
identities by retelling stories about their lives, past, present, and future. Pamela’s
identity as a “scribbl[er]” is integral to her upward mobility (100). She works out
her thoughts and plans as she writes the account of her struggles against the incur-
sions of Mr. B. At the same time, she reconciles her conduct with her family’s rig-
orous Protestantism and her reading of secular texts, such as Hamlet and The Rape
of Lucrece. Jackson’s early novels also feature female writers who are attempting
to come of age and into their own. In Hangsaman, Natalie Waite’s writing, closely
directed and sharply critiqued, is intended by her overbearing father to be her key
to development. Her 10:00 a.m. conferences with her father are given priority in
the family schedule, but when she is shipped off to a college whose brochure pro-
claims, “Theory is nothing, experience all” (49), she is unprepared for the vicious
competition between her peers. Pamela and Natalie try to write themselves into a
more stable, self-possessed state of being as their family beliefs and systems are
strained to collapse and their social “betters” do not adhere to expected roles. Just
as Pamela’s parents use correspondence to exhort their daughter (“resolve to lose
your Life sooner than your Virtue” . . . Your loving Father and Mother), Mr. Waite
pressures Natalie with letters from home, counseling her to “scrutinize carefully
anyone aspiring to be your friend,” yet then proffering his own “friendly” advice
(20, 118).
The critique of Richardson’s and Jackson’s young women writers extends to
more severe methods of silencing. The censorship imposed upon Clarissa Har-
lowe resembles that meted out to Harriet Merriam in Jackson’s The Road Through
the Wall for correspondence considered dangerous by her family. In each novel,
the tyrannical control of parents includes the violent confiscation of writing mate-
rials and attempted silencing of young women’s independent voices. Clarissa
faces down psychological warfare within her family as she is imprisoned in her
room, deprived of her “standish and all its furniture” (324), and informed that
all of her relations have bound themselves in league against her by signing a
document. These early scenes of censorship establish a grim tone that builds to
eventual tragedy, leading Margaret Anne Doody to declare that “Freedom is very
much at the centre of Richardson’s novels” (Natural Passion 11). Clarissa ulti-
mately dies a martyr of her family’s stony-hearted oppression, and yet exonerates
 Exploration of the precarious self 17
their actions by acknowledging her own original fault of disobedience. Similar
issues of freedom and familial disorder provide the starting point for Jackson’s
first novel. When Harriet Merriam arrives home from school, she finds herself
confronted by a steely-faced mother:

The word “letters” carried Harriet hastily up the stairs and into her room; if
there had been a lock on the door she might have been able to lock herself in,
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but she slammed the door violently, and then walked miserably over to her
desk, although she knew, had seen from the doorway, that it was open. The
slant-top, which should have been securely locked, was dropped down to
make the table surface, and Harriet’s small papers and notebooks lay as she
kept them, mercilessly neat, put back in the pigeonholes, perhaps even put
back more carefully than Harriet, who loved them, ever did.
(11)3

The multiple levels of violation – of her ownership of the room, of her prized writ-
ing desk (a gift from her father), and of her very private writing – bring the girl
to tears in this scene. Harriet grows increasingly distraught as she imagines her
mother, positioned in her daughter’s space, reading what is not hers to read. The
traumatic afternoon worsens with a “scene” at dinner (with Harriet once again
remanded to her room), the burning of all of Harriet’s notebooks by her mother,
and a “reconciliation” where Harriet is told that she will be allowed to learn
some recipes to cook under the supervision of her mother. Over time, she accepts
and internalizes this punishment and learns to parrot her mother’s prejudices, a
frightening conformity that shows how easily children are bullied into becoming
younger versions of their parents.
In their shared focus on writerly protagonists, Richardson and Jackson also
explore the ways that their characters circumvent censorship and gain power for
themselves. Pamela and Clarissa often hide their writings next to their bodies,
and at one point Pamela worries that her expanding shape may betray her secret:
“. . . I begin to be afraid my Writings may be discover’d; for they grow large! I
stitch them hitherto in my Under-coat next my linen” (130–31). She hides her
writing because it is personal and judgmental of her earthly “Master’s” behavior
on the higher authority of her religious faith. As she repeatedly stitches packets
of paper to her undercoat, Pamela’s prolific writing swells around her, evoking
the fullness of pregnancy; this fruitfulness of her wit circumvents Mr. B’s literal
impregnation of her body – as he crudely hints, “I wish I had thee as quick another
Way, as thou art in thy Repartees” (70). In The Bird’s Nest, writing is also a mat-
ter of survival. Miss Richmond’s writing surges with hateful profanity composed
by one of her subsumed personalities who is attempting to come forward. These
missives critique the dominant personality, Lizzie, yet are valued by her as well
as a sign of her importance: “Someone had written her lots of letters, she thought
fondly, lots of letters; here were five. She kept them all in a red valentine box”
(18). Like Pamela, Miss Richmond seeks to preserve her correspondence in an
intimate fashion, away from the censoring eyes of the reigning authority, in this
 18 Jennifer P. Wilson and Michael T. Wilson
case her Aunt Morgen. The valentine box chosen as a hiding place symbolizes the
deeply intertwined relationship between the different facets of herself, where even
a hostile message can be interpreted as a sign of love.
Another sort of concealment is cultivated as Richardson and Jackson employ
what might be termed a palimpsestic or encrypted sort of writing to represent
the identity crises of their characters. Richardson’s final heroine, Harriet Byron,
has no option but to share the ostensibly private letters that everyone knows she
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is constructing and thus requests to hear. She absents herself from company so
frequently to write that Charlotte Grandison blames her for her diligence: “Your
nasty scribbling! Eternally at your pen” (1.396). Despite the privacy that goes
into the creation of her correspondence, Harriet faces overt scrutiny once her
letters are publically read, discussed, and analyzed by all her acquaintances; as
such, the public nature of her private letters forms an ongoing test of her char-
acter. Harriet’s primary trait of “‘Frankness’ means acknowledging to the group
(as best one can) one’s feelings, hopes, wishes, real desires – and that cannot be
done without acknowledging the group’s right to speak on the matter, to arrange,
to judge, to reshape the individual’s emotions and wishes into some socially
acceptable form” (Doody, “Identity” 113). Harriet does, however, find a way
to get around the problem of public performance. In Volume Two, Letter Six,
she arranges a code with her cousin Lucy, the usual reader of the mail, so that
in articulating the contents for all to hear Lucy can skip over private passages
from Harriet that are marked with an image of a pointing hand and meant for
Lucy’s eyes alone (1.290). This scheme highlights one of the key questions of
Grandison: where should generous openness end and proper pride of self begin?
Only a reader with access to the entirety of Harriet’s letters, public and coded,
can judge Harriet’s response to this dilemma. In Jackson’s The Bird’s Nest, writ-
ing becomes a similar instrument of subversion rife with character revelation
when the determined Betsy personality infiltrates the professional work of Miss
Richmond through willed control of her writing hand. Betsy is not yet strong
enough to manifest completely, yet her ascendancy over Miss Richmond’s hand
symbolizes significant agency, power, and expression. With protagonists who
are intelligent enough to both perform and subvert the conventions of discourse,
Richardson and Jackson pursue similar methods of letting repressed voices of
dissent criticize the status quo.
The strongly parallel, multivocal forms of these authors’ novels likewise
expand outward to the way in which fragments of folksongs, adages, psalms,
mottoes, rhymes, and literary allusions serve to reflect the characters’ belief in
the great power of words to shape reality. In Richardson’s works, the heroines
weave the events of their confined lives into artistic media, such as poems and
psalm-settings that parallel biblical and contemporary events. Pamela’s letters, in
particular, display the influence of her Protestant upbringing as she filters her own
story through Christian exegesis. For example, Mrs. Jewkes is a “Jezebel” (126),
and Mr. B an “Amnon” (53), among a stream of steady references and reflections.
Pamela’s religious allusions always remain grounded in her immediate observa-
tions and thus remain psychologically realistic for the fifteen-year-old servant
 Exploration of the precarious self 19
that she is. Besides following biblical typology, Pamela’s imagery fits within the
basic story format of the fable, a form that Richardson knew well after adapt-
ing L’Estrange’s Fables of Aesop and Other Eminent Mythologists just two years
before composing his first novel.
Jackson’s works are similarly full of allusions and folk references, especially
those associated with childhood. Her characters engage in age-old games, such
as Tin-Tin, repeat lies from Shakespeare, contemplate mottoes engraved within
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their homes, sing carols, remember nursery rhymes, and fend off singsong chants.
When Jackson incorporates these invasive words, the characters typically are
feeling threatened; what might be pleasurable or comforting instead takes on a
darker tone. Jackson is fully alive to the sinister side of childhood and the way
its rituals victimize children and predict their destruction. Her recurring use of
such devices constructs a Richardsonian atmosphere of uncertainty and fear that
is more subtle than the Gothic variety of fiction that would emerge at the end of
the eighteenth century and dominate thereafter. The imagery she resorts to is at
once nostalgically juvenile and uncannily tainted. Such use of multistability and
the ambiguity it creates can be found, for instance, in The Haunting of Hill House,
when Eleanor Vance reiterates Feste’s song from Twelfth Night. In Shakespeare’s
comedy, this piece occurs during a night of carousing and thus it expresses the
unity and happiness of the servants’ after-hours party. Its lines, “In delay there lies
no plenty . . . Present mirth hath present laughter . . . [and] Journeys end in lovers
meeting,” all stress action and fulfillment (19, 30). At first, this allusion seems to
tell us that Eleanor is a romantic and perhaps a bit of a naive fool, but as these
words keep infiltrating her thoughts, we wonder if Hill House has seized control
of the contents of her memory, exerting its influence to push its relationship with
her to “Journey[’]s end” and the finality of death, or, worse, an eternity locked
preternaturally within the house. Jackson never resolves the question, leaving
the reader with a disturbing uncertainty. Unresolved ambiguity is a favorite tech-
nique of Samuel Richardson as well, who wanted to encourage the judgment of
his audience and strove to make many components of his fiction debatable, even
encouraging feedback from readers of his drafts so that he could adjust character
portrayals toward the unresolvable (Keymer xvii–xviii). The most well-known
example of this mixed portrayal is the characterization of Lovelace as heroically
villainous, virtuous enough to attract Clarissa Harlowe’s interest but flawed
enough that readers would not valorize a morally unacceptable rake.
Amid all these allusions, underlying and destabilizing every other element,
Richardson and Jackson stress the subjectivity of words themselves. Pamela
argues with Mr. B:

Would it not shew that I could bear anything from you, if I did not express
all the Indignation I could express, at the first Approaches you make to what
I dread? . . . And what is left me but Words? And can these Words be other
than such strong ones, as shall shew the Detestation, which, from the Bottom
of my Heart, I have for every Attempt upon my Virtue?
(210)
 20 Jennifer P. Wilson and Michael T. Wilson
Pamela is well aware of the half-life of words; she chooses the strongest ones she
can summon up because, ultimately, words are all she has to define and defend
herself. As a servant, she is regarded as a part of the household owned by Mr. B,
yet here she speaks with force to set a guard around her body and her values.
Like Pamela, Jackson’s characters repeatedly realize, utilize, and are victim-
ized by the power and danger of words. In The Road Through the Wall, Marilyn
Perlman loots Thackeray for words that will give her authority: “from Vanity Fair
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she had gleaned ‘adorable’ and ‘fearsome’ and ‘horrid’” (16). Others wallow in
their insufficiency at finding the right words. In the same novel,

Harriet [Merriam] looked down at the “Dearest George” on the pink paper,
and read on, in her own writing, “Let’s run away and get married. I love you
and I want to – ” The letter ended there, because Harriet had not been able to
think of what she wanted to do with George.
(12)

In Hangsaman, Lizzie also laments her dearth of words:

I wonder what I would say to a psychoanalyst. I wonder where people find

words for all the funny things inside their heads. I keep turning around in
circles and finding how well things fit together, but nothing is ever complete.
(107)

In these passages, Jackson’s characters trace words up to the brink of a chasm of

collapsing identity and sanity they cannot traverse. In mapping where the words
break off, the reader can follow the contours of that journey and sense the threat
of that imminent collapse. We see human weaknesses, fears, and cruelties that are
suggested but all the more powerful because unsaid.
Although the instability of language thus prefigures the dangers confront-
ing a self-possessed, stable name and identity within the world, the forces of
evil in Richardson’s and Jackson’s works attempt to solidify language into a
set reality. In The Sundial’s apocalyptic twilight, domineering heiress Orianna
Halloran literally publishes her list of “instructions” for the new, tiny society
of relatives, servants, and houseguests that she intends to control in much the
same narrative-driven fashion that Mr. B advances his “Articles” for cohabi-
tation and “Rules” for marriage in Pamela. Soon thereafter Orianna is found
dead at the bottom of the staircase with the inquiring motto “WHEN SHALL
WE LIVE IF NOT NOW? . . . painted in black gothic letters touched with gold
over the arched window at the landing,” a question that she failed to answer
in her attempts to force language to serve her own selfish ends (2). Later, her
body is removed outside, next to the sundial with its own legend inquiring,
“WHAT IS THIS WORLD?” (219). In this moment, Orianna, who “never liked
the inscription,” resembles Arcite, the character from Chaucer’s “The Knight’s
Tale” who voiced the question too late (219). Both are shortsighted fighters for
immediate dominance. Other tyrants who attempt to impose their own language
 Exploration of the precarious self 21
on others include Mr. Harlowe, Clarissa’s father, who issues a damning curse
against her once she has left his house, and Mr. Hugh Crain, original inhabit-
ant of Hill House whose book, “MEMORIES, for SOPHIA ANNE LESTER
CRAIN,” contains moral lessons replete with gruesome depictions of conse-
quences should one fail to follow them (123). This tome is offensive in multiple
ways – in warping the unknowing childhood of his daughter and in destroying
other books to harvest their illustrations – making “MEMORIES” an Ur-book
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of sins that characterizes all of life as damnation and darkness.

By foregrounding names, multivocal effects, and the process of writing, Rich-
ardson and Jackson explore language’s approach to nearly ineffable states of
being. Both authors’ fictions are particularly interested in what we can learn about
the traumatized mind through language use. In the aftermath of rape, both Clar-
issa Harlowe and Natalie Waite experience a lag in their usually keen powers of
expression. Clarissa does not seem herself after the violation; she is subject to
intensive shifts of mood because of the drugs that were secretly administered to
her, although the language of her writing hints at great lucidity behind a veneer of
madness. Her writing is fragmentary, and as she creates, she tears up the papers
that she writes. Lovelace gets his hands on several scraps and has them transcribed
for Belford; they proceed circularly through half-assembled thoughts, riddles,
exclamations, and comparisons to the natural world, not communicating sense
in a linear fashion, but cumulatively giving a portrait of a mind trapped in time
between her habitual self and this new state she has entered. In Paper X, Clarissa
pens Otway’s lines from Venice Preserved describing “my divided soul, / That
wars within me, / And raises ev’ry sense to my confusion,” a self-division also
reflected in the typography that includes scattered quotations from her reading
memory rendered sideways around the main column of type (893). This document
of Clarissa’s scattered mind portrays the flood of recriminations, the mental dis-
sonance of her reason attempting to piece together what has happened. Similarly,
after drinking too much at her parents’ party, Natalie Waite wakes up the morning
after her apparent rape and enjoys

the clear uncomplicated moment vouchsafed occasionally before conscious-

ness returned. Then, with the darkening of the sunlight, the sudden coldness
of the day, she was awake and, before perceiving clearly why, she buried her
head in the pillow and said, half-aloud, “No, please no” . . . If she got out of
bed it would be true; if she stayed in bed she might just possibly be really
sick, perhaps delirious. Perhaps dead. “I will not think about it,” she said, and
her mind went on endlessly, Will not think about it, will not think about it,
will not think about it.
(43)

Natalie’s denial enables her to perform her previous self at the breakfast table.
All through the family ritual, though, the undercurrent of Natalie’s mind recurs,
“Will not think about it.” Like the shredding of paper by Clarissa, the shredding
of Natalie’s memory, over and over again, shows that for both traumatized young
 22 Jennifer P. Wilson and Michael T. Wilson
women, all of reality has been warped. The price of living is mental vigilance to
repress or sublimate the most traumatic day of their lives.
Repressed fears also afflict the eponymous Pamela and Miss Richmond of The
Bird’s Nest as they inevitably encounter that which they wish to avoid. Richard-
son’s heroine, terrified by trying to choose the right course of action, sinks down
into no action at all. In her best chance for escape, she imagines threats where
there are none:
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I looked, and saw the Bull, as I thought, between me and the Door; and
another Bull coming towards me the other way: Well, thought I, here is dou-
ble Witchcraft, to be sure! Here is the Spirit of my Master in one Bull; and
Mrs. Jewkes’s in the other.
(153)

Once she is returned to confinement, Pamela looks back and sees that what she
imagined to be bulls were really only peacefully grazing cows. Her mental image
of sexualized, threatening beasts overcomes her actual sense of vision, leaving her
so shaken that she hobbles back into captivity rather than continue her attempted
escape. In The Bird’s Nest, Elizabeth Richmond breaks apart into separate person-
alities because some components of her being want to look back and understand
her mother’s death. Betsy, most motivated to “find” her mother, is alert to old
threats that used to thwart her access to her parent. Her worries about her mother’s
boyfriend, Robin, cause her to anticipate him on the streets and in the hotels of
New York, much as Pamela sees what she most fears as she tries to escape Mr.
B’s house:

And [Betsy] could hear him after her, down the hall and down the stairs, pray-
ing not to stumble, not Robin again, it wasn’t fair, not after all she’d done,
not after all she’d tried, not Robin again, it wasn’t fair, no one could do that
again, praying to move quickly enough, to be safely out of it and away before
he could touch her, to be safely out of it.
(125–26)

The short, panicked lines of this passage convey Betsy’s anxiety over “that” –
the repressed secret of her youth, having dallied with her mother’s boyfriend in
order to break up their relationship. Her reiteration “it wasn’t fair” and desire to
be “safely out of it” suggest that her childish attempt to play at being her mother
turned into sexual activity that she could not control. Now, all younger men evoke
shades of “Robin” for her, a phobia that has forestalled her own development into
adulthood.
Thus influenced by Richardson’s intensely psychological studies of his hero-
ines, and repeatedly incorporating his techniques and tropes into her own fiction,
Jackson’s novels investigate what happens when trauma obscures a coherent sense
of self. Both authors destabilize traditional markers of identity, such as names and
family structures, in order to suggest that human affective bonds pose little refuge
 Exploration of the precarious self 23
against change. Their multivocal novels highlight the instability of language, par-
ticularly the fragmenting, slippery language which their protagonists use as an
attempt to shore up their identities, forcing readers to interact actively with the
range of possible interpretations of any given event and character. Mark Kinkead-
Weekes calls this mode of narrative construction “dramatic form”: “creating
through the characters and allowing them to produce the changing situations”
(425). Richardson and Jackson, although separated by two hundred years, thus
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argue that human identity, even in the confines of a fictive character, constantly
shifts under the weight of questions about the nature of consciousness itself. The
results are fascinating, character-driven plots that involve their readers in unre-
solved and unresolvable questions about instrumentality and freedom.

Notes
1 Jackson herself acknowledged an abiding interest in Richardson’s portrayal of good
and evil, asking, “Is a sinful man the less sinful because his crimes are against a stan-
dard more rarified than ours?” (217). See “Notes on an Unfashionable Novelist (Samuel
Richardson, 1689–1761)” in Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings,
ed. Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman DeWitt, New York: Random House,
2015. 215–18.
2 Although Pamela was a popular sensation in the 1740s and beyond, readers interpreted
the heroine’s trials quite differently. “Pamelists” admired her adherence to a code of
Christian virtue and “anti-Pamelists” critiqued her religiosity as a cover for her real
code – self-interest. For more on this debate and its aftermath, see Thomas Keymer
and Peter Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in
Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.
3 Biographer Judy Oppenheimer argues that Jackson worked through issues from her
own childhood in many of her characterizations, the portrayal of Harriet Merriam
being a notable example. Like Harriet, Jackson had a deep need for privacy and
resented her mother and grandmother invading her desk and rifling through her writ-
ings (23–24, 124).

Works cited
Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Multiple Personality and the Postmodern Subject: Theoriz-
ing Agency.” Murphy 52–80.
Doody, Margaret Anne. “Identity and Character in Sir Charles Grandison.” Samuel Rich-
ardson: Tercentenary Essays. Eds Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1989. 110–45. Print.
———. A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson. Oxford: Claren-
don, 1974. Print.
Downey, Dara and Darryl Jones. “King of the Castle: Shirley Jackson and Stephen King.”
Murphy 214–36.
Friedman, Lenemaja. Shirley Jackson. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1975. Print.
Hattenhauser, Darryl. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. New York: State U of New York
P, 2003. Print.
Jackson, Shirley. The Bird’s Nest. New York: Penguin, 2014. Print.
———. Hangsaman. New York: Penguin, 2013. Print.
———. The Haunting of Hill House. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.
 24 Jennifer P. Wilson and Michael T. Wilson
———. Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings. Eds. Laurence Jackson
Hyman and Sarah Hyman Dewitt. New York: Random House, 2015. Print.
———. The Road Through the Wall. New York: Penguin, 2013. Print.
———. The Sundial. New York: Penguin, 2014. Print.
Keymer, Thomas and Peter Sabor. Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and
Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2009. Print.
Keymer, Tom. Richardson’s Clarissa and the Eighteenth-Century Reader. Cambridge:
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Cambridge UP, 1992. Print.

Kinkead-Weekes, Mark. Samuel Richardson: Dramatic Novelist. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1973.
Print.
Murphy, Bernice M. Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland and Company, 2005. Print.
Oppenheimer, Judy. Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. New York: G.P. Put-
man’s Sons, 1988. Print.
Richardson, Samuel. Clarissa; or, the History of a Young Lady. Ed. Angus Ross. London:
Penguin, 1985. Print.
———. The History of Sir Charles Grandison. Ed. Jocelyn Harris. 3 vols. London: Oxford
UP, 1972. Print.
———. Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded. Eds. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2001. Print.
Rubenstein, Roberta. “House Mothers and Haunted Daughters: Shirley Jackson and the
Female Gothic.” Murphy 127–49.
 2 A failed experiment
Family and humanity in
The Sundial
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S. T. Joshi

Misanthropy as a philosophical doctrine has been espoused by a tiny proportion of

the human race, even among those intellectuals who are well aware of the overall
deficiencies – moral, intellectual, cultural, and physical – of the human race. This
is understandable: given the seemingly instinctive urge to perpetuate the species,
the espousal of misanthropy – and its practical corollary, the call for the destruc-
tion or elimination of the race – is inherently repulsive to the majority of humans,
especially as a kind of selective misanthropy leads to such undoubted evils as
racism, misogyny, and terrorism.
How, then, does one justify a misanthropic approach to life? There are any
number of plausible scenarios whereby the extirpation of our species can be seen
as right and fitting (see Joshi, God’s Defenders 273–78), but most misanthropes
relent to the extent of pointing to the general contemptibility of the race as a whole
while singling out a few individuals for approval or beneficence. Ambrose Bierce,
the great American journalist and fiction writer, engaged in this argument on one
occasion when defending the harshness of his literary, moral, and political judg-
ments in his newspaper columns against a critic accusing him of a broader-based
misanthropy:

John Bonner, does it really seem to you that contempt for the bad is incom-
patible with respect for the good? – that hatred of rogues and fools does not
imply love of bright and honest folk? Can you really not understand that
what is unworthy in life or letters can be known only by comparison with
what is known to be worthy? He who bitterly hates the wrong is he who
intensely loves the right; indifference to the one is indifference to the other
thing. Those who like everything love nothing; a heart of indiscriminate hos-
pitality becomes a boozing ken of tramps and thieves. Where the sentimental-
ist’s love leaves off the cynic’s may begin. You have lived and written to little
purpose if you have yet to learn why the good do not make the bad behave
themselves.
(Sole Survivor 215–16)

All this sounds very noble and even morally upright, but in practice it appears that
Bierce took great relish in lambasting the “boozing ken of tramps and thieves”
 26 S. T. Joshi
and found relatively few individuals who corresponded to the “bright and honest
folk” he is claiming to champion.
There is, moreover, a significant overlap between misanthropy (however that
term is interpreted or applied) and satire – an overlap that begins at least as early
as Juvenal and proceeds down through such figures as Jonathan Swift, Bierce,
Evelyn Waugh, H. L. Mencken, Nathanael West, Gore Vidal, and many others.
It is at this intersection that we may profitably study much of Shirley Jackson’s
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work, in particular her inscrutable novel The Sundial (1958).

Jackson once wrote in her diary, “Nothing has the power to hurt which
doesn’t have the power to frighten” (quoted in Oppenheimer 42). This single
statement may be all we need to gauge how Jackson’s extensive contributions
to nonsupernatural terror, or psychological suspense, fuse elements from mis-
anthropy and satire to generate horror, very much in the manner of Ambrose
Bierce. Bierce’s landmark story collection, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians
(1891; revised in 1910 as In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civil-
ians), features a succession of tales that systematically emphasize how the
protagonists’ human frailties – cowardice, envy, irrational fear, jealousy – can
backfire upon them, with horrific consequences. His most famous story, “An
Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” is a tour de force in depicting the lengths
to which a desperate man, about to be hanged as a spy during the Civil War,
can fantasize escaping from his captors. In “The Man and the Snake” a man
is frightened literally to death by a snake that proves to be a toy. “A Watcher
by the Dead” and “A Tough Tussle” exhibit characters succumbing to the
perceived terror of a dead body. Bierce became such a master at this kind of
psychological torture (a torture that extends both to his protagonists and to
his readers) that Maurice Lévy stated, “One is almost tempted to believe that
one day he decided to instill fear into his contemporaries by hatred, to gain
revenge on them” (14, emphasis in original).
I am not aware of any documentary evidence that Jackson read Bierce; but
since Bierce’s reputation as both a writer of horror fiction and a classic exponent
of Civil War fiction had been established by the time she reached her maturity, it
seems unlikely that Jackson could not have sampled him during her college or
even her high-school years. Much of her short fiction has a distinctively Biercian
flavor – derived no doubt from a roughly similar temperament rather than from
any direct literary influence.
Her most famous story, “The Lottery” (1948), could, on one level, be inter-
preted as a condemnation of the kind of “mob mentality” that we also see, in more
limited form, in The Sundial: a tradition of stoning selected individuals in order to
ensure good crops has continued down to the present day, long after the folly of
such sympathetic magic and ritual has been exposed by scientific advance. “One
Ordinary Day, with Peanuts” (1955), a story that surprisingly remained uncol-
lected during her lifetime, is another prototypical example. In this tale, a man
leaves home in the morning and seems intent on accomplishing nothing but good;
through a succession of actions he seems, both to himself and to others, to be
benevolence itself. He comes home, meets his wife, and tells her how his day
 Family and humanity in The Sundial 27
went. She tells him about hers. She tells of all the nasty and unpleasant things she
has done. What will happen the next day?

“Fine,” said Mr. Johnson. “But you do look tired. Want to change over
tomorrow?”
“I would like to,” she said. “I could do with a change.”
“Right,” said Mr. Johnson.
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(Just an Ordinary Day 304)

That is virtually the end of the story. In other words, the qualities of benevolence
and malevolence can be put on and taken off with the insouciance of changing
one’s hat or coat – it makes no moral difference in the end.
Misanthropy as terror probably reaches its height in Jackson’s work in the late
novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), a searing portrayal of the hatred
that the Blackwood family feels for the townspeople who have ostracized them.
Merricat Blackwood (who, it turns out, is a murderess) expresses the following
sentiments to herself early in the narrative:

I wish you were all dead, I thought, and longed to say it out loud. Constance
said, “Never let them see that you care,” and “If you pay any attention they’ll
only get worse,” and probably it was true, but I wished they were dead. I
would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all,
even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain and dying.
I would then help myself to groceries, I thought, stepping over their bodies,
taking whatever I fancied from the shelves, and go home, with perhaps a kick
for Mrs. Donell while she lay there. I was never sorry when I had thoughts
like this; I only wished they would come true.
(15–16)

The course of the narrative – entirely told from the Blackwood family’s point
of view with the townspeople depicted as virtually faceless “trash” (17) whose
hatred is spiteful and irrational – encourages the reader to agree with Merricat’s
sentiments here.
The Sundial presents misanthropy in a somewhat more restrained or indirect man-
ner, but it can nonetheless be seen as a driving force in the text, as multiple characters
exhibit a loathing for one another that fuels the twists and turns of the narrative. The
novel tells the superficially absurd story of an aristocratic family, the Hallorans, who
become convinced that the entire world will be consumed by fire and that their spa-
cious home will be all that is left standing, and they will thereby become the source
for a newer and presumably better human race. The novel ends inconclusively, and
we never learn whether the impending cataclysm has occurred or will occur. In my
judgment, the novel is a pungent exploration of a nearly universal misanthropy that
is a central element in Jackson’s philosophical and aesthetic outlook.
Jackson’s biographer, Judy Oppenheimer, states that The Sundial grew directly
out of an unpleasant incident in her adopted home of North Bennington, Vermont,
 28 S. T. Joshi
where she led a campaign to oust an elderly schoolteacher who had been physi-
cally and emotionally abusive toward her daughter Sally. In the course of her
campaign against the teacher, however, Jackson aroused the hostility of the town,
which largely took the teacher’s side and made Jackson feel even more isolated
in the close-knit community than before (see Oppenheimer 213–15). While it is
unlikely that this single incident was the catalyst for The Sundial, it is evident that
Jackson’s general sense of isolation from the community of North Bennington
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had much to do with the bitter and cynical tone of the novel.
From the point of view of genre, The Sundial occupies a kind of middle
ground between such clearly supernatural works as The Haunting of Hill House
(1959) and such tales of psychological aberration as The Bird’s Nest (1954)
and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. The matter of the “truth” or real-
ity of the impending destruction of the world remains unresolved to the end;
and, although there are a few incidents in the novel that might be interpreted
supernaturally, I believe we are to see the prophecy – ludicrous on its face – as
fundamentally false, and false in a way that augments the essential misanthropy
underlying the entire work. Although Jackson (as Gore Vidal did in the novel
Kalki [1978]) would no doubt take great relish in the extirpation of nearly the
whole of humanity, the overwhelming likelihood that the world will remain
intact, even as the Hallorans calmly await its destruction, augments the misan-
thropic element by refusing to single out the Hallorans as any better than the
ignorant townsfolk they scorn.
Jackson may have given a subtle nod to the genre implications of the novel
by a disquisition about Strawberry Hill, the eccentric neo-Gothic mansion built
by Horace Walpole in the eighteenth century (see Sundial 168–69). Jackson was
no doubt well aware that Walpole was also the originator of the Gothic novel
with The Castle of Otranto (1764), and the rambling, multistory Halloran house
is indeed a miniature “Gothic castle” in much the same sense as the Blackwood
house in We Have Always Lived in the Castle. And, as in many works of Gothic
fiction, the convoluted byways of these “castles” suggest the unstable mental and
psychological states of their inhabitants.
It is of interest to note that some reviewers of the novel detected the misan-
thropy that underlies it – but they did so in a naively censorious manner that
reflects the conventional view that such a philosophical stance is itself morally
evil and unjustified. Harvey Swados, in tones of magisterial condemnation,
wrote,

Why is it then that the book finally leaves such a small impression? For one
reader it is primarily because, while Miss Jackson is an intelligent and clever
writer, there rises from her pages the cold fishy gleam of a calculated and
carefully expressed contempt for the human race.
Pleasure in the vileness that human beings can commit one upon the other
soon palls, particularly [if] it is unaccompanied by any imaginary representa-
tion of the specific moral gravity of a good human being. The result is that the
figures in this literary landscape become less and less human and more and
 Family and humanity in The Sundial 29
more simply the vehicles for an extended bitter joke that ends after several
hundred pages by being merely tedious.
(20)

This is a moral criticism masquerading as an aesthetic judgment, and the fallacy

of the latter paragraph is that it is entirely plausible to assume that there simply are
no “good human beings” to form a counterweight to the bad ones. Somewhat less
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judgmentally, David L. Stevenson noted that the novel “is a macabre and comical
morality of the human id, in which all the characters are articulate and capable of
decision only at the level of their most primitive wishes for power, their sublimi-
nal feelings of hate, greed, lust” (58). William Peden wrote disapprovingly, “For
all its wry humor, the novel seems to me to be primarily a bleak inquiry into what
can only be called the idiocy of mankind” (16).
For a relatively short novel, The Sundial features a bewildering array of char-
acters, not all of whom are depicted quite as fully and three-dimensionally as one
could have wished. It would be helpful to keep in mind the various figures who
strut throughout the novel:

Richard Halloran, son of the deceased builder of the house, now confined
to a wheelchair and with a tenuous hold on reality.
Mrs. Orianna Halloran, Richard’s wife and the dominant figure (in every
sense of the term) in the work, always seeking to maintain her preemi-
nence against all challengers.
Fanny Halloran, Richard’s sister, an unmarried and aging woman (she is
forty-eight but seems and acts older), snobbish and intolerant, striving as
best she can to battle with Orianna for supremacy in the household, and
the one who claims to have heard the prophecy of cataclysm from the
ghost of her dead father.
Maryjane Halloran, widow of Richard and Orianna’s son Lionel. She is a
flighty ex-librarian who seeks only to gain whatever she can from the
family she has married into.
Fancy Halloran, Maryjane’s young daughter, seemingly a sweet, innocent
child but also animated by cold self-interest.
Essex, a young man hired to catalogue the library and who aims to sidle up
to whoever he believes can improve his own fortunes.
Miss Ogilvie, Fancy’s governess, timid and put-upon.
At later stages of the novel, several other individuals appear on the scene
and take up residence in the house:
Mrs. Willow, a friend of Orianna, plain-speaking and a bit coarse.
Arabella and Julia, her daughters; Arabella is the pretty one, and Julia the smart one.
Gloria Desmond, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Orianna’s cousin, seem-
ingly endowed with psychic powers.
Captain Scarabombardon, a stranger whom Fanny has brought to the house from
the village, apparently for reproductive purposes when the new Eden dawns.
His name is fictitious, having been arbitrarily assigned to him by Fanny.
 30 S. T. Joshi
There are any number of other minor characters – chiefly various denizens of the
nearby village – but they play very small roles in the action.
The novel opens strikingly with the bland assertion by Maryjane (an assertion
believed by her daughter, Fancy) that Orianna has killed her own son, Lionel, by
pushing him down the stairs. Was this done in order to allow Orianna unfettered
dominance in the household? It would certainly appear so. Her very name is no
accident, for it clearly evokes Gloriana, the nickname given to Queen Elizabeth I.
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The name Oriana is a character (a British princess) in the medieval Spanish

romance Amadis de Gaula (c. 1304) and was used in a musical work, The Tri-
umphes of Oriana (1601), a collection of madrigals assembled by Thomas Morley
and dedicated to Elizabeth I.
Orianna’s heartlessness and dismissiveness toward the remaining members of
the household are amply displayed by her appalling comment about her own son
(“We could very well do without Lionel” [14]) and by her subsequent plans to dis-
miss Essex, put Miss Ogilvie in a cheap boardinghouse, banish Aunt Fanny to the
tower room, send Maryjane back to the library where she worked before marrying
Lionel, and keep Fancy for herself as the ultimate heir of the house.
It is shortly after this revelation that Fanny, in the garden near the eponymous
sundial, has the vision (or fantasy) that her dead father is speaking to her, declar-
ing that there is danger everywhere except in the house. Although Orianna scoffs
at the vision, a snake suddenly emerging out of the fireplace convinces Maryjane
that Fanny is speaking the truth. Soon thereafter, Fanny hears the prophecy that
governs the subsequent action in the novel:

Aunt Fanny was listening to her father, repeating to them what he told her.
With a happy smile on her face and her eyes shut, she listened with a child’s
care, and spoke slowly, word for word. Aunt Fanny’s father had come to tell
these people that the world outside was ending. Neither Aunt Fanny nor her
father expressed any apprehension, but the world which had seemed so unas-
sailable to the rest of them, the usual, daily world of houses and cities and
people and all the small fragments of living, was to be destroyed in one night
of utter disaster. Aunt Fanny smiled, and nodded, and listened, and told them
about the end of the world.
(35)

Subsequently she concludes ruefully, “Humanity, as an experiment, has

failed” (36).
Because of this revelation, Fanny seems to be gaining the upper hand in the
household; indeed, it is stated that Orianna had “no choice” (41) but to believe
Fanny. But Orianna quickly seizes the moment. To her it is of no consequence
whether Fanny’s prophecy is true or false; all she is concerned about is emerging
on top when the new dispensation (if there is any) comes.
It is at this point that the Willow family and, soon thereafter, Gloria Desmond
appear. Gloria occupies a critical function in the novel, seemingly confirming
the prophecy by participating in a kind of spiritualist exercise whereby she looks
 Family and humanity in The Sundial 31
deeply into a mirror taken from the wall and placed flat on a table. By this means
she ascertains that the day of reckoning will be a few months from the time the
novel opens – specifically, August 30. It is here that the supernatural appears to
enter into the novel. One of Gloria’s visions depicted the family sitting placidly
at breakfast; some weeks later, that precise scenario, with numerous details from
Gloria’s vision, occurs (139). Still later, Gloria tells Fancy that she has never seen
Orianna in any of her visions of the world after August 30 (171) – a point that will
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gain relevance later.

Although the novel focuses almost relentlessly on the multifarious struggles
for power, influence, and supremacy within the Halloran household, including the
rambling house and capacious grounds, the unnamed village nearby also comes in
for some attention. A long and otherwise anomalous passage going into elaborate
detail about a teenage girl, Harriet Stuart, who killed her family but was acquit-
ted (70–71) is evidently meant to suggest that the moral, intellectual, and cultural
level of the villagers is even lower than that of the aristocratic Hallorans.
Numerous other passages reinforce this impression. On a trip to the village,
Miss Ogilvie – in spite of strict instructions to the contrary – speaks of the coming
cataclysm with a drugstore clerk; and although she explicitly declares (in accor-
dance with Jackson’s own antireligious bent) that it would be nothing like the
Last Judgment (84), the clerk tells his mother, who is a member of a small club
called the True Believers, whose (admittedly unorthodox) Christian leanings are
unmistakable. In a grotesque episode where some of the True Believers visit the
Halloran house, it is revealed that they believe that spacemen from Saturn are
coming to take them away. “We wish you a pleasant journey,” Orianna says with
bland sarcasm (93).
At a party thrown for the villagers on the day before the expected cataclysm,
Essex takes great pleasure in teasing a number of the villagers. He soberly declares
that Miss Ogilvie’s taciturnity has an odd source: “Miss Ogilvie as a child was
violated by a band of Comanche Indians in a lonely farmhouse on Little Wicked
Bend River” (187). This, and other obviously fabricated tales, is credulously
believed by the villagers.
But if the villagers are contemptible in numerous ways, the denizens of the Hal-
loran household are scarcely less so. That, by general consensus, the thousands of
books in the library are not only removed but also burned to make way for sup-
plies that will presumably be needed after the cataclysm is a pungent symbol for
the collapse of intellect that is overrunning all members of the household in the
wake of Fanny’s preposterous prophecy. Various characters from time to time do
express a mild skepticism about the veracity of the prophecy, but the others sum-
marily reject these doubts.
The character exhibiting the greatest skepticism is Julia Willow, who declares
flatly at one point (in reference to herself and the Captain), “We don’t believe
that crap, any of it” (122). Orianna, now in total charge of the situation, declares
that Julia is free to leave with the Captain; in fact, she cleverly gives the Cap-
tain a check for an unspecified but apparently enormous sum of money, blandly
remarking, “We are not going to need it any more” (125). The very size of this
 32 S. T. Joshi
check causes the Captain to have doubts of his own skepticism: If Orianna is so
convinced of the coming cataclysm, perhaps it would be prudent to stay on at the
house? He does so, leaving Julia in the lurch.
Julia is nevertheless determined to leave by herself, and Orianna provides her
with a driver from the village to take her to a larger “city” some distance away.
Is Jackson setting up a scenario whereby it becomes (supernaturally) impossible
for anyone to leave the house? Let us examine precisely what happens to Julia.
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The Captain’s desertion of her is a significant blow, but she tries to carry on in
his absence. The driver of the car proves to be a surly individual who attempts to
take advantage of the situation by demanding an increasingly higher fee for his
services, to the point that Julia abruptly leaves the car and proceeds on foot. At
this point a surreal atmosphere supervenes, but what has really happened is that
she simply gets lost in the dark and falls down a steep hill toward the river. She
awakens the next morning back at the Halloran house with Orianna delivering a
snide and gloating taunt: “My dear . . . if you continue uncooperative I shall not
let you go to the city again” (137). Nothing supernatural has actually occurred.
It is nothing more than Julia’s (and, by extension, any other potentially skeptical
character’s) physical and emotional weakness that prevents them from leaving the
house in the face of the collective insanity overwhelming its denizens.
In a revealing passage, Essex recites the motto (from Chaucer) that adorns the
sundial: “What is this world? What asketh man to have? / Now with his love, now in
his colde grave, / Allone, with-outen any companye.” Orianna makes a deliberately
ambiguous comment. “‘I do not care for it,’ Mrs. Halloran said, caressing the W of
WORLD” (149). This could mean either that she does not care for the quotation or
that she does not care for the world (i.e., that she is herself a misanthrope, or at best
a cynic and a pessimist). The latter interpretation is emphasized when Essex asks,
in reference to the world following the cataclysm, “Do you think we will be happy
there?” Orianna replies, “No . . . But then, we are not happy here” (149–50). The
new world will be pretty much as wretched and miserable as the old.
It is young Gloria who, a little surprisingly, expresses the most pungent mis-
anthropy in the novel. In a remarkable discussion with Fancy about the outside
world, Gloria offers a blanket condemnation:

“There’s nothing there,” Gloria said with finality. “It’s a make-believe world,
with nothing in it but cardboard and trouble.” She thought for a minute, and
then said, “If you were a liar, or a pervert, or a thief, or even just sick, there
wouldn’t be anything out there you couldn’t have.”
Fancy bent over the doll house. “Anyway,” she said, “I don’t care how
shabby it is. I’m not afraid of bad people, and of not being safe.”
“But there aren’t any good people,” Gloria said helplessly. “No one is any-
thing but tired and ugly and mean. I know.”
(167)

But if the outside world offers nothing of value, the Halloran house (and house-
hold) is little better. At the very outset we are told that, in the opinion of its builder,
 Family and humanity in The Sundial 33
the house “should contain everything” (8). In other words, it is a microcosm of the
world at large. And the motley array of denizens in the house, for all the aristo-
cratic pretensions of some of them, is a fittingly vile amalgam of the varied human
failings embodied by the villagers.
The climax of the novel only augments the general misanthropy underpinning
it. By this time, all doubt as to the reality of the impending cataclysm has disap-
peared, and a kind of mob mentality has taken over the entire Halloran household.
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Even those who had previously expressed skepticism are doing nothing but plan-
ning for life after the destruction of the world.
In a stunning confirmation of Gloria’s vision, which suggested that Orianna
would not be around following the cataclysm, Orianna is found dead on the fateful
day of August 30. She has been pushed down the stairs, exactly as she presumably
pushed her own son some weeks earlier. Who is the culprit? Without saying so,
Jackson strongly implies it is little Fancy. Perhaps taking hints from the image
of corrupted innocence in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Jackson has
throughout the novel portrayed Fancy as far from the sweet little girl she appears.
At the very outset her ruthless megalomania is etched keenly: “Fancy ran her hand
richly along the soft hearth rug. ‘It’s going to belong to me when my grandmother
dies,’ she said. ‘When my grandmother dies, no one can stop the house and every-
thing from being mine’” (17). And who else but Fancy could have been respon-
sible for the existence of a doll, clearly representing Orianna, that is stuck full of
pins and placed on the sundial (104–5)? Orianna may in fact have signed her own
death warrant when she told Fancy that the crown (really just a gold band) she is
wearing to symbolize her own supremacy in the household will go to Fancy only
“When I am dead” (200). Sure enough, Fancy snatches up the crown from the
dead Orianna’s head without the slightest remorse or grief: “‘My crown!’ Fancy
said suddenly, and bolted down the stairs” (216). If Fancy is the kind of ruler that
the new dispensation offers, the new world will truly be no better than the old.
But is that cataclysm actually going to occur? Jackson deliberately keeps the
reader in suspense to the end. She merely concludes the novel with a scene in
which the remaining denizens of the Halloran household exchange utterly trivial
and fatuous small talk while waiting stolidly for the destruction of the world.
She enjoys teasing the reader with suggestions that that cataclysm may in fact be
coming. In the days leading up to the climactic August 30, strange phenomena are
noted throughout the nation:

Toward the end of August the weather turned strange; various and unusual
phenomena were reported from one end of the country to the other: freak
snow storms, hurricanes, hail from a clear sky. . . . There were cases of death
from heat and death from drowning and death from wind in each morning’s
newspaper, along with statements that the earth’s surface was being lowered
into the oceans at the rate of two inches a century; a volcano which had been
dormant for five hundred years erupted, blasted its surrounding countryside,
and fell asleep again forever.
(179)
 34 S. T. Joshi
This may be an amusing anticipation of global warming, but Jackson knows (and
expects her skeptical readers to know) that each one of these incidents can be plau-
sibly be accounted for naturalistically. And in that final scene there is one more
hint of the cataclysm: “‘I thought I heard a crash,’ Julia said, turning her hands
nervously. ‘Probably one of the trees going down,’ Aunt Fanny said. ‘The best
thing for you, dear, is to try not to notice. Try to think of something else’” (221).
The crash of a single tree is insufficient to establish the extraordinary notion that
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the entire world is somehow coming to an end, and Fanny’s deadpan response is
only a further indication of her utter failure to realize the truly apocalyptic nature
of the calamity that she professes to believe.
The Sundial portrays humanity as a failed experiment in and out of the Halloran
household, so that it scarcely makes a difference whether the cataclysm predicted
by Fanny occurs. For all the elaborate preparations that the Hallorans engage in
to ensure the renewal of the race, there is little indication that – if that apocalypse
were actually to happen – the new crop of human beings would be much better
than the old. Moreover, the high probability that the Hallorans are merely waiting
around delusionally for a new dispensation that is only a product of their neurotic
imaginations points to Jackson’s refusal to single out any member of our species,
however high-born or self-important, as much better than his or her fellows. It is
a cheerless vision of humanity that Jackson portrays in The Sundial, but it is also
a fitting vehicle for the mordant satire that she wielded with customary aplomb.

Works cited
Bierce, Ambrose. A Sole Survivor: Bits of Autobiography. Eds. S. T. Joshi and David E.
Schultz. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1998. Print.
Jackson, Shirley. Just an Ordinary Day. Eds. Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman
Stewart. New York: Bantam, 1997. Print.
———. The Sundial. 1958. New York: Penguin, 2014. Print.
———. We Have Always Lived in the Castle. 1962. New York: Popular Library, n.d.
Joshi, S. T. God’s Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong. Amherst, NY:
Prometheus Books, 2003. Print.
Lévy, Maurice. Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic. Trans. S. T. Joshi. Detroit: Wayne State
UP, 1988. Print.
Oppenheimer, Judy. Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. New York: G. P. Put-
nam’s Sons, 1988. Print.
Peden, William. “The ‘Chosen Few.’” Saturday Review of Literature XLI (8 March 1958):
18. Print.
Stevenson, David L. “The Lost Audience.” Nation (2 August 1958): 58. Print.
Swados, Harvey. “What Is This World?” New Republic (3 March 1958): 19–20. Print.
 3 Perception, supernatural
detection, and gender in
The Haunting of Hill House
Melanie R. Anderson
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Contrary to popular belief, which tends to label Shirley Jackson as a Gothic

writer, she not only wrote horror or supernatural tales but also had a tendency
to incorporate aspects of the supernatural into many of her works. Even though
they are not ghost stories, her novels Hangsaman (1951), The Bird’s Nest
(1954), The Sundial (1958), and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) and
her final, unfinished novel, Come Along with Me (1968), do contain elements
that could be construed as supernatural. These elements often develop charac-
ters typical of Jackson’s fiction – marginalized women who use the supernatural
either as a bid to gain power or, more likely, as a symbol of their ghostliness
and lack of agency. For example, in the fragment Come Along with Me, Angela
Motorman “dabble[s] in the supernatural” (10), and in The Sundial, on the day
her conniving sister-in-law plans to kick her out of the Halloran ancestral home,
spinster Fanny Halloran hears the disembodied voice of her deceased father, the
patriarch of the Halloran family, announce the apocalypse and tell her that she
is favored among the family members. Jackson’s tendency to flavor her writing
with the uncanny could have played a role in her eventual slide into relative
obscurity in the American academy, a course that happily looks to be reversing.1
As Bernice M. Murphy notes,

Jackson has often been sidelined as too commercial, too generic or too popu-
lar. Yet . . . Jackson’s work has a great deal to offer. . . . Her writing provides
a fascinating portrait of American womanhood during a period of significant
change. She excelled at dramatizing the anxiety and claustrophobia experi-
enced by so many . . . American women during the postwar period.
(19)

This lack of critical attention for reasons of genre and popularity did not include
Jackson’s famous (or infamous) short story “The Lottery” or her novel The
Haunting of Hill House (1959), but even so these two narratives point to one of
the central tenets of her canon: evil lurks in the most ordinary of circumstances
and can surprise one at any moment. Another important aspect of her fiction is her
masterful use of the supernatural as a metaphor for this lurking presence of evil,
latent and overt in her writing, particularly in oppressions of a patriarchal society,
 36 Melanie R. Anderson
and in the victims’ sometimes doomed attempts to create possibilities for a life
within these strictures.
To this end, with its setting of a ghost hunt at a haunted mansion, Jackson’s
supernatural masterpiece, The Haunting of Hill House, to a greater degree than
her other works, becomes an excellent test case for her connections between
women and the supernatural. In this novel she combines her interests in mystery
and supernatural fiction, thus recycling such late nineteenth- and early twentieth-
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century materials as the reports of psychical societies and narratives of occult

detection into her own version of a ghost-hunting expedition. Jackson manipu-
lates the trappings of these narrative forms to subvert their patriarchal underpin-
nings and open a space for the investigation of the very real terrors of 1950s
American culture for women. This failed search for spirits becomes an explora-
tion of the conflict between authoritative and subjective narratives. Consequently
the novel contains two levels: on the surface is Dr. Montague’s paternal, rational,
and supposedly scientific quest to explain the supernatural, whereas underneath
that investigation and unnoticed by Montague is Eleanor’s real struggle as she
attempts to find a home in a society that does not value her as an unprotected and
unattached woman. The inexplicable and dangerous supernatural atmosphere in
Hugh Crain’s Hill House is a microcosm of the damaging world Eleanor faced
before she arrived, embodied in her own family relationships, or the lack thereof.
These competing narratives and perceptions suggest Jackson’s use of the plot of
occult detection as a handy fictional translation point for the experience of women
who, by circumstance or choice, do not fit the accepted scripts of behavior in a
patriarchal society.
The paranormal that peppers Jackson’s creative work, even those stories osten-
sibly received as humorous sketches of family life, stems from her own inter-
est in the supernatural, an interest that was no secret in the literary world of the
1950s and early 1960s.2 As a result of the marketing of her work, her intellectual
and creative curiosity about witchcraft and magic became almost immediately
intertwined with her literary persona. In order to achieve a broader, more popular
audience, her husband, Stanley Hyman, wrote a biographical blurb for her first
novel, The Road Through the Wall (1948), that included the line that Jackson
was “perhaps the only contemporary writer who is a practicing amateur witch”
(Oppenheimer 138), and Jackson continued this thread of publicity in her own
biographical sketch for The Lottery and Other Short Stories (1949). Claiming that
she was “tired of writing dainty little biographical things that pretend I am a trim
little housewife in a mother hubbard stirring up appetizing messes over a wood
stove,” she wrote an autobiographical sketch that included a haunted house with
a ghost in the attic, magic incantations, and voodoo dolls (139).3 She uses these
touches of the supernatural to undermine the traditional connotations of “house-
wife.” As she repeatedly insists in her family stories, she can inhabit multiple
roles – she can be Stanley Hyman’s wife and Shirley Jackson the author. As a
writer, she has the possibilities afforded by imagination, and she snatches at the
power represented by creativity for her professional persona. For my purposes
of showing how Jackson uses the supernatural to represent the horror of reality
 Perception and supernatural detection 37
for women trapped in a patriarchal system, we can take note of a description of
the “supernatural” by one of her four children. In an interview with Judy Oppen-
heimer, Barry described his mother’s interest in the occult as curiosity about mys-
terious processes of human consciousness rather than a strict belief in spirits:

Is the . . . supernatural . . . ghosts of dead people, or another way of ver-

balizing other sides of the mind, other sides of emotion? . . . If you see a
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ghost walk across the room, have you seen a ghost or are you hallucinating?
There’s no way to tell. As with a lot of things where there’s no way to tell,
it makes absolutely no difference. It’s equally real whether it exists in your
head or in the room . . . So there is no difference between unknown parts of
the human mind and the supernatural.
(223)

In essence, the supernatural becomes a question of perception – proving that

something concrete exists is nearly impossible and not as important as explor-
ing why someone believes she saw it. As Jackson wrote after her first novel was
published,

I’ve had for many years a consuming interest in magic and the supernatu-
ral. . . . I think this is because I find there so convenient a shorthand statement
of the possibilities of human adjustment to what seems to be at best an inhu-
man world.
(Oppenheimer 125)

One of the settings that Jackson consistently revisits in her explorations of the
supernatural and inhuman is the structure of the house. In her essay “Experience
and Fiction” (anthologized by Hyman in the posthumously published collection
Come Along with Me), Jackson explains how she developed her ideas for the
novel she just finished – The Haunting of Hill House. While humorously empha-
sizing that she “had not the remotest desire to see a ghost,” she outlines care-
ful research that included reading all of the supernatural fiction she could find
and speaking with people who claimed to have experienced hauntings. From this
research, she emphasizes a particular study of a haunted location and its influence
upon her work. Critic Judie Newman describes the influence of the haunting of
Borley Rectory on Hill House, but she notes that the report on Ballechin House is
more likely the one that Jackson references here (182).4 What is most interesting
about Jackson’s description of this haunting is her emphasis on perception:

I happened . . . to read a book about a group of people, nineteenth-century

psychic researchers, who rented a haunted house and recorded their impres-
sions of the things they saw and heard and felt in order to contribute a learned
paper to the Society for Psychic Research. They thought that they were being
terribly scientific and proving all kinds of things, and yet the story that kept
coming through their dry reports was not at all the story of a haunted house,
 38 Melanie R. Anderson
it was the story of several earnest, I believe misguided, certainly determined
people, with their differing motivations and backgrounds. I found it so excit-
ing that I wanted more than anything else to set up my own haunted house,
and put my own people in it, and see what I could make happen.
(Come Along with Me 200–1)

After this lengthy description, Jackson admits that she felt compelled to write
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her haunted classic, flippantly commenting, “By then it was abundantly clear
to me that I had no choice; the ghosts were after me” (203). A reading of this
report, The Alleged Haunting of B – House, shows its influence on The Haunting
of Hill House, for similarities are numerous. The report is composed of notes
and journals from the investigation – much like Dr. Montague wishes to con-
struct his report of Hill House – and the hauntings have interesting echoes. The
report of the investigation of Ballechin House, like that of Hugh Crain’s estate,
records mysterious banging sounds like cannonballs striking on doors, specula-
tion about nuns, the involvement of spectral dogs, and ghosts experienced by
sensitive investigators through telepathic visions. Additionally, there is a mis-
trust of the techniques of female mediums on the part of the investigators that
finds resonance in Montague’s dismissals of his wife’s work with a planchette in
Hill House as being unscientific. In spite of these parallels, Jackson emphasizes
her focus on the story underneath the investigation. She notes, “I do not think
that the Society for Psychic Research would accept me as a qualified observer;
I think, in fact, that they would bounce me right out the door.” This suggested
rejection results from her interest not in proving the paranormal but in “learning
how people feel when they encounter the supernatural” (202). At this point she is
not so much interested in pursuing actual ghosts, per se, in her writing; rather she
is intrigued by the possibilities that ghosts (and their accompanying narratives)
offer for exploring the human mind, emotions, and identity.
These questions of subjectivity most likely influence the way Jackson handles
the “haunting” in Hill House. Even though she promised her publisher ghosts
galore in the novel, it is never clear exactly what is haunting the house – there are
no apparitions within its walls.5 This decision to avoid obvious specters follows
her emphasis on perception and the highly subjective nature of “hauntings.” But
it also follows quite closely occult and psychical theories of ghosts and haunted
homes that had been developing since the late 1800s in the British and Ameri-
can Societies for Psychical Research through Jackson’s contemporary moment
and the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory. With her extensive reading for The
Haunting of Hill House and her interest in the occult, Jackson was likely aware
of these developing theories. Predominant theories of hauntings usually focused
on ESP or telepathy, or the reaction of a subjective mind to overwhelming psy-
chical residue in certain places. This idea of ghosts as the results of “thought-
transference” repeats throughout the report on Ballechin House that was part of
Jackson’s research. In the late nineteenth century, the British Society for Psychi-
cal Research undertook an investigation into ghosts with mixed results. The first
investigator, Nora Sidgwick, concluded that ghosts were “thready creations of
 Perception and supernatural detection 39
foggy nights and fevered imaginations,” but she had to admit that the people
she interviewed were convinced that they saw ghosts or experienced hauntings.
She suggested that this “‘certain sense’ of being haunted” should be investigated
(Blum 94–95). In later investigations of “crisis apparitions,” members of the
society posited that telepathy could play a role (116). In the mid-1940s, investi-
gators for the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory created a file titled “The Sponta-
neous Case Collection.” Even though Professor J. B. Rhine refused to believe in
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ghost sightings, there were so many reports of ghosts sent to the laboratory that
they needed to open a file and investigate the most promising situations. Like
the members of the British Society for Psychical Research, Dr. Louisa E. Rhine
concluded that ghosts were the products of telepathy: “When someone sees a
ghost, he or she is essentially taking information gained via ESP and creating
a visual drama in order to convey that information from the unconscious to the
conscious” (Horn 79, 102).
These theories of the supernatural reported by the British and American Societ-
ies for Psychical Research and the Parapsychology Laboratory influenced fiction
from the late nineteenth into the mid-twentieth centuries, much of which Jack-
son probably read. One of the most well-known fictional ghost hunters, Alger-
non Blackwood’s “psychic doctor” John Silence, follows this theory of subjective
experiences of residual energy. In the story “The Psychical Invasion” he explains,

I have reason to believe that on the dissolution at death of a human being, its
forces may still persist and continue to act in a blind, unconscious fashion. As
a rule they speedily dissipate themselves, but in the case of a very powerful
personality they may last a long time.
(20)

In another story “Secret Worship,” Silence describes the ghosts that appear in the
victim’s unconsciousness as “shells of violent men,” and he cautions that “thought
and emotion can persist in this way . . . after the brain that sent them forth has
crumbled into dust” (170–71). With her broad reading in supernatural fiction, and
her interest in trends in psychical research, it makes sense that Jackson would be
aware of these theories in literature and popular culture at large. Tellingly, Jackson
refers in The Haunting of Hill House to the Duke Laboratory’s ESP cards, which
were popular at the time. Theodora’s consistently high scores in ESP tests with
these cards catch Dr. Montague’s attention when he is looking for assistants for
his investigation.6 Moreover, Jackson would imbue Hill House with the powerful
lasting psychic residue of Hugh Crain, the ultimate patriarchal figure and misogy-
nist. The supernatural manifestations then come through Eleanor, a woman sen-
sitive to such vibrations and uniquely positioned to be a perfect victim of these
forces. The supernatural experiences in the house monstrously mirror its violent
past for female inhabitants and Eleanor’s marginalized position outside of it in the
real world of 1950s America.
In addition to her interest in paranormal literature, Jackson also voraciously
read mysteries, a proclivity she mentions in her story “The Night We All Had
 40 Melanie R. Anderson
Grippe” (Come Along with Me 205), and her thoughts about supernatural lit-
erature and its emphasis on subjective perception find echoes in the literary ele-
ments of the mode of occult detective fiction. According to Srdjan Smajić in
his book Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists, if one of the basic tenets of
detective fiction is the phrase “seeing is believing,” then the fundamental basis
of supernatural fiction questions that visual literacy (92–93). While detective
fiction asserts that our surroundings are easily understood if one knows how to
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read clues that may include “footprints and fingerprints, facial expressions and
body gestures, cigar ashes and stained articles of clothing” (93), ghost stories
test the human tendency to trust one’s vision – they play with the very practice
of perception through their ambiguity and undecidability. Detective fiction uses
visual clues to pinpoint the perpetrator and explain the crime, but supernatural
fiction deconstructs this reliance on sensory interpretation. In ghost stories of
the uncanny, it is never crystal clear if the ghosts that are witnessed truly exist
or are caused by illusions or even delusions – none of the senses can be trusted
to interpret reliably the observed events. Smajić goes on to point out that in
Victorian ghost stories there is always a double current: “desire and reluctance
to believe that ghosts are more than optical illusions or mental projections” (61).
When detective fiction and the supernatural are combined into a hybrid of occult
detection, or, as we more commonly know it today, ghost hunting, these concerns
are present. There is a desire to discover proof of ghosts through rational or sci-
entific methods with a concurrent reluctance simply to accept hauntings on the
authority of communal stories and experiences. Just as in the long history of the
ghost story, where we find, on the one hand, spiritualists who claim to interpret
supernatural events through extrasensory means with second sight and séances
and, on the other hand, pseudoscientific occult specialists who desire methodi-
cally to categorize and precisely explain extranatural phenomena through obser-
vation and recordings, we find the boundary between the explainable and the
unknowable embraced and/or policed, depending on the method and the desired
outcome. Usually, however, the spirits who are being pursued do not cooperate
with either method and give the slip to human methods of understanding, thus
showing how deceptive our senses can be.
Working in this hybrid genre, Jackson combined her interest in mystery and
supernatural literature with her inspiration from reading reports of the Society
for Psychical Research and focused not on the investigations but rather on the
undercurrents of motive and character of the investigators. One of the aspects of
Jackson’s novel that confused initial readers and editors was this issue of identi-
fying its genre, or mode. Darryl Hattenhauer describes reader reports of an early
manuscript draft: “I can’t figure out what she wants to do with the story. Mys-
tery? Spoof? Psychomystery? Gothic horror?” (169). All of these are present. As a
result, in The Haunting of Hill House strands of supernatural and detective fiction
intertwine into a paranormal mystery.7 Dr. Montague becomes the occult detective
attempting to “explain” the inexplicable, but Jackson makes Eleanor, a woman out
of place in society, the protagonist. She is not independent nor married; neither
is she a mother. She is lonely, homeless, and lost. Through the interplay between
 Perception and supernatural detection 41
Montague’s attempt at rational, scientific investigation and Eleanor’s visceral,
fragmented descent into madness, Jackson subverts the patriarchal tradition of
detective and, ultimately, occult detective fiction.
Much as how Jackson’s novel characterizes Montague as a patriarchal authority
figure, in the course of the development of mystery fiction, the detective became
a distinctly male figure who has the market cornered on knowledge, observa-
tion, and rationality. In Sherlock’s Men: Masculinity, Conan Doyle, and Cultural
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History, Joseph A. Kestner posits that Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, in the
tales published from 1887–1927, not only influenced detective fiction to come and
contemporary theories of detection and crime investigation, but also responded
to a “crisis” of masculinity as British society struggled with rapid modernization,
changing gender roles, the rising challenges of the United States and Germany,
the cost of maintaining and expanding empire, and economic fluctuations (3, 11).
Kestner argues that the Holmes tales become “modes of modelling manliness” for
their contemporary moment. Holmes even becomes a prime example of proper
behavior for young men in Robert Baden-Powell’s 1908 manual Scouting for
Boys. According to Kestner, “Baden-Powell could plausibly endorse the Holmes
tales as constructing a masculine script, given that they confirmed qualities which
were radically gendered as masculine in Victorian culture: observation, rational-
ism, factuality, logic, comradeship, daring and pluck” (2). In Holmes, the master
interpreter of signs, “reason/masculinity/actuality” stands in stark contrast to the
feminine qualities of emotion and subjectivity (28, 32). He becomes the symbol of
the Victorian myth of “‘masculinist logocentrism’” (Kathleen Gregory Klein and
Joseph Keller qtd. in Kestner 38).
Besides serving as an example for boy scouts and various fictional detectives,
the character of Sherlock Holmes also greatly influenced the heroes of occult
detective fiction, the supernatural side of the mystery tale. In his introduction to
The Complete John Silence Stories, S. T. Joshi remarks on the influence of Doyle’s
detective on Blackwood’s development of John Silence. Silence keeps a consult-
ing room for clients, he refers to cases outside of the published Blackwood stories
in which he appears, and he has an assistant, who reports on Silence’s adventures
(vi–vii). In his introduction to W. H. Hodgson’s The Casebook of Carnacki the
Ghost Finder, David Stuart Davies also notes the influence of Holmes:

There is something very Doylean and Sherlockian about the Carnacki sto-
ries, not the least being the fact that while some of his cases prove to have
supernatural explanations, some prove to have rational solutions in which
traditional detective methods, of the kind that Sherlock Holmes would apply,
get to the root of the mystery.
(9)

Even though occult detectives often deal with supernatural mysteries that are dif-
ficult, if not impossible, fully to explain, they often follow Holmes’s methods by
applying rationalism and logic linked with background knowledge of the paranor-
mal to their clients’ quandaries. Their assistants, who report on their adventures,
 42 Melanie R. Anderson
often mimic Watson’s hero worship of Holmes. In attempts to make occult detec-
tion into a Sherlockian science, famous fictional ghost hunters, including Dr. Mar-
tin Hesselius, John Silence, Flaxman Low, Carnacki, Aylmer Vance, and John
Bell, to name only a few, study the supernatural through experiments in laborato-
ries and deep study in psychology, science, and esoteric lore, and they use meth-
ods of the Psychical Research Societies and special technologies – for example,
Carnacki’s photography and his “Electric Pentacle.”
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Furthermore, like the Holmes stories, most early occult detective fiction focuses
on a male figure as the interpreter-of-the-clues and the one-who-explains. Kestner
notes that, for Holmes, women are often not to be trusted, and their emotions
make them “inscrutable” and “puzzles” to his reason (35–36). This tendency is
echoed in occult detective fiction. For instance, there are predatory and sexu-
ally aggressive, thus evil, women in Blackwood’s “A Psychical Invasion” and
“Ancient Sorceries.” In his “The Camp of the Dog,” a young woman is a victim,
but part of the reason for the werewolf’s appearance is her inability to make up her
mind regarding a suitor and her latent desire for independence. The supernatural
situation is ameliorated when she accepts marriage. Alice and Claude Askew’s
Aylmer Vance (1914) faces a female vampire, albeit an apologetic and unwilling
one, in the appropriately titled story, “The Vampire.” In another Vance story, “The
Invader,” a husband must murder his wife because she has been irrevocably pos-
sessed by an evil spirit. George knows that his wife has changed because of her
wanton cruelty, strength, and aggressive sexual appetites:

Why, he declared that Annie’s face changed before his eyes – that a devil-
ish expression came into it, and to add to the sickening horror of the whole
scene, the woman who called herself his wife began to make violent love
to him – fierce, unrestrained love, and he had to suffer her hot, burning
kisses.
(17)

Here, Annie’s identity is supposed to be “the woman who called herself his
wife,” but the possession that makes her alien to her husband gives her a strength
of personality and passion that she did not have as his wife. Her newly acquired
passion and power mark her as unnatural and evil and give her husband the right
to kill her. Ironically, the situation resulted from George’s insistence on experi-
menting with the supernatural and hypnotism and using Annie as his test subject;
she begged not to be involved.
A concern with women’s positions in a patriarchal society – as displayed in
the occult detective fiction listed earlier – is an undercurrent in practically all
of Jackson’s work, and numerous critics have applied feminist lenses to her
novels. Lynette Carpenter has suggested that a recurring theme in Jackson’s
work revolves around the “causes and consequences of female victimization
and alienation” (200). For Carpenter, Jackson explores in her fiction the danger
of female agency in “a society where men hold primary power” (199). Simi-
larly, in his analysis of The Haunting of Hill House, Dale Bailey discusses the
 Perception and supernatural detection 43
importance of what he calls “the June Cleaver ideology” to Eleanor’s destruction
in Hugh Crain’s house, a structure that has never been welcoming to women in
its past. From its phallic tower housing the library to its centerpiece of Crain’s cut-
and-pasted and blood-signed book that mandates proper behavior for his daugh-
ters and threatens eternal damnation for any impurity, the house is a monstrous
monument to patriarchal parenting. It also stood a silent witness to the losses
of three of Crain’s wives, the quarrelling of his daughters, and the demise of
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any possibility of a direct line of descendants, as all of Crain’s hopes for a fam-
ily dynasty crumbled in acrimony. While Bailey notes that “the June Cleaver
ideology” “permitted greater autonomy than the imprisoning dogma women
labored under in the nineteenth century,” he posits clear links back to “The Cult
of True Womanhood” and views it as “a decades-removed middle-class dilution
of that primarily upper-class phenomenon” (33). This results in women becom-
ing limited to homemaker roles as “nurturing mothers” and “devoted wives.”
According to Bailey, “[t]he June Cleaver ideology flourished in the two decades
following World War II” and “placed the woman in the kitchen, highlighting
her role as a domestic life-support system for family members who functioned
largely outside the home” (33). These expectations, therefore, trap Eleanor, who
cannot see a path for her life other than the “June Cleaver ideology” scripted for
her by society. Unfortunately for her, this ideology forms Hill House’s founda-
tion, and the superficial ghost hunt becomes, for Eleanor, an intensely concen-
trated cauldron of her insecurities as the house calls to her to make a home there
and subsequently destroys her.
Since Jackson read mysteries and copious amounts of supernatural literature
as research for her fiction and lived as a woman writer in the stifling patri-
archy of 1950s America, the influences of the mystery and the supernatural
tale understandably would intertwine in her work and serve a very different
purpose than they did in works of the past. Her focus would be an oppressed
modern woman inadvertently at the mercy of a man who thinks he knows and
can interpret all – but cannot. To Montague, Eleanor appears to be irratio-
nally afraid, hysterical even, and he ignores her subjective experiences at the
investigators’ peril. Eleanor is doomed because of her obsession with society’s
conventions – love, romance, family and children, home – and because Mon-
tague cannot fathom the importance of her emotions and perceptions as fully
fledged components of his objective search for the supernatural. The paternal
and authoritative ghost hunter Montague cannot take Eleanor’s struggles with
gender roles and expectations into consideration, even as those struggles acti-
vate the haunting in the house and victimize her.
At its most basic level, The Haunting of Hill House is a ghost hunt, a kind of
hybrid nineteenth-century summer haunted house party meets our contemporary
conception of Ghost Hunters on the SyFy channel. Showing her awareness of her
research and genre, Jackson has her characters deploy multiple research tools,
scientific and extrasensory, to hunt their spectral quarry. The plot that maneuvers
Eleanor into facing her demons and her demise in Hill House is set in motion by
Dr. Montague, an ambitious academic hidden under a kindly paternal exterior.
 44 Melanie R. Anderson
Montague is a believer in the supernatural who is frustrated by the structure of
academe. Because searching for ghosts is looked down upon in research circles,
he takes a PhD in anthropology and bides his time waiting for a “haunted” house
to try his hand at investigating. The degree is earned to shore up his “unscientific”
interest in the supernatural – it lends him an “air of respectability, even schol-
arly authority” (The Haunting 4). His mission is to write “the definitive work
on the causes and effects of psychic disturbances in a house commonly known
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as ‘haunted’” (4). Immediately, readers can see other Jackson doctors in Mon-
tague. His ambition, single-minded interest, and desire for authoritative power
are reminiscent of the psychiatrists in The Bird’s Nest and the story “Colloquy”
(both of whom dominate and misguide female patients). As Hattenhauer empha-
sizes, Jackson parodies Montague and his wife’s efforts to explain paranormal
phenomena (10–11, 156). Dr. Montague foolishly believes that he can document
the haunting of Hill House. He soon learns that his efforts are useless, as are those
of his wife, who conversely is a proponent of extrasensory methods that rely on
séances, psychic sensitivity, and automatic writing.8 Meanwhile, as a masterpiece
of indeterminacy, Hill House remains an ambiguous signifier where inhabitants’
perceptions become twisted physically, because of its carnival house dimensions,
and mentally as it preys upon the one vulnerable member of the group, the lonely
and passive Eleanor Vance.9 Eleanor lacks a strong sense of agency, identity,
home, and reality before Hill House, and the house exploits this confusion. While
everyone else hunts for Hill House’s ghosts, Eleanor finds within Hill House, and
the ambiguities of haunting, a “convenient shorthand” (Oppenheimer 125) for her
inability to live a successful life within the strictures of patriarchal society – the
“real world” outside of the house’s walls.
Dr. Montague, the Sherlockian figure, believes that one can rationalize and
control fear, a human emotion: “Fear . . . is the relinquishment of logic, the will-
ing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we
cannot meet it halfway” (The Haunting 159). In his mind, only unreasonable
people without logic and willpower succumb to fear of the supernatural. Yield-
ing means that one is overly emotional and weak. His strength is in rationally
explaining the supernatural. Of course, by the end of his experiment, he has
failed: Eleanor is dead, and he leaves Hill House disgraced, his grand study in
question of ever being published. Hattenhauer describes Montague as having
“a patina of empiricism and objectivity [that] deflect[s] any penetrating view of
his underlying commitment not to investigate reports of ghosts, but to endorse
them” (155). Montague comes to Hill House already believing that it is haunted
because of stories he has heard; his investigation is not as objective as he claims
it is. Indeed, Hattenhauer places some of the blame for Eleanor’s demise on
Montague’s faulty reasoning and his fear of her fragmentation, a fear that he
would deny. Hattenhauer writes,

For Montague, to uphold reasonable patterns is to keep doing the same thing
even when logic dictates otherwise. . . . If he would handle [Eleanor’s] anxi-
ety with less of his own, she would not kill herself in the end. But he has to rid
 Perception and supernatural detection 45
Hill House of this foul contagion of irrationality, no matter how irrationally
he does it.
(156)

Jackson undercuts the patriarchal occult detective figure by showing that he does
not have all of the answers. He pretends to knowledge that he simply cannot pos-
sess, and he hides behind his credentials and his position in society.
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Subsequently, as if to spite the “rational” Montague, nothing supernatural

in Hill House can be concretely documented. Every time the team encounters
something that they believe to be supernatural, they cannot prove its otherworld-
liness. All four investigators are rarely present for a supernatural episode, and if
they are, it is still unclear whether their experiences are identical. By creating an
unreliable narration that takes place partially in Eleanor’s mind, Jackson makes
it clear that the team is attempting to compartmentalize scientifically something
that cannot be contained by human observation and measurement. Dr. Montague
completely misses Eleanor’s slow deterioration into a merged subjectivity with
the house. He is surprised by her collapse, while the reader sees it coming from
the beginning.
If we look at the supernatural events in Hill House, we directly notice their
dependence on perception. Often, these manifestations test the adage that
“seeing is believing.” The notes that Montague asks his guests to complete
become useless: “Each of them had written – carelessly, and with little atten-
tion to detail – an account of what they thought they had heard and seen so
far in Hill House” (149, emphasis added). Theodora rails against the futility
of them: “I hate writing these notes. . . . What are you saying about those
noises last night? I can’t describe them” (209). When the team first encounters
the cold spot outside of the nursery, a spot that every person can feel, they
disagree over how they experience it. Each member of the group describes
the cold slightly differently. When they return to document the cold spot, they
cannot measure it with any instrument. The chill makes it impossible to hold
a measuring tape long enough to note the spot’s dimensions. When they drop
a thermometer into the spot, it “refused to register any change at all.” The
doctor “fumes wildly” about investigators at Borley Rectory who documented
an eleven-degree drop in temperature. He “noted his results in his notebook,”
even though there is no real proof of the cold spot that can be recorded (150).
Hill House defies explanation and observation. At one point in the investiga-
tion, Theodora’s room is described as covered in a substance like blood, and
the investigators close the room so that Montague can document it later. At
the end of the novel, when Luke mentions that he never wants to see that room
again, Mrs. Montague reveals that she checked it, and that “[t]here’s nothing
wrong with it,” except that it needs dusting. Mrs. Montague’s sessions with
her planchette reveal little beyond information about her partner Arthur, and
the supernatural events that she does describe are stock Gothic and ghost story
narratives that do not apply to Hill House. The investigators cannot use mea-
suring tape, chalk, thermometer, automatic writing sessions, or notes to pin
 46 Melanie R. Anderson
down and prove their shared experience of a haunting. Everything becomes a
subjective narrative within Jackson’s narrative of Hill House’s effect on Elea-
nor. This subjective outcome is reminiscent of Jackson’s comment about the
Ballechin House investigators:

They thought that they were being terribly scientific and proving all kinds of
things, and yet the story that kept coming through their dry reports was not at
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all the story of a haunted house, it was the story of several earnest, I believe
misguided, certainly determined people, with their differing motivations and
backgrounds.
(Come Along with Me 200–1)

Eleanor’s experiences and her fragmented perceptions filtered through her

imagination form the bulk of the novel for the reader. In his obsession with prov-
ing the existence of ghosts, Montague misses the effects of the supernatural on the
most vulnerable of his assistants, primarily because he does not value her experi-
ence. Smajić asserts,

Occult detective stories are narratives about invasion, possession, obsession –

about confrontation not just with external supernatural forces but also with what
lies within: unexcavated layers of the psyche, buried selves that challenge the
conviction that we are in possession of ourselves and that the self is a coherent,
consistent, rational thing.
(198)

Here, Smajić could very well be describing Eleanor’s terrors during the inves-
tigation. While Dr. Montague and his wife work feverishly at proving there are
ghosts in Hill House, the reader learns that, for all intents and purposes, Eleanor
is the ghost.10 She deals with the fear that “the self [is not] a coherent, consis-
tent, rational thing” as she tries on new personas and new friends, and finally
merges with the house itself. Hill House becomes her space of dissolution. It
adds her to its pantheon of isolated and destroyed women, victims of the house’s
designer and patriarch, Hugh Crain. Eleanor has no place in the outside world
other than in subservience. Her life has been paused since she had to be her
mother’s caretaker; she has no career; she has no home; she feels that she has no
future outside of the fairy-tale narratives that she daydreams, which all involve
a caring maternal figure and a dashing romantic prince to rescue her. During the
investigation, Eleanor is confusing dreams and reality, she is losing time, and
she is feeling targeted by the house, often telling the others that she wants to sur-
render to its influences. Dr. Montague never vacillates, though, from his obser-
vation of presumed “ghosts,” and Mrs. Montague cannot even remember who
exactly Eleanor is. For all of the Montagues’ attempts at explanation, Hill House
stands at the end of the novel exactly as it stood at the beginning, unchanged
and unexplained, and Eleanor is left exactly as she was in life – placeless and
following another’s script.
 Perception and supernatural detection 47
Along these lines, approaching the novel as occult detective fiction emphasizes
Jackson’s masterful use of the supernatural to trouble traditionally solid bina-
ries, thus calling into question our very methods of “knowing.” Jodey Castricano
takes this approach in her article “Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House
and the Strange Question of Trans-Subjectivity,” in which she argues that the
entire book is about intersubjectivity as the characters’ consciousnesses overlap
through Theodora’s telepathic abilities. Castricano argues that Jackson’s aim is to
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investigate “the issue of what ‘separates one mind from another’” (88), and she
explores how “telepathy, clairvoyance, and the sentience of objects are tropes
that combine in Jackson’s novel to challenge certain classical models of human
consciousness and subjectivity” (89). Hill House becomes a space in which the
boundaries between characters’ minds are almost imperceptible. This situation
makes Hill House fertile ground for questioning the coherence of the self and its
place in the larger society. I would posit, however, that Eleanor has the potential
to be as sensitive as Theodora. After all, Eleanor was chosen for this experiment
because she was the center of poltergeist phenomena when she was an adolescent
(an experience she fears and vehemently denies). Therefore Eleanor’s conscious-
ness and her struggles to define her place in society and in Hill House become
the focus for the reader, while Montague’s experiments, ironically, occult this
information. Because Jackson’s narration is filtered through Eleanor’s conscious-
ness, her perceptions color those of readers, and we become just as confused as
she is about what is real and what is supernatural, or if these two categories even
are mutually exclusive.
While Montague pursues his “objective” mission, the reader is immersed in
Eleanor’s imagination and dreams. Questions about the relationship between
dreams and reality flood the book from the first page, where the narrator imagines
that even “larks and katydids . . . dream,” to the end during Eleanor’s bizarre
moment of alert fear behind the wheel when she suddenly “realizes” that her car
is crashing (The Haunting 1, 245–46). Because of her loneliness, Eleanor day-
dreams a new life for herself during her drive to Hill House, and these possibili-
ties indicate her desires for romantic love and a family; she awakens in the midst
of dreams of her mother’s death to find herself experiencing supernatural events;
she has a nightmare that she seems to believe actually occurred; and toward the
end of the novel she becomes confused as to what constitutes reality. Most telling
are those moments where the characters’ minds interpenetrate based on Eleanor’s
dreams and perceptions, consequently suggesting that she is becoming the nexus
of the haunting. Theodora, Luke, and Montague either mention aspects of Elea-
nor’s dreams or discuss her thoughts out loud without her prompting them. Most
of the conversations in Hill House seem to originate in Eleanor’s daydreams and
nightmares. Moreover, the other three investigators embody aspects of Eleanor
that she dreams for herself: Luke as the courtly lover, Theo as the independent
woman of emotion and passion, and Montague as the caring father figure. The
entire novel could be read as a series of waking dreams, transforming the house
and its occupants into metaphors for Eleanor’s disturbed mind. Once she joins
her consciousness to Hill House, she has permanently severed ties to her old life,
 48 Melanie R. Anderson
the present, and even reality itself. Ultimately, through these recurring dream
states, Jackson shows the characters’ minds intertwining and merging, perspective
becoming unreliable and murky, and the house itself invading human conscious-
ness, as it preys on Eleanor’s lonely hopes and dreams for a home.
Eleanor’s lack of agency and disconnection from reality are evident during
her drive to Hill House, a journey that she believes constitutes her first choice
in life. She defies her sister’s imperious order to stay home and believes, as she
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says, that something is finally happening to her. During this drive, she whiles
away the time by daydreaming. She imagines elaborate narratives for her life,
using the different homes and scenes that she passes. These fairy-tale fantasies
boil down to her playing the role of a dutiful daughter in a functional family
and waiting for a Prince Charming to come sweep her away. After the loss of
her father and a lonely childhood, Eleanor’s adult life has consisted of being
the caretaker for her ill mother until she died as well, waiting on the woman’s
every need all day, and reading her romance novels in the evening. Later, she
will mold even her experience at Hill House into one of a happy family, and
she repeats the refrain “Journeys end in lovers meeting,” expecting a romance
to blossom during her stay. Eleanor has bought into scripts delineating how her
life should be, rather than taking control and actually living it. She tries to live
through her dreams and wishes for a “spell” to change her drab reality. Once
she arrives at Hill House, aspects of her daydreams recur in her conversations
with the other investigators. Eleanor is ashamed of her solitary life, so she cre-
ates a life for herself with details from her journey: she lives in a cottage with
stone lions on the porch and oleanders in the yard. Interestingly, each character
participates in this charade of playing a role rather than disclosing personal
information. The group decides that Eleanor is a courtesan, Theo is a princess
in a fairy-tale realm, Luke is the brave bullfighter, and Montague is a pilgrim.
Theo and Luke continue this courtly banter any time Eleanor is present, and
Theo elaborates on her princess story with details that Eleanor did not share.
One example is Theo’s flight to the “woodcutter’s hut” to escape her enemies
(The Haunting 123). Any time Eleanor is present, her dream world seems to
entangle and overlap with the surrounding reality. There is no way that these
subjective perceptions can play a role in Montague’s formal investigation of
Hill House.
The characters keep up this playacting and their comments on Eleanor’s
state of mind and her concerns until specific moments when she seems to
awaken in the midst of a conversation, thus creating a moment where every-
thing changes, as if she had come awake from a deep dream. Since Eleanor
often is readers’ only conduit of knowledge about what is occurring, we are
just as shaken as she is. In the first moment, the conversation of the eve-
ning begins with Luke’s regaling the party with detailed stories of executions.
While he is describing ways of killing people, it is notable that Eleanor is
thinking about how much she hates Theo and wants to kill her. Then, when
Eleanor begins to explain how she feels when she is afraid, each of the char-
acters chimes in with a new perspective on fear: according to the doctor, we
 Perception and supernatural detection 49
fear ourselves; according to Luke, we fear seeing ourselves for what we truly
are; and for Theo, we fear knowing what we want (159–60). All of these sug-
gestions could apply to Eleanor. When Eleanor suggests that she could survive
if she “could only surrender,” the others cut her off sharply, and she jolts into
consciousness. She does not even know what she was saying: “I was just talk-
ing along, she told herself, I was saying something – what was I saying?” The
others are horrified because, as Luke says, “She has done this before” (160).
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They stare at her, making her more uncomfortable. This scene also makes
readers uncomfortable because we realize that we are as confused as Eleanor.
Perhaps the entire preceding scene was a product of Eleanor’s dream world.
Since Jackson has a limited third-person narrator dependent on Eleanor’s per-
ceptions, readers are as much in the dark as to who is speaking to whom about
what as Eleanor is. In this situation, how can we truly know anything? This
moment is our first indication that Eleanor has been spacing in and out of
conversations since she arrived.
Reminiscent of the questionable supernatural episodes of the investigation,
this problem for the reader simply to know objectively the happenings at Hill
House sharply comes into question during the brief scenes when Eleanor is spy-
ing on the other characters. As we see her comrades interacting, the differences
from what we have previously observed are astounding. Instead of childish ban-
ter about cottages and woodchoppers, courtesans and courtly favors, we hear
Theo and Luke discussing the investigation and speculating about the profes-
sor’s book. The most shocking change is in Mrs. Dudley, who, rather than being
a horrifying automaton of the house warning others that no one in town can
hear you when you scream, is shown to be a kindly woman. In a conversation
with Mrs. Montague, she says nothing about the dark or screaming; instead, she
offers her companion more coffee and defends Theo and Luke as young people
having a fun summer fling (221–22). With Eleanor out of the way, the reader
sees a much different picture of Hill House and the people inside of it. There
are two levels: one contains Montague’s investigation, and the other Eleanor’s
shifting perceptions during the investigation. This layering calls into question
the possibility of a single way of perceiving the situation, and it helps to dis-
mantle Eleanor’s fragile reliability.
As Eleanor believes that she is joining Hill House, her consciousness meshes
more fully with the house, and she moves further away from her companions.
During her last night at Hill House, she realizes that she can hear everything
inside and outside of the structure (206). She hears everyone in every room, and
she hears the crickets on the lawn. She proceeds to run through the house and
recreate the elements of the earlier paranormal events. She beats on the doors,
dances and sings, and then leads everyone on a wild-goose chase into the library.
Illustrating her twisted connection to the house’s dark history, she climbs the spi-
ral staircase from which the companion committed suicide. For her, every struc-
ture of consciousness and existence has collapsed and is fluid. She is one with the
house, so she thinks, “Time is ended now” (232). She has no separate identity or
place in time. She is in a flux within Hill House’s time and space. At the precipice
 50 Melanie R. Anderson
of self-dissolution, she looks down at the others in a confused liminal state of
consciousness:

For a minute she could not remember who they were (had they been guests
of hers in the house of the stone lions? Dining at her long table in the candle-
light? Had she met them at the inn, over the tumbling stream? Had one of
them come riding down a green hill, banners flying? Had one of them run
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beside her in the darkness? and then she remembered, and they fell into place
where they belonged) and she hesitated, clinging to the railing. They were so
small, so ineffectual.
(233)

At this moment Eleanor cannot distinguish between her imagination and reality.
For her, the time before and after Hill House has merged. There is no difference
between what she actually saw and people that she actually met on her trip and the
people that she met in Hill House, and there is no distinction between real people
and elements of her daydreams from her drive.
Eleanor’s ultimate disturbing descent into unreality occurs when she is forced
to leave Hill House for her own good. She strenuously refuses to go and finally
admits to the others that she has no home of her own. Even though she begins
to drive away, since she has nowhere to go and has linked her dream desires
to the house, she continues to assert her right to stay. Apparently, she commits
suicide, a tradition at Hill House, by driving her car into a tree that is just off of
the driveway, but readers only reluctantly can ascribe agency in this act because
Eleanor appears to be in yet another dream state. As she is driving toward the
tree, she thinks, “I am really doing it, I am doing this all by myself, now, at last;
this is me, I am really really really doing it by myself,” but this triumph of choice
is soon undercut at the moment of impact. In a final instance of coming to her
senses amid a state of confusion, Eleanor suddenly questions what is happening:
“In the unending, crashing second before the car hurled into the tree she thought
clearly, Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why don’t they stop me?”
(245–46). Seemingly, Eleanor has nodded off at the wheel and then jerked awake
to a shocking end. Moreover, she does not gain the connection and comfort that
she sought at Hill House because “whatever walked there, walked alone” (246).
The other consciousness in Eleanor’s head leaves her at impact, and she dies as
alone as she was in life.
According to Castricano, Jackson manages to blur all structural oppositions in
this novel, and I believe that she does so by revisiting and revising the conven-
tions of mystery and supernatural stories, or occult detective fiction. She took
that kernel of inspiration from the report on Ballechin House and created her own
house, with her own people, and saw what she could make happen (Come Along
with Me 200–201). Thus she follows her own suggestions that hauntings are more
about perceptions than apparitions, and she continues her concern with wom-
en’s agency by exploring whose perceptions ultimately matter. Smajić notes that
occult detective tales often involve “trauma, psychological collapse, and violent
 Perception and supernatural detection 51
death” (183), and The Haunting of Hill House contains all three, only the focus is
on the occulted experience of women. Jackson presciently anticipates future femi-
nist movements and escapes easy critical categorization as a popular genre writer
by addressing concerns with women’s place in society through an adept blending
of multiple traditional modes of fiction.11

Notes
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1 Since the 1990s, there has been a resurgence of scholarly interest in Jackson’s work.
In addition, since 2010, more of Jackson’s fiction has come back into print, including a
Library of America volume that collects The Lottery and Other Stories, The Haunting
of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and Penguin Classic editions
of The Road Through the Wall, Hangsaman, The Bird’s Nest, and The Sundial.
2 S. T. Joshi discusses Jackson as a writer of weird fiction, and he focuses on the super-
natural aspects present in her domestic stories/family sketches. Darryl Hattenhauer
examines Jackson’s “belief” in the supernatural and its role in criticism of her work. He
notes, “Jackson did not literally believe in the supernatural, for example, witchcraft and
psychic phenomena. After her career was firmly established, she admitted that using
anecdotes about her witchcraft and magic were promotional ploys” (8–9). In a similar
vein, I am arguing that for Jackson, the supernatural is a metaphor that she deploys to
interrogate very real issues, especially for women.
3 Similar to Jackson’s attempts to avoid being summed up with one label – a “house-
wife,” who happens to write – but rather be a writer and a wife and a mother in her bio-
graphical blurbs (and domestic sketches), another 1950s writer, Grace Metalious, faced
a similar conundrum, only in her case over a publicity photograph, known as “Pan-
dora in Blue Jeans,” for her novel Peyton Place (1956). Alongside of the photograph,
which shows Metalious dressed casually in jeans and sneakers pensively looking at a
typewriter, her publisher decided to stress her marriage and family in her biographi-
cal blurbs. Emily Toth comments, “The appeal of Peyton Place would be the contrast
between the respectable author – who, as small-town mother and schoolteacher’s wife,
fit perfectly the image of fifties’ conformity – and the shocking contents of her book”
(116–17, 121).
4 Jackson’s knowledge of and interest in the lore surrounding Borley Rectory and Bal-
lechin House are confirmed in the essay “The Ghosts of Loiret,” recently published in
the collection Let Me Tell You (249).
5 According to Tricia Lootens, Jackson promised her publisher “some dandy ghosts” and
that “it may turn out that different people see different things; see, in fact, just exactly
what they are expecting to see” (156). Even though there may not be a traditional
specter in Hill House, Eleanor certainly encounters a personalized haunting that, as
Lootens argues, plays on her position in society and the ways in which women can be
“destroyed by the nuclear family, sexual repression, and romantic notions of feminine
self-sacrifice” (152).
6 Stacy Horn cites this appearance of the Duke ESP cards in The Haunting of Hill House
as an example of the contemporary public’s fascination with the laboratory’s work and
Jackson’s own awareness of this phenomenon (155–56).
7 While the investigators of Hill House fall asleep on their first night in the haunted
building, Luke’s aunt is mentioned as, three hundred miles away, she “closed her detec-
tive story” (92). This is one of many mentions of books and stories that are folded into
Jackson’s novel. Hattenhauer calls The Haunting of Hill House a “heteroglossic novel”
and traces the many references in it to writing, including, to name a few instances,
ghost stories, legends, fairy tales, mentions of other novels, and the importance of the
library (169).
 52 Melanie R. Anderson
8 Deborah Blum describes how a large amount of the work of the British and American
Societies for Psychical Research focused on debunking fraudulent mediums. Jackson’s
decision to play Mrs. Montague’s methods against those of her husband may have
issued from her awareness of this conflict.
9 Eleanor Vance’s last name is an intriguing call back to Alice and Claude Askew’s early
twentieth-century occult detective Aylmer Vance.
10 See Anderson for a discussion of Eleanor as the ghost of Hill House.
11 Thank you to Benjamin F. Fisher, Amy K. King, and Lisa Kröger for offering com-
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ments on drafts of this essay and to Alida Moore for a helpful conversation about
gender concerns in detective fiction.

Works cited
Anderson, Melanie R. “‘Whatever Walked There, Walked Alone’: What Is Haunting Shir-
ley Jackson’s Hill House?” Journal of the Georgia Philological Association (2009):
198–205. Print.
Askew, Alice and Claude Askew. Aylmer Vance. 1914. Supernatural Detectives. Volume 2.
Landisville, PA: Coachwhip Publications, 2011. Print.
Bailey, Dale. American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular
Fiction. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green SU Popular P, 1999. Print.
Blackwood, Algernon. The Complete John Silence Stories. Ed. S. T. Joshi. Mineola, NY:
Dover Publications, 1997. Print.
Blum, Deborah. Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life
After Death. New York: Penguin Books, 2007. Print.
Carpenter, Lynette. “The Establishment and Preservation of Female Power in Shirley Jack-
son’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle.” Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary
Legacy. Ed. Bernice M. Murphy. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland and Company,
2005. 199–213. Print.
Castricano, Jodey. “Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and the Strange Question
of Trans-Subjectivity.” Gothic Studies 7.1 (May 2005): 87–101. Print.
Crichton-Stuart, John Patrick (Marquess of Bute) and Ada Goodrich-Freer, eds. The Alleged
Haunting of B – House. 1899. Project Gutenberg, 2005. E-book. http://www.gutenberg.
org/files/16538/16538-h/16538-h.htm.
Hattenhauer, Darryl. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. Albany: SUNY P, 2003. Print.
Hodgson, W. H. The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost Finder. London: Wordsworth Editions,
2006. Print.
Horn, Stacy. Unbelievable: Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy, and Other
Unseen Phenomena from the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory. New York: Harper Collins
Publishers, 2009. Print.
Jackson, Shirley. The Bird’s Nest. 1954. New York: Penguin Books, 2014. Print.
———. “Colloquy.” The Lottery and Other Stories. 1949. New York: Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux, 2005. 145–47. Print.
———. Come Along with Me: Part of a Novel, Sixteen Stories, and Three Lectures. 1968.
Ed. Stanley Edgar Hyman. New York: Penguin Books, 1995. Print.
———. Hangsaman.1951. New York: Penguin Books, 2013. Print.
———. The Haunting of Hill House. 1959. New York: Penguin Books, 1999. Print.
———. Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings. Eds. Laurence Jackson
Hyman and Sarah Hyman DeWitt. New York: Random House, 2015. Print.
———. The Sundial. 1958. New York: Penguin Books, 2014. Print.
 Perception and supernatural detection 53
———. We Have Always Lived in the Castle. 1962. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. Print.
Joshi, S. T. “Shirley Jackson: Domestic Horror.” Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary
Legacy. Ed. Bernice M. Murphy. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland and Company,
2005. 183–98. Print.
Kestner, Joseph A. Sherlock’s Men: Masculinity, Conan Doyle, and Cultural History.
Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997. Print.
Lootens, Tricia. “‘Whose Hand Was I Holding?’: Familial and Sexual Politics in Shirley
Jackson’s the Haunting of Hill House.” Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy.
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Ed. Bernice M. Murphy. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2005. 150–68. Print.
Murphy, Bernice M., ed. Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy. Jefferson, NC,
and London: McFarland and Company, 2005. Print.
Newman, Judie. “Shirley Jackson and the Reproduction of Mothering: The Haunting of Hill
House.” Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy. Ed. Bernice M. Murphy. Jef-
ferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2005. 169–82. Print.
Oppenheimer, Judy. Private Demons. New York: Fawcett Columbine (Ballantine Books),
1988. Print.
Smajić, Srdjan. Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian
Literature and Science. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2010. Print.
Toth, Emily. Inside Peyton Place: The Life of Grace Metalious. 1981. Jackson: UP of Mis-
sissippi, 2000. Print.
 4 Speaking of magic
Folk narrative in Hangsaman and
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
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Shelley Ingram

Syracuse University professor H. W. Herrington once wrote to Shirley Jackson,

congratulating his former student on the success of her short story “The Lot-
tery.” Jackson wrote back, saying that “it had all originated in his folklore course”
(Oppenheimer 131). Though Jackson would remain steadfastly mercurial about
the origins or meanings of “The Lottery,” this exchange tells us that Jackson had
been, at least at one time, a student of folklore. And how could she not be? Her
husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, was a prominent, outspoken folklorist and liter-
ary critic. The consensus seems to be that Hyman was “her greatest influence”
and that theirs was a relationship of deep mutual respect and, at times, loathing:
codependent and destructive, but also sustaining and crucial. His was one of the
loudest voices in one of the most divisive theoretical debates of the time, that of
the role, meaning, function, and origin of myth. It seems inevitable, then, that
Jackson would have had a great deal to say about her husband’s mythic view of
the world. But it is not enough to argue, as Darryl Hattenhauer does, that Jackson
“disables” Hyman’s theories of myth and ritual and “increasingly undercuts” the
“mythy modernists,” that she “subverts myth” by rooting it in “traces of the pub-
lic” and “devalorizes myth” by placing it alongside folklore (46; 186–87). Jack-
son’s engagement with the ideas of Hyman and his cohort of “mythy modernists”
is more complicated than that, her definition of folklore more sophisticated. She
was not simply subverting or undercutting Hyman’s views; she was dynamically
interacting with them.
In her novels Hangsaman and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Jackson
consciously and playfully manipulates myth, ritual, fairy tale, legend, and other
folk narrative forms, wrenching them from their myriad “traditional” contexts and
reconstituting them in the text.1 By making estrangement from and oppression
by folk and “pseudofolk” communities analogous to psychic despair, Jackson is
moving within a critical discourse that positions belief, myth and folklore, and
individual psychology as virtually inextricable. At the end of Hangsaman and
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Natalie and Merricat, the novels’ respec-
tive protagonists, must each confront suppressed knowledge of a traumatic event.
This confrontation leads to a conscription into folk narrative – myth for Natalie,
legend for Merricat – which fixes them in discourse and alienates them from their
lived communities. Natalie’s and Merricat’s stories are now communally shaped
 Speaking of magic: Folk narrative 55
by the forces and functions of folk belief. But the different iterations of folk nar-
rative we see in the texts suggest slightly different outcomes for each character,
showing Jackson’s facility with the conventions of traditional storytelling and her
deep engagement with the era’s debates about the quality and function of folklore.
In these novels, Jackson not only casts doubt on the authenticity of modern folk
culture, but also questions its ability to provide narratives from which her pro-
tagonists can construct psychically whole identities.
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Hyman once argued that “without exception folk art” was “of very ancient com-
munal origin . . . never the record of a historical personage or event,” but “always
a development out of primitive fertility ritual”(“Some” n2). While some scholars
were looking for historical or cosmological antecedents for myth, Hyman, draw-
ing primarily from Jane Harrison and George Frazer, saw all myth deriving from
ritual. He felt that ritual theory worked “for all areas of myth and folk literature,”
and he praised contemporary works on folk drama, folk tale and legend, customs,
children’s games, and music as exemplars of applied ritual theory (“Myth” 466).
He believed myth to be ritual’s “spoken correlative,” which then broke down into
other units of folklore as the original rite was forgotten or as new social needs
arose. In short, Hyman tended to see in most “authentic” folklore a mythic, and
therefore ritual, origin (McCullen 283).
Hyman’s views were clearly influenced by both the broadly evolutionary ideals
usually credited to the British anthropologist E. B. Tylor and the theories of Freud.
Tylor and his cohort, like Hyman favorite Andrew Lang, posited an evolution of
human culture through three distinct stages: savagery to barbarism to civiliza-
tion. The dominant belief at this time was that “in savagery, people’s lives were
guided by myths; in barbarism, people wove the vestiges of the myths into folk-
tales.” These folktales survived in “civilized” society, but only if “the educated”
turned “to peasants and to children” in order to find these “quaint remnants of the
past” (Zumwalt, American 77). What survived from the earlier stages into more
“evolved” culture was thought to be folklore. Hyman felt this view of folklore
“dovetailed best” with “the classical psychoanalysis of Freud” (“Myth” 472).
Freud’s theories of the unconscious were appealing for folklorists because
Freud himself mapped the evolution of the individual psyche onto the evolution
of culture. Freudian folklorists therefore held fast to the evolutionary theory of
culture because it offered a model fitted to their beliefs that “neurotic symptoms
are . . . vestigial remains from infancy just as Tylor’s survivals were seen as ves-
tiges from society’s primitive past” (Schmaier and Dundes 143).2 The most per-
sistent Freudian folklorists felt that the folk did not need psychotherapy because
they still had folklore, that folklore was where “the folk” worked out, through
sublimation or expression, the conditions of the mind that psychotherapy sought
to cure.3 Hyman time and again linked “folk work” to “dream work,” arguing that
“folk material is analogous to the dream as a disguised fulfillment of repressed
wishes” (“Anthropological” 238). For example, Hyman laments the degradation
of the British traditional ballad in part because “like magic and the supernatural,
sex, incest, and kin-murder tend to disappear or diminish” in “a folk process very
like individual repression” (“Child” 236).
 56 Shelley Ingram
Thus the dominant framework for interpreting folklore in the Jackson/Hyman
household saw the unconscious expressing itself through folklore, a process
deeply related to primitive rituals and myths of past societies. We see, for exam-
ple, in We Have Always Lived in the Castle that Jackson was “quite consciously
splitting herself into” the sisters Merricat and Constance, representing “the same
person, both Shirley.” According to her first biographer Judy Oppenheimer, Jack-
son “had written the truth of what it was like for her” in their town in Vermont in
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order to examine “one of the central questions of her life – her own identity” (234,
236). Oppenheimer argues that there was always a “very direct link for Shirley
between the book she was writing at any moment and the life she was then living”
(236). Such ethno-autobiographical readings link Jackson’s ideas about “truth” to
a view of folklore that would see expressions of folklore, especially folk narrative,
as expressions of the unconscious.
But folklore often asks us to believe in things that scientific rationalism insists
cannot, in fact, be true. Such rationalism engenders the “attitude that many of
the cultural expressions identified as folklore, especially folk belief, [are] patho-
logical” (Mullen 120). We see this in Hattenhauer’s vehement objections to both
Hyman’s marketing of Jackson as a witch and his interpretation of Oppenheimer’s
claim that “when Jackson saw and heard things that others did not, such phe-
nomena were actually there” (9). Such assertions, Hattenhauer argues, “are not
just laughably illogical. They are reactionary. They enable the sentimentalizing
of Jackson as the purveyor of ‘private demons’ and the erasure of Jackson as
the complex political writer who compares with the best of her generation” (9).
Despite Hattenhauer’s (or even Oppenheimer’s) decisive claims, though, we can-
not actually know what Jackson believed. Because belief is a cognitive, subjec-
tive process, we can never have access to it. All we can access are expressions of
that belief (Pimple 51). Or, as Jackson once wrote, “being impossible, an abstract
belief can only be trusted through its manifestations, the actual shape of the god
perceived, however dimly” (Sundial 3). In his critique, Hattenhauer divides the
world into believers/sophisticates, echoing the earliest scientific ventures of folk-
lore studies itself, which posited “folk belief” as the domain of the uneducated
and irrational and “disbelief” as the neutral, objective, rationalist stance.4 Hat-
tenhauer seems to deny the rationality and complexity of those who believe in or
experience the numinous. But imagining the relationship between rationality and
irrationality, whatever that is, as dichotomous misses the point of Jackson’s repre-
sentations of humanity and misreads, I believe, the “manifestations” of her belief.
In the past, folk belief was often interpreted as either, on the one hand, non-
mainstream spirituality, superstitions, and “mistaken beliefs” (Pimple 52) or, on
the other, “pathologies that advancing people had to leave behind” (Mullen 122).
But there was a paradigm shift in the academic study of folklore toward the end of
Jackson’s life and Hyman’s career that led to the redefining of folklore as not only
something that is but also something that is done at a particular time in a particu-
lar place – folklore as process and performance. The shift from text to context in
folklore studies, combined with the radical reconceptualizing of a folk group as
any group with a common trait that fostered common expressions, also forced the
 Speaking of magic: Folk narrative 57
creation of a new definition of folk belief. Current folkloristics situates belief out-
side of the binaries of true/false or superstition/ knowledge. Instead, it starts with
the seemingly simple, and wholly human, notion that belief is “the certainty that
something is true” (Hufford, “Beings” 19). Folk belief came to mean “beliefs that
members of a (folk) group hold because they are members of that group” (Pimple
52), or more simply, “unofficial knowledge,” a “way of knowing” (Motz 339).
This definition of folk belief is critical in the study of folk narrative (i.e., stories
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with currency in the vernacular discourse of a folk group) because it is not form
or content that primarily determines how narratives are categorized. Instead, it is
“the attitudes of the community toward them” (Oring 124). While Hyman saw
all verbal and customary folklore as deriving from the myths that existed as the
“spoken correlative of rites,” William Bascom, a frequent target of Hyman’s ire,
offered up a typology of folk narrative that centered belief as the key component
of their categorization; he classified folk narratives according to the beliefs of
their tellers and their groups. Myths are sacred stories, believed by their audiences
to somehow tell a truth, while folktales are clearly fantastical and meant to be
unbelievable. Legends fall somewhere in between. That is, legends can be consid-
ered true, false, or possibly either, as they “often depict the improbable within the
world of the possible” (Oring 125). What makes a legend is that “at the core” of
the narrative “is an evaluation of its truth status” (Oring 125).5
Despite the emphasis on belief, however, narrative conventions came to exist
as markers of genre. It is difficult to tell a fairy tale in our culture that is recogniz-
able as a fairy tale without a “once upon a time,” a damsel in distress, or a troll
under a bridge, because folk narratives are communally interactive and reactive. It
is within this dynamic tradition that Jackson works. She explores the connections
between myth, ritual, and all of their descendants, including legends, tales, bal-
lads, and rhymes, and she plays with the boundaries between belief and disbelief.
Perhaps most importantly, she exploits the tension that exists between communal
and individual iterations of folk narratives. Jackson situates Natalie and Merricat
within worlds filled with folklore. Sometimes, the folklore compels them, speaks
to them and to their conceptions of their own identity. Other times, the folklore
serves as a tool of alienation, a way for Jackson to render concrete what she saw
as a stultifying oppression by “the folk.” But ultimately, Jackson complicates the
notion that folklore can fully work for her particular protagonists and suggests that
it can provide them only with an uneasy means of coping with psychic trauma.
In a 1958 review essay, Hyman singled out Hangsaman as a novel which positively
represented the trend toward “myth and ritual” in American literature, as it was struc-
tured by a “series of ceremonial initiations leading to maturity” (“Some” 5). Because
Hyman defined myth as the “spoken corollary to rite,” it follows that he was read-
ing the novel within the framework of sacred ritual. Hyman endorsed Arnold van
Gennep’s deceptively simple formula for ritual, a now familiar paradigm which
proposed that all ritual followed a relatively stable tripartite pattern: a separation
from the known world followed by a period of liminal existence, during which the
ritual participant undergoes a kind of transformation that makes possible the final
stage – a reintegration of the self into a new, refined social order. The subsequent
 58 Shelley Ingram
critical reception of Hangsaman has been a variation on that theme, with Hangsa-
man often being read as “a novel of initiation into the adult word” (Lyons 63),
an “initiation story” that leads to Natalie “finally emerging . . . literally as well
as figuratively, to a new self-understanding and a new approach to tangible real-
ity” (Parks 19). It is no surprise, then, that the novel can be divided into three
sections, each representing a stage in the ritual process and each establishing,
as Hattenhauer astutely argues, a “metonymic chain of signifiers in [Natalie’s]
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unconscious” from her father, Arnold, to his various substitutes (7). But while
we would like young Natalie Waite to have reached a maturity that will help
her repair her damaged psyche and reintegrate into her social order, her last
words are fraught with ambivalence. After rejecting the advances of the female
friend-turned-phantom Tony and returning to the seemingly solid safety of her
university, Natalie realizes, “as she had never been before, she was now alone,
and grown-up, and powerful, and not at all afraid” (218).
Hangsaman begins with Natalie living at home with her overbearing aca-
demic of a father and a retreating, resentful mother. Natalie is waiting to
begin college, “desperately” fearful but ultimately determined to leave, as
the thought of living the rest of her life with her parents was “a prospect so
horrible” that she found herself “almost enjoying her fear of going away” (4).
And go away she does, to a university clearly modeled after Hyman’s Ben-
nington College. Here Natalie struggles to fit in, unable to connect with the
other women on campus or to distinguish herself in her studies. It is while she
is caught up in the bickering marriage of her professor, Arthur, and his wife,
Elizabeth, that Natalie discovers Tony. Read, alternately, as a real, flesh-and-
blood person or as a manifestation of schizophrenic psychosis or as Natalie’s
“braver, more self-sufficient alter ego,” Tony presents Natalie with her ulti-
mate test: give in to the irrational promise of her seduction, or reject her and
accept reality and adulthood (Rubenstein 313).
Folklorists often view folk narratives as especially powerful tokens of resis-
tance, as folklore in general exists outside of ideologically sanctioned conduits
of knowledge and outside of the notice of traditional power structures. But while
folklore has great capacity for subversion, it also “informally teaches by support-
ing and reifying belief systems – as well as by controlling people,” since they
“learn from their culture’s folklore what is proper and possible for them” (Stew-
art 54). The first two-thirds of Hangsaman highlights this alienating and oppres-
sive dimension of folklore and folk narrative, as Natalie continually resists being
incorporated into the competing folk and pseudofolk discourses that surround her.
This resistance contributes to Natalie’s increasing insecurity and the crumbling of
her autonomy into a mess of disengaged pieces. It is not until she goes with Tony
into the woods at the end of the novel that she stops resisting folk narratives, and
the ambivalence inherent in this last line becomes key to a newly constructed
mythic identity for Natalie, one that relies on the primordial fertility rite at the
root, according to Hyman, of all folk culture.
Natalie’s home life before she leaves for college is dominated by the autocratic
Arnold, who I agree is as close to a literary representation of Hyman as we see
 Speaking of magic: Folk narrative 59
in Jackson’s work (Hattenhauer 103). He and Natalie engage in a ritualistic tête-
à-tête each morning, where she hands him her previous day’s writing, always
with a profound “moment of dismay” (10). That moment also always passes, and
she never fails to give him her notebook for his assessment. All the while, she
is simultaneously composing various counternarratives that run as the unspoken
corollary to this rite. Counternarratives are stories that ideally work to “identify”
and “make visible” the “fragments of master narratives that have gone into the
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construction of an oppressive identity” (Nelson 7). I say “ideally” because coun-

ternarratives do not always succeed, and Natalie’s have differing levels of suc-
cess. The dominant counternarrative in the first section of the novel is a pulp
detective story, in which Natalie imagines herself interrogated about the mur-
der of her ambiguously unnamed lover, whose body is found on the floor of her
father’s study. Interspersed with the details of the morning spent with her family,
this is a story that, as Wyatt Bonikowski points out, suggests violence against both
her father and herself (79).
But Natalie invokes other counternarratives as well, including folk tales, bal-
lads, rituals, and legends. Natalie is estranged from them all, and though she
tries, she can never quite use them to resolve the nascent troubles of her uncon-
scious. The garden at the Waite home had “belonged exclusively to Natalie;” it
was here that her younger self “had delighted in playing pirate and cowboy and
knight in armor” (22). Jackson does not situate Natalie as the princess in these
stories, waiting to be rescued, just as she chooses for the novel’s epigraph a
stanza from the ballad “Maid Freed from the Gallows” that presents at least the
possibility that the maid frees herself from a hanging. Natalie’s play with leg-
ends of outlaws and heroes attempts to enact a counternarrative to the demands
of the father, as legends are stories that could conceivably happen. Their power
is in their possibility, and their meaning often resides in their “exploration[s] of
social boundaries” that “challenge in some way . . . what the world is or should
be” (Ellis 11). Other times, when Natalie feels overwhelmed by the horrors of
growing up female – that is, when confronted with the possibility of marriage
and children – she disengages by “her usual method – imagining the sweet sharp
sensation of being burned alive” (10). Such an image connects her again to the
punished maid at the gallows and perhaps to the witches of Salem. Natalie uses
legendary narratives of women’s suffering as a type of silent refusal of her soci-
ety’s narratives for women. The alternative narratives that she imagines are all,
in one way or another, negotiating the fate of the subject: the maid bargaining
for her life, the witch claiming power through death, the refusal of the princess
in favor of the cowboy or the pirate.
Natalie’s engagement of these legends fails, though, because something, which
was “only remotely connected with knights,” made the forest beyond the garden
“dark and silent and unprovocative” (22). At a weekend party hosted by her father,
the central event of the first section of the novel, it is strongly suggested that
Natalie is sexually assaulted by one of Arnold’s friends. This unnamed man leads
her into the woods at the edge of the property, where awaited a “great terrifying
silence,” with trees which pulled darkness “about her with silent patient hands”
 60 Shelley Ingram
(42). The man tells her to sit on a fallen tree trunk, and she does. The use of free
indirect discourse seamlessly intertwines the various competing narratives of this
section:

“Come along,” the man told Natalie. “This I intend to hear more about.”
“And the blood?” the detective said fiercely. “What about the blood, Miss
Waite? How do you account for the blood?” “One is one and all alone and
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evermore will be so.”

(41)

Within the space of three lines, Jackson writes three competing narratives with
the margins between them so fine as to be almost indistinguishable.6 The first
is the inscribing word of the father, spoken by the unnamed man functioning as
Arnold’s double. The unnamed man seems to be angry that Natalie made “a per-
fectly outrageous statement” in describing herself as “wonderful.” Erupting into
this dominant patriarchal discourse, and in turn being disrupted by the unnamed
man, is Natalie’s interior fantasy, drawing from pulp fictional narratives of inter-
rogating detectives and blood-soaked carpets. This fantasy allows her the power
to murder the father/lover but does not provide a clear escape from being fixed by
the interrogatory male authority.
The third narrative is folk. The lyrics of the folk ballad “Green Grow the
Rushes, O” disrupt both the reality of the father and the fantasy of the daughter.
This is a communal voice, a “swell of sound” made up of the voices of the party
with “everyone singing,” the “people’s voices” masking the conversation of Nata-
lie and the stranger (37). The song’s “stacking” method is both mnemonic and
forcefully participatory, each stanza building on the one before. The critical inter-
pretation of these lyrics, which had been much discussed in the pages of the Jour-
nal of American Folklore in the decade prior to the publication of Hangsaman, is
that the “one” was the godhead, a celebration of “the original singularity, and the
singular originality, of the divine source of life” (Kertzer 224).7 In this instance,
however, the song, performed by a faceless group of suburban intellectuals, offers
no restitution of the divine, only a grotesque parody of communal performance.
Its pseudofolk nature serves as backdrop to trauma – Natalie’s presumed rape dur-
ing her parents’ party. The man, a family friend, sits Natalie down under “indif-
ferent” stars, where no narrative can provide protection for her as she thinks, “Oh
my dear God sweet Christ . . . is he going to touch me?” (43).
After this attack in the woods, Natalie creates a rite of repression, chanting, “I
will not think about it, it doesn’t matter,” using ritual as a way of actively sup-
pressing her trauma (43). We see again the importance of ritual when Natalie is
later forced to participate in a dorm initiation where first-year students are roused
from their beds in the middle of the night, sat on a stool, and then forcefully
questioned by upperclassmen about obscene jokes and sex. Natalie thinks that
the upperclassmen do not care too much that not all of the freshmen were pres-
ent: “Another instance, she thought regretfully (or at least remembered later that
she had so thought), of ritual gone to seed; the persecution of new students, once
 Speaking of magic: Folk narrative 61
passionate, is now only perfunctory” (60). This scene has been treated lightly by
critics, read as Jackson’s mocking of empty gesture – but it is not empty, not for
the other women and thus, by comparison, Natalie. As each girl steps down from
the stool, after facing inquisition by her peers, she returns to “oblivion among her
friends; she had passed,” having clearly demonstrated that “she was not in any
way eccentric, but a good, normal, healthy, American college girl, with ideals and
ambitions and looking forward to a family of her own; she had merged” (61). The
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ritual, for most of the women, was successful.

In the essay “The Symbols of Folk Culture,” Hyman suggests that the “Greek
symbols never seem conventional or allegorical, but always the literal picturing
of objects full of mana, magical power.” He continues: “the absence of a folk cul-
ture in America seems to be precisely the absence of these mana experiences.”
One elusive site of mana is “the experience of ritual communion,” a “temporary
merger of individual identity in a collective whole that is larger than the sum of its
parts,” which “at its conclusion releases its individual units purged and fulfilled,
as though they had been cast up from the belly of the whale” (307–8). It is Nata-
lie’s inability to be part of this collective release, largely because the event in the
woods makes it impossible to answer the question “are you a virgin,” that robs
the moment of its mana: “What a silly routine, Natalie thought, not realizing . . .
[that] worse than the actual being a bad sport was the state of mind which led
her into defiance of this norm, this ring of placid, masked girls” (62). This is not
a ritual “gone to seed” so much as it is a ritual out of reach for Natalie. Like at
the party, where Natalie is separate from the pseudocommunal voice of the song
and the patriarchal discourse of the father, she cannot participate in the rituals of
her peers, because she has no way to believe in the mana they are attempting to
claim. Natalie remembers “so clearly” the moment she began to question mana,
when she rejected the possibility that wishing on a “wishing stone” would bring
her a bicycle. This leads her to lament, some “cynical years later,” that “it was
less important . . . to allow her father’s humor to be transmitted to his children
than to keep alive her mother’s faith in magic” (108). If she had just waited for
the right moment, when she knew that she could, in fact, get a bicycle, “magic
would have been sustained, and cause and effect not violated for that first, irre-
coverable time” (108). Choosing her father’s narrative, one rooted in a seem-
ingly rational “cause and effect,” over her mother’s made the rituals of her peers
impossible.
And yet, it is in her father’s study that she finds books on “demonology”
and, more important, “an abridged Golden Bough” (25).8 Later, in a letter from
Arnold to Natalie that Jackson clearly (and humorously) positions as Oedipal,
Arnold fancies himself a knight and Natalie his princess. He writes, “It is as
much as any knight can do, these days, to keep in touch with his captive prin-
cesses, let alone rescue them.” He is interpellating her into the romance of the
fairy tale, offering to “attack the dragon” that guards her, for she is “surely not
confined only by magic” (137). Arnold seems to dismiss household magic while
embracing, even if ironically, grand mythic narratives. But Natalie has spent
much of the novel resisting all levels of interpellation into folk culture. Natalie
 62 Shelley Ingram
fights knights in armor in her woods, until the nameless man attacks her. She
does not add her voice to the chorus singing “Green Grow the Rushes, O,” and
she avoids being subsumed by the rituals of her classmates. She rejects the
magic of her mother, and she resists the rescue of her father/lover. All around
her are competing narrative discourses that would move her into the world of
the pseudomagic; but it is her letter responding to Arnold, in which she links
him to a suitor “caroling lustily under my window,” that she finally crosses into
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the most mythic section of the novel. The narrative thus moves from clear non-
belief, since fairy tales exist purely in the world of imagination, into the more
truthful world of myth. It is, “speaking of magic,” in this letter that Tony is first
mentioned (138).
The “last erotic object in the metonymic chain that begins with her father”
(Hattenhauer 108), Tony emerges from the woods, and Natalie, “going across
the grass under the trees,” sees “in the moonlight a figure coming toward her,”
the “girl Tony” (Jackson 141). As contemporary critics have pointed out, Tony’s
connections to trees are numerous, from her creation story to her sudden appear-
ance one night, when Natalie at first mistakes Tony for a tree that “was not rooted
and perhaps not completely indifferent” (148). Natalie’s own indifference toward
both her schoolwork and her family grows as she and Tony become closer, and
Natalie feels that she has finally found a true friend, someone with whom she
can enjoy “the feeling of being together without fear” (181). The weekend after
Thanksgiving provides them a moment of respite from college and family life,
and the two head out together on an odyssey that propels them further and further
from campus.
Along the way they buy drinks at a drugstore, meet a one-armed man, spin
vampire stories based on film posters, and stop to stare at a toy “hanged-man”
in a shop window, a “tiny figure on a trapeze which turned and swung, around
and around, endlessly and irritatingly” (193). “A tree of sacrifice is not liv-
ing wood,” Natalie says. Their “antirational and antisocial exhilaration” during
this journey is alienating for the reader, as they move quickly from one venue
to another, seemingly losing grasp on reality as they go (Lyons 63). This is,
as Stevens argues, where Jackson begins to “trust the patient rather than the
doctor,” as the third-person narrator loses its objective neutrality, its disbelief
(225). Natalie and Tony eventually catch a bus and ride to the end of the line to
a closed-up amusement park called “Paradise Park,” a grotesque Eden barren
on this late November weekend. Tony pulls Natalie with siren-like power to a
small copse of trees, where Natalie “saw with complacent pleasure a fallen tree
across the small clearing and, as she knew she was expected to, sat down upon
it” (212). Tony joins her there, and

with Tony’s hands on her face, on her back, holding her, Natalie shuddered.
One is one and all alone and evermore will be so; “I will not,” said Natalie,
and ripped herself away. She wants me, Natalie though with incredulity, and
said again, aloud, “I will not.”
(214)
 Speaking of magic: Folk narrative 63
This moment is often read as Natalie’s reintegration into the outside world,
where she deals with the trauma of abuse and irrevocably rejects magic for adult-
hood. In one of the earliest readings of the novel, John O. Lyons insists that, quite
simply, “Tony (unknown to Natalie) is a Lesbian,” and her intended seduction of
Natalie leaves her “revolted,” so much so that she “shakes herself awake from the
world of childish imagination which has ended in horror and returns to the solid
reality of the college” (63). Lyons dismisses the probable rape at the beginning
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of the novel as simply a case of Natalie “los[ing] her composure” at the “harm-
less” touching of her arm. But subsequent critics quickly corrected Lyons’s early
misreading, making clear the deep connections between the forest, the father, the
rapist, and Tony. As Natalie follows Tony around the park, she notices that it “was
indeed very dark and that ahead of her the figure she had mistaken for Tony was
only another tree” (210). Tony is now usually read as a manifestation of Natalie’s
fractured consciousness, either as “schizophrenic episodes that result from her
growing fear that she has no internal self” (Hague 80) or, in Wyatt Bonikowski’s
convincing argument, as representative of “the nature of the destructive jouis-
sance within her, the claim of the Real outside of the Symbolic order” (83). But I
am not so sure that it is entirely clear that Tony is an imaginary alter ego, invisible
to all but Natalie. After all, Elizabeth (at least, according to the novel’s third-
person narrator) does say to Natalie “I saw you with someone” (149). What is
clear is that Tony is not entirely of the world.
Throughout the novel, Natalie tries out different identities – a murderer, a pirate,
a waitress, and a mental patient, a regent mapping the boundaries of her country.
These repeated and unsuccessful attempts to construct effective counternarratives
all lead her to Tony in the woods. This journey actually begins before the incident
with the unnamed man, when, presumably surrounded by the books on demon-
ology and The Golden Bough, her father leafs through her notebook and says,
“‘This has always been a favorite of mine, Natalie’ . . . ‘This one about the trees.
“Lined up against the sky” is good, very good’” (10). It is easy to see, then, how
the misplaced forest in “Paradise Park” can be read as the inevitable setting for the
novel’s conclusion, echoing that first conversation with Arnold and representing a
“locale where the laws of conventional reality can be easily breached and where,
as a result, the unwary traveler is all too vulnerable to demons both real and imag-
ined” (Murphy 109). That she is expected in the grove of trees at this moment of
reckoning is even less of a surprise, however, if we read Hangsaman as Hyman
suggested, as myth, for next to the fairgrounds is a lake, and next to the lake are
the trees, and Tony says, “We have to be here first,” before they can run away from
the world to a place where “no one is alive but us” (209). Tony is offering Natalie
a world outside of time, carried away by a “he” who would “take us wherever we
wanted to go,” finally landing in a place where

sitting we can rule the world, where the stars are around our feet and the sun
rises when we glance down and beckon, where far below there are contests to
make us laugh and above us there is nothing but our own crowns.
(208–9)
 64 Shelley Ingram
In short, Tony is offering Natalie the chance to be a god.
Bonikowski argues that Natalie “has recreated and relived the trauma of the
sexual assault in the garden” through the “repetition of a primordial crime that
lies at the heart of her relationship with her father” (83, 81). Adding the lens
of Hyman’s myth-ritual theory weaves together the two concurrent strands of
criticism in a way that would be intimately familiar to those in Jackson’s liter-
ary circle. The central “primordial crime” that is at the heart of Hyman’s myth-
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ritual theory is the murder of the dying king. Hyman says that “the key image
of The Golden Bough, the king who slays the slayer and must himself be slain,
corresponds to some universal principle we recognize in life” (Armed 439). The
slayer becomes “King of the Woods,” Diana’s priest, who guards her sacred grove
next to the lake at Nemi. Here he waits, until the next runaway slave finds and
breaks the golden bough, signaling his intent to challenge the sitting king. The
winner’s triumphant strength and health assure the continued strength and health
of his community. Because Hyman believed that “rites, and only rites, have myth-
engendering power,” because he “subsumes all folk narrative under that term”
(Fontenrose 28), and because he calls Hangsaman a mythic novel, I want us to see
what he saw: Jackson seizing as a powerful site of meaning-making the primor-
dial crime at the heart of his particular brand of myth and folklore.
The “King of the Wood at Nemi,” according to Frazer, “was regarded as an
incarnation of a tree-spirit,” who “had to be killed in order that the divine spirit,
incarnate in him, might be transferred in its integrity to his successor” (iii. 205).
Frazer imagines “a dream-like vision of the little woodland lake of Nemi, ‘Diana’s
Mirror’ as it was called by the ancients” (i. 1). Jackson creates in “Paradise Park”
a type of funhouse mirror version of Diana’s sacred grove. It is late fall instead of
spring, and the park is crowded with remnants of its secular nature, like the “faint,
almost undetectable odors of wet bathing suits, and stale mustard, and rancid pop-
corn” (206). While Natalie at first rejects an anthropomorphic rendering of trees,
saying that “a tree is not a human thing, with its feet in the ground and its back
hard against the sky,” eventually her “feet went without sound on the path,” and
she “knew surely that the trees bent over her, trying, perhaps, to touch her hair”
(209–10). She “came out at last, almost crying . . . onto a smooth bare place where
the dusk, or the light of the lake far behind reflected from the clouds overhead, fell
with a brazen and ghastly clarity” (212). The reflection from “Dianna’s mirror” is
grotesque, an inversion of the sacred realm of myth.
Though promised the chance to live as a god with nothing above her but her
crown, Natalie knows that this promise is a lie and that only “one and one and all
alone” can emerge from this confrontation. She looks, hopes, for “a weakness in
the traitor to make this an equal battle,” while Tony “her head back against a tree
trunk” says, “‘It’s good to be here at last; it’s the only possible place’” (213). Jack-
son is deliberately playing with the anthropomorphic imagery of the tree spirits
and sacred groves, reconfiguring the traditional myth to highlight its inadequacy
as a viable narrative for Natalie. Natalie rejects Tony, slaying the father/rapist
only to take Tony’s place in a world of ambivalence, where “everything’s waiting”
for her, where she expects a “hand or branch to pull her rudely down again” (214).
 Speaking of magic: Folk narrative 65
This victory is ambivalent because, in the myth, such a victory cannot promise
peace. The winner does not move into a life of luxury; he now takes his place a
watcher of the grove, constantly fearing the appearance of a challenger, for the
new priest will have “only escaped the fire to fall by the sword” (Frazer, Abridged
816). It is a life defined by surveillance. Natalie has perhaps bested her trauma and
achieved some peace, but at a price. She has not been fully reintegrated into the
world around her; instead, she is rewritten and subsumed by its mythology. Nata-
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lie has been taken up by the mythic process and is now simultaneously part of the
narrative of the folk and always separate from it, for “no crowned head ever lay
uneasier, or was visited by more evil dreams,” than the slayer of the king (Frazer,
Abridged 1–2). She is now Natalie “waits,” her identity prescribed by the ambiva-
lence of the primordial myth, and she waits for her own inevitable sacrifice.
Merricat Blackwood begins We Have Always Lived in the Castle in a similar state
of suspended animation, still venturing into the village but always vigilant of threats
to her carefully maintained world. Hattenhauer argues that in Castle, Jackson “places
myths and rituals alongside fairy tales, legends, and nursery rhymes” as part of her
“nascent postmodern subversion of myth criticism.” He goes on to say that what is
“even more important” is that “she devalorizes myth criticism by breaking the oppo-
sition of myth and ritual on the one hand, and magic and witchcraft on the other,”
thereby “demystifying” the “myth critics’ tendency to obscure ideology under valo-
rized canonical myths and to separate those privileged myths from other beliefs and
practices they called ‘folklore’” (187). But this is not actually how Hyman defined
folklore. Hyman believed that all folk work and folk art derived from myth. The
“other hand” of myth and ritual was not folk culture but what Hyman called “pseudo-
folk” culture – that is, that which passed as folklore but was really popular or mass
culture or idiosyncratic creations of an individual artist.
Hyman instead argued that artists “are not creating in a folk or primitive tradi-
tion, but are using the myth and legend, the magic and ritual, of these cultures
with some degree of ironic adaptation to their own needs,” so that their “art can
furnish us with meaningful and moving symbols that can bring mana back into
a culture sadly deficient in it” (“Symbols” 312). He suggested that the only truly
mythic folk culture left in the United States, aside from small pockets of immi-
grant culture, belonged to “children at play,” who expressed “true folk culture,
age old and magical, in their games and songs,” and the “full ritual communion –
collective, purgative, and overwhelming” of the lynch mob (311). In Castle, Jack-
son continues to engage with various folk forms in order to exploit the tension
between the individual, the unconscious, and the community. Jackson represents
both these sites of “true” folklore in an “ironic adaptation” that is quite comfort-
ably in line with Hyman’s views. What she does question, though, is the possibil-
ity or viability of mana at all in modern society, because the reification that results
from the inclusion of the Blackwood sisters into narratives of folk culture also,
like in Hangsaman, makes permanent their alienation.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle begins by intimately situating the reader in
Merricat’s mind: “My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old,
and I live with my sister Constance. . . . Everyone else in my family is dead” (1).
 66 Shelley Ingram
That Merricat poisoned her father, mother, younger brother, and aunt is not
fully revealed until the last third of the novel, and it is Constance, the elder sis-
ter by a decade, who stood trial and was ultimately acquitted for the murders.
The unmarried sisters live together in Blackwood Manor, surviving quite well on
the money and goods that had been accumulated by their parents and the Black-
woods before them. Constance is agoraphobic, unable to leave the grounds of the
Blackwood manor, closing herself off from almost all interaction with the outside
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world. Merricat loves Constance, yes, but Constance is not the sole remaining
member of Merricat’s family. They live with their incapacitated Uncle Julian, who
managed to survive his attempted murder, and Jonas the cat.
When the novel begins, Merricat is away from the manor on her weekly errands,
travelling through town terrified of being tormented by the villagers, the “ugly
people with their evil faces,” their “flat grey faces with the hating eyes” (2). She is
accosted by these villagers, pinned by their vicious stares, constructed through their
gossip, and taunted by their children. Readers so acutely feel her terror that we find
it possible to empathize with her as she says, “I would have liked to come into the
grocery some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying
there crying with the pain and dying” (9). Merricat’s fear permeates the book and
is seemingly justified when, near the end of the novel, the townspeople stone the
Blackwood manor and gleefully destroy much of house’s first level, breaking dishes
and windows, emptying food onto the floor. The moment they spy Merricat and
Constance huddled together, waiting for a chance to flee, is truly frightening, and it
is a relief when the sisters get to hide away in Merricat’s secret grove, a womb-like
enclosure from which she and Constance emerge the next day as a postlapsarian
Adam and Eve. It is only after this event that Merricat confesses, and the reader gets
confirmation, that, yes, at twelve years old Merricat murdered her family.
The major conflict in the novel is set in motion with the arrival of Cousin
Charles, come to lay claim to Constance and thus the Blackwood fortune. Mer-
ricat both detests and is deeply afraid of Charles, for she fears that he will disrupt
the seemingly Edenic life she fights so hard to maintain. When Merricat sets the
Blackwood manor on fire as a way to drive out the “demon” Charles, the fire
draws the villagers to them. It is only then, after the fire is extinguished, that the
villagers stone the house. When Merricat and Constance return to the ruins of
their home the morning after, they begin the new normal of their lives, drinking
from the two surviving handled cups and hiding from the world. Charles makes
one last attempt to win Constance, but despite a moment of hesitation, Constance
ultimately chooses Merricat. The sisters now live together in Merricat’s fantasy
world on the moon: “We are so happy,” Merricat says (146).
We see an immediately recognizable form of folklore in the first chapter, when
the children of the town shout taunts at Merricat:

Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea?

Oh no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me.
Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep?
Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!
(16)
 Speaking of magic: Folk narrative 67
The study of children’s lore at first fits comfortably within familiar evolutionary
ideology carried over from the nineteenth century, the prevailing theory being
that a child “recapitulates the development of the race” because “survivals of
the primitive” were “preserved in children’s folklore” (Zumwalt, “Complexity”
25). Children were seen as incubators in civilized society for the folklore of the
past, joining “savages” and “primitives” and the human unconscious as sites for
folklore’s preservation. Children’s folklore often relies on parody and inversion
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of recognizable narratives found in the adult world, and such refractions allow
children the space to try out different epistemologies of power. Rhyming is one of
the most recognizable forms of children’s folklore since its formulaic structures
make the rhymes fairly easy to remember and allow creative energy to be focused
on adapting local or specific language and content (Mechling 109). Most impor-
tantly, children are simultaneously members of several different folk groups,
through which they learn to “use stylized communication to create the sense of a
shared, meaningful world” (Mechling 94). Folklore is one of the most powerful
tools in the acculturation of children.
Fieldwork done with children’s taunting behavior shows that, across cultures,
“the person insulted is depicted as deviating from culturally defined values,” so
that “the children’s estimations of the extent to which cultural values are implicit
in the insults were close to those of the adults” (Jorgensen 224). Taunts are
reversals of the cultural imperative to be polite, but because the targets of taunts
often turn out to be those individuals of whom adults also implicitly or explic-
itly disapprove, they are safe receptacles for “malicious intentions and negative
emotions,” like revenge or hatred or domination (Jorgensen 222). Taunts are not
about “kids being kids”; they are about children becoming adults and the way in
which play helps them learn who and how to hate. Taunts allow children to probe
the boundaries of the adult community that they are one day going to enter, and
in Castle the children’s taunts are clearly defined moments of border-controlling
logic that are crucial to the textual construction of folk groups. The Blackwoods
are outsiders because of their wealth and because of how they use their wealth
against the people of the town. The taunts reverse that power dynamic, turning
it on itself in a moment of carnivalesque joy. Merricat’s hatred of the townsfolk
is not benign, and it is part of the Blackwood legacy. The Blackwood sisters get
away with murder, free to live with their riches in the big castle beyond the “wire
fence” constructed “to keep the people out” (53). The taunts correct the mistakes
of the institutions – in this case, the courts – and they allow the children to exert
control over figures of whom they are afraid. In short, though this particular
taunt cannot be found in any ethnographic collection of children’s folklore, it is
an accurate representation of the performance of folklore, both in function and in
form. Here are the folk, expressing through folklore what they might otherwise
repress.
Likewise, Hyman suggested that “the only culture trait” citizens in the United
States “possess which might fairly be called a full ritual communion – collective,
purgative, and overwhelming” is “the lynch mob” (“Symbols” 311). In Castle,
that trait manifests when Chief Jim Donell, after putting out the fire at the Black-
wood manor, despite the repeated chants of the townspeople to “let it burn,” bent
 68 Shelley Ingram
down and “took up a rock,” and “in complete silence . . . turned slowly and then
raised his arm and smashed the rock through one of the great tall windows.” Soon
“a wall of laughter rose and grew behind him and . . . they moved like a wave”
toward the house (105–6). The stoning of the manor is punctuated with lines from
the children’s taunts, such as when the family doctor runs in and asks, “Where
is Julian Blackwood,” to be answered with a shout of “Down in the boneyard
ten feet deep” (107). The joy of the mob reaches an apex when Jim Donell says,
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softly and politely, “Oh, no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me,” while “over it all
was the laughter” (109). That these two folk cultural traits, highlighted by Hyman
as signifying presence in a culture otherwise marked by absence, converge in this
moment suggests that Jackson was pointedly engaging folklore to make manifest
the darker communal impulses of human society.
Thus readers are forced to confront early on the consequences of folklore being
used as a tool for conscription, suppression, and expulsion. Oppenheimer insists
that Jackson saw Castle as the “truth” of what life was like, that Constance and
Merricat were herself, split in two. Jackson’s daughter agreed, saying that her
mother “told me that’s what Constance and Merricat are about . . . they are the
same person, both Shirley” (235). This may be, but Merricat is nonetheless an
invented person, and invented people have invented folklore; Jackson manipu-
lates recognizable narratives of folklore in order to heighten the creativity of Mer-
ricat’s own insular world-building. Merricat’s invented folklore, though, like that
of Hangsaman, is uncanny, a type of funhouse mirror inversion of traditional
forms.
Merricat’s childhood is atypical, and not just because she murdered her fam-
ily. She lacked a folk community within which to create that “shared, meaning-
ful world” (Mechling 94). With no Tony to usher her into the world of myth
and ritual, Merricat has to make do on her own. She had fairy tales she read
and myths she learned from her cat and, most prominently, rituals she invented.
Merricat buries and nails a mixture of protective tokens around the Blackwood
property that represent patriarchal, economic, and epistemological power on
the one hand and a patently infantilized feminine world on the other. There are
a “box of silver dollars buried by the creek” and “a little notebook” phallically
nailed to a tree, where her father “used to record the names of people who owed
him money, and people who ought, he thought, to do favors for him” (53). But
she also buries a doll, her baby teeth, her marbles, and other “treasures” given
to her by Constance, like “a penny, or a bright ribbon” (41). These are all arti-
facts of realms in which she does not and cannot belong, and they function as
a way for her to make contact with worlds outside her of understanding and to
harness, she believes, their power in the interest of bringing concrete stability
to her lived reality.
These rituals are structured as superstitions, verbal expressions with conditions
and results often followed by a conversion ritual. If salt is spilled (condition), bad
luck will follow (result) unless some of the salt is thrown over one’s shoulder
(conversion ritual) (Mullen 126). But despite the tendency of critics to read Mer-
ricat’s beliefs about the power of her sympathetic magic as superstitions, they
 Speaking of magic: Folk narrative 69
are not. Ritualized superstitious behavior acts outside of reason; the “compulsive
act” of superstition is performed in spite of rationality, not as replacement for
it (Hufford, “Response” 105). If a person performing a ritual believes the ritual
to work because of clear cause and effect, it is not a superstition, because the
performer believes they are acting rationally. Merricat’s rituals may be unrec-
ognizable to anyone but her, and they may not have any easily recognizable
ethnographic corollary, but Jackson makes it clear that Merricat believes they
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will work.
But do they? The rituals and talismans are meant to keep Constance in and
Charles out. As this is ultimately what happens, what is to keep us from accept-
ing Merricat’s magic as true, other than an expected scholarly stance of disbelief?
James Egan argues that Merricat’s magic “fully” fails, that “Merricat’s ‘magic’
rituals and her elaborate, insular fantasy world . . . substitute for a normal moral-
ity,” allowing a “monstrous” and “total, horrific inversion of the domestic ideal”
(22, 23). Egan’s use of scare quotes around the word “magic” makes his view of
Merricat’s rituals clear. The rituals have to fail if we are to read the novel as a
cautionary tale about monstrous children, and if we are to see it as a perversion
of the midcentury American family. And for many ritual theorists, rites “cannot
exist in an aesthetic or formalist vacuum; they require the context of commu-
nity.” They “convey the sense of satisfaction peculiar to them alone in the intense
experience of community that is their chief reason for being” (Hardin 847). Mer-
ricat’s rituals are practiced outside of a human folk group, bringing about no
communion. Indeed, they specifically reference a world in which she has no
place. Merricat has repressed her act of familicide, but unlike the villagers she
has no outlet through which to express that repression, no traditional community
from which to learn the coping mechanism of folklore. Jackson, then, does not
construct Merricat’s rituals as a reflection of any so-called authentic folk experi-
ence, but as a testament to the needs of an individual alienated, or exiled, from a
traditional folk culture.
We see similar disconnects between Merricat and what scholars at the time
would have considered “traditional” folk communities in reference to folk nar-
rative. While Merricat tries to stop the change promised by Charles’s arrival, for
instance, she turns to her cat Jonas for myth: “All cat stories start with the state-
ment,” Merricat hears Jonas say, “my mother, who was the first cat, told me this”
(53). Merricat thus is able to believe for a moment that “there was no change
coming,” that she was “wrong to be so frightened” (53). Merricat constructs an
etiological myth and endows Jonas with the ability to share it, using the language
of myth as a conduit of communion with a community uncomplicated by murder
and ghosts and “ugly people with their evil faces” (11). Much as the tokens of her
rituals are fetishistic totems signifying lack, so too is the claiming of a mythic his-
tory through her cat. The language of myth shows Merricat’s need to believe that
the power of her magic will hold.
Perhaps most telling is Merricat’s linking of her own narrative to the fairy
tale. She “likes fairy tales” best, tales preserved in books found in the library.
At the beginning of the novel, the conventions of the fairy tale are tellingly used
 70 Shelley Ingram
to flatten Constance (20). She describes Constance as “a fairy princess,” saying,
“I used to try to draw her picture, with long golden hair and eyes as blue as the
crayon could make them . . . the pictures always surprised me, because she did
look like that” (19–20). Merricat’s fairy-tale view of Constance comes from the
literary (rather than oral) tradition, and her corporeality is described only by the
transfer of crayon to paper. This is a singular, exiled, rather than plural, com-
munal characterization. It is through the solitary acts of reading and drawing that
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Merricat imposes the narrative of the fairy tale onto her reality. This singularity
continues when Merricat says that

I had buried all my baby teeth as they came out one by one and perhaps some-
day they would grow as dragons. All our land was enriched with my treasures
buried in it, thickly inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my
teeth and my colored stones.
(41)

The repetition of the singular possessive – “my teeth,” “my marbles,” “my
treasures” – also marks Merricat outside the realm of folk tradition, as an agent
acting on it rather than within it.
The fixing of the narrative of We Have Always Lived in the Castle as a fairy
tale is beguiling, because it can resolve much of the tension around the end of
the novel and recoup a morally ambiguous narrative. Being able to frame the
story’s plot as “happiness/ disturbance/ happiness restored” or “Lack/ Lack Liq-
uidated”9 gives us a pattern for reading the text that is comfortable and amelio-
rates some of the unease brought about by Merricat’s murderous revelations. It
allows the reader to believe Merricat when she says that she and Constance are
“so happy,” without having to take a seemingly unreliable narrator’s word for
it. Jackson herself asks us to consider this when she writes that, after returning
home following their night in the woods, Merricat and Constance had “come
back through the wrong gap in time, or the wrong door, or the wrong fairy tale”
(114). Merricat says, “I could not allow myself to be angry, and particularly not
angry with Constance, but I wished Charles dead. Constance needed guarding
more than ever before and if I became angry and looked aside she might very
well be lost” (79). Merricat here is cast as the dragon protecting the princess.
That Charles neatly fulfills the traditional role of the prince, seeking a princess
and her father’s wealth, lends credence to this reading, as he attempts from the
moment of his arrival to vanquish Merricat. But as Honor McKitrick Wallace
argues, “Merricat’s narrative also places her in the role of Propp’s hero, questing
after the princess Constance,” besting the false hero Charles (179). Merricat’s
rituals now have a certain pragmatism, as her “new magical safeguards were the
lock on the front door, and the boards over the windows, and the barricades along
the sides of the house” (145–46). She even contemplates finally “mending the
broken step.” These are protective acts, ones that can be read as prescriptively
masculine. By the end of the novel, though, Merricat drapes herself in tablecloths
while Constance dons Uncle Julian’s suits, presenting perhaps a third option for
 Speaking of magic: Folk narrative 71
the dramatis personae of the fairy tale: Merricat presenting herself as a princess,
living in her castle with her prince, Constance.
But it is the “wrong fairy tale,” because the novel is not meant to be read as
a fairy tale at all. A fairy tale is not meant to be believed. It is wholly fantastic,
thought to exist in a world outside of our own. Instead, the novel takes on the
characteristics of myth and, finally, legend in order to ask its readers to believe
in the truth of Merricat. We once again see a young female protagonist who both
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refuses and is refused participation in any community that would have been con-
sidered traditional, venturing into the sacred woods with her closest companion.
In Hangsaman this is Tony; in Castle, it is Constance, who is also, like Tony, often
read to be a manifestation of the protagonist’s “other half” (Oppenheimer 234). But
where Natalie slays, Merricat embraces. Natalie refuses seduction, while Merricat
seduces, leading Constance to the “entrance of [Merricat’s] hiding place” where
she “pushed [Constance] gently” down onto a bed of leaves and blankets (110).
But both choices deny Jackson’s protagonists full participation in the civilizing
world of adulthood, and neither reintegrates them fully into “normal” society but
instead into a world of heightened surveillance: while “all the strangers could see
from outside, when they looked at all, was a great ruined structure overgrown
with vines,” every day Merricat and Constance sat and looked out, “watched the
children playing, the people walking past” (140).
Merricat and Constance, however, do not become moribund in an ancient myth,
fixed by its unchanging universality. The remains of the Blackwood manor have
been incorporated into local lore. As one visitor remarks, “It used to be a lovely
old house, I hear. . . . I’ve heard that it was quite a local landmark at one time,”
an appeal to credibility mixed with distancing from the source (“I’ve heard”) as a
negotiation of belief (140). The sisters live in the ruins of their once magnificent
house, subsisting in part off of the offerings of food cooked by the village women.
The motives for these ritual offerings are a mixture of guilt, penance, and, finally,
fear: “You can’t go on those steps,” the children warned each other; “if you do, the
ladies will get you.” This time, when children taunt, “Merricat, said Constance,
would you like a cup of tea,” it is followed by an offering of “a basket of fresh
eggs and a note reading, ‘He didn’t mean it, please’” (146). The taunts of the
children are now mediated by Merricat and Constance’s status. They are living
alone, absent a traditional patriarch, certainly challenging the “boundaries of what
the” villagers thought the “world is or should be” (Ellis 11). While in Hangsaman
Tony offers Natalie a chance to live above the world, “where the stars are around
our feet” and people exist only “far below,” the women of the Blackwood manor,
though sacralized through ritualistic offerings, are firmly part of the everyday, a
horizontal rather than vertical separation from the community. As such, in Castle
Jackson has created legend – a powerfully dynamic narrative form that forces
its audience to confront the fantastic and sacred in the world of the mundane, to
test their belief in that which seems unbelievable.10 In Hangsaman and We Have
Always Lived in the Castle, then, Jackson connects negotiations of belief to the
narratives of folk communities and to the depths of the human unconscious in a
way that shows deep engagement with the era’s discourses of folklore, signifying
 72 Shelley Ingram
in many ways on her husband’s full immersion into theories of myth and rit-
ual. Jackson does not destabilize myth by equating it with folklore; instead, she
unmoors folk narratives from their traditional contexts and reimagines them for a
world in which her damaged women refuse interpellation into a folk community.
Nonetheless, when repressed knowledge erupts, folk narratives take over. Nata-
lie and Merricat had resisted, rejected, and been rejected by traditional folk com-
munities, only to at last become rescripted through them and their narratives. For
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Natalie, that narrative is mythic; for Merricat, it is legendary. This difference is

more than categorical – it is perhaps essential to the way the texts make meaning.
Legends are fragmentary, unstable narratives, lacking the rigid formulaic struc-
ture of myths and fairy tales. They involve an active audience who negotiates and
tests their belief, offering the possibility for truth in a way that myth and fairy tales
do not; as such, there is agency in legend for the teller of the tale and for the char-
acter being constructed. This gives a dynamism and adaptability to legend that
separate it from traditional myth narratives. In that way, no, Merricat’s magic does
not fully fail. She is, like Natalie, still conscripted by folk narrative, but she and
Constance are now important to the town’s knowledge of itself, upheld through
the ritual actions of the community and nourished, quite literally, by the power
of its belief. Jackson has disrupted the primordial myth by creating a legendary
space in which her protagonists, while not completely healthy or whole, can at
least reject the solitary anxiety and the overdetermined identity that come from
the slaying of the king. They are indeed utterly and completely happy in their “life
on the moon.” At least, that is, according to Merricat.

Notes
1 See DeCaro and Jordan for more on the process of “re-situating” folklore.
2 A large part of the appeal of Freudian psychology as a method for understanding folk-
lore was that Freud himself had expressed a deep interest in it, arguing that “we derive
our knowledge from widely different sources: from fairy tales and myths, jokes and
witticisms, from folklore, i.e., from what we know of the manners and customs, say-
ings and songs, of different peoples, and from poetic and colloquial usage of language.
Everywhere in these various fields the same symbolism occurs, and in many of them
we can understand it without being taught anything about it” (188).
3 The psychological branch of the myth-ritual school felt that “myth embodies man’s
unconscious feelings,” that “the psychic and biological growth of the individual reen-
acts the stages of the psychic and biological growth of the human race,” which is
expressed through a group’s folklore (Ferris 255).
4 See Hufford, “The Scholarly Voice and the Personal Voice: Reflexivity in Belief
Studies.”
5 The categories of “myth,” “folktale,” and “legend” go back to the earliest days of folk-
lore study. The Grimms’ categories of mythen, märchen, and sägen were revised in
Bascom’s prose typology, which still serves as a foundational text in the study of folk
narrative.
6 Indeed, Stevens claims the novel to be “solely from Natalie’s point of view,” leading to
his primary argument that the novel “lets the patient speak for herself” (225).
7 The version cited in Hangsaman is English, but the ballad itself is widely diffused
and can be traced back to at least the fifteenth century. The debate in the Journal of
 Speaking of magic: Folk narrative 73
American Folklore was concerned, among other things, with whether the song was of
Christian or Jewish origin, as it is part of both Christmas and Passover traditions. See
Yoffie.
8 James Frazer’s The Golden Bough was a cornerstone of Stanley Edgar Hyman’s ideas
about the world. It was a book that connected magic and religion, myth and ritual, and
Hyman was as famous for his dogmatic adherence to Frazer’s ideas as he was for any
of his own writing. Yet it is an abridged version we find in Arnold’s possession. Hyman
was insistent that any critique of Frazer (numerous by the time Hyman was writing) be
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centered on the full thirteen volumes of The Golden Bough.

9 Alan Dundes, in The Morphology of North American Indian Folktales, extrapolates
from Propp’s Morphology of the Folk Tale what he calls the “motifeme” – the plot
motivation of lack (L) and lack liquidated (LL). Similarly, fairy tale scholar Max Lüthi
argues that “the structure of the fairytale is characterized by the basic framing tension
[of] Lack / Striving for remedy, behind which stands that pattern Happiness/ Distur-
bance/ Happiness restored” (56).
10 I see this as an act of ostension, or “legend-tripping,” which refers to a physical, bodily
engagement with the subject of legend – for example, reenacting the plot of legends or
visiting legend sites. There is a wide span of emotional engagement possible with such
ostensive events, ranging from “thrill-seeking play to humbled reverence,” which can
lead to “legend as pious thrill” and a “legend-trip as a religious experience” (Lindahl
174). Visits to sites of legend, like, I would argue, Blackwood Manor, realize “all the
playful, scary, and sacred dimensions of ostension” (Lindahl 165). Furthermore, Don-
ald Holly and Casey Cordy link the involvement of material objects, like offerings, to
the moment when ostension shifts from disbelief to belief, when it comes to act more
like religion than vicarious play (336). We see Jackson representing a full range of
ostensive action outside Blackwood Manor, from the women who make offerings of
food as if to a deity to the children who fearfully but gleefully trespass on the grounds
to the tourists who stop to picnic and take pictures. These are all elements of legend
ostension, in which meaning is negotiated from the profane to the sacred so that it can
function in a variety of ways for individual pilgrims.

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Hyman, Stanley Edgar. “The Anthropological Approach.” The Journal of American Folk-
lore 66.261 (1953): 237–38. JSTOR. Web. 29 Jul. 2014.
———. The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism. New
York: Vintage, 1955. Print.
———. “The Child Ballad in America: Some Aesthetic Criteria.” The Journal of American
Folklore 70.277 (1957): 235–39. JSTOR. Web. 17 Jun. 2014.
———. “Myth, Ritual, and Nonsense.” The Kenyon Review 11.3 (1949): 455–75. JSTOR.
Web. 24 May 2014.
———. “The Ritual View of Myth and the Mythic.” The Journal of American Folklore
68.270, Myth: A Symposium (1955): 462–72. JSTOR. Web. 17 Jun. 2014.
———. “Some Trends in the Novel.” College English 20.1 (1958): 1–9. JSTOR. Web. 7
Jun. 2014.
———. “The Symbols of Folk Culture.” Symbols and Values: An Initial Study. Ed. Lyman
Bryson. New York: Cooper Square, 1964. 307–12. Print.
Jackson, Shirley. Hangsaman. 1951. New York: Penguin, 2013. Print.
———. The Sundial. 1958. New York: Penguin, 2014. Print.
———. We Have Always Lived in the Castle. 1962. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.
Jorgensen, Marilyn. “Teases and Pranks.” Children’s Folklore: A Source Book. Eds. Brian
Sutton-Smith, Jay Mechling, Thomas W. Johnson, and Felicia R. McMahon. New York:
Garland, 1995. 213–24. Print.
Kertzer, Jon. “The Course of a Particular: On the Ethics of Literary Singularity.” Twentieth-
Century Literature 50.3 (2004): 207–38. JSTOR. Web. 7 Jun. 2014.
Lang, Andrew. Cock Lane and Common-Sense. 1887. New York: AMS, 1970. Print.
Lindahl, Carl. “Ostensive Healing: Pilgrimage to the San Antonio Ghost Tracks.” The Jour-
nal of American Folklore 118.468, Emerging Legends in Contemporary Society (2005):
164–85. JSTOR. Web. 1 Sep. 2015.
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1984. Print.
 Speaking of magic: Folk narrative 75
Lyons, John O. The College Novel in America. 1962. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP,
1968. Print.
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283–84. JSTOR. Web. 2 Jul. 2014.
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113.448 (2000): 119–43. JSTOR. Web. 2 Jul. 2014.
Murphy, Bernice M. “‘The People of the Village Have Always Hated Us’: Shirley Jackson’s
New England Gothic.” Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy. Ed. Bernice M.
Murphy. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2005. 104–26. Print.
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Elliott Oring. Logan: Utah State UP, 1986. 121–45. Print.
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Century Literature 30.1 (1984): 15–29. JSTOR. Web. 28 Jul. 2014.
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———. “The Complexity of Children’s Folklore.” Children’s Folklore: A Source Book.
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New York: Garland, 1995. 23–48. Print.
 5 The Road Through the Wall
and Shirley Jackson’s America
Richard Pascal
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In recent years readers who are aware of Shirley Jackson’s recurring concern with
some of the dominant sociopolitical patterns of her era have uncovered, even in
her more Gothically oriented texts, a keenly discerning social critic. The later
novels, The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in
the Castle, teasingly deploy elements of the Gothic in order to comment obliquely
upon the domain of suburban realists, such as John O’Hara, Richard Yates, and
John Cheever. And her most famous work, “The Lottery,” though disturbingly set
somewhere in the rural America of her time, ordinarily strikes readers and com-
mentators as a grim fable or parable about the tragic consequences of adherence
to damaging traditions and social conventions rather than a realistic dramatiza-
tion of life in the modern era. Her brilliance as a fantasist of the uncanny is, of
course, justly admired. Traces of the occult, or at least of obscure forces that lurk
in shadows, are indeed the defining features of much of Jackson’s work, as the
titles of several of the most prominent critical studies of it readily indicate: Darryl
Hattenhauer’s Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic, Roberta Rubenstein’s “House
Mothers and Haunted Daughters: Shirley Jackson and Female Gothic,” and John
G. Parks’s “Chambers of Yearning: Shirley Jackson’s Use of the Gothic,” to cite
only a few examples.
Unfortunately, however, that categorical frame, appropriate with regard to much
of Jackson’s fiction, has apparently had the effect of distorting critical analyses of
her excellent first novel, The Road Through the Wall, and perhaps of discouraging
scholarly interest in it. As a Gothic critique of aspects of modern America, she
was not concerned to focus directly upon the very secular everyday world inhab-
ited by most of her likely readers.1 Yet The Road Through the Wall presents itself
as a narrative that is grounded within and focused upon a mid-twentieth-century
suburban setting notably devoid of Gothic shadows or hints of malignant pres-
ences.2 Heavily laden with details of a specific time and social milieu, it adheres to
social realist conventions, and it seeks, overtly in places, to contextualize its char-
acters and narrative events by indicating the social and economic forces that have
largely determined them. Only the dire Old Testament recitations of a minor char-
acter, an elderly recluse who addresses them to her dog, are suggestive of even a
figuratively occult dimension to latent powerful forces affecting the people and
events related in the narrative. But the relevance of her mystical mutterings to the
 Shirley Jackson’s America 77
actual state of the community is vague at best, and their direness is rendered hol-
low by portions and aspects of the narrative that call attention at significant points
to contrastingly prosaic socioeconomic determinants that press upon the lives of
the residents of Pepper Street. These are embodied discreetly, as I will argue, in
the figure of another elderly woman, a wealthy and worldly-wise nonresident who
appears to own much of the property in the area. She is seemingly the most minor
of all the characters in the narrative, easily overlooked by readers; Pepper Street
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people appear to be unaware even of her existence. Yet her importance to the fate
of the community, and to the concerns of the novel, stands in ironically inverse
proportion to the small amount of textual attention that is directed to her. In her
very facelessness and worldliness she is, so to speak, the blank face of the secular
Powers that preside over them.
The Road Through the Wall, in short, not only openly invites a historicizing
approach but also demands to be read as a work of mimetic fiction. My argu-
ment here, in brief, is that the small community of “Pepper Street” scrutinized in
the novel is intended to be representative of much of middle-class suburban life
in the postwar era. Modernity’s wistful, sentimentalizing memory of the feudal
village as a community of citizens who live in fellowship with one another as
social equals is the mythic paradigm for leafy suburban areas such as the novel’s
“Pepper Street,” but its applicability is perpetually undermined by the society’s
still more intense veneration of another idealized remnant of feudal society, that
of the landed estate. For an actual “estate” in the modern sense of the term, an
exclusive, walled community, lies adjacent to the small neighborhood in which
the events of the narrative transpire. This estate overtly incarnates the conspicu-
ously consumed privacy bought by worldly success – privacy that signifies not
merely privilege but also social purity, isolation from polluting contact with
social Others; and its tantalizing proximity is also figurative, suggestive of the
pervasive myth that social grandeur on that scale, though by nature exclusive,
may be a realizable aspiration for some who are as yet outsiders. The result
of modern society’s jostling juxtaposition of the two romanticized preindus-
trial institutions has been to make ostensibly village-like suburban communities
fundamentally uncommunal sites of suspicion, isolation, and instability such
that even the ancient practice of mobbish victimization, the very basis of social
bonding in the grim vision of “The Lottery,” can only faintly and sporadically
inspire residents to congregate into a collective whole that is greater than any
single one of them.

Their forgotten village green

Oddly, but significantly for what is in most respects a conventionally conceived
narrative, there is no focalizing protagonist or group of characters that can be
regarded as “major” in The Road Through the Wall. Rather, the action ranges
freely among eleven households, and the focus frequently shifts from one charac-
ter to another of the more than two dozen residents of Pepper Street in Cabrillo,
a small town that lies within easy commuting distance of San Francisco. The
 78 Richard Pascal
effect is to foreground the neighborhood itself as the narrative’s major “charac-
ter,” as though to enforce our sense of the street’s holistic communitarian aspect.
Initially, it seems that the small community is imagined as a site of idyllic rural
retreat from a perhaps unsettling wider world. Thus, in the beautifully conceived
prologue, a panoramic introductory tour of each house and household on Pepper
Street climaxes in an evocative account of an ordinary spring day in which the
doings of schoolchildren and parents are virtually apotheosized by the image of a
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“bedroomish arch” of tree blossoms presaging timeless fine times for “the roots
of growing things,” human as well as vegetable (12). In this opening section, it
is as though the inclinations of individuals and families to cluster together into a
close-knit community are regarded as no less rewarding and fundamental than the
rhythms of the natural world. The privacy afforded the neighborhood appears to
offer an optimal climate for participation in a small and highly interactive social
group.
The impression of such communal amity and complacency is subtly under-
mined from the very start, however, with the opening sentence’s declaration
that “The weather falls more gently on some places than on others, [and] the
world looks down more paternally on some people” (3). The subtle conflation
of “weather,” or natural forces, with a “world” that in playing favorites can be
understood only as the social realm, establishes Pepper Street as a fabricated
natural environment (“place”) that cloaks its hapless dependence upon power-
ful outside economic interests in sylvan garb – and, importantly, signals that
it is but one of a multiplicity of communities thus paternally blessed. What
applies there applies much more widely, in other words, to most if not all other
“charming and fairly expensive” (4) socially constructed places; it may serve,
the text has discreetly insinuated, as a specimen suburb. A subsequent, less
subtle narratorial comment hints more baldly at socioeconomic determinants
in observing interpretively that “No man owns a house because he really wants
a house,” and Pepper Street’s residents live there “because they were able to
afford it, and none of them would have lived there if he had been able to afford
living elsewhere” (3).
As the narrative progresses and episodic glimpses of convivial individuals
and families accrete, the pattern established in the initial paragraph is repeated
and amplified. While the reader is on one level encouraged to imagine the com-
munity as a harmonious social entity, a counteractive undertow of suggestions
emerges to indicate that the neighborhood’s cohesiveness and sense of commu-
nal identity are at best transitory and frail because impersonal forces determine
where and how individuals reside. The most emphatic indication is a lengthy
narratorial aside strategically situated at the approximate midpoint of the text.
It announces that a great transformation of the literal and social structures of
the area is imminent: the wall enclosing the adjoining “estate” is to be altered
so that an apartment block may be constructed. As will be discussed ahead,
the alterations are portentous for the residents of Pepper Street. Of significance
here, however, is the narrative’s concern to ensure the reader’s awareness of the
economic imperatives that condition the lives of those who “called themselves
 Shirley Jackson’s America 79
upright American citizens” (180). If the lives of their forefathers had been “qui-
etly governed” for them by forces of nature, such as the sky and the earthworm,
modernity has created

other unseen governors: the prices in a distant town, regulated by minds and
hungers in a town even farther away, all the possessions which depended on
someone in another place, someone who controlled words and paper and ink,
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and who could by the changing of a word on paper influence the very texture
of the ground.
(178–79)

Such impersonal governors – such governance, more precisely – require that the
very “hungers” of citizens be regulated for the sake of prices in that distant town.
“Even the very chair on which Mr. Desmond sat in the evenings,” we are told,
“belonged to him on sufferance . . . and Mr. Desmond, although he had not known
it, had chosen it because it had been presented to him as completely choosable”
(179). The passage rattles on in similar vein, echoing Veblen’s turn-of-the-century
notion of “conspicuous consumption” as well as anticipating in some degree Wil-
liam H. Whyte’s conception of the “organization man.” From an aesthetic stand-
point it seems somewhat intrusive, a brief jeremiad that distracts attention from
the characters and their interactions. Its import, though, has thereby been ampli-
fied: the residents of all the Pepper Streets, all the middle-class suburban com-
munities of America, are hardly more than counters to be manipulated and shifted
as deemed necessary or desirable for the sake of profit. And under such condi-
tions, community in the traditional sense, which values stability, permanence, and
neighborly affiliation, is not a viable possibility.
Even so, the narrative suggests in various ways that the impression of a latter-
day village community offered in the early pages is not entirely without founda-
tion. A certain amount of sociable activity does take place: street games played
by teenagers and children provoke occasional amicable conversations between
onlooking adults; some of the wives meet weekly in different homes for a chatty
sewing circle; the most respected man in the neighborhood conceives a plan to
involve the street’s youngsters in a drama group; a neighborhood garden party
promotes a mood of camaraderie among those who attend and drink freely; and
most significantly, the everyday familiarity enforced by residences situated in
close proximity to one another leads, in several instances, to the striking up of
friendships. It is largely the neighborhood’s young people whose interactions
create a semblance of communal feeling. The kids and adolescents often gather
on the street, in pairs or larger groupings. Their games and group activities
are derived, it is implied, from an atavistic desire to coalesce into an assem-
blage wherein individual autonomy may be justifiably rendered subordinate to
the claims of the larger group. An evening of “tag and hide-and-seek and long
involved games with a line across the street from curb to curb and elaborate
systems of bases and penalties,” for example, is said to involve the playing
out of “some ancient ritual of capture and pursuit” (38). The point is conveyed
 80 Richard Pascal
emphatically in a subsequent episode that sees several of the children playing a
word game called “Tin-Tin”:

Tin-Tin is probably as old as children. . . . Wherever children congregate they

will probably have their own version of Tin-Tin, its elaborate ritual deter-
mined by the children and their fathers and their grandfathers operating indi-
vidually on an immutable theme. Pepper Street’s Tin-Tin was as nonsensical
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as most; the entire introductory ritual had lost its meaning and probably its
accompanying dance.
(138)

This musing narratorial comment, tellingly digressive, stresses the nonsensical-

ity of the game, even while imputing to it residual traces of a meaning that is
immutable, although long forgotten or possibly sublimated. The apparent con-
tradiction hints at the significance of Tin-Tin and games similar to it: their ritu-
als, irrespective of meanings forgotten, instill in each participant a sense of the
rudiments of their communal association. Tin-Tin involves the assigning to each
player of a secret nonsense name that is subsequently disclosed to all in response
to an interrogation process that sanctions “any personal or outrageous or hilarious
question.” There are, the game instructs, rules that must be complied with and
patterns that must be adhered to rigorously, and expressions of individuality are
encouraged but closely monitored. “The whole procedure,” the narrator goes on
to observe, “filled some deep undefined need in neighborhood life” (139). Like
the lottery in the famous story, if less brutal, the “procedure” is a bonding ritual
whose original significance has been forgotten but which calls unto the neighbor-
hood as a neighborhood.
Those few commentators who have analyzed The Road Through the Wall at any
length have found in the text’s presentation of the community’s pastoral pleasant-
ness an underlying “Edenic” myth of innocence (and ultimately innocence lost).
This is the reading advanced by Joan Wylie Hall, who extracts from the narra-
tive’s occasional references to gardens and dying plants an implicit metaphorical
reference to the Garden of Eden and its “fall”: “The dying flowers and the crushed
grass of this first novel speak unmistakably of the loss of the innocence of Eden”
(269). The effect, and the stated intent, of this reading is to de-emphasize the
novel’s sociohistorical context and foreground rather a “more universal” (263)
thrust. But the textual justification for inferring an “Eden” metaphor is speculative
at best, as there are no explicit references to the Old Testament story, and the bibli-
cal Eden was hardly, in any meaningful sense, a community as well as a garden.
Pepper Street’s garden-like environs and its appearance of communal harmony
hark back rather to a different mythicized historical site that is implicitly alluded
to by the children’s games, and explicitly signaled in subsequent portions of the
narrative: the preindustrial village. In the most significant such passage, thirteen-
year-old Marilyn Perlman confides to her newfound friend Harriet Merriam her
cherished daydream fantasy of a former life. “‘I know who I was’” (152), she
tells her closest friend, and on being pressed for details she conjures up an idyllic
 Shirley Jackson’s America 81
“village green” community within which her own individuality was assured, as
well as her sense of group affiliation. In part it is a reverie designed to render in
greater depth the personality of the dreamily introspective character who articu-
lates it. Marilyn, sensitive and different, occupies a rather tenuous position among
her peers in the neighborhood. Yet it is clear that the narrative accords Mari-
lyn, by virtue of her sensitivity, a degree of imaginative clairvoyance lacking in
most of the other characters. Thus, while her friend’s corresponding fantasy of a
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past incarnation as a bejeweled Egyptian priestess is given only cursory narrative

attention and is openly deflated by the narrator’s catty observation that she is “try-
ing to look inspired” (154), Marilyn’s vision of a prior incarnation is recounted in
lengthy, respectful detail:

“I remember,” Marilyn said emphatically. “I really do.” Her voice became

softer, as though she were describing a scene familiar and lovely. “There’s a
very very blue sky, and the hills and grass are so green they almost hurt your
eyes and the road is white and it curves around the hill and there are flowers
and trees and everything is so soft-looking, and far away beyond the hill you
can see where the road leads into a little town. . . . I can see the town, too,” she
added, never looking at Harriet. “It has houses with low roofs and a bridge
over a little river and all the houses are white and they have brown wood
trimmings and there’s a village green in the center of the town.”
(153)

The implication is that she envisions, with almost mystical second sight, the
pastoral paradigm that subliminally informs the modern suburban imagination.
When she further elaborates upon her vision, the static scene is activated into a
lively scenario in which an approaching commedia dell’arte troupe becomes the
town’s populace. And the spectacle of Pantaloon and the rest, stock characters
who traditionally exemplify diverse personality types, “talking and laughing and
singing” in evident enjoyment of the company of one another (153), encourages
the previously distant dreamer, not a popular child in her actual neighborhood, to
come running toward them in exhilarating anticipation of being welcomed and
invited to join in. In the embracing softness of that town there is only commedia,
because there is no sense of divisive Otherness – only a subsuming acceptance of
individual peculiarities.
The full significance of Marilyn’s reverie doesn’t become apparent until the
closing portions of the novel, which recount the efforts of the people of Pepper
Street to band together collectively in accordance with a shared sense of purpose.
As the garden party enters its dying stage, it is discovered that three-year-old Car-
oline Desmond is missing and has not been sighted for hours. When subsequent
hasty searches fail to locate her, a sense of crisis settles upon the neighborhood,
and the neighbors gather, “almost everyone, on what was traditionally their forgot-
ten village green – the sidewalk in front of the Donald house” (252). The ground
underfoot is asphalt, not a greensward, and like the meanings of the street games
the significance of a village green has been largely lost to communal memory;
 82 Richard Pascal
only the dreamy Marilyn can still summon it to the forefront of consciousness. On
occasion even so, as though in response to a pattern deeply engrained in an inac-
cessible but influential region of their psyches, these suburbanites may assemble
on its nearest contemporary equivalent, the quiet street. The “occasion” related
in the novel turns grim, with implications to be explored ahead. But the horrible
nature of the incident should not obscure the fundamental point that the subur-
banites’ sporadic displays of community spirit derive from an atavistic and never
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entirely subdued impulse to reside communally as well as domestically.

Enviable privacy
Increasingly, as marketplace-oriented modernity has its way, the allure of the for-
gotten village green in the modern suburban unconscious is more than counterbal-
anced by the desire to inhabit another dimly remembered preindustrial social site,
that of the medieval landed “estate.” The desire for a grand and secure domain of
one’s own points away from the public concourse. Where the image of the village
green is suggestive of openness and (to a degree) of egalitarian commonality, that
of the estate signifies triumphant individuality and autocratic exclusiveness to
the point of regal isolation. There are in the novel’s “Cabrillo” actual estates – of
a sort. The narrative is careful to specify that the town is situated upon formerly
secure class and ethnic borderlines that are in the process of being redefined. In
the period between the two World Wars – the novel is set in 1936 – the subur-
banization movement in the United States that would accelerate greatly in the
post–World War II era was beginning to burgeon, for many previously discrete
towns not far from cities had become satellite residential communities (Beaure-
gard 41–42). Cabrillo is presented as a virtual case study of such a town in that
period of transition. Formerly a locale in which the very wealthy resided in mag-
nificent mansions bounded by private parklands – a classic nineteenth-century
suburb, in other words – it has recently broadened its social base to incorporate a
number of middle-class families of more ordinary means, as well as a few lower-
class residents. It is located “perhaps thirty miles from San Francisco . . . halfway
between a suburban development and a collection of large private estates” (9) on
a main highway that leads to the city.
“Fairly expensive” (4) Pepper Street, where houses were constructed in the
recent past on property originally encompassed by a large nearby estate, is “on the
borderline between these two” (19). The young neighborhood’s position ensures
that it is possessed of what is termed, in a key phrase, “an enviable privacy”
(9–10), in that it is “rarely troubled with invasions” (10) from the nearby main
highway. In stressing the degree to which the area affords its occupants a high
degree of such privacy, the text insinuates that a desire to be insulated from the
diverse urban population of America partly motivated the quite recent migrations
to Pepper Street. Therefore, for example, an encounter between two teenage girls
and an “excellently dressed” (68) Chinese man points toward racist attitudes that
underlie the residents’ cheery communal interactions. After accepting his invita-
tion to tea, they are surprised when he tells them that the apartment isn’t his. “‘Not
 Shirley Jackson’s America 83
in this neighborhood,’” he tells them; “‘They wouldn’t rent an apartment to me’”
(116). The girls’ relative obliviousness of the racism endemic to the area is an
indication of its ideological unobtrusiveness in the larger society. Clearly, it is a
powerful social undercurrent that is not often acknowledged openly as such. Con-
trastingly, the belief that those engaged in menial occupations are lower orders
in the fullest sense is a very prominent aspect of the community’s set of shared
assumptions and values. When the man further explains that he works in the apart-
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ment as a servant, the girls are appalled at having socialized with “help” and depart
abruptly. Further underscoring the implication that such shared ethnic and class
bigotry is rife in the community is the treatment, both in behavior and gossipy
innuendo, directed by several of the street’s social stalwarts at a Jewish family, at
two lower-class families who inhabit (sequentially) a frowned-upon “house-for-
rent,” and at serving girls who work in one of the middle-class households. The
neighborhood strives to perpetuate and refine its status as an enclave reserved
for white middle-class citizens, and members of nonmainstream subgroups are
regarded as potential advance agents of invasions from the main highway.
The enclave mentality that enshrines privacy as a sacred right in the neighbor-
hood and, by implication, the entire town and many others like it is operative in
relation to an even more circumscribed area, that of the individual residential
site. The reputedly witchlike behavior of the street’s oldest resident, “crazy old
Mrs. Mack” (5), presents a parodic extreme of the widely shared obsession with
defining one’s house and its immediate environs as an exclusive private fiefdom.
Mrs. Mack sees almost no one, and the children of the neighborhood believe
that she spends all day in her home “peering out at them through the boarded-up
windows, putting spells on anyone who entered her yard” (87). The spells aren’t
known ever to have harmed anyone at whom they were directed, but they do
achieve their purpose of reinforcing neighborhood respect for the property line
that demarcates Mrs. Mack’s territorial imperative. The aim of asserting domain
over a separate home site in a “nice” area composed of many such is to establish
the right to hex away, at will, any intruders – even when the latter are your neigh-
bors and class peers. It is decidedly not village green behavior.
While crazy old Mrs. Mack simply wishes to establish territorial domain in
order to banish the surrounding community totally, most of her neighbors face a
more complicated challenge. Modern suburbanites must achieve a similar though
less extreme result by inhabiting homes that are at once attractive and exclu-
sionary. Important though it is to secure the home against invasion, the irony
implicit in the phrase “enviable privacy” is that privacy thus ensured has become
an enshrined mode of exhibitionism. The walls and hedges and lawns of the nicer
homes on Pepper Street serve not only as obstructions to public scrutiny but also
as fetishistic inducements to it. Passersby are meant to notice grounds and facades
in order to behold the elegant secretiveness that veils from full view the internal
space of familial and personal intimacy. Thus the prologue’s house-by-house sur-
vey of the Pepper Street community subtly specifies the extent of visual exclu-
siveness afforded most of the residences, in the forms of fences, facades, lawns,
and gardens, and calibrates the degree to which commodified privacy has been
 84 Richard Pascal
effectively flaunted by each. Next to Mrs. Mack’s house, for example, “success-
fully hid” by an orchard, is the rented residence of the Byrne family, a “recent
regrettable pink stucco” (5). The Roberts family, situated economically some-
where between the Byrnes and the more affluent Desmonds, inhabits a house
“thickly surrounded with bushes which were inadequate to disguise the fact that
the roof was colonial, the windows modern, and the whole a gaudy yellow” (5).
They are of relatively modest means, so cannot (or do not know how to) conceal
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their shameful vulgar taste more than partially from the prying eyes of passersby.
By contrast, it is the Desmond family who, above all, instantiate the socially
endorsed aspiration to be conspicuously private. Theirs is the quintessential mod-
ern middle-class suburban house – one that is “designed,” as Catherine Jurca
phrases it, “to manufacture one’s credentials for inhabiting it” (36). They are “the
aristocracy of the neighborhood” and their impressive home, “richly jeweled with
glass brick” (4), is simultaneously eye-catching and opaquely resistant to fully
effective gazing. Its privacy teases.
The desirable higher state of splendorous private space would be residence
in what Mr. Desmond envisions for his children in the not too distant future: “a
house not visible from the street” (72). An enormous expanse of pastoral terrain
between the household and the public area, more effective by far as both impedi-
ment and display than are walls constructed of glass bricks, is the exception-
ally coy exhibitionism reserved for the very affluent – an “arrogant veil of gated
privacy” (12), as Baxandall and Ewen concisely put it. And it is such a site of
discreetly advertised privacy that the neighborhood beyond the tall brick wall
represents to Pepper Street residents. Significantly, the wall’s importance is purely
symbolic, for it is not a literal barrier to access; there is a gated entry, but the gates
are “square piles of brick . . . with no bars between.” Nonetheless, it is regarded
by all on Pepper Street as a venerable socioeconomic borderline that is not to be
transgressed: “an effective end to Pepper Street life” (11), for the exclusiveness
signified by the wall, while it elicits middle-class envy, is felt not as an affront but
as a source of inspiration, pride, and security. Proximity to it engenders in some
of the street’s residents a belief in their own capacity to relocate someday within
the elite neighborhood, but even those who entertain no such aspiration appear
to regard the adjacent buildings and grounds subconsciously as grandly propor-
tioned images of their own domestic sites. This is explicitly said to be so of the
Merriam home, “modeled originally after someone’s grandfather’s manor-house”
(9), but it clearly pertains to others, at least figuratively. The privacy that is held
to be enviable and worthy of emulation is infused with the romantic aura of a
social configuration derived from preindustrial times that lingers in modernity’s
appropriation of the term “estate.” Kate Flint has observed that the connotations
of “suburb” in modern times have included “buying oneself . . . into the tradition
and culture of the aristocracy,” even for homeowners of modest means. As one
1920s suburbanite cited by Flint reflected, “‘We felt like we were living rich in
miniature’” (114).
It is not commodity fetishism solely that motivates the public displays of afflu-
ence common in upscale suburban areas such as Pepper Street, however. The
 Shirley Jackson’s America 85
widely prevalent feeling of affiliation with the more exclusive nearby neighbor-
hood is insinuated strikingly in the reaction of an elderly resident, Mr. Martin, to
news of a planned demolition of the wall and concomitant redevelopment of a
portion of the grounds presently enclosed by it into a new apartment block:

[O]nce the wall was broken into, the fields of the estate, the sacred enclosed
place which harbored the main house, the garages, the tennis court and the
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terraced gardens as well as Mr. Martin’s greenhouses, would be exposed to

intrusions from the outside world, perhaps small boys with stones, perhaps
curious trespassers gathering flowers, perhaps all those people with large feet
who trample down tiny growing things.
(185)

In his senility, Mr. Martin blurs the distinction between his own modest domain
and the much grander one on the other side of the wall. The significance of his
reverie of vicarious possession must be understood in the light of a further point
of confusion that the text subtly indicates. Mr. Martin envisions an “estate” in
the original, premodern sense of the term, which denotes a large landed prop-
erty dominated by a mansion, rather than the modern derivation, which refers to
an upmarket suburban housing development. Early in the novel it is made clear,
however, that a substantial portion of the “large estate” that once encompassed
the property on both sides of the wall “had been sold off lot by lot” (10). Subse-
quently, even though the exclusive neighborhood is still referred to as an “estate,”
with connotations derived from the older usage, there is no longer one main house
presided over by one wealthy family: it has become (although the term is never
specifically invoked) a prestigious and expensive “housing estate.” Where for-
merly there was the venerable oneness of an aristocratic domestic model, there is
now plutocratic plurality.
And plurality is itself debilitating in Mr. Martin’s mind. The “enclosed spaces”
of modern households and communities are “sacred” primarily insofar as they
look inward upon themselves. The only communality that is sacred begins and
ends at home, and in the extreme consists in monadic isolation and differenti-
ation even from one’s neighbors. As Kenneth T. Jackson has argued, from its
beginnings in the nineteenth century the suburban movement imbued even the
most modest of houses with “the values once accorded only the ancestral house,
establishing it as the temporary representation of the ideal permanent home” (51).
Those middle-class houses may mimic the trappings of wealth by way of material
display in varying ways and degrees, as we’ve seen. But their most valued attri-
butes are those of “permanence,” or the appearance of such, and – perhaps more
importantly – “detachment” from the wider society, as Peter G. Rowe suggests
when he observes that “the dominant feature in the American middle landscape
is the single-family home. No other artifact is as pervasive or carries the same
emotional charges as the detached house in its suburban garden” (67). Modern
suburbs, howsoever smitten with nostalgic references to neighborly village liv-
ing, are checkerboard agglomerations of manifestly detached and inward-looking
 86 Richard Pascal
households. With or without the showy trappings of a miniature manor house,
they pointedly advertise their detachment.
That is why Mr. Martin doesn’t wish to acknowledge that the original estate
has already been torn apart and reconfigured, albeit into lesser facsimiles of
itself: it represents not merely wealth and privilege but also the impregnable
integrity of a stronghold. The vision of small boys with stones, and of trespassers
who might pick some flowers or walk on one’s lawn, seems an unlikely catalyst
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for grave foreboding; such petty transgressions of territorial imperative are to be

expected in any small neighborhood community that functions as such. But the
redevelopment portended by the destruction of the wall brings with it the prob-
ability of even more “neighborhood” in the modern sense: more demographic
diversity, higher population density, and the disruptiveness of an economy that
feeds on the “disregarding abandoned battering tearing-apart of things perma-
nent” (186) in order to convert them into marketable real estate. If the nearest
concrete embodiment of the prevailing residential dream has fallen victim to dis-
ruptive social and economic forces, the prospect for one’s own home site appears
to be bleak. Demolition and fragmentation seem, literally, to be just around the
corner. But the point is less that the homes of people such as Mr. Martin are to
become more vulnerable to redevelopment schemes in the area than that the mere
introduction of the possibility of change renders faith in “things permanent” –
such as enclave households and holistic small communities with village green
mentalities – untenable: “what with tearing down walls and selling land, who
could tell what would follow?” (186).

Barbarity and dirt: Privacy transgressed

Although the old man’s excessively grim forebodings may not precisely reflect
the feelings of other Pepper Street residents, it is clear that his distress over the
impending destruction of the wall is in some degree shared by most of them. In
articulating the community’s reaction to the news, the narrator employs rhetoric
and imagery suggestive of a doomsday scenario: “a breach was to be made in the
northern boundary of the world. Barbarian hordes were to be unleashed on Pep-
per Street” (180). Apprehensiveness about the construction of the “road through
the wall” of the novel’s title takes the form, initially, of irritation with the dust
raised by the demolition process. “The idea that placid Pepper Street was being
deformed by workmen and dirt and great foul machines was almost as bad,” the
narrator observes, “as the prospect of being shortly on a direct road with the rest
of the world” (185). Neighborhood outsiders, and class or ethnic Others, are par-
ticularly to be shunned, for their strangeness is extremely apparent, and may rub
off the more readily. A dirty street presages a body politic befouled, because when
the literal dust has settled, the socioeconomic defilement is likely to commence
in earnest. The immediate threat is that more barbarians – more workmen, more
outsiders, more class and ethnic Others – may be on the way. But greater num-
bers of residents of any kind whatever augur badly. On Pepper Street, as we’ve
seen, social interaction, even with likeminded neighbors, is to be engaged in only
 Shirley Jackson’s America 87
fastidiously and diffidently, for in varying degrees all who are Other in even the
most basic sense are barbarians, invasive foreign particles, “dirt.” The commu-
nity’s presentiment of all that impinging, discomfiting, sweating multiplicity con-
strues it as barbaric otherness sufficient to “put the first wedge into the Pepper
Street security, [a security] so fragile that, once jarred, it shivered into fragments
in a matter of weeks” (182).
The fragility of “Pepper Street security” is a measure of the degree to which the
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community valorizes insularity and homogeneity at all levels: communal, domes-

tic, and personal. Security thus rigidly conceived is an inherently precarious state
in a community that is not wealthy enough to construct homes so distant from
the public thoroughfare that neither neighborhood nor household can be a world
utterly unto itself. Nonetheless, the prevailing, if unattainable, domestic ideal is
to remain emotionally chaste, unaffected by social intercourse, and the exemplary
family in this regard is, predictably, the Desmonds. Their high status, evident, as
discussed earlier, in their showy house, is even more apparent in the care they lav-
ish upon their golden-haired three-year-old daughter. A much-admired child who
is never seen to interact with any of the other children, Caroline is kept immacu-
lately clean by her obsessive mother. When a lower-class seven-year-old girl from
the street’s so-called rented house presses upon Caroline the gift of a “grimy rag
doll,” Mrs. Desmond hastens her daughter home for a wash (84). And when work-
men arrive in the neighborhood to demolish the wall, the dust thereby aroused
compels Mrs. Desmond to change Caroline into clean clothes three or four times a
day and eventually to move to a summer resort until the street work is completed.
But more is implied by the adulation of the pristine Caroline than the prevailing
communal attitude toward class hierarchy and the desire to maintain an imperme-
able boundary between the privileged and those less advantageously positioned.
Just as Mrs. Mack’s sense of territorial imperative indicates fear and loathing
of all outsiders, irrespective of their class affiliations, Mrs. Desmond’s efforts to
isolate Caroline’s body within a virtual halo derive from a distaste for personal
contact with anyone – anyone at all! In the extreme, physical cleanliness signifies
not only class or ethnic superiority but also a state of inviolate self-containment
that seems all but metaphysical. When Mrs. Desmond’s acquaintances in the sew-
ing circle refer to Caroline as an “angel,” it seems more than a casual term of
endearment. Caroline’s purity does not connote Christian sanctity or even Victo-
rian innocence so much as social virginity. She is viewed as an especially rarefied
being because her appearance suggests that, throughout the charmed course of her
early childhood, contact with persons outside her household has been minimal
and has left no lasting impression. Certainly no dust raised by contact with class
or ethnic Others who inhabit “the rest of the world” beyond Pepper Street has tar-
nished her angelic composure, and neither has she been affected in any discernible
manner by contact with her peers. Neighboring Hallie Martin, nine years old, has
become accustomed to feeling herself to be “lean and dirty and wet-faced” upon
sighting the “little and delicate and clean” Caroline. In an early incident, Hallie is
seen to be aware that were she to stand outside the Desmond yard, Mrs. Desmond
would “come out on the side porch to sit quietly until Hallie was gone away; if
 88 Richard Pascal
Hallie stayed Mrs. Desmond would finally take Caroline indoors” (31). That is
why, sensing such an attitude on the part of Mrs. Desmond, and fearing that the
immaculate Caroline may almost be the superior creature that her appearance is
fashioned to embody, Hallie then wanders down the street, saying to herself, “old
Caroline wets her pants” (31). To the resentful earthling an angel sullied is an
appealing thought, the articulation of which, even inaudibly, may besmirch the
luminous being with telltale commonness.
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The association of dirt with debasing personal contact resonates with a closely
related concern in the novel: the interrogation of the notion of what is “dirty”
in the familiar slang sense of the term that connotes sexual vileness. An early
series of episodes focuses upon the neighborhood’s scandalized reaction to the
revelation that among several of the schoolgirls there has been, recently, a fad for
composing love letters to local boys. Although the text makes it clear that in most
cases the activity is not indicative of sexual precocity, the responses of some of
the parents and one of the boys suggest that they presume otherwise. Of particular
significance is the fretfully antagonistic behavior of fourteen-year-old Pat Byrne
toward his younger sister Mary: “‘You cut out all this dirty stuff,’ Pat said. He put
his face close to his sister’s and said again almost helplessly. ‘You just cut it out,
that’s all’” (30).
Pat has been receiving letters from his own sister, a comical indication of her
unawareness of the construction that might be placed on what she has been doing.
Only twelve years old and swept along by the tide of peer group enthusiasm
orchestrated by an older and more knowing teenager who lives down the street,
she, like the others, is motivated by a desire for the feeling of group affiliation that
derives from engaging in such a clandestine activity. Her brother’s squeamishness
about this innocuous fantasy game reflects the society’s attitude toward sexuality
or anything even faintly connoting it. Even the mere thought of sex has the power
to befoul and humiliate anyone it brushes against.
While Caroline incarnates purity, another child comes to embody dirtiness. The
association of sexual desire and dirt is established most strikingly in an episode
in which thirteen-year-old Tod Donald, whose alleged personal deficiencies have
established him as a pariah among the children in the neighborhood, sneaks into
the Desmond home while its inhabitants are away. In a protracted act of voyeur-
ism he investigates various rooms in the house, and the climactic phase of his
trespass occurs when he ventures into the bedroom shared by the mother and
daughter, both of whom he reveres. To Tod’s young male imagination the softly
textured chamber with its curtains gently stirring is a space that exudes feminine
softness, delicacy, and beauty; it is “so pretty that even the presence of Mrs. Des-
mond would have been superfluous” (93). An “overpoweringly sweet” whiff of
some perfume he has dabbed on himself then renders that impression so palpable
that he finds himself creeping into her clothes closet:

Half-shutting the closet door behind him, he wormed his way in through
Mrs. Desmond’s dresses and negligees until he reached the most hidden part
of the closet, and he sat down on the floor, his perfumed hand over his face.
 Shirley Jackson’s America 89
There, far back in the closet in Mrs. Desmond’s room, he said, quite loudly,
all the dirtiest words he knew.
(95)

Tod’s behavior in this instance is that of an adolescent boy who is confused about
sexual longings that have no socially acceptable outlet even on the verbal level.
Unmistakably, he is simulating a transgressive sexual act. Yet, while striking,
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the sexual implication of his verbal ejaculations in the “most hidden part” of a
feminine enclosed space is secondary in significance to what the incident implies
about his need to impress something of himself upon Mrs. Desmond. He articu-
lates words intended to demystify her as a living incarnation of pristine, insular
selfhood by chanting it into a state as base as that which he believes his own to be,
and thus to render her assailable.
On the intimately personal level no less than on the domestic and social lev-
els, then, enviable privacy deters transgression even while coyly inciting it. The
metonymic paradigm is in this instance distinctly gendered and sexual. But the
text’s primary concern is not to suggest that all amorous negotiations between
men and women conform to a pattern in which the female is passive and the
male is aggressive; the schoolgirl love letter affair is one of a number of incidents
in which conventional notions of gender behavior are at least partly overturned.
The significance of Tod’s desire to violate Mrs. Desmond’s personal space is
not simply sexual but, so to speak, residential. The important implication is that
the conventional conception of male-female romantic interplay, which projects
female virtue as an insular state that arouses male desire for transgressive contact,
encodes society’s dominant model for communal, familial, and personal fulfill-
ment: triumphant occupancy. Suburb, home, self, and even body constitute, in this
vision, areas within which insularity flourishes by flaunting itself and proclaiming
its imperviousness to invaders who are filth-ridden with their Otherness.

Bonding ritual: The “stoning” of Tod Donald

In the narrative’s climactic sequence of events the figures of Caroline and Tod,
embodying respectively the idealized insider and the despised domestic outsider,
insularity and transgressiveness, purity and dirt, are positioned in sharp contrast
to one another. Often rejected and mocked by the other children, Tod has been
the neighborhood’s domestic pariah throughout the novel. Earlier the narrative
has recounted incidents in which the harsh treatment meted out to him by other
children has provoked in return aggressive efforts to gain attention. On one occa-
sion, for example, in order to attract notice he throws stones at another child in full
view of a group that has been treating him with unconcealed contempt. Therefore
it is no surprise when the spreading awareness of the disappearance of Caroline
at the neighborhood party causes suspicion to gravitate toward the dirty little nui-
sance despised by all. Residents’ ordinarily dominant inclinations to retreat into
the private strongholds of home and self as the party winds down are set aside, but
less out of concern for the missing child than because the occasion has provided
 90 Richard Pascal
them with an experience of shared exhilaration: “The prevailing mood was one
of keen excitement; no one there really wanted Caroline Desmond safe at home”
(253–54). Death, or serious harm to an innocent child, is in the offing – and the
communal impulse, catalyzed by the prospect of shared horror, is reinvigorated.
Subliminally, at least, the community is willing to sacrifice even its most iconic
insider – as well as, even more readily, her somewhat despised antithesis. There is
a touch of mob frenzy in the responses of this polite modern neighborhood. In the
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impressionable eyes of the frightened Frederica, a teenager of extremely marginal

status on the street as she lives in its one rented house,

The people in the street . . . had gathered closer together so that it was impos-
sible to single out any one of them . . . [T]hey were so close together that
there were no names for any of their faces, and the hands might be clasped
tight in the hands of strangers.
(257)

Thus it is that, on a village green summoned for a short time from the oth-
erwise forgetful collective unconscious, insular modern suburbanites affiliate
into a semblance of leveling, blanketing crowd anonymity. Pressure is brought
to bear upon the homegrown agent of subversion and pollution by the residents’
adrenalin-charged closing of ranks. They do not have to stone Tod literally, as
their counterparts in “The Lottery” do to their annually designated victims. It is
enough that he be made to squirm with shame and fear. An extensive search of
the area finds Caroline’s dead body in a ravine that is sometimes incorporated
into the play activities of neighborhood children, and a bloodstained nearby rock
is taken as evidence that she has been murdered, and probably violated. (Sig-
nificantly, “No-one had ever seen Caroline as dirty as she was then” [258].) The
prevailing suspicion is then fueled by another youngster’s account of a visit paid
him by a strangely behaving Tod somewhat earlier. When Tod finally does return
home, after having hidden for a while in incredulous awareness that most of the
neighborhood’s residents were out in the night looking for him, he is interrogated
by an intimidating policeman in whom he sees several other authority figures – a
dentist, a doctor, “the man at the movie theater who wanted to know how old you
were before he let you in for half price” – who have had the power to make him
feel tarnished with sin. Insinuating interrogation by the policeman reactivates the
rejection anxiety he has been subjected to throughout his childhood. And subse-
quently, left alone for nearly an hour under harsh instruction to “think about all
this” (263), he hangs himself to death with a piece of clothesline.
As though openly reflecting the impression given by the narrative’s positioning
of the incident – it is related near the end of the novel – the policeman’s response
is a “great, gusty breath” of closure: “‘Well . . . that settles that’” (263). And so
it seems to, superficially, for as shown earlier, the reader has been primed to sus-
pect strange little Tod and therefore to endorse the swelling communal verdict.
While the narrative treatment of the closet incident is itself coolly sympathetic in
tone, encouraging understanding of Tod’s emotionally malnourished nature rather
 Shirley Jackson’s America 91
than dismissiveness or condemnation, what the climactic episode reveals seems in
keeping with an incriminating behavioral pattern observable throughout the rest
of the novel: he is an unhappy boy, not entirely in control of himself, and capable
of forcible entry into, and desecration of, spaces deemed private. It seems particu-
larly telling that upon exiting the Desmond home, Tod had plucked a blossom in
the garden and crushed it in his hand “cruelly” (96).
Yet, while the circumstantial case against Tod appears compelling, in its con-
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cluding paragraphs the narrative expends considerable effort upon the raising
of serious doubts about the verdict it had seemed previously to encourage. A
conversation between Mr. Merriam and Mr. Perlman that takes place not long
after the double tragedy, but long enough for the collective fervor to have dis-
sipated and residents to reflect and respond as individuals, reveals that each has
some doubts about the grounds for assuming that Tod was a murderer. And in a
separate exchange Mrs. Byrne informs Mrs. Merriam of her son Pat’s conjecture
that Caroline wasn’t assaulted but had fallen and hit her head fatally against a
nearby rock, thereby panicking an accompanying Tod into his suspiciously eva-
sive behavior. By the novel’s end the matter remains murky. Nothing is said that
exonerates Tod resoundingly, but neither is his guilt confirmed, or even rendered
more probable than not. His suicide may or may not amount to a tacit confession
on his part; possibly it signifies nothing more than his sad, passive-aggressive
acceptance of his status as the neighborhood pariah. What is beyond doubt, how-
ever, is the implication that the sensational public spectacle of his death, and that
of Caroline, has had a catalytic effect on the neighborhood. Normally diffident
street residents had joined together to engage in guilty pleasures – voyeurism
and scapegoating – and thereby thought and acted, for a brief while, as an old-
fashioned community, a village, rather than a mere agglomeration of autonomous
and discrete individuals.
The Road Through the Wall thus shares with “The Lottery” a vision of a small
community in which the sanctioned victimization of designated domestic Oth-
ers persists. To a significant degree, the figurative stoning of Tod parallels the
literal stoning of Tess Hutchinson: both are village insiders turned Other so that
the community can reinvigorate its sense of bondedness. In the novel, however,
victimization is not ritualized or bound to a single calendar date, nor is it overtly
violent. In most instances it takes the form of hurtful gossip and innuendo and, at
times, exclusionary practices. Among the neighborhood’s adult residents there is
much demeaning of workers, menial help, and members of marginalized religious
and ethnic groups; and their children are constantly on the alert for signs of weak-
ness or Otherness in any of their number so that taunting and shaming may be
crudely rationalized. What is most unsettling about both the story and the novel is
their insinuation that communality is reinforced by the willingness of people who
are in most respects peaceable, whatever their other petty failings, to persecute
one of their own. For this reason, the claims of some commentators that these
two narratives expose something amorphously metaphysical, such as the “wick-
edness in human nature” or “evil [that] lies within the human heart” (Murphy 19),
fail to grasp the perhaps more unsettling implication that such acts of communal
 92 Richard Pascal
persecution are perpetrated by entrenched impersonal patterns of behavior that
may be fundamental to the very process of social aggregation; individuals, as
individuals, have very little control over their actions. Therefore the stoning in
“The Lottery” elicits cruel acts from the crowd as a collective entity, but there is
no indication that malicious impulses impel any of the townspeople as individu-
als; it is telling that even as the stoning commences there is nothing frenzied in
their behavior. Similarly, while what happens to Tod in The Road Through the
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Wall exposes the readiness of the neighborhood residents to permit emotional pain
to be inflicted through the sanctioned cruelty of its young, there is no indication
that his violent end is what they had foreseen, desired, or required. For all their
pettiness and narrow-mindedness, most of them are not cruelly inclined; they are
modern suburbanites pursuing their separate paths who yet retain a desire for the
rallying sensation of being a collectivity. They welcome the opportunity to par-
ticipate in a faint, ad hoc approximation of the traditional village bonding ritual in
which a designated Other is rendered persona non grata, even unto death.
The bonding experience in The Road Through the Wall differs significantly
from that in “The Lottery,” however, in that its effect is superficial and fleeting.
The village in “The Lottery” seems not merely stable but also classless. There
is not an estate to be seen in the vicinity of their village and none is referred to,
and its inhabitants seem content with their small democratic polity. By con-
trast, the hierarchically minded people of Pepper Street appear to sense that their
suburban street is a makeshift fabrication of community at best, a way station
for some who are rising and an enclave for others who have nowhere better to
relocate. The neighborhood is an unstable social compound and has been from
the start. The closing portions of the novel mute the impact and significance
of the deaths of the two children by highlighting the community’s imperma-
nence and social fragility. Several families are said to have moved away not
long after the tragic block party, but not, with the exception of the Desmonds,
in consequence of it. The emigrations of families and individuals are simply
integral to the contemporary order of things; “from the 1940s to the 1970s,”
James T. Patterson has noted, “roughly 20 percent of Americans changed resi-
dence every year” (66). In quest of the showy veneer of stability, Jackson’s
suburbanites are ever willing to disrupt their lives by relocating. Though they
are desirous of the aura of permanency associated with the village green and
the landed estate, their veneration of antique social arrangements and institu-
tions is belied by their reclusiveness and Sisyphean restiveness. Eventually the
enlarged road through the wall is completed, signifying the transition to what
will be a much altered neighborhood, but one that will be no more socially
stable than it had ever been. Before a year has passed, the new pavement laid
down in the reconfigured street betrays its inherent mutability (and by exten-
sion that of the community) despite one young citizen’s effort to establish, in
time-honored kid fashion, a transcendent connection with other eyes and future
generations: “A wide break appeared in the sidewalk the first winter, near the
spot where Jamie Roberts had left the print of his hand in the fresh cement”
(271). What happened to Caroline and Tod, and the bonding effect it had on
 Shirley Jackson’s America 93
the residents, is in the process of becoming just as vague as the impression of
Jamie’s hand.
Yet the implication of the novel’s closing pages is not merely that, as Cath-
erine Jurca observes in her study of the suburb in modern fiction, “in the postwar
period suburban house ownership and transiency were more frequently aligned
than opposed” (145). The narrative’s dispassionate account of the aftermath of
the partial diaspora that transforms the neighborhood also highlights the sug-
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gestions advanced throughout the text that powerful, if obscure, socioeconomic

forces dominate the lives of modern suburbanites. In the end, it is primarily the
gnawing of estate envy and the marketplace mentality underlying it, not a bat-
tering influx of barbarians from the highway, that have rendered the traditional
village green but a dimly remembered anachronistic model for the community. In
The Organization Man, the classic study of middle-class life that appeared a few
years after The Road Through the Wall, William H. Whyte observed that “On the
one hand suburbanites have a strong impulse toward egalitarianism; on the other,
however, they have an equally strong impulse to upgrade themselves” (287). In
Jackson’s novel the egalitarian impulse is the weaker force, although still a fac-
tor. The desire of some to secure their holdings in a safe suburban stronghold and
the aspirations of others to relocate to a grander, more conspicuously discreet
gingerbread castle together provoke the shifting social alignments of modern
America. Those who can better themselves proceed to own bigger; they migrate
outward and upward. Those who cannot advance hold fast, ever more inclined to
secure their households against the public concourse; they migrate, so to speak,
inward. In either situation, the ideal has been, as Kenneth T. Jackson put it, “no
longer to be part of a close community, but to have a self-contained unit, a pri-
vate wonderland walled off from the rest of the world” (58). Thus has estate
envy invaded the superficially reassuring confines of America’s village green
suburbias.
And it is upon that note, ironic rather than tragic or melodramatic, that The Road
Through the Wall closes. In quest of stability and permanence, much of the middle
class has embraced transiency as its de facto way of life. America ever aspires
to be on the make and on the move – primarily because those aspirations have
become commodified. Modernity has subordinated the community to the mar-
ketplace, nature to business, and individual agency to impersonal socioeconomic
forces. Nothing could be farther from Marilyn’s idealizing vision of a holistic
small community in which everyone has a standing invitation to be welcomed and
embraced than the modern suburban configuration, which, inherently prone to the
“disregarding abandoned battering tearing-apart of things permanent,” detaches,
dislocates, and isolates.
These sobering implications are conveyed most strikingly at the end of the
narrative by the curiously congruent fates of two reclusive elderly ladies – the
hermetic Mrs. Mack, by reputation a witch to the children on the street, and
the woman whose financial dealing has in actuality brought “ruin” of a sort to
the superficially stable neighborhood. As noted earlier, the gnomic Old Testa-
ment mutterings of Mrs. Mack offer a vaguely metaphysical commentary on the
 94 Richard Pascal
changes besetting her small neighborhood and, by extension, middle-class Ameri-
can communities generally. Near the end of the narrative, she quotes verbatim
from the Book of Habakkuk (2:9–12), intoning aloud:

‘Woe to him . . . that coveteth an evil covetousness to his house, that he may
set his nest on high, that he may be delivered from the power of evil! Thou
hast consulted shame to thy house by cutting off many people, and hast
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sinned against thy soul. For the stone shall cry out of the wall, and the beam
out of the timber shall answer it. Woe to him that buildeth a town with blood,
and stablisheth [sic] a city by iniquity.’
(269)

Unmistakably – albeit with the thundering vagueness of prophetic discourse –

the passage refers to the recent happenings in the community in which a wall
has been tampered with for the sake of covetousness. But its inflated rhetoric
and moralistic excessiveness are strong indicators of its inapplicability, in other
than a very general sense, to the actual social phenomena it decries – as is, of
course, the fact that the only audience for Mrs. Mack’s scriptural outpourings
is her dog, for the text itself is no more impressed than that dog presumably
is, having shown that the “town” that is Pepper Street was not built by blood
or evil, but by high finance. Nor was it by the wider Cabrillo, or American
suburbia generally, established by iniquity in the biblical sense, but rather by
the impersonal workings of the capitalist marketplace that treats home sites as
commodities and foists an isolating ethos of individualistic possessiveness upon
those who inhabit them.
A living prophecy at variance with the rhetoric she invokes, Mrs. Mack’s fate
has been clear throughout: she will end her days in nutty privacy in her fiercely
defended stronghold, a sad instantiation of suburbia’s obsession with walling
oneself within one’s personal territorial imperative. But at the very end, with a
terse closing paragraph, the narrative summons to the forefront of the reader’s
attention an even more striking embodiment of the socially bereft state of life in
modern communities: the nameless property-owning old lady who personifies, so
to speak, the depersonalizing ethos that dominates the newer ways of communal
life. As dispassionate and economical as she herself had been in her socially dis-
regardful real estate manipulations, the final sentences provide a purposively flat
denouement to the novel: “The old lady who had owned the wall and the property
it enclosed passed away very quietly in her sleep. No one was at her bedside when
she died” (271). Significantly, she remains nameless, and very, very private –
more “detached,” even, than any of the residents and households whose “bed-
roomish arch” she and the forces that empower her have irretrievably disrupted.
Her reappearance at the critical curtain-closing stage of the narrative seems some-
what incongruous, superficially, for she has not previously seemed an important
figure. Subsequent to her brief appearance midway through the text she has gone
unmentioned until the final paragraph. But the implication of her belated promi-
nence is that she – or what she represents – has been, all along, the one “major
 Shirley Jackson’s America 95
character” in the novel, for socioeconomic agency, the power of the marketplace
to effect events and affect people, is unobtrusive, impersonal, and uncaring. Her
covert centrality is not eerie or evil or psychologically deranged, but simply a
prosaic fact of contemporary society. She is no witch, but her well-hidden, callous
power is, in its modern way, very spooky.

Notes
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1 This generalization may appear to overlook Jackson’s amusing prosaic treatments of

middle-class family life that appeared in such mainstream venues as The Saturday Eve-
ning Post, Reader’s Digest, and Woman’s Day. These chronicles were “realistic” only
in the sense that family situation comedies on radio and television widely popular in
their time can be said to inhere in verisimilitude. They were not regarded as “serious”
literature by Jackson herself, however, nor have they been treated as such by latter-day
commentators.
2 One reading of the novel that appears to suggest otherwise was offered, if Jackson bio-
grapher Judy Oppenheimer is to be believed, by Shirley Jackson herself. Oppenheimer
cites her as having asserted that everything she had written expressed her sense of “great
forces of destruction, which may be the devil,” and that The Road Through the Wall
“stated this in miniature.” Oppenheimer hasn’t offered a more precise reference for the
quotation other than to record that it is taken from an “unpublished statement . . . for
publisher’s publicity use” in the Shirley Jackson archive at the Library of Congress.
While the analysis of the novel offered in this essay should serve, I hope, as an effec-
tive refutation of that way of understanding it, I will note here that Jackson is notorious
for having promoted herself as a “practicing amateur witch,” which she undoubtedly
believed was a more attention-getting persona to put before the reading public than that
of a social realist. See Oppenheimer (125, 287).

Works cited
Baxandall, Rosalyn and Elizabeth Ewen. Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened.
New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000. Print.
Beauregard, Robert A. When America Became Suburban. Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota P, 2006. Print.
Flint, Kate. “Fictional Suburbia.” Popular Fictions: Essays in Literature and History. Eds.
Peter Humm, Paul Stigant and Peter Widdowson. London: Methuen, 1986. 111–26.
Print.
Hall, Joan Wylie. “Fallen Eden in Shirley Jackson’s The Road Through the Wall.” Rena-
scence 46.4 (Summer 1994): 261–70. Print.
Hattenhauer, Darryl. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. Albany: SUNY P, 2003. Print.
Jackson, Shirley. Come Along with Me. New York: Viking, 1968. Print.
———. The Road Through the Wall. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1948. Print.
Johnson, Bernice. The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture. Houndmills: Pal-
grave Macmillan, 2009. Print.
Joshi, S. T. “Shirley Jackson: Domestic Horror.” Studies in Weird Fiction 14 (Winter 1994):
9–28. Print.
Jurca, Catherine. White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. Print.
Kosenko, Peter. “A Marxist/Feminist Reading of Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery.’” New
Orleans Review 12 (1985): 27–32. Print.
 96 Richard Pascal
Kunstler, James Howard. The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s
Man-Made Landscape. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993. Print.
Oppenheimer, Judy. Private Demons: A Life of Shirley Jackson. New York: Putnam’s,
1988. Print.
Parks, John G. “Chambers of Yearning: Shirley Jackson’s Use of the Gothic.” Twentieth-
Century Literature 30 (1984): 15–29. Print.
Patterson, James T. Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974. New York: Oxford
UP, 1996. Print.
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Rowe, Peter G. Making a Middle Landscape. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991. Print. Ruben-
stein, Roberta. “House Mothers and Haunted Daughters: Shirley Jackson and the Female
Gothic.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 15.2 (Fall 1996): 309–31. Print.
Whyte, William H. The Organization Man. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956. Print.
 6 “Laughing through the words”
Recovering housewife humor in
Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always
Lived in the Castle
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Andrea Krafft

Throughout her novels and short fiction, Shirley Jackson embraces tropes such
as haunting, the feminized victim, and, most importantly, the dilapidated manor
house. Accordingly, much of the existing scholarship about Jackson’s final novel,
We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), situates this work within the Gothic
tradition and focuses on how Mary Katherine (also known as Merricat) and Con-
stance Blackwood occupy a marginal position as the “witches” of their village.
While the Blackwood sisters are undoubtedly monstrous, to focus solely on this
novel’s Gothic elements ignores its central relationship with strange laughter. I
aim to recuperate the lighter side of We Have Always Lived in the Castle by build-
ing on James Egan’s observation that Jackson fuses Gothic and comic elements
in order to intensify “her vision of a flattened, empty world” (“Comic” 46). More
specifically, I argue that Jackson parodies Cold War domestic life in this novel
by combining horror and humor in order to lay bare the absurdity of a culture
that limited a woman’s interests to “her husband, her children [and] her home”
(Friedan 18).
As not only a writer but also a wife and mother of four children during the
post–World War II era, Jackson was quite familiar with how the demands of
domesticity could lead to a sense of personal crisis. She often wrote about the
difficulty of maintaining her professional identity when others treated her as
“Mrs. Stanley Hyman,” reducing her to the title of “housewife.”1 Her dissat-
isfaction with being diminished to her domestic role in many ways prefigures
the issues that Betty Friedan catalogues in The Feminine Mystique (1963).
Friedan notes how, during the late 1950s, women felt “a strange stirring,” a
sense of incompleteness in the midst of their homebound lives (15). She even
describes the home in Gothic terms, as a “comfortable concentration camp”
in which women found themselves trapped (307). Although the two women
share a common interest in critiquing Cold War domesticity, Friedan distances
herself from Jackson (in addition to Phyllis McGinley and Jean Kerr), claiming
that her use of humor essentially betrays women and that “there is something
about Housewife Writers that isn’t funny – like Uncle Tom” (57). While Friedan
would understandably disapprove of making light of women’s problems, she
overlooks how humor also might enable women “to subvert the very power that
 98 Andrea Krafft
keeps” them “powerless” (Walker 9). Throughout We Have Always Lived in
the Castle, humor very clearly becomes the primary mode of conflict between
the villagers and the Blackwood sisters, as Merricat and Constance gain power
through laughter and jokes and refuse the silence that the villagers attempt to
impose upon them.

Ranch house, haunted house: The Gothic

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genre as a Cold War parody

Prior to examining the ways in which We Have Always Lived in the Castle
explores the power struggle over humor, I want to acknowledge how this novel’s
Gothic genre caricatures the settings of domestic life. As Elaine Tyler May argues
in Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988), the cultural
consensus during the 1950s was that the home “held out the promise of security”
against outside threats, thus leading to the spread of “domestic containment” (16).
However, like other writers in the female Gothic tradition who exaggerate domes-
tic enclosure, Jackson reveals how the comforting home might also be potentially
imprisoning and strange.2 For example, she describes the Blackwood manor as
“a castle, turreted and open to the sky,” transforming the home into something
“weird” and haunted (Jackson 120). As the site of Merricat’s poisoning of her par-
ents, brother, aunt, and uncle, the house is, even before the novel begins, aligned
with fragmentation and violence rather than with the familial ideal of “together-
ness” that originated in McCall’s magazine in 1954 (Halberstam 591). Similarly,
the “unchangingly grey” village does not provide the sisters with a comforting
sense of community but instead reminds them of the pressures of conformity and
their own marginalization, essentially parodying the paranoid suburbs of the Cold
War era (Jackson 6). The Blackwood sisters are in many ways victims of contain-
ment, as the occupants of the village attempt to limit their mobility and usher them
back into their isolated home.
Similarly to how she aligns the Blackwood manor and village with Gothic loca-
tions, Jackson characterizes Merricat and Constance Blackwood as monstrous in
order to emphasize how their society views them as “other.” As Hélène Cixous
notes in “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1976), the woman is “the uncanny stranger
on display,” a figure that might become destructive if released from the margins
(880). Merricat draws attention to the weirdness of women when she describes
herself and Constance in the midst of their housework as “carrying our dustcloths
and the broom and dustpan and mop like a pair of witches walking home” (Jackson
69).3 In this fusion of domestic work with malicious magic, Merricat manifests
Friedan’s “schizophrenic split,” in which women cannot reconcile domesticity
with their desire for something more (46). Constance’s apparent agoraphobia is
a similarly grotesque exaggeration of the effects of domestic enclosure, as, ever-
obedient, she represents how some women during the 1950s felt “like shut-ins”
(Friedan 22). The Blackwood sisters, despite being warped and “witchy,” garner
the readers’ sympathies, as domesticity becomes the more fearsome monster in
this novel.
 Recovering housewife humor 99
“Laughter, coming from all sides”: The villagers
and normalizing humor
Just as Jackson parodies the haunted house and the monster in order to criticize
domesticity, she crucially alters the Gothic mob of angry villagers to examine
the pressures of Cold War “normativity.” In We Have Always Lived in the Castle,
the villagers do not just “storm the hated castle” (which occurs later in the novel)
but also, more importantly, alienate the Blackwood sisters by aggressively ridi-
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culing them (Murphy, “People” 122). Lynette Carpenter notes that this kind of
humor serves the purposes of patriarchy, for it threatens to dismantle the Black-
wood sisters’ dearly purchased “self-sufficiency” (“Establishment” 32). Jackson
explicitly genders the villagers as masculine: “the men stayed young and did
the gossiping” (3). Because the jokers enjoy a privileged social position, they
have “the freedom . . . to enjoy, to joke, to criticize, [and] to question” Merricat
without facing any repercussions (Walker 44).4 Their laughter is constant and
insidious, as Merricat, walking through the village, senses “the laughter, coming
from all sides” (Jackson 6).
The omnipresent laughter of the villagers helps them to achieve two basic pur-
poses: to deal with their fear of the Blackwoods and to mark the sisters as abnor-
mal. With respect to the first purpose, Freud suggests that humor allows people to
avoid the emotions “to which the situation would naturally give rise” by replacing
the expected response “with a jest” (162). He argues that a criminal facing the gal-
lows, instead of demonstrating his fear about his execution, could joke that “the
week’s beginning nicely” (Freud 161). The villagers similarly rely on the tactics
of gallows humor because Merricat’s mere presence in the grocery store terrifies
them. For example, after letting out “a little horrified laugh,” Mrs. Donell coun-
teracts her fear of Merricat with a joke, noting that “the Blackwoods always did
set a fine table” (Jackson 8).5 Beyond demonstrating their fear of the Blackwoods,
the villagers’ laughter works as a corrective and singles out individuals who do
not fit “what we ought to be” (Bergson 17). Henri Bergson, in his famous study
of laughter, notes that humor serves the goals of a group by implying “a kind of
secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers” (6). The villagers,
by mocking the Blackwoods, thus attempt to enforce a sense of cultural normal-
ity that, according to Anna Creadick, became “most fully articulated and deeply
inscribed into everyday American life” during the postwar years (2).
Because the Blackwood sisters have so far overstepped appropriate social
boundaries, the villagers no longer try to befriend them, but rather use their jokes
to aggressively excise Merricat and Constance from the town. Because “the people
of the village have always hated” the Blackwoods, they use humor to express their
rage, allowing it “to bubble up without restraint” (Jackson 4; Douglas 364). Jim
Donell does this when he confronts Merricat in the coffee shop, claiming that he
heard a rumor that she was “moving away” (Jackson 12). Laughing at his morbid
punch line that “a good number of the Blackwoods are gone already,” he indicates
his desire to drive out the remaining members of the family (Jackson 13). Addition-
ally, his physically threatening stance, as he crowds Merricat and stares directly
 100 Andrea Krafft
at her, signifies the aggression that underlies his humor. In a similar gesture, the
crowd of laughing children mirrors Jim Donell’s confrontation of Merricat in the
coffee shop. As she is leaving the village, a row of Harris boys line up and chant:

Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea?

Oh no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me.
Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep?
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Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!

(Jackson 16)

Merricat’s speculation that the children’s parents taught them the nursery rhyme
indicates its underlying social function: it mocks the crime of the Blackwood sis-
ters and simultaneously attempts to shame them into leaving the village. Though
the Blackwoods continue to live in their family estate, the laughter of the villag-
ers succeeds in establishing a group whose language Merricat does “not speak”
(Jackson 16).
While the alienating humor of the villagers creates a clear “in-group” and
“out-group,” Jackson demonstrates how this kind of laughter bleeds into physi-
cal aggression. This is evident toward the end of We Have Always Lived in the
Castle, when the villagers combine their laughter with a physical assault on the
Blackwood house. After the local fire brigade extinguishes the blaze that drew
them to the property, Jim Donell initiates the destruction by smashing a “rock
through one of the great tall windows” (Jackson 106). The physical attack on the
home serves the same purpose as the villagers’ humor, specifically targeting “the
drawing room and the kitchen” in order to undercut the Blackwood gynocracy
(Carpenter, “Establishment” 36). Merricat conflates this violence with the humor
of the villagers, as they produce “a wall of laughter” that moves “like a wave,”
threatening to dismantle the property with the rocks (Jackson 105–6). As she
describes the damages to the property, she claims that “above it all, most horri-
ble, was the laughter” (Jackson 106). When the villagers finally find Merricat and
Constance, their laughter again creates an aggressive boundary between them-
selves and the Blackwoods. Their chanting of fragments of the nursery rhyme
pushes back the sisters, who respond to the villagers by retreating into domestic-
ity (Jackson 108). Notably, only the death of Julian Blackwood ends the vicious
laughter of the villagers, as their respect for patriarchy negates their desire to
destroy matriarchy.
The aggressive humor of the villagers apparently succeeds in marginalizing
the Blackwood sisters from the outside world. To some extent, the sisters opt into
their position as outsiders, preferring their own community to that of the people
who hate them. Although James Egan sees the Blackwood sisters as madwomen
locked into “a Gothic dungeon,” I see their movement toward domestic enclosure
as a culmination of their attempt to reclaim the house as their own (“Sanctu-
ary” 23). As Merricat notes early in the novel, she believes that property should
pass down from mother to daughter. She takes offense that the Rochester house,
where her mother was born, is now owned by a new family when “by rights it
 Recovering housewife humor 101
should have belonged to Constance” (Jackson 3). Likewise, Merricat’s poisoning
of her family ensures that the Blackwood house will pass on to her older sister
rather than to her younger brother. Merricat’s aggression effectively echoes an
increasing sense of frustration among disenfranchised American women during
the 1950s, when married women’s property still became absorbed into the hus-
band’s and “many states still had ‘head and master’ laws, affirming that the wife
was subject to the husband” (Coontz 5).6
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“Frighten[ing] them more”: Merricat’s aggressive humor

“Silly Merricat” demonstrates how women can adopt an aggressive stance as a
(sometimes preemptive) defense mechanism against a society that threatens to
control and silence them (Jackson 73). Specifically, she morbidly teases people,
reminding them of her potential for violence through her smiles. Merricat’s dark
humor aligns her with a larger tradition of female writers who value subversion
and violence, such as Hélène Cixous, who celebrates the deadly figure of Medusa
because “she’s beautiful and she’s laughing” (885).7 Cixous claims that the main
task of women writers is to embrace this chaotic figure, “to blow up the law, to
break up the ‘truth’ with laughter” (888). Nancy Walker and Zita Dresner simi-
larly point to humor as a means of expressing violence “in more covert and indi-
rect ways than men do” (41). Because social expectations of feminine passivity
discourage overt aggression, laughter allows a way for women to toy with vio-
lence. This kind of behavior is particularly fitting for Merricat, as her burial of
aggression in humor reflects her poisoning of the Blackwood family dinner, in
that she hides violence in apparently pleasant and domestic contexts. Through
Merricat, we can see the “hint of Medusa’s glare” that Joan Wylie Hall recognizes
as a feature of Jackson’s comedic writing (74).
Merricat frequently draws on aggressive humor in order to compete with the
overwhelming laughter of the villagers. When she hears the awkward chuckling
of the people in the grocery store, Merricat orders “a small leg of lamb” noting
that it is a favorite dish of her Uncle Julian (Jackson 8). In response to her request,
“a little gasp went around the store like a scream,” as everyone knows that lamb
was on the menu for the final Blackwood family dinner (except for the reader,
who is initially left out of this joke) (Jackson 8). Merricat makes clear that her
order is not accidental, as she immediately follows her mention of the lamb with
a request for sugar (Jackson 8). Her relentless dark humor recalls that smiles and
laughter function in similar ways to baring one’s teeth and growling, presenting
“visible weaponry to a possible opponent” (Barreca 75). Merricat notably bur-
ies her morbid allusions within domestic language: on the surface, she is simply
gathering groceries, but underneath, she fantasizes about the villagers fleeing and
dying in front of her. She calms herself by thinking about how she “could make
them run like rabbits” if she “said to them what” she “really wanted to” (Jackson
8). Thus, Merricat’s particular talent lies in masking her rage with a smile.
Just as she responds to the public laughter of the villagers with aggressive
humor, Merricat teases visitors to the Blackwood estate in order to distance
 102 Andrea Krafft
herself and Constance from the community. When Helen Clarke and Lucille
Wright visit for tea, Merricat purposefully makes the women uncomfortable by
alluding to the family murders. Even though everyone knows that the sugar bowl
once contained arsenic, she repeatedly offers it to her guests. She also assures the
shaky women that “everything my sister cooks is delicious” and happily encour-
ages them to eat what they fear to be poisonous (Jackson 29). When the nervous
women finally leave, Merricat acknowledges that she was teasing them because
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she enjoys “frighten[ing] them more” (Jackson 39). She delights in mortifying
the other women, an activity in which Constance and Julian also participate by
openly discussing the poisonings. Yet, Merricat initiates her dark jokes only after
Helen and Lucille suggest that Constance should “come back into the world”
(Jackson 27). Because she wants to preserve her isolated home, she becomes
violent and smashes a milk pitcher before turning against those women who
represent the threat of the impinging community. Merricat attempts to define
the boundaries of her sister’s world through her aggressive humor by keeping
Constance laughing at her antics rather than seriously considering the appeal to
return to the community.
Merricat’s aggressive humor is her crucial weapon for defending her home
against not only female visitors but also the threat of a patriarchal return in the
person of her cousin, Charles Blackwood. She envisions Charles’s entry into the
house as an invasion, noting that “our wall of safety had cracked” as Charles
begins to lay claim to the family’s money and to live in her father’s old room
(Jackson 58). Because Charles disrupts her bond with Constance (and because
he is unkind to Uncle Julian), Merricat confronts him with a darkly humorous
recitation of the death-cup mushroom and its effects. Sitting at the dinner table,
she notes that “the Amanita phalloides . . . holds three different poisons,” and she
enumerates the symptoms of “violent stomach pains, cold sweat” and “vomiting”
(Jackson 72). Her mention of poison recalls her murder of the former Black-
wood patriarchs, which Charles does not think is “very funny” (Jackson 73).
Constance laughs at her sister’s morbid reference, however, noting that her sister
is “silly” (Jackson 73). Although the scene is not explicitly funny, Merricat and
Constance clearly delight in the subversion of Blackwood men through imagined
(or real) violence. In such moments of dark laughter, the sisters resemble what
Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik call “the empowered monstrous female” of femi-
nist Gothic texts (117).
In a similar manner to his youngest niece, Julian Blackwood also experiments
with aggressive humor as a means of counteracting the threatening presence of
the patriarch. Lynette Carpenter notes that Julian is in a similar position to the
Blackwood women, effectively feminized because he depends on the charity of
his brother, John, and is thus “subject to his authority” (“Establishment” 33).
Even after the murder of his brother, Julian never succeeds in accumulating his
own wealth because the arsenic incapacitates him both mentally and physically.
Remarkably, when he senses the return of his brother in the figure of Charles,
Julian responds quite aggressively. He yells at Charles to “get away from my
papers” and calls him a “damned impertinent puppy” (Jackson 92, 93). As with
 Recovering housewife humor 103
Merricat’s violent outbursts, the sisters find Julian’s attack on Charles to be funny,
as it undercuts the potential return of the father figure. Merricat observes that she
“was laughing at Charles and [that] even Constance was smiling” because Uncle
Julian caught his nephew off guard (Jackson 93). Though part of Julian’s humor
stems from his confusion of Charles with John and Arthur Blackwood, he shares
Merricat’s drive to remove the patriarch from the home through mockery.
Although Julian and Merricat both aggressively mock Charles, the Blackwood
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women find it necessary to shift from verbal to physical attacks against the male
imposition of power in their lives. Merricat imagines the various ways in which
she could punish her cousin for his invasion of her household. For instance, after
he digs up her box of silver dollars (one of the various charms of protection she
hides on the property), she imagines burying his head in a hole and scratching his
face on “a round stone the right size,” laughing at the thought of his funeral (Jack-
son 89). And yet, Merricat’s threats escalate, just as the aggressive laughter of the
villagers eventually intermingles with their destruction of the Blackwood home.
Because her dark humor does not effectively remove Charles from the household,
Merricat starts a fire in his room using his pipe and newspaper (Jackson 99). Con-
stance responds to Merricat’s violence with amusement and serenity: Charles runs
screaming from the house, but she helps Julian up to his room to collect his papers
(Jackson 101). This reflects Constance’s earlier complicity in Merricat’s dark vio-
lence when she “never called a doctor until it was too late” and “washed the sugar
bowl,” both ensuring that her sister’s plan would be effective and destroying the
hard evidence of the crime (Jackson 37). Constance is not simply a bystander to
her sister’s violence, but participates in it as “a passive-aggressive enabler,” and
perhaps even as a conspirator (Hattenhauer 177).

From smiling domesticity to liberated laughing ladies

While Merricat’s aggressive humor provides the Blackwood sisters with a help-
ful way of defending themselves against the violence of the surrounding com-
munity, Constance offers a more positively charged mode of affective response.
When she first appears in the novel, Constance, with her apparently permanent
smile, reflects the idealized model of the feminine mystique, as she is “fluffy
and feminine; passive; [and] gaily content in a world of bedroom and kitchen”
(Friedan 36). Recalling her own experience during the 1950s, Nancy Weisstein
similarly observes that women were encouraged “to laugh as much [as] pos-
sible, and when you can’t manage a laugh, to smile” (132). In some ways, Con-
stance seems to be merely placating her strange sister, babying her, and thereby
adopting the role of ersatz mother. Her smiles and laughter serve, however, two
important functions within the Blackwood house. First, Constance’s embracing
of Merricat’s dark jokes is a kind of gallows humor: she laughs at reminders
of the murders because she refuses to feel “compelled to suffer” (Freud 162).
More importantly, Constance’s participatory laughter with Merricat is “a means
of communication” that strengthens the bond between the two sisters (Walker
xii). Because nihilism may be the only alternative response for the marginalized
 104 Andrea Krafft
sisters, laughter helps them to reconstruct a feminine community from the rub-
ble of their family home.
The manner in which laughter gives way to a gender-exclusive community
bound together with mirth is evident in the sisters’ use of jokes that are primarily
nonsensical to the reader (i.e., inside jokes). In response to Constance’s observa-
tion that “furred leaves” could potentially grow on the moon, Merricat starts jok-
ing that Jonas is a kind of furry plant (Jackson 59). Merricat’s response, though
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illogical, serves its purpose of making Constance laugh, as their in-joke is based
on “a common pool of information and a shared perspective” (Barreca 85). Just
as the secrets of the Blackwood murders join the two sisters together, their inside
jokes unite them in a mutual bond. This communicatory role of laughter is espe-
cially crucial after the destruction of the Blackwood property, which more clearly
separates the sisters from the remainder of the community. Because the brutality
of the villagers demonstrates to Constance that a return to society is impossible,
she consigns herself to a life within the home. Like the villagers’ aggressive “wall
of laughter,” the sisters use humor to close themselves off from the world (Jack-
son 105). In addition to boarding up the house, Constance and Merricat constantly
laugh and smile, turning inward on their relationship as a kind of safeguard (Jack-
son 128).
This communal laughter occurs after Charles Blackwood finally leaves the sis-
ters to themselves, signaling their complete separation from the possible return of
masculine control. After Charles departs for his car, Merricat notes that she and
Constance “held each other in the dark hall and laughed . . . our laughter going up
the ruined stairway to the sky” (Jackson 144). Merricat describes their laughter
as something transcendent that transports the joined female voices to the level of
the heavens. Furthermore, this characterization of the victorious female voices
signals, as Carpenter has noted, a celebratory rejection of romantic love in favor
of sisterhood (“Establishment” 34). The sisters delight in the fact that Charles
fails to replace John Blackwood and that they retain possession of their “father’s
safe” and the family property (Jackson 119). Furthermore, with the departure of
the patriarch, we see the transformation of female aggressive humor from an out-
wardly directed threat into a kind of in-joking. For example, Constance, mocking
Charles’s exaggerated despair, observes that he should have shot “himself through
the head in the driveway” (Jackson 146). Unlike previous instances of aggressive
humor, the main difference here is that Charles cannot hear Constance’s mockery.
Instead, Constance threatens Charles from a distance not to attack him but rather
to bond with Merricat. Thus, the sisters turn to mirth as a way of protecting their
“self-contained community of women” (Carpenter, “Establishment” 38).
It is difficult, however, to view this laughter as entirely positive, as the sisters sit
in the ruins of their former home, mixing their giggles with tears (Jackson 144).
Constance’s final stance in the text is especially ambiguous, as she seems to be
on the verge of hysteria. When dressing her sister in a tablecloth, she asks, “What
have I done to my baby Merricat?” (Jackson 136). Similarly, Merricat notes that
her older sister lives “in terror lest one of our two cups should break” (Jackson
145). Constance’s precarious position between terror and laughter indicates the
 Recovering housewife humor 105
instability of the new feminine community, especially given the continuing threat
of starvation. Because of the physical realities of their situation, the sisters are not
entirely self-sufficient: they depend on the kindness of the village women, since
they refuse to leave the house to purchase food. On the one hand, the food pro-
vides “a means of communication” between the Blackwoods and a larger society
of women (Carpenter, “Establishment” 36). This expands the imagined feminine
community that Constance and Merricat establish through laughter, while still
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sheltering them from the threat of the male villagers. On the other hand, the sisters
become codependent on the community, indicating that their desire for margin-
alization and domestic enclosure does not completely triumph over the power of
the community at large.
This calls into question how subversive their communal female humor really
is, since they constrict their laughter to the home instead of turning to “an open
rebellious humor” (Weisstein 136). Barreca notes that humor, if it remains
“behind closed doors . . . stay[ing] among ourselves,” is a socially permitted
model for women’s expression (196). Walker similarly argues that women can
joke easily among themselves because they are “invisible to men,” thereby
posing no threat to existing power structures (85). However, these critiques of
domestically enclosed female humor unfairly ignore what Merricat and Con-
stance gain through their communal laughter. If the sisters remain committed
to the aggressive model of humor, their constant confrontation with the villag-
ers does not offer any possibility of resolution. Though Cixous complains that
women “shouldn’t be conned into accepting a domain which is the margin,”
Merricat and Constance quite consciously choose to separate themselves from
these violent social relations (881).
The Blackwood sisters gladly participate in their own marginalization by
embracing the creation of their own isolated community because of the fear
and shame of the villagers. The villagers treat the Blackwood manor, “a great
ruined structure overgrown with vines,” as a kind of haunted house (Jackson
146).8 The sisters mock the villagers for imagining that the monstrous witches
who inhabit this crumbling house could inflict “some sort of preternatural ven-
geance” (Murphy, “People” 123). Furthermore, they embrace their newfound
role as Gothic monsters, as their supposed mystical power ensures that the
villagers will leave them alone (for the most part). The villagers, in turn, trans-
form the Blackwoods into a tool for behavioral control by claiming that they
“go hunting little children,” especially the “little bad boys” who walk “too near
that house” (Jackson 141). Although some “curious villagers” still gather “out-
side the house,” they maintain a tense level of respect for the sisters (Jackson
146). Tellingly, they leave baskets of food for Merricat and Constance, apolo-
gizing for their behavior, but also asking the sisters not to respond in kind.
Moreover, after a little boy shouts a fragment of a mocking nursery rhyme at
the house, they find eggs and a note claiming that “he didn’t mean it, please”
(Jackson 146). The sisters not only pity the fearful villagers but also joke about
their newfound role as witches, laughing about the idea that they eat children.
In their Gothicized household, the sisters are fully enclosed from the threat
 106 Andrea Krafft
of the aggressive villagers, which allows them to be (as Merricat claims) “so
happy” (Jackson 146).
Ultimately, Jackson celebrates the monstrous women of We Have Always Lived
in the Castle, as they break away from society and demonstrate the possibility of
a female-determined community. However, it remains unclear if their contain-
ment within the home ends up confirming the power of their surrounding society
to alienate subversive women and thus to maintain the normative structures of
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domestic life. At the very least, laughter provides a significant starting point for
subversive feminine voices seeking more radical change. As Jackson emphati-
cally and optimistically noted in her journals, “laughter is possible laughter is pos-
sible laughter is possible” (qtd. in Carpenter, “Domestic” 147). It is not surprising,
then, that her final novel ends with the insistent laughter of the Blackwood sisters
echoing in our ears, and the villagers quaking in fear as the witches cackle in their
castle.

Coda: Getting the last laugh

I conclude by considering how We Have Always Lived in the Castle relates to
Jackson’s larger oeuvre, specifically Life Among the Savages (1952) and Rais-
ing Demons (1957). Like her final novel, Jackson’s domestic memoirs combine
the mundane with the imagery of horror, most noticeably in their titles. Yet,
much of the existing scholarship about Jackson (with the exception of Bernice
M. Murphy’s “Hideous Doughnuts and Haunted Housewives: Gothic Under-
currents in Shirley Jackson’s Domestic Humour”) ignores the cultural critique
that underlies her domestic writings. Her biographer, Judy Oppenheimer, char-
acterizes Life Among the Savages as “sunny and peaceful” and Darryl Hatten-
hauer omits the memoirs from his book-length study of Jackson’s fiction (169).
I argue that this oversight stems from the fact that multiple critics and even “the
Hymans did not take the [domestic] stories seriously,” given that much of the
content of Raising Demons and Life Among the Savages was originally pub-
lished in women’s magazines, such as Mademoiselle, Good Housekeeping, and
Woman’s Home Companion (Friedman 150). To reject writing directed toward
housewives overlooks how even apparently optimistic domestic narratives can
speak to a broader interest in renegotiating domesticity and motherhood. After
all, women’s magazines repeatedly sought out contributions from Shirley Jack-
son, published articles about divorce, printed editorials from anxious mothers,
and so on. Furthermore, as Murphy has noted, Jackson published her memoirs
contemporaneously with her “explorations of psychological breakdown,” sug-
gesting “the close relationship between two of her favourite subjects – madness
and domesticity” (“Hideous” 231). In this brief examination of Jackson’s
domestic memoirs, I will demonstrate how she represents the home as a site
of unpredictability, a critical tendency that also emerges in her more explicitly
Gothic novels.
The primary source of anxiety and comedy throughout Jackson’s memoirs is
the sense of chaos that seems to prevent her from maintaining control over both
 Recovering housewife humor 107
the cleanliness of her home and the behavior of her children. Life Among the Sav-
ages begins thusly:

Our house is old, and noisy, and full. When we moved into it we had two chil-
dren and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow
and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a
million books.
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(385)

This commentary on the apparent self-replication of both children and house-

hold objects serves a twofold purpose. First, Jackson imagines absurd domestic
and maternal excess in order to amuse a likeminded reader. Second, this pas-
sage points to a more sinister suggestion that children might overpower the home,
physically overwhelming the mother with their chaotic bodies. Like Merricat,
Jackson’s children frequently flout Dr. Benjamin Spock’s promise that “your baby
is born to be a reasonable, friendly human being” (42).
Jackson’s belief in the dark potential of domesticity becomes fully evident
when she describes her family’s home in Gothic terms; in such moments she
transforms the dream of housewifery and motherhood into the stuff of nightmares.
In the beginning pages of Raising Demons, she describes the magnetic pull of the
home as “the grip of something stronger than I was,” a kind of inexorable force
that overwhelms her (538). Likewise, she aligns the home with Gothic imagery
in Life Among the Savages, which ends with a handbill (written by her husband,
Stanley Edgar Hyman) describing their home as “a meeting-place, or nest, for
demonic spirits” (529). Though Jackson includes this handbill as an illustration
of a familial inside joke, it remains difficult to ignore how the language of horror
signals her domestic frustrations, especially given that she similarly warps the
home with the Blackwood manor. She even sarcastically notes, “I cannot think
of a preferable way of life, except one without children,” and she additionally
describes her life as one of “back-breaking labor” (Jackson, Savages 386, 397).
While she does not condone the abandonment of domestic life and at other times
seems perfectly satisfied with her home and family, in such moments of complaint
she seeks to elicit a dry chuckle from readers who also worry about losing their
free will to housework and maternal responsibility.
The communal impetus of Jackson’s humor emerges most clearly in an episode
from Life Among the Savages, in which she and another mother share a laugh at
the meat counter of the local grocery store (a site which is also central to Mer-
ricat’s aggressive humor). Despite a previous squabble, Jackson and Mrs. Howell
find common ground in commiserating about their children and describe them
as “horrible little beasts” and “liars” (Jackson, Savages 414). By ending their
confrontation with a shared laugh about the deceptiveness of children, Jackson
demonstrates the potential of domestic humor to bring together “a community of
women” (Neuhaus 121). This brief moment of bonding between Mrs. Howell and
the narrator signals the greater relevance of Jackson’s domestic comedy to the
broader community of women readers, a topic that Jessamyn Neuhaus explores
 108 Andrea Krafft
more thoroughly in “‘Is It Ridiculous for Me to Say I Want to Write?’: Domes-
tic Humor and Redefining the 1950s Housewife Writer in Fan Mail to Shirley
Jackson” (2009). Yet, I would like to add that the two women not only exchange
a laugh about demonic children but also exchange recipe tips about cooking ham-
burger and liver. This demonstrates that comedic critiques of domestic life can
exist alongside the very material of familial togetherness that one might find in
the pages of a women’s magazine.
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Jackson’s primary complaint throughout Life Among the Savages and Raising
Demons is that she is living in an age that establishes unrealistic ideals for family
life. As Nancy Walker says in A Very Serious Thing: Women’s Humor and Ameri-
can Culture (1988), Jackson and other domestic comediennes like Jean Kerr ask
us not to examine “ineptitude on the part of the homemaker but instead to [con-
sider] the impossibility of the standards for performance” (186–87). Jackson’s
memoirs contain strains of the Gothic and moments of disruptive laughter that
destabilize the notion of familial normativity and predictability by requiring us
to reconsider the ideal portraits of family life that emerged in postwar sitcoms
such as Leave It to Beaver (1957) and Ozzie and Harriet (1952). Likewise, her
final Gothic novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, moves away from the
postwar model of the nuclear family in favor of a more radical vision of a sororal
community based on humor. Although Judy Oppenheimer puzzlingly claims that
“Shirley was no feminist” (164), Jackson, in both her early nonfiction writing and
her final novel, fuses the Gothic with the comic, thus calling into question the
fantasy world of Cold War domesticity that continues to dominate the American
popular imagination.

Notes
1 See both “Epilogue: Fame” (1948) and “The Third Baby is the Easiest” (an episode from
Life Among the Savages) for Jackson’s narratives about other women ignoring her role
as a writer in favor of emphasizing her domestic identity.
2 Angela Hague similarly notes that homes in Jackson’s writing “often function as places
of entrapment and incarceration for the women who visit or live in them” (82).
3 In an earlier moment of monstrous identification, Merricat speculates that she “could
have been born a werewolf” (Jackson 1).
4 Mary Douglas similarly notes that the joker in “a privileged position . . . can say certain
things in a certain way which confers immunity” (372).
5 Although some of the villagers who joke are women, their humor still supports the goals
of patriarchy. Mrs. Donell is a particularly striking example, as her husband, Jim, leads
the charge against Merricat and Constance.
6 Merricat is by no means Jackson’s only character who aggressively reclaims domestic
space. In “The Story We Used to Tell” (unpublished until 1997), two women escape
their entrapment in an aging portrait of a mansion by murdering the old man who owns
it. Similarly, “Mrs. Anderson” and “What a Thought” (both also unpublished until 1997)
feature women who violently turn against their husbands.
7 Similarly, Regina Barreca notes that “a woman who can make a man laugh when he
doesn’t want to is as dangerous as a Medusa” (19).
8 John G. Parks observes that the vines covering the house, in addition to lending it a
Gothic significance, represent nature sheltering the sisters from “the assaults of a venge-
ful and violent world” (248).
 Recovering housewife humor 109
Works cited
Barreca, Regina. They Used to Call Me Snow White . . . But I Drifted: Women’s Strategic
Use of Humor. New York: Viking, 1991. Print.
Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Trans. Fred Rothwell.
New York: Macmillan, 1914. Print.
Carpenter, Lynette. “Domestic Comedy, Black Comedy, and Real Life: Shirley Jackson, A
Woman Writer.” Faith of a (Woman) Writer. Eds. Alice Kessler-Harris and William
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McBrien. Westport: Greenwood, 1998. 143–48. Print.

———. “The Establishment and Preservation of Female Power in Shirley Jackson’s We
Have Always Lived in the Castle.” Frontiers 8.1 (1984): 32–38. JSTOR. Web. 29 Nov.
2010.
Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs
1.4 (1976): 875–93. JSTOR. Web. 29 Nov. 2010.
Coontz, Stephanie. A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the
Dawn of the 1960s. New York: Basic, 2011. Print.
Creadick, Anna G. Perfectly Average: The Pursuit of Normality in Postwar America.
Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2010. Print.
Douglas, Mary. “The Social Control of Cognition: Some Factors in Joke Perception.” Man
3.3 (1968): 361–76. JSTOR. Web. 4 Dec. 2010.
Egan, James. “Comic-Satiric-Fantastic-Gothic: Interactive Modes in Shirley Jackson’s
Narratives.” Murphy, Shirley Jackson 34–51.
———. “Sanctuary: Shirley Jackson’s Domestic and Fantastic Parables.” Studies in Weird
Fiction 6.1 (1989): 15–24. Print.
Freud, Sigmund. Humor 1927. Scribd. Sean Springer. 19 July 2010. Web. 5 Dec. 2010.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Norton, 1963. Print.
Hague, Angela. “‘A Faithful Anatomy of Our Times’: Reassessing Shirley Jackson.” Fron-
tiers: A Journal of Women Studies 26.2 (2005): 73–96. JSTOR. Web. 14 May 2014.
Halberstam, David. The Fifties. New York: Villard, 1993. Print.
Hall, Joan Wylie. Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993.
Print.
Hattenhauer, Darryl. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. Albany: State U of New York P,
2003. Print.
Horner, Avril and Sue Zlosnik. Gothic and the Comic Turn. New York: Palgrave, 2005.
Print.
Hyman, Stanley Edgar, ed. The Magic of Shirley Jackson. New York: Farrar, 1966. Print.
Jackson, Shirley. “Epilogue: Fame.” 1948. Jackson, Ordinary 386–88.
———. Just An Ordinary Day. Ed. Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman Stewart.
New York: Bantam, 1997. Print.
———. Life Among the Savages. 1953. Hyman 383–530.
———. “Mrs. Anderson.” Jackson, Ordinary 99–103.
———. Raising Demons. 1957. Hyman 531–753.
———. “The Story We Used to Tell.” Jackson, Ordinary 179–85.
———. We Have Always Lived in the Castle. 1962. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.
———. “What a Thought.” Jackson, Ordinary 170–73.
May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York:
Basic, 1988. Print.
Morris, Linda A., ed. American Women Humorists: Critical Essays. New York: Garland,
1994. Print.
 110 Andrea Krafft
Murphy, Bernice M. “Hideous Doughnuts and Haunted Housewives: Gothic Undercurrents
in Shirley Jackson’s Domestic Humour.” The Ghost Story from the Middle Ages to the
Twentieth Century: A Ghostly Genre. Eds. Helen Conrad O’Briain and Julie Anne Ste-
vens. Dublin: Four Courts, 2010. 229–50. Print.
———. “‘The People of the Village Have Always Hated Us’: Shirley Jackson’s New England
Gothic.” Murphy, Shirley Jackson 104–26.
———, ed. Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and
Company, 2005. Print.
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Neuhaus, Jessamyn. “‘Is It Ridiculous for Me to Say I Want to Write?’: Domestic Humor
and Redefining the 1950s Housewife Writer in Fan Mail to Shirley Jackson.” Journal of
Women’s History 21.2 (2009): 115–37. JSTOR. Web. 23 Nov. 2010.
Oppenheimer, Judy. Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. New York: Putnam,
1988. Print.
Parks, John G. “Chambers of Yearning: Shirley Jackson’s Use of the Gothic.” Murphy,
Shirley Jackson 237–50.
Spock, Benjamin. Baby and Child Care. 1945. New York: Giant Cardinal, 1957. Print.
Walker, Nancy. A Very Serious Thing: Women’s Humor and American Culture. Minneapo-
lis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. Print.
——— and Zita Dresner. “Introduction to Redressing the Balance: American Women’s
Literary Humor from Colonial Times to the 1980s.” 1988. Morris 131–39.
Weisstein, Nancy. “Why We Aren’t Laughing . . . Any More.” 1973. Morris 131–39.
 7 “Listening to what she had
almost said”
Containment and duality in Shirley
Jackson’s We Have Always Lived
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in the Castle
Ashleigh Hardin

Criticism of Shirley Jackson’s work has frequently dealt with what is perceived as
her “duality,” citing the oppositions in Jackson’s career, personal life, and legacy.
She wrote for Good Housekeeping; she wrote for the New Yorker. She was a
housewife and mother; she was a respected practitioner of her craft. She was nur-
turing and rather conventional; she was deeply interested in the occult and witch-
craft. Although her short story “The Lottery” is one of the most anthologized in
twentieth-century American fiction, her oeuvre otherwise has been largely ignored
by scholars. Judy Oppenheimer, her biographer, returns frequently to the trope of
Jackson’s dual nature, claiming that it allowed her to write in multiple genres and
create characters with multiple or fragmented personalities (Oppenheimer 139).
The implication is that Jackson’s novels are reflections of her complex psychology
and consequently divorced from their contexts, and this thesis motivated much of
the criticism of her fiction. Ahistorical readings of Jackson are still en vogue in
the twenty-first century, as Jonathan Lethem claims in his 2006 introduction to
We Have Always Lived in the Castle that Jackson had been practicing “splitting
her aspects among several characters in the same story” (ix, my emphasis). Thus
are two of the characters in that novel, the willful, volatile, and murderous Mer-
ricat Blackwood and her nurturing and acquiescing sister, Constance, seen as two
halves of the same person, Shirley Jackson herself.
As scholars of the postwar era have pointed out, however, to have a dual or
multiple personality was the status quo for the middle-class married woman. The
title of Doris Fleischman’s popular memoir posits that a wife was “many women”
in the postwar period, especially those like Fleischman (and Jackson), who mar-
ried and had children but retained their own names and independent careers.
Duality was not simply the experience of individual women, rather, but the diag-
nosis of what was “wrong” with women in general. In Modern Woman: The Lost
Sex, psychologists Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham concluded that the
titular figure, feeling pressure to find satisfaction outside the home, “finds herself
facing her fundamental role as wife and mother with a divided mind,” when in
actuality she should be fulfilled by housekeeping and mothering, as “the domain
[they] suggest for women broadly includes all of biology, psychology, sociology,
 112 Ashleigh Hardin
medicine, pedagogy, philosophy, anthropology, and several other systematic dis-
ciplines” (241, 370). Full-page advertisements for the “Toastmaster” frying pan
ran in Good Housekeeping, reminding women “You lead two lives,” hostess and
homemaker (McGraw-Edison 184). Within the pages of this magazine, Shirley
Jackson published her “domestic” nonfiction, stories of raising her four children
and dealing with her husband, literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. She appears
as another case of a woman with a dual nature: both motherly memoirist and
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best-selling novelist whose fictional work dealt primarily with themes of psy-
chological and physical horror. Regardless of whether individual women con-
sciously cultivated multiple personae, duality was viable because it corresponded
to cultural narratives of female agency. As the foregoing examples suggest, frag-
menting a woman’s identity into multiple discrete parts or roles allowed what
Elaine Tyler May calls women’s “increasing sexual and economic emancipation”
to be “channel[ed]” into the family (105). Therefore, Jackson’s duality should be
understood not as an essential facet of her individual psychology but as a tenuous,
historically situated arrangement that was as much a perception of her as an act
of will on her part.
In terming Jackson a “proto-postmodernist,” Darryl Hattenhauer attempts to
account for the neglect of Jackson and provide a paradigm for examining her
work that would account for its emphasis on multiple personality, including the
narrative oddities of Castle and its unreliable narrator, Merricat. Unfortunately,
Hattenhauer, like many critics of Jackson, does not move beyond a psycho-
logical understanding of her duality into a notion of duality as a historically
constructed theme of her writing and her carefully cultivated public persona.
Angela Hague, drawing on the words of Jackson’s husband, argues for a reas-
sessment of Jackson as providing “a faithful anatomy” of her historical moment
specifically through her characters’ “isolation, loneliness, and fragmenting
identities, their simultaneous inability to relate to the world outside themselves
or to function autonomously” (Hague 74). Hague points out that, even in her
own time, Jackson was misunderstood as writing primarily about personal psy-
chology rather than the symptoms of a culture of “repression, containment, and
paranoia” (74). As Hague notes, attempts by feminist critic Lynette Carpenter
to reevaluate Jackson’s work produced some renewed interest, but did not, ulti-
mately, persist (73). Neither have critics, other than Hague, considered Jack-
son’s work in the context of the Cold War.
The consequences of this neglect of context for interpretations of Castle and
its narrator are intriguing and somewhat troubling.1 In an effort to redeem the
memorable protagonist critics frequently aligned with the author herself, Mer-
ricat has been construed as a liberator rather than a murderer.2 True to the “dual
nature” paradigm, critics also have tended to view Constance as assisting with
the murders to some degree. Hall claims she colludes with Merricat (116), and
Rubenstein carries this further by suggesting that “the two women are ‘two halves
of the same person’ – in fact, two aspects of Shirley Jackson herself” (143). Thus,
the end of the novel, when Merricat and Constance are sequestered in the burned-
out remains of the house, sleeping on the floor of the kitchen, is often read as a
 Containment and duality 113
positive outcome.3 Though critics such as Hall, Egan, and Hattenhauer acknowl-
edge the Gothic qualities of the ending and suggest that they trouble any opti-
mistic interpretation, by reading Jackson psychologically rather than historically,
none have been willing to suggest that Merricat’s “triumph” discloses the depen-
dency of cultural narratives of containment on a domestic ideology that stunted
and silenced women.
The presumed complementarity of Merricat and Constance Blackwood needs
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to be re-examined. The title of the novel, with its emphasis on the plural first
person, suggests readers may conclude that the “we” and “always” represent the
harmonious and unchanging state of the sisters’ relationship. The first sentence,
however, shatters this illusion: the narrator announces, “My name is Mary Kather-
ine Blackwood” and from then on introduces a number of idiosyncratic narrative
devices that highlight the limitations of her perspective. Nonetheless, Merricat
has a tendency to conflate the singular and the plural, declaring several times
throughout the novel that “we” are, were, or are going to be “happy.”4 In other
words, Merricat consistently tries to contain Constance within the family home
and within her totalizing “we,” and she succeeds in the end when Constance for-
feits any ideas about leaving the home and gasps, “Merricat, I am so happy” (145,
my emphasis). Constance, for her part, attempts to contain Merricat by managing
her sister’s emotions and preventing her from facing the consequences for her
actions, whether by sneaking her food upstairs when their father has sent her
to bed without dinner or by taking the fall when Merricat poisons the family.
Rather than being complementary, then, Merricat and Constance are constantly
in tension, each trying to contain the energy of the other. These efforts at contain-
ment, particularly on the part of Merricat, are furthermore always in danger of
spilling over, becoming excessive, erupting in violence, and it takes an explosion
of violence to ensure, finally, that Constance will stay in the home as Merricat’s
caretaker.
Narratives of containment, like Castle’s, permeated Cold War culture. As
Alan Nadel cogently argues, to view entities as containing binary oppositions,
thus requiring greater external vigilance, is a feature of “containment culture,”
a series of narratives proliferating through multiple media in the postwar era
to contain the spread of communism and the threatening energies of changing
norms of sexuality, gender, and race (34). The “dual nature” of Shirley Jackson
and the “we” of We Have Always Lived in the Castle mark the text as a Cold
War novel by illustrating the dependence of containment on unstable narratives
of domesticity. The end of the novel, which finds Constance and Merricat still
contained within the family home but in greatly reduced circumstances, suggests
the failure of containment to account fully for all the “disparate narratives upon
which it relied” (Nadel 53). It is the failure of containment that Nadel argues
produces American postmodernism, marked by its preoccupations with excesses,
endings, and ontology. Considering the novel as a product of “containment cul-
ture” provides a rubric to interpret the assumed complementarity of Constance
and Merricat and the formal aspects of Castle (especially those that Hattenhauer
terms “proto-postmodernist”).
 114 Ashleigh Hardin
Untangling Merricat’s motives from Constance’s shows the tremendous pres-
sure necessary to contain oppositions and make duality appear “natural.” Mer-
ricat’s violence is not merely the opposite of Constance’s timidity; it, not mutual
affection, is the binding force of their relationship. In Merricat Blackwood, we
are shown the logic of containment taken to its extreme, and her desire to prevent
Constance from leaving the family home illustrates the dependence of all narra-
tives of containment on the postwar ideology of domesticity. Evidence in the text
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of Constance’s resistance suggests that, rather than being an enabler of or colluder

with Merricat, Constance is actively trying to escape her. In fact, it is Constance’s
resistance to Merricat that drives the plot. In a 2009 review essay, Joyce Carol
Oates suggests that Constance’s apparent attraction to her mercenary cousin,
Charles, can be read as “a measure of her desperation” for “a way into a possible
new life” (Oates 12). This desire is evident from the very beginning of the novel,
before Charles arrives on the scene. Merricat’s narration begins on a day when
Constance has ventured further than ever beyond the house’s garden (Jackson 19).
Merricat takes Constance’s prediction that she’ll go even further into the village
as “teasing” but is disturbed when Constance continues to make allusions to it
(Jackson 21, 24). In a calculated rage, she “content[s herself] with smashing the
milk pitcher which waited on the table” and leaves the mess so “Constance would
see [it]” (Jackson 27). The broken pitcher signals, if not a threat, at least Merricat’s
displeasure, and Constance reacts to this displeasure by becoming more reserved
and cagey when she speaks of leaving. Instead of speaking of it as an inevitability,
she tries to appeal to Merricat’s self-interest by asking if she wouldn’t like to leave
some time. When Merricat responds hostilely, Constance’s face is “very serious
for a moment,” before she smiles at Merricat and tells her not to worry, saying,
“Nothing bad will happen” (Jackson 54). On subsequent occasions, Constance
censors herself as she conspires with other people to leave the house. Merricat
walks in on Constance talking with Mrs. Wright and Helen Clarke, presumably
about leaving, since when Merricat enters, she drops the subject and offers Mer-
ricat a placating smile: “‘ – do with Mary Katherine?’ Constance was saying, and
then she turned and smiled at me in the doorway” (Jackson 28). Later, Constance
stops herself midsentence, “‘But I’ll have to if I – ,’” when Merricat brings up
the subject of moving Julian to a hospital. She then returns to cooking and asks
Merricat about the applesauce she plans to make. Merricat certainly understands
what Constance is planning as she tells the reader she “sat very quietly, listen-
ing to what she had almost said” (Jackson 84). The struggle between Con-
stance and Merricat then is one that occurs largely beneath the surface of their
interactions and the narration. However, as the foregoing examples illustrate,
Constance is aware of Merricat’s dangerous potential and at least contemplating
a life without her.
Perhaps one of the reasons critics have tended to overlook Constance’s resis-
tance to Merricat is that the image of Constance that Merricat provides for the
reader is one of extreme docility and subservience – it is an image of conventional
postwar femininity. Merricat believes that Constance likes only “books about
food,” so this is what she brings her from the library5 (Jackson 2). She thinks that
 Containment and duality 115
Constance is emotionally fragile, so she offers to turn away an unexpected visitor.
Despite Constance’s protests that she can handle the visitor, Merricat insists, “I
won’t have you frightened . . . I want to send them away” (Jackson 24). Conceiv-
ing of Constance as the soft, nurturing complement to Merricat reinforces read-
ings of Jackson and the novel as having a dual nature, but the novel suggests that
Merricat’s interpretation of Constance is based in a specific kind of literary fan-
tasy: the fairy tale. This is one of the two genres (the other being history) that Mer-
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ricat specifically names as her preferred reading (Jackson 2). Merricat remembers,

When I was small I thought Constance was a fairy princess. I used to try to
draw her picture, with long golden hair and eyes as blue as the crayon could
make them, and a bright pink spot on either cheek; the pictures always sur-
prised me, because she did look like that.
(Jackson 20)

Critics have similarly viewed Constance as a stereotypically docile and nurturing

woman. John G. Parks terms her a “virtual handmaiden of nature, raising and
canning fruits and vegetables, and tending flowers all over the estate” (Parks 26).
In Rubenstein’s article, Constance is “saintly,” the good daughter (and eventually
the mother figure) that survives the poisonings and the good half of Merricat that
must be contained (319–20). Though she recognizes that Merricat has idealized
Constance, when she comes to the question of Constance’s motives, Rubenstein
suggests that the idealization is not merely Merricat’s but the novel’s. In other
words, Jackson’s and Merricat’s conceptions of Constance are coextensive. How-
ever, in addition to the evidence of Constance’s resistance and the presence of
characters like Charles and Helen Clarke,6 who contradict Merricat’s vision of
Constance, Jackson peppers Merricat’s narration with fantasies, games, and even
hallucinations to remind the reader of the limitations of her perspective.
Merricat also places herself in a privileged position with regards to Constance,
claiming to be able to see and understand her in ways others do not. She “sees”
that Constance “detested having anyone near her but [Merricat]” (Jackson 26).
Of course, Merricat’s claims to this closeness are, like her image of Constance,
mostly subjective and self-serving. At one point, Merricat ascribes discomfort to
Constance despite Constance’s claims to the contrary and without looking at her.
The construction of the sentence showing Merricat’s privileged insight invites
skepticism: “Without turning I could hear from her voice that she was quiet”
(Jackson 24). The sentence is both almost contradictory (hearing quietness) and
unnecessarily descriptive of Merricat’s position. The emphasis on “turning” sug-
gests that Merricat cannot see Constance, making “quietness” something one can
hear and see, rather than an absence of sound. Other episodes in the novel sug-
gest that Merricat confuses seeing and hearing in some fundamental way, and the
limitations of her perspective have been critiqued. Few critics have pointed out,
though, how self-serving Merricat’s claims to access to Constance as well as her
constructed image of Constance as having a zest for the feminine mystique really
are.7 If, as I am suggesting, Merricat is trying to imprison Constance rather than
 116 Ashleigh Hardin
free her from the “dangerous illusion” of “heterosexual romance” (Carpenter 36),
it is not to make her an equal partner in a feminist utopia at novel’s end but to
promote Constance from older sister to “Mom.”
Merricat’s desperation to keep Constance at home aligns her with the ideology
of containment, and she embodies the prejudices, paranoia, and violence neces-
sary to sustain it. As Elaine Tyler May convincingly argues, the political strategy
of containment depended on a corresponding ideology within the home. Dur-
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ing the Cold War, people increasingly returned to the home, both physically and
psychically, as the nuclear family seemed to offer both “a secure, private nest
removed from the dangers of the outside world” and “a psychological fortress
that would protect them against themselves” (May 1, 13). Cold War domestic-
ity also had its own dark duality; it “ultimately fostered the very tendencies it
was intended to diffuse: materialism, consumerism, and bureaucratic conformity”
(May 13). In the case of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, although Merricat
has rebelled against her parents by ending their lives, she nonetheless inherits
their class prejudices. Her father fenced in the Blackwood property at her moth-
er’s request, because “The highway’s built for common people . . . and [her] front
door is private” (18). Merricat also cultivates a fetishistic attitude toward the fam-
ily’s wealth and material objects. Merricat buries her teeth and jewelry to protect
the property. She also makes “offerings” of jewelry and dresses in her family’s
clothes on Thursday, her “most powerful day.” Her identity and her sense of her
family’s identity are bound up in material objects: “we always had a solid founda-
tion of stable possessions” (Jackson 1). To punish Constance, she breaks dishes,
and when she discovers the villagers have broken one of her mother’s Dresden
figurines during the ransacking of the house, she wants to punish them too (Jack-
son 110). Perhaps the most highly symbolic item in Merricat’s mystical arsenal is
a small black notebook her father kept, which contains the names of “people who
owed him money, and people who ought, he thought, to do favors for him” (Jack-
son 53). This book she keeps nailed to a tree on the property, and when Charles
arrives shortly after it falls, she immediately connects his presence to the book’s
failure. Merricat’s imbuing of the book with magical powers literalizes the eco-
nomic power her father wields in the community and his extended family. After
the elder Blackwoods die, Merricat repurposes the objects that served as symbols
of their status to effect the same distance from the outside world. By the end of
the novel, she has reenacted her father’s enclosure of her mother within the family
home by trapping Constance there and ensuring, through fear rather than physical
barricades, that intruders will not return.
The contradictory and reciprocal nature of her paranoia regarding intruders
further establishes Merricat’s connection to containment. McCarthyism, writes
Nadel, is “a term that describes generically the growing fear of subversion and the
extreme measures to counter it” (71). This climate fosters and exploits paranoia,
as constant vigilance is required not only to police one’s neighbors but also to
make sure one’s own behavior is above suspicion. In Castle, Merricat repeatedly
places herself in positions to observe “outsiders” (both the villagers and visitors
to the Blackwood house) while carefully denying them the same access, often
 Containment and duality 117
through silence or through scripted conversations she does not deviate from (from
her formulaic conversations with Stella to her reliance on a grocery list for inter-
actions at the store) and also through such rules as not eating in front of other
people. What the villagers “know” about the Blackwoods, however, is not the
truth; they seem to believe that Constance murdered the family and got away with
it, perhaps because of her family’s privilege. Their distrust of Constance is more
threatening to Merricat than if they suspected the truth, for Merricat depends on
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Constance not only for food and care but also to legitimize her worldview. By not
going outside, Constance confirms Merricat’s position that “the world is full of
terrible people” (Jackson 54). Merricat ardently strives to inculcate her own para-
noia in Constance. Only at the end of the novel, when the villagers are convinced
that the reclusive sisters can see and hear their “sins” and so begin bringing them
food to beg forgiveness, has Merricat’s paranoia manifested itself in the larger
community. Intruders are now tolerated (if not welcomed) on the grounds near
the house “turreted and open to the sky” (Jackson 120), because they behave with
proper deference to Merricat in recognition of the “extreme measures” of which
she is capable.
Significantly, Merricat’s violence also is linked explicitly with the potentially
destructive, unstable energies of the atomic age. Under stress, she repeatedly
describes herself as “chilled” and “held tight” or otherwise bound.8 Merricat’s
stress is invariably caused by the threat of Constance leaving the house. That her
reaction to this threat ineluctably evokes containment and the “Cold” War under-
scores containment’s reliance on the domestic and its inherent instability. Though
chilled and contained, Merricat in this state feels as though she will “explode.”
She repeatedly attempts to channel her destructive energies through magic words
and talismans and breaking dishes rather than combusting from the inside. While
Merricat’s use of “magic” has led some critics to classify Jackson as a writer
of “weird” (i.e., genre) fiction,9 Nadel’s explication of the relationship between
containment and American postmodernism provides a way to read Jackson as a
“proto-postmodernist” (as Hattenhauer suggests) while reading Castle in its Cold
War context. By reading the end of the novel through this lens, I argue that the
conclusion is pessimistic not only about domesticity’s ability to free itself from
containment culture, but also about the continued viability of working women
writers’ so-called duality.
Merricat has two seemingly oppositional impulses when it comes to resolving
her conflict with Charles: she wants to turn back time to before he appeared and
make sure nothing ever changes, but she also wants to move forward, to escape to
“the moon” with Constance and Jonas. Her primary goal when she starts destroy-
ing the bedroom where Charles is staying is to erase his presence by wiping his
fingerprints off doorknobs and breaking a watch he has wound by winding it
backwards. Nevertheless, she finds that she cannot return the watch or house back
to an original state, so she chooses to “alter” her father’s room, where Charles is
staying. As a result, “Charles would be lost, shut off from what he recognized,
and would have to concede that this was not the house he had come to visit and
so would go away” (Jackson 87). After erasing his presence fails to disorient him,
 118 Ashleigh Hardin
Merricat knocks a lit pipe into a wastebasket full of newspapers. Though this is
apparently a deliberate act, Merricat’s narration serves to make it passive. She
seems to deny the fire as she “wonders” about her eyes: “one of my eyes – the
left – saw everything golden and yellow and orange, and the other eye saw shades
of blue and grey and green; perhaps one eye was for daylight and the other was
for night” (Jackson 99–100). Just as she appears to believe human vision can be
contained within separate eyes (which, incidentally, denies the cognitive abili-
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ties necessary for sight), she believes that the fire can be contained to a single
room of the house. Of course, Merricat’s “magic” is no more effective here than
it is elsewhere in the novel. It is significant that this failure of containment fol-
lows so quickly on Merricat’s attempt to separate day and night in her two eyes.
With vision as a metonym for her perspective, the novel offers apocalyptic con-
sequences for Merricat’s ideology. The energy Merricat hopes to control is too
unstable to be contained. The fire burns the house Merricat wanted to protect and
serves as a reason for the villagers to intrude and further destroy it. She is capable
of containing Constance within the house, but that act of containment too requires
Merricat’s own unstable energy and exacts a price from both sisters.
The kitchen is the only room left to the sisters when they return to the house.
Materially, this signifies the foreclosure of Constance’s desires to leave the site.
Because Merricat set the destruction of the house in motion in order to prevent
Constance from leaving, this reduced sphere of movement can be interpreted as
the consequence of attempting to escape. Nonetheless, like many Cold War–era
housewives, Constance had prepared for such an event by stocking her cellar with
canned goods. These canned goods and Constance’s unshakeable middle-class
fear of shabbiness (she is shocked by the suggestion that they allow the windows
of the burned-out remains of the home to become dirty and insists they use cups
with handles so that they may take their meals “like ladies”; Jackson 121) allow
the Blackwood sisters to establish a new pattern for their days.
Moreover, the home has also been converted to “the moon,” a location that
Merricat mentions no fewer than thirteen times over the course of the short novel.
When Constance wakes up in the forest after the fire, Merricat tells her, “We are
on the moon at last” (Jackson 112). When Constance finally agrees that she too is
very happy, Merricat reminds her, “I told you that you would like it on the moon”
(Jackson 145). Lape suggests that the moon for Merricat is a symbol of female
power, “the eternal great mother, the eternal feminine” (Lape 159). No critic of
the novel has yet considered that Merricat’s moon mythology might be more con-
temporary than ancient. It was during the time Jackson was writing Castle that
exploration of the moon started to seem inevitable, so much so that Carl Sagan
was able to posit in 1960 that “the extensive deposition of both hard- and soft-
landing packages on the lunar surface seems to be imminent” (396). As with the
debates over the use of nuclear power, late 1950s and early 1960s discussions of
the moon were influenced by containment narratives. In particular, the national
and international science communities were concerned (as Sagan exemplifies)
with possible contamination of the moon by biological agents from earth. The
threat of an unseen microbe infecting an entire planet mirrored the fears of the
 Containment and duality 119
power of the infinitesimal atom to destroy the earth. The International Congress
of Scientific Unions formed a committee on Contamination by Extraterrestrial
Exploration in 1958. Concern about the moon’s “virginity” infiltrated mainstream
culture, as articles in Reader’s Digest, Newsweek, and Time during that same
year attest. Despite the invocation of this ancient metaphor, the moon was los-
ing its status as mythological object and becoming real. An explosion of articles
between 1957 and 1961 in mainstream periodicals focused on the moon’s physi-
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cal characteristics (its surface, atmosphere, orbit, and temperature), suggesting

that the average American’s knowledge of the moon was increasingly empirical
and scientific. A 1958 Good Housekeeping article even prophesized the “end of
moon myths” in the age of space exploration when “we’ll know, finally and for
sure, what’s up there,” debunking “all those strange and wonderful things that
someone, somewhere, has always believed about the moon” (“Coming” 152). The
moon, as both celestial body and symbol, is in danger of being contaminated by
human intervention.
Merricat’s musings about the moon endow the place with the fantastic ele-
ments humanity could once believe existed there: from the exotic “scarlet fish
in the rivers” (Jackson 15) to the opulent “feathers in our hair, and rubies on
our hands . . . golden spoons” (60), the mythological “cat-furred plants and
horses dancing with their wings” (75), and the familiar “rose petals” (58) and
“our mother’s pearls” (75). Most importantly, the moon is a place of security
(“Everything’s safe on the moon”; 44) and abundance (“On the moon we have
everything”; 75). Furthermore, the moon cannot be contaminated by the villag-
ers, Charles, or even the lingering effects of Merricat’s own actions: “on the
moon Uncle Julian would be well” (75). The moon as the frontier exists in Mer-
ricat’s imagination as a place she can keep creating, adding to, and making the
consummation of her desires. When Merricat terms the burned-out house “the
moon,” she has removed it from its mythological status and made “the moon”
the charred building and ash-covered land created by her inability to contain her
rage. Merricat’s fantasies may remain for her at novel’s end, but Constance does
not share in them.
Beyond the “final frontier,” the material conditions of the Blackwood sisters,
particularly Constance, have not improved. It is telling that Constance is now
literally confined to the kitchen, her routines reduced to caring for Merricat and
preventing further decay. Constance certainly does not behave as one liberated
from patriarchy. Hiding in the dark while the villagers ransack the house, Con-
stance finally asks Merricat if she was the one who poisoned the family. Merricat
tells us that they had never spoken of it before. Perhaps Constance speaks only
out of utter shock, as in the ensuing pages, she’s described as pale and still: “Con-
stance, who was always dancing, seemed now unwilling to move” (117). Later,
she apologizes to Merricat, saying she was “wicked” to “have reminded you of
why they all died” (130). Constance has been silenced, having been made aware
once again of what Merricat is capable. To make sure she is not a victim of Mer-
ricat’s rage, Constance will “never talk about it again” (130), and she consents to
take care of the “poor baby” Merricat (112).
 120 Ashleigh Hardin
Even if Merricat’s fantasies remain, her ability to communicate them to the out-
side world has been changed. In the new order she has created, the outside world
infiltrates through the gifts the villagers bring, but all attempts to make sense of
what has happened in narrative break down. Merricat finds herself in a state of
confusion: “we had somehow lost ourselves and come back through the wrong
gap in time, or the wrong door, or the wrong fairy tale” (114). She narrates eating
her breakfast after sifting through the rubble in the destroyed kitchen but notes,
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“I do not know when I found three chairs and when I ate buttered bread, whether
I had found the chairs and then eaten bread, or whether I had eaten first, or even
done both at once” (Jackson 116). Even though the destruction of the home is the
direct result of events that Merricat set in motion, she cannot conceive of herself
as responsible, and thus finds both past and present untethered from a comprehen-
sible series of causes and effects.
Significantly, this is a new order into which Julian is not permitted. Julian, the
novel’s housebound, wounded writer, spends his postpoisoning life obsessed with
the “unsolved” case. In this, he embodies modernist poetics described by Brian
McHale as dominated by epistemological concerns (McHale 9). Julian worries he
will not be able to account for every detail: he tells Constance, “I have a thousand
details to remember and note down, and not a minute to waste. I would hate to
lose any small thing from their last day; my book must be complete” (Jackson
50). He relishes the possibility of talking to Cousin Charles in order to be filled in
on “details” during the trial he could not have observed himself; he also worries
that additional details, crucial though they may be to his sense of “completion,”
will further hinder his progress (62). Information and time are inversely related
to each other. Julian sees himself on an epistemological quest to account for an
infinite number of details within a finite number of pages and within a finite num-
ber of years. Perhaps, as a result of the poisoning, the ontological uncertainty that
McHale finds to be the distinguishing characteristic of postmodernism is intro-
duced into Julian’s project. Julian begins to ask if “it” really did happen (Jackson
32, 66). He is reluctant “to invent, to fictionalize, to imagine” (66), but he feels
that he will be forced to. He names Constance as his literary heir, hoping she
will be a “worthy cynic” (43). Constance assures him that the poisonings really
happened and agrees to accept his papers, thereby suggesting the possibility that
the “housewife” might become the writer, with the blessing of her predecessors
to tell stories “not too concerned with the truth” (43). Julian seems to allude to
the inevitability of the breakdown of containment narratives and to suggest that a
previously silenced voice, Constance’s, might be allowed to speak.
In one sense, Constance does act as Julian’s heir: after the majority of her
clothes burned in the fire, she wears, as Merricat puts it, “the skins of Uncle
Julian” (137). By placing his papers in a box and promising never to speak of
the poisonings again, however, Constance demonstrates that her association with
Julian the writer is only “skin” deep. Instead, the “writer” that emerges is the nar-
rator, Merricat, telling her story to an interlocutor who seems as uncurious about
the poisonings as she is. The story Merricat tells, then, is of the time that Con-
stance almost escaped and the lengths to which Merricat went in order to contain
 Containment and duality 121
her within the home. Merricat’s power, her narrative, and the very title of the book
rely on the presence of Constance, the “fairy princess” trapped in her kitchen,
unaware of the time of day or even how old she is, silenced forever and subsumed
within Merricat’s “we,” but of course, as Merricat tells us, “very happy.”

Notes
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1 Critics have viewed Merricat as “bold” (Oppenheimer 165), “creative, imaginative”

(Carpenter 202), “compulsively appealing” (Downey 189), the “most complex and sat-
isfying of Jackson’s creations” (Lape 25), and the only truly happy character in all of
Jackson’s fiction (Murphy 20). Carpenter finds that Constance “empowered” Merricat to
poison the family (202); Egan terms her an accomplice after the fact (23). Hattenhauer
suggests that Constance is actually the mastermind of the pair, “a passive-aggressive
enabler who unconsciously uses her cloying sweetness to get the dark Merricat to do her
dirty work. She is the one who taught Merricat about poisons. And Merricat adminis-
tered it by slipping it into the sugar that Constance put on the table” (Hattenhauer 177).
2 Merricat’s actions are characterized as a rebellion against the patriarchy (Carpenter
202), to free her helpless sister Constance (Lape 173) from oppression and perhaps even
sexual abuse (Hall 111) by murdering their mother, father, aunt, and younger brother.
3 The ending is called a “triumph” (Oppenheimer 165), a “woman-centered life” (Lape 25),
a matriarchal new order held together by “the sisters’ mutual affection” (Carpenter 202),
free of “domestic expectation, free of schedules, deadlines, and responsibility to others”
(Lape 180).
4 See pages 61, 125, 136, 145, and 146 of Castle.
5 Merricat perhaps hints that the reason she brings Constance books from the library is
not really to fulfill Constance’s desire to read cookbooks, but because Julian likes the
“look” of a woman reading: “Although Uncle Julian never took up a book, he liked to
see Constance reading in the evenings while he worked at his papers, and sometimes he
turned his head to look at her and nod. ‘What are you reading, my dear? A pretty sight,
a lady with a book’” (Jackson 2).
6 Though Charles is clearly mercenary and critics have tended to read him as a threat-
ening male figure, he disrupts Merricat’s conventional image of Constance. Charles
calls her “Connie,” rather than “Constance,” the diminutive signaling not only familiar
affection but also a reluctance to dwell on the past and foreclose change, impulses
which both Merricat and Julian entertain. He is the only member of the Blackwood
family who is content to eat whatever Constance cooks instead of “ordering” food each
morning (Jackson 64). He reminds Merricat that Constance “works like a slave” (81).
Merricat even notes that he makes his own bed and assumes that “his mother must have
taught him” (76).
7 In an interesting take on the novel, Marilyn Boyer argues that Merricat exploits Uncle
Julian’s disability to ensure her own survival (i.e., Constance’s continued presence in
the house). See “Disability as a Survival Mechanism in the Works of Shirley Jackson”
in Studies in Weird Fiction 25 (2003): 12–21. Print.
8 For references to Merricat being chilled, see pages 19, 21, 27, 39, 50, 55, 90, 92, and
130. For references to her being bound or held tight, see pages 27, 57, 61, 84, and 92.
9 See Egan, James. “Sanctuary: Shirley Jackson’s Domestic and Fantastic Parables.”
Studies in Weird Fiction. No. 6 (Fall 1989): 15–24, and Joshi, S. T. “Shirley Jackson:
Domestic Horror.” Studies in Weird Fiction. No. 14 (Winter 1994): 9–28. Also, in Paul
N. Reinsch’s A Critical Bibliography of Shirley Jackson, American Writer (1919–1965):
Reviews, Criticism, Adaptations, he notes that “the view of Jackson as an, admittedly
exceptional, author of occult horror literature still dominates critical discussion”
(Reinsch 1).
 122 Ashleigh Hardin
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Reinsch, Paul N. A Critical Bibliography of Shirley Jackson, American Writer (1919–
1965): Reviews, Criticism, Adaptations. Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen P, 2001. Print.
Rubenstein, Roberta. “House Mothers and Haunted Daughters: Shirley Jackson and Female
Gothic.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 15:2 (Autumn 1996): 309–31. Web.
JSTOR. 5 Feb. 2010.
Sagan, Carl. “Biological Contamination of the Moon.” Proceedings of the National Acad-
emy of Sciences of the United States of America 46:4 (1960): 396–402. Web. JSTOR. 8
Jul. 2011.
 8 Knowing and narration
Shirley Jackson and the
campus novel
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James E. Dobson

In The College Novel in America, John O. Lyons’s 1962 survey of the American
college novel, Lyons argues that the novel of academic life is one in which educa-
tion itself, rather than the social lives of students, is taken seriously as the text’s
main subject. It must, he adds, also feature students or professors as the major
characters. Lyons’s survey was the first to consider the possibilities of the Ameri-
can college experience as material for producing what he considered a “serious”
national novel. He relies upon conventional understandings of the novel during
the midcentury, including Lionel Trilling’s now well-known oppositional pairing
of the romance and the novel. Lyons proceeds to examine a large set of contend-
ers for the serious novel of university life, from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Fanshawe
(1828) to Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe (1951), in making his com-
pelling case that the American campus novel could fit into his contemporary crite-
ria for a serious novel. His criteria for selection leans, as one might expect, toward
the rather male and middle-class. When he turns to consider the female variant
of the academic novel, he names Shirley Jackson’s odd representation of Natalie
Waite’s troubling first-year college experience in Hangsaman (1951) “the most
impressive novel about an undergraduate’s experience at a women’s college” and
devotes the majority of this slim chapter to a reading of this text.1
Despite this important positioning, Jackson’s novel has, for the most part, dis-
appeared from considerations of the American campus novel. Once the novel
went out of print, it gradually ceased to be an object of discussion. Even the
feminist critique of Lyons’s early canon of college books ignores Jackson’s place
in this literary tradition. What seems most interesting about Lyons’s assessment
of Hangsaman within the bounds of the genre as he defines it is the degree to
which higher education is not taken seriously at all by the novel or the characters.
Jackson’s novel is one of the more critical and ambivalent accounts of Ameri-
can college life. Hangsaman reveals a deeply alienating culture that both enables
and complicates the possibility of the transformative experience that has been
assumed as the goal of undergraduate education, since at least John Henry New-
man’s classic The Idea of a University (1852). Within the American context, cam-
pus novels, including Jackson’s, also address the degree to which another kind
of promised transformation associated with higher learning, economic and class,
may have become increasingly difficult during the twentieth century. The recent
 124 James E. Dobson
republication of Jackson’s novel by Penguin in 2013 provides an opportunity to
reconsider her novel and its representation of college life and the undergraduate
experience. Indeed, it is only through the recovery of Hangsaman’s place within
this tradition that we can uncover the roots of a disturbing countercurrent within
the modern American campus novel and, at the same time, make Jackson’s novel
a little less strange.
The campus novel is a novel set primarily at a college or university and, despite
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Lyons’s protestations, concerns both the academic and the social lives of students.
This genre takes advantage of the similarity in confusion and naiveté between
the student protagonist and the reader to introduce the new and frequently self-
contained world through which the student will undergo some transformation. In
a recent critical essay, Jeffrey Williams notes the division between the academic
and the campus novel and the growing interest in the former category at the pres-
ent time. Williams produces the distinction as such:

“campus novels” . . . tend to revolve around campus life and present young
adult comedies or dramas, most frequently coming-of-age narratives [while]
“academic novels” . . . feature those who work as academics, although the
action is rarely confined to a campus, and they portray adult predicaments in
marriage and home as well as the workplace, most familiarly yielding mid-
life crisis plots.
(562)

Williams’s key characteristic for the campus novel, the transitional “coming-of-
age narrative,” has been at the center of discussions about many campus novels,
and the degree to which this narrative structures Jackson’s Hangsaman has framed
most of the existing critical work on the novel. The challenges to the coming-of-
age plot within the college or university setting have certainly been the subject
of the campus novel since its early forms, from Owen Johnson’s Stover at Yale
(1912) to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920), through May Sarton’s
The Small Room (1961) to Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004), and Jef-
frey Eugenides’s recent take on the genre in The Marriage Plot (2011). Jackson’s
Hangsaman adds an important corrective to the college novel’s coming-of-age
plot through its depiction of the complications encountered by a female college
student in adapting herself to a fundamentally alienating narrative structure with a
predetermined ending. Jackson shows how this restrictive environment is funda-
mentally at odds with the promise of American universities and colleges to enable
numerous class, social, and personal transformations.
Within critical takes on the idea of the university, the concept of self-
transformation has also remained an ideal. Andrew Delbanco’s recent argument
for the retention of liberal education within the American university, College:
What It Was, Is, and Should Be (2013), places itself directly in conversation
with the topics concerning the authors listed earlier. Fictional representations of
campus life are among his key sources for examining the idea of the university
within the American cultural imaginary. And why not? As a professor of English,
 Shirley Jackson and the campus novel 125
Delbanco well knows the power of representational forms such as the novel to
materialize and test the highest ideas and ideals of a culture. He cites a response
from John “Dink” Stover, the protagonist of Johnson’s Stover at Yale, to his ques-
tion of the purpose of college: “I’m going to do the best thing a fellow can do at
our age, I’m going to loaf!” Defending the ideal of contemplation and the pos-
sibility of transformative experience that depends upon the wide-ranging liberal
study forming the conditions of possibility for contemplation, Delbanco’s College
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explicitly engages with the coming-of-age narrative within the discourse of the
campus novel.
While Lyons’s The College Novel in America (1962) set the tone for the dis-
cussion of the campus novel for years to come, recent surveys such as Shirley
Marchalonis’s College Girls: A Century in Fiction (1995) and Elaine Showalter’s
Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents (2005) provide updated
accounts. Marchalonis explicitly responds to Lyons’s thesis by noting the margin-
alization of accounts featuring women’s colleges or the experiences of women in
coeducational institutions. She selects works written by authors attending college
during the period from 1890 to 1910 and thus is unable to contend with Lyons’s
assertion that Jackson’s novel is a crucial text in the understanding of fictional
representations of a women’s college. In addition, Marchalonis argues that her
selected texts struggle with a double-bind to simultaneously represent going to
college as a novel experience while demonstrating that college women were no
different than the others. This results in the idealization of the women’s college
that Jackson’s novel seeks to undermine:

The early writing presents a women’s space that nourished community –

a space, called the green world in this book, with its own rules; it offered
women more room to define themselves than they could find anywhere else.
This women’s space is the core of all good in the early fiction.
(4)

Showalter’s Faculty Towers takes a different tack through her shifting of emphasis
from novels of student life to those featuring professors – the subgenre that both
she and Williams refer to as the academic rather than campus novel. Showalter’s
list of novels charts out a deeply satirical subgenre that questions the idealistic
assumptions held by many novels focusing on student life.
If the campus novel generally concerns the process of self-definition and the
representation of the liberal ideal of a transformative experience for the under-
graduate student, it also has a tendency to invoke what might be called the flip
side of this romance plot. Mirroring the description of an internal transformation,
we also find Gothic college tales that show the degree to which the spires and
towers of academe have frequently concealed a darker story of class stratifica-
tion and conflict, sexual assault, binge drinking, and drug use. In this narrative
social concerns and student life issues overwhelm and interfere with what Lyons
would consider the serious plot of education. We find examples throughout the
literary representation of the university, from the radicals attempting to end secret
 126 James E. Dobson
societies and social privilege in Stover at Yale and This Side of Paradise to the
depiction of overworked and abandoned students, like May Sarton’s Jane Sea-
man in The Small Room. In our present moment, student life issues have become
pressing; with the Department of Education’s recent use of Title IX to investigate
the preponderance of sexual violence and discrimination on college campuses,
discussions of previously unreported and underreported activities and crimes are
finally being taken seriously. For authors like Shirley Jackson and certainly for
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far too many students, Marchalonis’s “green world” was artificially maintained.
My aim in this essay is not to reveal a submerged network of reference and cita-
tion within and directed toward Hangsaman – although one could certainly do
this – but to ask what Jackson’s novel can teach us about the promises and failures of
the mid-twentieth-century American college. I will begin by locating Hangsaman
in relation to Shirley Jackson’s larger depiction of college students, faculty, and
campus life and in relation to her specific representation of Bennington College.
I then position Jackson at the origins of a Bennington-centric literary tradition
of critical campus fiction. Finally, I’ll offer my own reading of Hangsaman that
brings together the numerous topics, figures, and, most importantly, critiques that
collectively haunt this tradition.
In the spring of 1945 Shirley Jackson moved to rural North Bennington, Ver-
mont, with her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, from Greenwich Village in New
York City. Hyman was to teach at Bennington College at the invitation of Ken-
neth Burke. At the time, Jackson was already well known within literary circles
for several short stories that she had published in the New Yorker. In 1948, she
published her first novel, The Road Through the Wall, and in June of the same
year, her infamous “The Lottery” appeared in the New Yorker. This was also the
year in which Hyman published his assault on contemporary literary criticism,
The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism (1948).
In dedicating his volume of criticism to Shirley, “A critic of critics of critics,” he
draws attention to the importance of Jackson’s critical faculties by naming her a
metacritic. In 1949 Jackson, Hyman, and their three children moved from Ben-
nington to Westport, Connecticut; they returned to North Bennington in 1952, and
Hyman once again took up teaching at Bennington College.
Hangsaman was Jackson’s second novel. It was published by Farrar, Straus &
Young in 1951 during the Hymans’ three-year absence from North Bennington.
The novel describes the first-semester experiences of Natalie Waite at an unnamed
and recently founded women’s college that has more than some resemblance to
Bennington College. It opens during Natalie’s last few weeks at home with her
family, and the early section turns around a Sunday afternoon cocktail party at
her family’s home prior to her departure. During the party, and under the cover
of darkness, Natalie is led into the woods by a friend of her father’s and sexually
assaulted. With no notice taken of her state by her family, she denies and quickly
represses any memory of this event and prepares to leave for college. Natalie
arrives on campus, enrolls in a slate of dull introductory courses, and encounters
a cast of collegiate archetypes: Rosalind, a conspiratorial friend who later turns
against her; Arthur Langdon, her English professor, who mirrors her own father
 Shirley Jackson and the campus novel 127
and for a short while serves as the object of her affections; Arthur’s disenchanted
and alcoholic young wife, Elizabeth, only a few years older than Natalie; two
older students, Anne and Vicki, who are engaged in a romantic tryst with Arthur;
and Tony, a mysterious acquaintance who appears to be called into being by Nata-
lie’s imagination. Feeling alienated by everyone else, Natalie and Tony ultimately
decide to reject college life and leave the campus. Arriving in a wooded space
at the end of town, Tony’s suddenly strange behavior frightens Natalie, and she
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decides to make a break with Tony. Tony disappears into the woods, and Natalie
solicits a ride back to town from a passing vehicle, briefly considers suicide, and
then returns to the campus.
A major plot element of Jackson’s novel, Natalie’s or possibly even Tony’s
departure from college for the woods, closely resembles the real-life disappear-
ance of a twenty-one-year-old Bennington student, Paula Jean Welden. Welden
hitchhiked from Bennington on December 1, 1949, to take an evening hike on
an extended trail network known as the “Long Trail.” Welden was never found,
and her sudden disappearance continued to haunt Jackson’s imagination. A later
story, uncollected until the publication of Just an Ordinary Day (1996), evidences
the long-term impact of Welden’s disappearance on Jackson. “The Missing Girl”
appeared in Fantasy and Science Fiction in December of 1957. The story con-
cerns the disappearance of a camper by the name of Martha Alexander from a
girl’s summer camp, the “Phillips Educational Camp for Girls Twelve to Sixteen.”
Despite switching the setting from Bennington College to a summer camp, Jack-
son continues her exploration of the logic that allows a figure within an institution
to disappear without a trace. After several weeks of searching for Martha, the
search ends. The camp director, “Old Jane,” and the local police chief, Hook,
scrub their respective official records clean of any presence of Martha. In order
to make life easier for themselves, her roommate, Betsy, and Martha’s extended
family deny Martha’s existence. The body is eventually found and buried without
much notice. Jackson’s story shows how much easier and more acceptable it is to
erase Martha from existence than to acknowledge the social failures of the camp
to look after its own campers.
Jackson’s experiences with college resembled those had by more than one of
her fictional characters. She first attended the University of Rochester in Roches-
ter, New York, in 1934. She left in the spring semester of 1936 reportedly because
of poor academic performance. After a year of sustained, daily writing back at
home, Jackson applied to and was accepted by Syracuse University, where she
studied English and communication. She was active in several student publica-
tions as a contributor and editor. Jackson earned her BA in English in June of
1940, alongside her then-boyfriend and future husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman.2
Her first story, “Janice,” was published in 1938 in the Syracuse literary annual,
The Threshold. “Janice” is shorter than most Jackson stories but the origins of her
art can be found in this, her first publication. “Janice” is just over one page of a
narration of an afternoon and evening in the life of a student who has attempted
suicide earlier in the day in response to the news that her parents can no longer
afford to send her to college. An unnamed friend narrates “Janice” and listens as
 128 James E. Dobson
Jan compulsively tells her friends about how she started a car in the family garage
but was interrupted by a neighbor cutting the grass. The narrator listens to the
story, first over the phone and then in a social setting with others, and each time
asks for minor details about the event. The story ends on the start of Jan’s third
repetition of what has become her refrain: “nearly killed myself this afternoon”
(566). The narrator and Jan’s friends demonstrate a complete lack of compassion;
other than curiosity about the near-death experience, these friends seem uninter-
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ested in Jan. From “Janice” we can draw two major threads that we find repeated
in Jackson’s other works of college fiction, including Hangsaman: the existence
of an institutionally and socially alienated student and difficulty in self-narration
that leads to narrative reproduction rather than transformation and re-creation.
Jackson’s college students seek escape from institutions and the limiting nar-
rative structures in which they are frequently embedded. An unnamed college
student frequents a small bookstore to take furtive glances at a copy of William
Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity in a story that takes its title from Empson’s
monograph. Unable to afford this text, the student returns to the store again and
again to read it in segments. His habit is broken only by the purchase of this
text, in the student’s absence, by a man who the student assisted in locating well-
known and canonical books of interest. In “The Man in the Woods,” a story first
brought into print in April of 2014 by the New Yorker, a young male protagonist
named Christopher rather spontaneously leaves his college only to find a cottage
in the woods and the site of his own possible murder. Christopher describes his
departure from school as such: “One day I was there, in college, like everyone
else, and then the next day I just left, without any reason except that I did” (180).
Like “The Missing Girl,” this story enables Jackson to work through the possible
reasons for Paula Welden’s sudden disappearance from Bennington. Christopher
is like most of Jackson’s student protagonists; they seldom seem at home on cam-
pus and are in a restless search for alternatives and escapes. In so doing, students
also animate animosities between faculty wives and faculty members and upend
the supposedly safe campus for certain groups of people. From Just an Ordinary
Day, “The Very Hot Sun in Bermuda” concerns a young undergraduate by the
name of Katie Collins, who, like many other female students in Jackson’s work,
engages in a quasi-secret romantic tryst with her professor, Peter. Throughout the
story, Collins refers to Peter’s wife as a “hag” while pressuring Peter to leave with
her for a vacation to Bermuda.3 Hangsaman examines a variation on this theme
through the flirtations between Arthur Langdon and Anne and Vicki, two of his
students.
Whereas the wives are neglected and humiliated, the faculty husbands are inept
and in possession of a stereotypically inflated sense of self-importance. Jackson
almost routinely represents her academics as idiosyncratic, arrogant, and incom-
petent. The Haunting of Hill House’s Dr. John Montague is an example of such
an academic. Dr. Montague is an anthropologist who, in apparent opposition to
his more rationally minded peers, studies supernatural manifestations. He brings a
group of strangers together to live in Hill House as an experiment for his research
into the supernatural. Jackson describes the conclusion of his experiment as an
 Shirley Jackson and the campus novel 129
utter failure: “Dr. Montague finally retired from active scholarly pursuits after the
cool, almost contemptuous reception of his preliminary article analyzing the psy-
chic phenomena of Hill House” (417). James Harris, one of Jackson’s frequently
used figures within her shorter fiction, takes the role of an academic in a story
titled “Of Course.” This Mr. Harris is an oppressive patriarchal figure, much like
the other academics found in Jackson’s work and perhaps resembling academics
most familiar to Jackson, in particular her husband, Stanley Hyman. Harris is a
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controlling scholar who “writes monographs” for a profession and disapproves of

almost all popular culture, from board games, the radio, movies, to newspapers,
the latter of which he refers to as “a mass degradation of taste” (182). Harris’s
high-culture disapproval of popular entertainment alienates his wife and son from
all society, including the family’s new neighbors, the friendly and disruptively
modern Taylor family.
Perhaps Jackson’s best-known representation of college life can be found in a
satirical essay describing her experiences as what she terms a “faculty wife” in an
essay for Mademoiselle in December of 1956, five years after the publication of
Hangsaman. In this essay, Jackson creates a persona that allows her the distance
needed to produce a critique of the social relations that appear in a different form
in Hangsaman. She writes of herself, as she does in some of her other work, as a
housewife and thus removes any relation between her as the authorial subject of
this fictionalized autobiography and her occupation as a writer. Jackson’s Ben-
nington is an antagonistic environment in which she feels devalued and constantly
compared to the faculty, the other wives, and the students. When responding to a
student’s question about her own prior attendance at college and “how come you
just ended up doing housework and stuff,” Jackson responds, “I have a job. I cook
and sew and clean and shop and make beds and drive people places and – .” Cut
off and ignored by this student, Jackson concludes her essay with a humorous
threat: “I think that maybe I will invite a few of my husband’s students over for
tea one of these days and drop them down the well.”
Her feeling of displacement as a faculty wife, to be sure, an overdetermined role
in a small college town, also appears in her autobiographical memoir of domes-
tic and family life that was published shortly after Hangsaman, Life Among the
Savages (1953). In this text, which was produced from several of her successful
magazine pieces, Jackson describes anxiously arriving at a hospital for the birth
of her third child and her encounter with a skeptical nurse:

“Age?” she asked. “Sex? Occupation?”

“Writer,” I said.
“Housewife,” she said.
“Writer,” I said.
“I’ll just put down housewife,” she said.
(68)

Not having a distinct and visible role within the community, it seems that Jackson
cannot claim the professional role as author. This dialogue also exhibits potential
 130 James E. Dobson
anxieties resulting from turning everyday domestic situations into the material for
her professional work as a writer. If telling the story of being a housewife enabled
her to sustain herself as a writer – and, we should note, her writing sustained the
entire family, as Stanley’s income was quite small compared to the money that Jack-
son was able to command for her magazine publications – then she would be forced
to reenact a version of this scene between herself and the nurse with her reader.
Having made North Bennington her home after her initial departure, the small
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New England town and its liberal arts college continued to animate Jackson’s
imagination until her untimely death. Although still a very young institution –
founded in 1932, Bennington College was hardly a decade old when Jackson and
Hyman arrived – she saw a Bennington that had quickly become like every other
institution despite its initial radical conception. “Anything which begins new and
fresh,” she writes in the early pages of Hangsaman, “will finally become old and
silly” (47). Her fictionalized depictions of Bennington are frequently negative;
Hangsaman critiques what she sees as the great distance between the ideals and
the lived reality of the college. Her narrator describes the aims of the institution
as such:

The college to which Arnold Waite, after much discussion, had decided to
send his only daughter was one of those intensely distressing organizations
which had been formed on precisely the same lofty and advanced principles
as hoarier seats of learning, but which applied them with slight differences
in detail; education, the youthful founders of the college had told the world
blandly, was more a matter of attitude than of learning.
(47)

The proper attitude, as Hangsaman explains, means being open to what it calls
“experience,” and it is experience that this fictionalized institution seeks to impart.
Yet the institution is not prepared to handle or render teachable the actual experi-
ences of its students. According to her narrator, the college was caught between
two states of being that prevented it from functioning as an idealized academic
community:

Thus the college was, in brief, a place modern, authentic, progressive, realis-
tic, honest, and humane, with decent concessions to the fact that it was sup-
posed to be, and had to be a strictly budget-balanced proposition, a factory in
which the intake must necessarily match the outgo.
(50)

We find, then, in Jackson’s novel a depiction of an institution that has made a

whole series of “concessions” between two positions that work to shift the focus
from academics to socializing and led to the employment of an undertrained and
incompetent faculty.
The Bennington College that Jackson was intimately familiar with, however,
was a little different. Faculty and visitors were involved in the production of
 Shirley Jackson and the campus novel 131
many important works of literature and literary criticism. Bennington left a
lasting impact on numerous writers and critics who had a relationship with
the institution, including, but hardly limited to, Ralph Ellison, Mary Oliver,
Howard Nemerov, and Anne Waldman. Many of these figures were guests of
Hyman and Jackson, and after visiting Bennington, several authors, includ-
ing Ellison and Nemerov, exchanged numerous letters and manuscripts with
Jackson. Shirley Jackson’s work and her critique of college life have produced
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a profound influence on a generation of former Bennington College students,

including Jonathan Lethem, Donna Tartt, and Bret Easton Ellis. This group,
all of whom attended Bennington in the early 1980s, shared a common set
of concerns and criticisms centered on the fundamental problems of social
inclusivity and the impediments to economic and social transformations found
within Bennington’s privileged and increasingly wealthy student body. Having
become coeducational in 1969, the Bennington these students found was cer-
tainly much different from the single-sex institution encountered by Jackson.
In 1982 when Jonathan Lethem arrived at Bennington and took up residence
in North Bennington, he felt that the town was still marked by the presence of
Shirley Jackson. He remarks on this presence in an introductory essay to We
Have Always Lived in the Castle that was reprinted under the title “Outcastle”
in a recently published collection of his nonfiction essays: “Jackson is one of
American fiction’s impossible presences, too material to be called a phantom in
literature’s house, too in print to be ‘rediscovered’” (373). Not only was Jack-
son still present, but so too were some of those who had inspired her: “some
of the local figures Jackson had contended with twenty years before were still
hanging around the town square where the legendary lottery took place” (375).
The difficulties for outsiders, especially those from less privileged families,
that Jackson found at this insular and small liberal arts college remained a fer-
tile source for the literary imagination.
Donna Tartt and Bret Easton Ellis followed Jackson in writing campus novels
set at Bennington. The local history and aura of this town and college informed
their cynical and Gothic take on the campus novel. Donna Tartt had first entered
the University of Mississippi before she transferred to Bennington in 1982. The
Secret History (1992) was her first book and was written while she was a student
at Bennington. Like many campus novels, The Secret History narrates the expe-
riences of an outsider figure attempting to navigate an inclusive institution and
social scene. Like herself, Tartt’s protagonist Richard Papen transfers from an
institution quite different from a small New England liberal arts college. Tartt
set The Secret History at “Hampden College,” a lightly fictionalized Bennington,
and the novel details two murders committed by a small group of exclusive and
wealthy classics majors. One section of the novel concerns the believed disap-
pearance, following his murder, of a student named “Bunny” in the dark woods
surrounding Hampden. Tartt’s use of this trope participates in the same referential
gesture to Paula Welden’s disappearance as Jackson’s Hangsaman. When Bunny
vanishes from the campus, we see little notice or concern on the part of the other
students. In keeping the secret of both murders, Richard is able to successfully
 132 James E. Dobson
transform himself into an insider and gain acceptance from the other classics
majors.
Bret Easton Ellis was at Bennington at the same time as Tartt and published
his first novel, Less Than Zero (1985), while still a student. His second novel,
The Rules of Attraction (1987), is set at a small New England college named
“Camden College” that has more than some resemblance to Bennington. Open-
ing with a student recalling her rape by several students, Ellis’s dark campus
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novel details the sexual and social lives of the disenchanted and suicidal students
of the mid-1980s. The majority of the chapters in The Rules of Attraction are
first-person narrations of the experiences of an interconnected yet isolated stu-
dent body during a single academic year. The novel formally depicts the indeter-
minacy of several events by narrating each from multiple perspectives with very
different understandings of the content and meaning of these events. Experience,
in Ellis’s novel, trumps education as his highly experimental students switch
friends, drugs, and sexual partners. Ellis revitalizes the campus novel by restor-
ing the private lives of students and imagining a whole new set of behaviors and
practices that he understands to be operating within what Andrew Delbanco has
termed the modern college’s “playground of unregulated freedom” (19). Ellis’s
novel suggests that this playground is only for the privileged, as his fictionalized
campus has no characters like Tartt’s Richard Papen, who desire to transform
their socioeconomic class.
Christopher Findeisen has recently argued that the American campus novel
has a special concern with examining the class-leveling promise of higher
education. Findeisen identifies an alternative tradition within the genre that
demonstrates that the promise of higher education to “address society’s eco-
nomic inequalities” (292) was never a real possibility. He opens his essay with
a reading of The Rules of Attraction in order to propose that this novel is an
exception to the norms of the genre: “The Rules of Attraction – a campus novel
that denies the transformative power of education – is thus at odds with the
dominant cultural narratives surrounding the social uses of universities in neo-
liberal America” (292). To make this argument, Findeisen turns to Tartt’s The
Secret History and her depiction of Richard Papen as an outsider who success-
fully converts himself into an insider through an inclusive institution of higher
education. While the event that makes Papen’s social transformation possible
is the shared secret of the murders and not the result of any institutional prac-
tice or the outcome of any pedagogical practice, Findeisen is correct about
the greater economic diversity found in Tartt’s depiction of Bennington. Yet
this does not enable any sort of fundamental transformation of the students;
Papen achieves social acceptance through his wealthy sociopaths, not eco-
nomic transformation or the promise of future monetary success – the novel,
after all, ends with Richard in a doctoral program in English. While The Secret
History and The Rules of Attraction share a set of references and make gestures
toward each other’s novels – the result of writing together in undergraduate
workshops at Bennington – neither contains explicit references to Jackson’s
Hangsaman. Rather, it is their shared interest in examining the hostility of
 Shirley Jackson and the campus novel 133
insular and privileged students to the outsider figure wherein we find a useful
representational relay.
The unofficial “motto” of Natalie’s unnamed women’s college reads “theory
is nothing, experience is all” (49). Throughout Hangsaman, Jackson relentlessly
mocks this institution for insufficient academic rigor, loose requirements, unre-
strained sexual relations between students and faculty, and lack of collegiality
between students, yet she too believes in the power of experience. But the expe-
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rience that Jackson values is not to be found through association with faculty –
that results only in a repetition of familiar and familial relations – rather, she
has in mind private experience, a category of events that Jackson’s novel with-
holds through narrative elision and oblique reference. Narratively indeterminate
events produce epistemological uncertainty within the novel and only increase in
occurrence during Natalie’s first year at college. It is only through her developing
ability to become the author and interpreter of her experience that Natalie survives
the process of institutionalization.
There are two main methodological frames that have been the most successful
in the interpretation of Natalie and in understanding what takes place in Hangsa-
man: the psychological and the psychoanalytic. To these we might add trauma
theory and an account of PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder. While these
readings reveal important aspects of the novel, Natalie’s struggle to exercise con-
trol over her own narrative signals its participation in the logic of the coming-of-
age story that characterizes the campus novel. This is not to say that the novel is
uninterested in an exploration of Natalie’s psychological state, but that Jackson
represents Natalie’s interiority, her sense of self, as a developing set of narratives
that are under constant threat by others. Natalie is foremost a writer and the extent
to which she has control over her own narratives is crucial to Jackson’s represen-
tation of her development. Everyone in the novel demands that Natalie produce
narratives. We find a demand for writing or confession in three major locations:
her daily diary entries that her father requests and reads, the academic writing
required by her professors, and the confessions demanded by other students.
The novel opens with a depiction of Natalie producing several major narratives
at the same time. These are threaded throughout the first chapters and include
her private fantasy detective story, the repressed event of her sexual assault in
the woods, and the written narratives produced by Natalie that her father reads
back to her. Once Natalie leaves home for college, several of these narratives
are replaced with her dialogues with her friend Tony, but her discourses with
her father continue, now via letters exchanged through the mail. Natalie then
produces academic papers and creative stories for her English professor, Arthur
Langdon. These writings differ from the others since they are not the same sort
of confessional stories or character sketches demanded by her father. As Natalie
develops, she gradually rejects or restructures the importance of these demands
for narratives throughout the novel by withholding and reworking her private
experience.
Jackson first introduces the idea that coming-of-age for Natalie means control
against narrative multiplicity through a scene in which Natalie reflects on the
 134 James E. Dobson
world and herself in the one space at her home in which she feels the most free and
in the most possession of her personality, the garden. Lying on the grass, Natalie
looks out over the fields and the mountains in the distance and absorbs this fanci-
ful vision as the material for her private imagination:

she was not able to leave the fields and mountains alone where she found
them, but required herself to take them in and use them, a carrier of some-
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thing simultaneously real and unreal to set up against the defiantly real-and-
unreal batterings of her family.
(23)

This is a scene of awakening: Natalie realizes “her capacity for creation,” and it
is this creative and defensive act that awakens something in her that will, by the
end of the novel, render her a “solitary functioning individual.” But at this point
she contains multitudes and remains subject to the “real-and-unreal” of family
and institutional life.
We had already seen elements of the real and unreal in the most striking of
Hangsaman’s narratives, the private fantasy unfolding within Natalie’s head of
her interrogation by a private detective. In this story, which Jackson’s narration
forces into a confusing overlay with the action of Hangsaman, a detective fol-
lows Natalie as she conducts the everyday tasks necessary to prepare and exe-
cute a Sunday afternoon cocktail party. Believing Natalie to have committed
a murder, the “secret voice” of the detective probes and inquires. The narrator
makes it clear that this dialogue is secret and the detective imaginary by sig-
naling the reader that Natalie speaks “back to him in her mind” (5). Likewise,
another private and highly creative narrative enables Natalie to remove herself
from the too real realities of the domestic scene: “Natalie, because her mother
and father were bickering, transplanted herself to an archeological expedition
some thousand years from now” (21). The archeological fantasy space is dis-
tinct from the detective story, but it does share several features; in both narra-
tives Natalie imagines herself as the primary subject of analysis and producer
of self-knowledge.
In a daily ritual, Natalie meets her father, Arnold, in his study after breakfast
with her mother and brother to review her notebooks. In addition to giving her
writing assignments to complete, Arnold demands access to Natalie’s writing. He
reads these, “savoring” the contents, and critiques her writing. On the morning of
the cocktail party, Arnold reads while Natalie imagines the study transformed into
a murder scene, soaked with blood. Arnold has given her an assignment to describe
him, and he reacts strongly to the critical image she creates of him. Informing
Natalie that it is natural that she feels some “filial resentment” because of the
“basic sex antagonism” that separates them, he explains that it will be difficult for
them to be honest with each other and thus he will continue to “assign” character
descriptions like the one she just completed. Giving Natalie’s notebook back to
her, he tells her, “I shall learn from you” (15). Arnold desires these descriptions
not because he believes that practice will improve Natalie’s facility with language
 Shirley Jackson and the campus novel 135
and help her become a writer but because he thinks writing reveals something that
Natalie can repress or hide in her speech.
Like the controlling Mr. Harris, Arnold Waite wants to maintain order within
his family. He exercises this control most obviously during his cocktail party.
While he flirts with a young woman only a little older than his own daughter, he
symbolically offers his daughter to a strange friend of his, who leads Natalie off
into the woods. Jackson represses what happens next between paragraphs, but it
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is unambiguously a traumatic assault. Natalie’s last thought before this event and
the end of her evening concludes the paragraph: “Oh my dear God sweet Christ,
Natalie thought, so sickened she nearly said it aloud, is he going to touch me?”
(43). She speaks only upon waking in her bedroom the day after: “No, please no.”
This is a delayed speech act that answers the action by the unnamed man during
the night before with a clear denial of consent that crosses the narrative lacuna
that encloses the unnarrated event of her sexual assault. Once she speaks the word
“no,” a constant stream of denial flows from Natalie: “nothing happened, nothing
happened, nothing happened, nothing happened” (43). Jackson depicts Natalie’s
repression of this event as a response to its status as a real event, unlike those
“real-and-unreal” events within her everyday life at home.
While the cocktail party was not a going-away party for Natalie – her depar-
ture still twenty-one days away – her assault at the hands of her father’s friend
marks the end of her time at home. A section break follows, and the next page
opens with a description of Natalie’s college. Jackson represents Natalie, like
many college students, as imagining that by leaving home and attending college
she will encounter the possibility of a “new start” (50). The novel depicts her
home as an oppressive environment: her father’s authority, her mother’s depres-
sion and alcoholism, and the site of her sexual assault. College, however, fails to
be such a fresh start because it too closely replicates this environment. Certain
figures are doubles of her family: Elizabeth Langdon doubles her mother, Arthur
Langdon her father, and other students resemble her younger brother, Bud. Nata-
lie’s symbolic ties to her family structure are reproduced simultaneously with
the cruel actions of her fellow students and a continued exchange of written text
with her father.
Shortly after arriving at college, Natalie is forced to undergo a hazing ritual
or what her fellow students refer to as freshman initiation. Wearing masks, the
older students quickly wake up all first-year students at 3:00 a.m. Physically and
verbally harassing the students while calling them what Natalie refers to as the
“movie word,” frosh (57), these older students herd the nervous first-year stu-
dents into a large circle on the floor of a large bathroom on the second floor of
her dormitory. A single chair is placed in the center of the circle, and the stu-
dents attempt to force their randomly selected victims into the center and onto
the chair. Jackson’s initiation scene repeats earlier depictions of Natalie as under-
going interrogation; throughout the novel she is constantly asked to take on the
role of a storyteller and to rehearse a narrative. Like all scenes of initiation, this
ritual works to sort the students into an organizing hierarchy; Natalie “needed
abruptly to establish her own position” and the ritual was understood as providing
 136 James E. Dobson
an institutionally sanctioned forum for her to become a member of the community
(61). Yet in asking for the sexual status (“virgin?”) of the first-year students, the
older students force Natalie to re-encounter her recent traumatic assault. Natalie
refuses to answer the question and then is asked to tell a dirty joke. This too she
refuses because she “was more afraid of being found not to know dirty jokes than
of being found to have a rich supply” (62). This request for her to produce a narra-
tive would by necessity be linked to her knowledge of sexual activity and thus her
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own assault. Her refusal results in the students collectively rejecting Natalie from
the community and the game: “Bad sport, rotten sport, not fair.” Natalie exits to
return to her own room, where she takes up her pen and begins the production of
yet another narrative, this time in the form of a letter to her father.
Arnold Waite’s letters to Natalie preserve his authority over her interiority
while providing a space for him to compete, on several fronts, with his double,
Arthur Langdon. He competes, for example, with Langdon over the judgment
and assessment of grammatical and stylistic errors in her writing: “I sent you to
college to enjoy yourself, not to get an education, but, my dear, please hereafter
do try not to split infinitives” (96). In another letter, he remonstrates with Nata-
lie for the style she used in her last letter home. He quotes a paragraph of her let-
ter and proceeds to suggest modifications and corrections. In one letter he asks
if Arthur Langdon has seen his last essay for the Passionate Review and says
that she “may use its argument as your own . . . and confound him” if he has
not (105). Arnold Waite writes in a letter to Natalie to be “extremely cautious”
in her dealings with Langdon; he warns her: “do not under any circumstances
allow Arthur Langdon to convert you to any philosophical viewpoint until you
have first consulted me” (118). Understanding himself as also in competition
with Langdon for Natalie’s affections, he warns her against listening to Lang-
don’s advice. Arthur Langdon is, after all, a younger version of Arnold Waite.
Their names combined together produce the name of a single individual, Arthur
Waite, the creator of the Rider-Waite tarot card system and an important refer-
ence in this book that makes several explicit references to the “Hanging Man”
tarot card.
Natalie also writes letters to herself. These are, of course, her diary entries, but
because of the focalization of narrative through the third-person narrator, they are
the only way that we get direct access to Natalie’s consciousness. One diary entry
comes directly after she reads a letter from her father (105). In this entry, Natalie
adopts a clinical gaze and examines herself as if from the outside. She writes, “I
suppose you have even noticed – Natalie seems so strange lately, she seems so
withdrawn and distant and quiet, I wonder if Natalie is coming along all right, or if
there is something troubling her” (105). Lenemaja Friedman argues that the diary
entries and Natalie’s distancing perspective in these letters evidence “schizo-
phrenic tendencies” (92), but rather than resorting to a psychological account-
ing for this self-division, we might understand Jackson as seeking to represent
transformation in the absence of another person. What this passage suggests is
Natalie’s attempt to measure and assess her own progress, to examine whether
she is “coming along all right.” Perhaps we could understand this not so much as
 Shirley Jackson and the campus novel 137
a manifestation of some deeply rooted psychological problem, as Friedman would
have us do, but as the registration of Natalie’s complicated participation in the
coming-of-age narrative. Her diary entry continues:

Well, that’s why I’m writing this now. I could tell, my darling, that you were
worried about me. I could feel you being apprehensive, and I knew that what
you were always thinking about was you and me. And I even knew that you
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thought I was worried about that terrible thing, but of course – I promise you
this, I really do – I don’t think about it at all, ever, because both of us know
that it never happened, did it?
(106)

The “terrible thing” that she references in this diary entry is her repressed sexual
assault. This event functions to complicate her reconciliation of narratives by
refusing to be brought into representation. It is an event that she cannot mention.
Natalie has no privacy. Her letters to her father are intercepted by two older
students who tell Elizabeth Langdon, Arthur’s wife, about the content of these
letters: “We’re all afraid of Nat anyway; do you know that she writes the most
wicked descriptions of all of us to her father? I positively dream sometimes of
what Nat is telling Daddy about me” (125). The students, who have admitted
to entering Natalie’s room by using their key, which happens to open the rooms
above their own, attempt to use the existence of these narratives to end a devel-
oping friendship between Elizabeth and Natalie. They do so because they are
pursuing a relationship with Arthur Langdon. Langdon, like her father, conducts
conferences with Natalie to discuss her written work. During one of these confer-
ences, she says to Langdon, “My father discusses my work with me very much as
you do” (102). Despite Natalie’s hesitations about the act of literary creation and
what she sees as its pointlessness, Langdon encourages her to write and to become
a writer. He dismisses her serious questions by calling them “metaphysical non-
sense” before inquiring about her ideas regarding death.
Faced with continual demands for her to produce narrative, she turns to her pri-
vate diary to confess her own views about the work of confession. Imagining what
it would be like to talk to a psychoanalyst and finally fulfill the ongoing demand
for the entirety of her internal life, she writes,

I think if I could tell someone everything, every single thing, inside my head,
then I would be gone, and not existing any more, and I would sink away into
that lovely nothing-space where you don’t have to worry any more and no
one hears you or cares and you can say anything but of course you wouldn’t
be any more at all and you couldn’t really do anything so it wouldn’t matter
what you did.
(107)

Natalie links herself, her “I,” to a capability to produce new narratives. The pos-
sibility of running out of stories to tell, much like her fear during the hazing scene,
 138 James E. Dobson
frightens her. At the same time, she realizes that in order to be she must withhold
some part of her self.
Instead of undergoing analysis, Natalie finds or invents a friend that she
believes can understand her without the compulsive need to produce dialogue, a
friend with whom she can engage in friendship without demands. She and Tony
play a series of games, sleep together, shower together, and read erotica together.
In short, they have a brief romance. It is only when Tony begins to push Nata-
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lie, when she begins to make demands and control her, that Natalie rejects Tony.
Tony desires to be an authoritative figure, another version of Natalie’s father or
Arthur Langdon. A turning point occurs when they have run away from the cam-
pus and are in the woods together. Tony says to Natalie, “later I might let you go
back” (213). Deciding to leave Tony and the mystery of the woods behind, Natalie
reflects on Tony’s demands and says to herself, “everything is waiting for me to
act without someone else” (214).
Natalie seeks to have the capacity to be alone, but she can do so only once she
has resisted the Other’s desire for access to her interiority. Natalie’s insight is
what prevents her suicide and enables her to return to her campus. On the bound-
ary between the campus and the town, while standing on the bridge that marks
this division, she contemplates jumping, only to realize that her death would only
increase the interest in her narrative:

More people were nearby on the bridge, but she was not embarrassed to turn
away from the parapet and walk quietly toward the college; it occurred to
her that unless she actually jumped over the parapet into the river she was of
small interest to them.
(218)

She climbs down, and these students walk “quietly along without interest” in her.
She returns to her dormitory: “[a]s she had never been before, she was now alone,
and grown-up, and powerful, and not at all afraid” (218). Darryl Hattenhauer
claims that we cannot trust the narrator and that any suggestion of a conclusion of
Natalie’s initiation into adulthood is both a “sop” to the reader’s desire for a happy
ending and an ironic start of another plot. Yet it is likely that Jackson has created
a campus novel that seems unfamiliar because the novel rejects a feminized ver-
sion of the coming-of-age plot that requires Natalie to undergo her transformation
within the space of the institution. Instead, Jackson’s heroine makes a series of
decisions that include giving up her infatuation with Arthur Langdon, rejecting
Tony, choosing not to jump from the bridge, and returning to the campus. These
decisions demonstrate Natalie’s attainment, in spite of her college, of the ability
to interpret her own experience and to act independently, once again, as a “solitary
functioning individual.”
We find a contrary experience in another piece of Jackson’s college fiction that
shares some similar elements with Hangsaman. “Family Treasures” opens dur-
ing the first days of Anne Waite’s sophomore year. At the end of the previous
academic year Anne’s mother had died. Her father already deceased, Anne has
 Shirley Jackson and the campus novel 139
become an orphan and her university has become her only home. Initially, follow-
ing her mother’s death, her fellow students offered her sympathy and friendship,
but now, in the fall semester, they all slowly returned to their previously cool treat-
ment and Anne into “anonymity”: “Anne faded back into the colorless girl on the
third floor who lived alone, had no friends, and rarely spoke” (121). She begins
to steal from the other girls in the dormitory; she takes only a few small items,
in the process reading diaries and letters as she “penetrated the secrets buried in
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handkerchief boxes, under beds, in the darkest corners of closets” (130). Once
others become aware of the thefts, the housemother, Miss McBride, launches an
exhaustive search of the entire dormitory with the assistance of a small group of
students. This search results in a scene of complete exposure and the breakdown
of sociality:

No one cared to speak; each one knew the secrets of all the others; no one was
inviolate any longer. It would be a long and painful process to build new pri-
vacies, secure them safely against intrusion, learn to trust one another again;
there was a great destruction that went on in the house that night, of ruined
treasure being burned, torn, cut with nail scissors.
(132)

Rather than developing a rich sense of internal life that might enable her to func-
tion independently within her now indifferent campus community, Anne Waite
secretly packs up her stolen items into her overnight bag and leaves the univer-
sity: “she slipped quickly out the front door and down the street, carrying the
overnight bag; mighty, armed” (133). While Anne needs to destroy all sense of
privacy before she leaves, Natalie can return to her college only after she gains
some control over her private narrative.
Hangsaman depicts a college student learning to narrate her discontinuous expe-
rience through what I have argued was a deeply alienating culture. Jackson finds
midcentury Bennington College an inhospitable site for women, and this inhospi-
tality produces the strangeness in Jackson’s depiction of the college. John Lyons
notes that Jackson’s pessimism links her to other authors of college fiction who
seek to address the experience of women within colleges and universities: “All
of the novels about women’s colleges, and especially those about Vassar, are not
only violently critical but bad. All of them tend to be a potpourri of anecdotes and
bitter reminiscences” (62). While we should reject Lyons’s aesthetic judgments,
he is right about the degree to which the strong institutional critique frequently
is accompanied by the lack of a linear plot. While Lyons blames the institutions
for failing to impress upon students the mission of the women’s college, to “make
themselves clear” to students, it seems more likely that the “potpourri of anec-
dotes” are deeply related to the narrative difficulties inherent in attempting to yoke
together a story of self-transformation to an alienating encounter with an inhospita-
ble environment. Symptomatic of the inability to tell a story of progressive change
and transformation, these discontinuous narratives gesture toward the fragility of
the promise of American higher education to improve the lives of students.
 140 James E. Dobson
Jackson’s fiction has had a measurable impact on the campus novel and
the tight-knit group of Bennington College authors who followed her in writ-
ing accounts of college life. The indeterminate and discontinuous narrative of
Hangsaman forces us to recognize that the campus novel’s “master narrative” of
the coming-of-age transformative experience is a mere fiction. In a later moment
Donna Tartt and Bret Easton Ellis both offer depictions of disenchanted students,
much like Jackson’s Natalie Waite, attempting to survive the process of institu-
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tionalization. Whereas Ellis and Tartt make use of postmodern literary aesthetics
to construct multiperspectival critiques of Bennington College, Jackson, as I have
argued, produces a division within Natalie’s self that contains a private compo-
nent that resists the Other’s desire to know. Thus we can understand Hangsa-
man as a fundamentally anti-institutional narrative that imagines the possibility of
being in an institution but not of it.

Notes
1 I would like to thank Mira Rogulski for introducing me to the magic of Shirley Jackson
during a seminar on Jackson that she conducted at Dartmouth College in 2013. Thank
you to Barbara Will, associate dean of the humanities, and Donald E. Pease for orga-
nizing the seminar. I owe much to Louis A. Renza for many stimulating discussions
about the campus novel and for helping me to think through a few of Jackson’s stories.
Thank you also to Rena J. Mosteirin for carrying on years of arguments about college
culture and for coming back, the hard way. Most importantly, I need to acknowledge
the students at Dartmouth who took my “Campus Life” course during the 2013–2014
academic year. In particular, I would like to thank Allison G. Wishner, Maya Poddar,
Ryan Schiller, and Abena Frempong for their invaluable and insightful contributions to
my understanding of the campus novel, campus life, and Jackson’s Hangsaman.
2 As of 2015, there is only one biography of Jackson’s life, Judy Oppenheimer’s Private
Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. I have relied upon this for much of the biographi-
cal information presented in this essay.
3 The recently published “Still Life with Teapot and Students” also concerns the presence
of student-professor relationships on campus. In this story Louise Harlowe, the wife of
a professor, invites two of her husband’s students over for tea and warns them to stop
“making passes at my husband” (17).

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Fitzgerald, F. Scott. This Side of Paradise. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.
Friedman, Lenemaja. Shirley Jackson. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1974. Print.
Hattenhauer, Darryl. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. Albany: State U of New York P,
2003. Print.
Jackson, Shirley. “Family Treasures.” Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other
Writings. Eds. Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman DeWitt. New York: Random
House, 2015. 119–33. Print.
 Shirley Jackson and the campus novel 141
———. Hangsaman. New York: Penguin, 2013. Print.
———. Haunting of Hill House. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.
———. “Janice.” Novels and Stories. Ed. Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Library of Amer-
ica, 2010. 565–66. Print.
———. Life Among the Savages. New York: Penguin, 1997. Print.
———. “The Man in the Woods.” Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writ-
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House, 2015. 173–87. Print.
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———. “The Missing Girl.” Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories of Shirley
Jackson. New York: Bantam, 1997. 339–49. Print.
———. “Of Course.” Novels and Stories. Ed. Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Library of
America, 2010. 179–83. Print.
———. “On Being a Faculty Wife.” Mademoiselle 44.2 (1956): 116–17, 135–36. Print.
———. “Still Life with Teapot and Students.” Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and
Other Writings. Eds. Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman DeWitt. New York:
Random House, 2015. 15–20. Print.
———. “The Very Hot Sun in Bermuda.” Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories
of Shirley Jackson. New York: Bantam, 1997. 32–36. Print.
Joshi, S. T. “Shirley Jackson: Domestic Horror.” Studies in Weird Fiction 14 (1994): 9–28.
Print.
Lethem, Jonathan. The Ecstasy of Influence. New York: Doubleday, 2011. Print.
Lyons, John O. The College Novel in America. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1962.
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Marchalonis, Shirley. College Girls: A Century in Fiction. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP,
1995. Print.
Oppenheimer, Judy. Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. New York: G. P. Put-
nam’s Sons, 1988. Print.
Showalter, Elaine. Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents. Philadelphia:
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Tartt, Donna. The Secret History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. Print.
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(2012): 561–89. Web.
 9 The haunting of Fun Home
Shirley Jackson and Alison
Bechdel’s queer Gothic
neodomesticity
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Jill E. Anderson

Near the end of Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House,
Mrs. Montague, a medium and the wife of the man who has gathered three
volunteers – Eleanor, Theodora, and Luke – at the Victorian-era mansion called
Hill House to experience its supernatural occurrences, arrives at the mansion.
Her goal is to communicate with Hill House’s spirits, and she sets about doing
so in a no-nonsense, practical manner. Before settling in for her first night,
Mrs. Montague expresses her self-righteous optimism in attempting to draw out
the spirits: “It is such a blessing . . . to know that the beings in this house are
only waiting for an opportunity to tell their stories and free themselves from the
burden of their sorrow” (144). But, shortly after retiring to their respective beds
for the night, the mansion’s inhabitants experience another supernatural cacoph-
ony of knocking and pounding in the hallways. “Could we have exhausted the
repertoire of Hill House?” Theodora nonchalantly quips, while the panicked
and psychologically fragile Eleanor silently considers, “We are in the eye of
the storm; there is not much more time. . . . I am disappearing inch by inch into
this house, I am going apart a little bit at a time because all this noise is break-
ing me” (147, 148–49). Each woman is experiencing the mansion’s “noise”
differently and in ways that reflect their overall states of mind. But Mrs. Mon-
tague’s comment is a metafictional moment that encodes Eleanor’s concerns as
the “burden” of never being able to be free. Eleanor lacks a story and a home,
so she experiences Hill House’s noises and hauntings, particularly the voice that
calls out to her, “ELEANOR COME HOME,” as a frightening yet ultimately
appealing trap. In one way, Hill House seems to be calling her home, into the
strange bosom of the mansion’s interior; in another, the demanding voice that
requests Eleanor “come home” is a comfort to her rejected sense of being. In
other words, for Eleanor, arriving at, inhabiting, and encountering the spirits of
Hill House become the markers of the beginning of her story, her opportunity
to realize a sense of belonging, however fraught and frightening, after years of
caring for her demanding, unappreciative, invalid mother.
Alison Bechdel, in her 2006 graphic memoir entitled Fun Home, also utilizes
the intersections of belonging, home space, and storytelling in order to unravel
Bechdel’s relationship with her father, Bruce, who died by an apparent suicide
after his homosexuality and his many affairs with younger men were exposed.
 The haunting of Fun Home 143
Bechdel1 opens the memoir with a chapter called, “Old Father, Old Artificer,”
in which she ruminates on her father’s relationship to the family’s Victorian-
era home in their small Pennsylvania town (purchased in 1962, not long after
the events of Hill House). She portrays her father as a meticulous renovator and
decorator,

an alchemist of appearance, a savant of surface, a Daedalus of design . . .

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that skillful artificer, that mad scientist who built the wings for his son and
designed the famous labyrinth and who answered not to the laws of society,
but to those of his craft.
(6–7)

Bruce practices this craft at the cost of his own family’s well-being, and Alison
sets her own aesthetic in opposition to her father’s: “Spartan to my father’s Athe-
nian. Modern to his Victorian. Butch to his nelly. Utilitarian to his aesthete” (15).
The attention to detail also figures into Bruce’s occupation as an undertaker in the
family-owned funeral home (the “fun home” of the title). The care Bruce takes
to create this home environment is, according to Bechdel, a manifestation of his
identity. Alison’s own sense of belonging is bound up in his identity, so opposi-
tional yet identical to her own. The story of her father’s coming-out is also the
story of Alison finding a place in the world and within her own home.
Because huge, old, possibly haunted Victorian homes figure prominently in
Jackson’s classic novel of Gothic horror and Bechdel’s acclaimed graphic mem-
oir, I find it impossible to ignore how characters’ attempts at storytelling figure
into their encounters with their domestic environments. Relationships to history –
public and personal – are an extension of how Eleanor and Alison incorpo-
rate themselves into a home environment as well as how they challenge the con-
ventions that bear heavily on those environments. The embodiment of domestic
practices in both texts uncovers not just essential acts of storytelling but also
how storytelling leads to empowerment. Both Eleanor and Alison tell stories from
within their respective homes to create and voice personal histories tied to domes-
tic practices that disrupt normative life trajectories. This disruption of normativity
produces, as J. Jack Halberstam explains, “alternative temporalities by allowing
their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics
that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience – namely, birth,
marriage, reproduction, and death” (2). But these practices go beyond devel-
opments toward Alison’s burgeoning lesbian identity and Eleanor’s presumed,
suppressed lesbianism into the realm of “queer time,” “a term for those specific
models of temporality that emerge within postmodernism once one leaves the
temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and
inheritance” (Halberstam 3). Essential to their narratives of futurity is the dismay
each feels at the possible life trajectories placed before them. Situated within the
Gothic mansions, Alison and Eleanor inhabit and enliven a queer time and space,
which allows them to voice narratives of alternative futures and to upset the pro-
ductivity of family life that conventional domesticity lauds.
 144 Jill E. Anderson
Because I posit that both novels are works of domestic fiction, Kristin Jacob-
son’s phrase “neodomestic fiction” is pertinent here. Jacobson argues that
neodomestic fiction “map[s] a revised generic conception of domesticity that
self-consciously addresses the ways in which various Americans have been (dis)
enfranchised” (29). Because nineteenth-century domestic fiction emphasizes the
struggles of straight, white, Protestant, usually middle-class women, neodomes-
tic fiction articulates the stories of others. It also, like earlier domestic fiction,
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“feature[s] a self-consciousness about the home’s physical space and the proj-
ect of homemaking,” but unlike it, “neodomestic fiction advances a politics of
domestic instability, particularly emphasized through its distinctive domestic
spaces and conclusions” (3). This instability, Jacobson explains, is manifest in the
fiction through three interconnected practices:

(1) “mobility,” bell hooks’s notion that home is not one place but locations;
(2) “relational space,” an understanding that the domestic sphere depends on
‘outside’ or ‘foreign’ relations and vice versa; and (3) “renovation” or “rede-
sign,” the active construction and (re)design of the (conventional) domestic
sphere and its concomitant effects on community and the self.
(29)

Although Jacobson’s work focuses exclusively on novels written after 1980,

her emphasis on instability and the need for a general troubling of categories is
central to my reading Jackson and Bechdel’s work as neodomestic fiction. To
varying degrees, Hill House and Fun Home renovate accepted, conventional
domestic practices, inside and outside the home, in relational spaces. Eleanor
and Alison also enact attempts at mobility or mapping other communities and
homespaces in order to alleviate alienation from their own biological families
and to destabilize accepted “chronobiopolitics.” This is Elizabeth Freeman’s
term for the concept of “having a life” that is “event-centered, goal-oriented,
intentional, and culminating in epiphanies or major transformations. The logic
of time-as-productive thereby becomes one of serial cause and effect: the past
seems useless unless it predicts and becomes material for a future” (5). While
the manner in which Eleanor and Alison “have” lives within their domestic
environments and construct their narratives seems oriented toward transforma-
tion, a closer look at these specific events confirms they are productive in creat-
ing other paths.
In particular, these domestic practices include acts of revisionist history-making,
reading, writing, and storytelling that subvert normative histories and engage
with what could be labeled queer possibilities.2 I like Diana Fuss’s argument that
“[h]omosexual production emerges . . . as a kind of ghost-writing, a writing which
is at once a recognition and a refusal of the cultural representation of ‘the homo-
sexual’ as phantom Other” (4). Fuss sees the need for ghostwriting as stemming
from “a certain preoccupation with the homosexual as specter and phantom, as
spirit and revenant, as abject and undead” (3). This invocation of ghostliness not
only connects the practice of queer production to the Gothic tradition, which I
 The haunting of Fun Home 145
discuss later in this essay, but also emphasizes the wider possibilities of crafting
one’s history in opposition to accepted conventions.
Jackson’s best-selling volumes of domestic sketches, 1953’s Life Among the
Savages and 1957’s Raising Demons, preceded the publication of Hill House. The
two volumes collected the writings Jackson had previously published in women’s
magazines, work she did to earn income to support herself and her family. To
my mind, the sketches provide an important model for Jackson’s attitude toward
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domestic life, an attitude that is amplified in such works as Hill House, her short
stories, and other novels, like We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) and The
Sundial (1958). As the collections’ titles would suggest, Jackson’s tone fluctuates
between bemused frustration and humored distraction as she (or the narrator, who
is never named but is most assuredly based closely on Jackson herself) recalls
the exploits of her four children and her daily domestic struggles. In the second
sketch in Life Among the Savages, Jackson opines, “all women, but especially
housewives, tend to think in lists” (77). After finding multiple scraps of paper in
her coat pocket with random reminders written on them, Jackson

realized how thoroughly the housekeeping mind falls into the list pattern,
how basically the idea of a series of items, following one another docilely,
forms the only possible reasonable approach to life if you have to live it with
a home and a husband and children, none of whom would dream of following
one another docilely.
(77)

She highlights the routineness of her domestic practices, and while she never
openly expresses dissatisfaction with this life, she is always working from the
sense that domestic life is, after all, disappointing and restrictive at its best. Rais-
ing Demons actually includes an epigraph that excerpts the Grimoire of Honorius,
a textbook of black magic attributed to Pope Honorius III during the twelfth cen-
tury. It is the book’s conjuration, which requests the demons to arrive in “comely
human form when you are called” and to “make [no] attempt upon the body, soul,
or spirit of the reader, nor inflict any harm on those who may accompany him.”
“Raising demons,” then, refers to not only bringing up her children but also the
conjuring of the demonic spirits writing and reading such a book would confer.
As the demonic conjuration in Raising Demons would suggest, Jackson is inter-
ested in elements of darkness and possible evil of the Gothic tradition. The most
obvious aspects that connect Jackson to this long-standing genre is her reliance on
elements of fear and thrill-seeking, her characters’ relationship to an old home that
harbors secrets, the use of plot devices such as mystery, darkness, madness, and
doubling, and a reliance on the supernatural. While the purpose of this essay is not
to rehash other critics’ legitimate arguments in this vein, there are some elements
of Gothic literature that are pertinent to my argument about the queer domestic
practices in both Jackson and Bechdel. Generally, Gothic literature features the
prospect that “[w]hen the domestic realm itself figures as a site of terror, however,
domestic ideology is undercut. Misery, unhappiness, and crime not only pervade
 146 Jill E. Anderson
households, they arrive from within them” (Wagner 110). The home cannot be
a site of idealized family life and clear-cut domestic responsibilities. Instead of
underscoring the clockwork-like nature of the daily activities of maintaining a
household, Gothic literature emphasizes the temporality of survival, whether
physical or psychological. The familial home, rather than providing a space of
safety and security from the outer world, actually replicates the dangers and anxi-
eties experienced in public spaces.
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As Dr. Montague explains in Hill House, the mansion is specifically planned

to be “off.” “[E]very angle is slightly wrong” in Hill House (105). The physi-
cal and psychic discomfort experienced by the inhabitants is deliberate. Hugh
Crain, the mansion’s first owner and the architect of its strangeness, disrupts
expectations about “right” angles: “Angles which you assume are the right
angles you are accustomed to, and have every right to expect are true, are actu-
ally a fraction of a degree off in one direction or another” (105). The inhabitants
experience this off-ness through darkness, claustrophobia (Hill House feels to
Eleanor like “a very tight belt”), and drifting, often losing large amounts of time
merely trying to navigate the mansion to find the dining room, for example. This
feeling of off-ness and drifting begins to take its toll on Eleanor’s sense of well-
being and disrupts the way she imagines her time at the mansion. Hill House
appears “somehow to have formed itself, flying together into its own powerful
pattern under the hands of its builders, fitting itself into its own construction of
lines and angles,” colliding with the idea that its inhabitants are what make a
home a home (25).3
Because much of Hill House takes place during what we might call the “lei-
sure” time of the inhabitants, Jackson underscores the domestic practices that
effectively queer notions of accepted, idealized housework. Even though Eleanor
declares herself “on vacation,” she is actually an active participant in Dr. Mon-
tague’s supernatural experiment. Her “work” there consists of being receptive to
the possibility of ghostly encounters, and in turn recording her observations of the
strange occurrences around Hill House. Her work is to be, to exist and observe.
But stripped of regular domestic tasks – cooking, cleaning, and caretaking –
Theodora and Eleanor develop a fondness for playfully listing activities aloud to
each other and mocking household duties in the manner of upper-class ladies-at-
leisure. Activities such as tending grapes, searching for gravestones around the
estate, and holding picnic lunches by the brook are named but ultimately remain
unperformed by the end of the novel. Naming these activities, I would argue, is
the women’s way of acting as inhabitants of a cohesive household. This verbal
play is one way they “have a life” during their time in Hill House. Indeed, the
women share many things throughout the novel – clothing, a bed, secrets, plans
for their futures – and develop a bond that has been read by many critics as essen-
tially a lesbian relationship, which would certainly upset the conventional life
trajectory for women in the midcentury.4
In a world in which a young woman’s options are fairly limited, the pain-
fully shy Eleanor cannot ultimately reconcile herself to a life that might include,
 The haunting of Fun Home 147
after meeting Theodora, a same-sex companion. While some critics label Theo-
dora explicitly lesbian, the doubling that occurs with Eleanor marks her as a
queer presence in the novel as well. Eleanor has a mantra – “Journeys end in
lovers meeting” – and it serves to remind her that not only does her excursion
to Hill House hold the possibility of a new future for her but also the journey
will presumably end in some manner. Besides, “lovers” is general enough to
cover multiple possibilities. At one point, Eleanor seemingly weds herself to Hill
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House, thinking she will never leave, marking the house itself as a lover. Colin
Haines, in Frightened by a Word: Shirley Jackson and the Lesbian Gothic, notes
that “lesbian apparationality” – that is, lesbianism as it exists through ghostly
presences – is reversed in Hill House because the mansion itself “emulate[s] het-
erosexual coitus” (63). Haines notes that much of the haunting that occurs in the
novel is through Hill House’s “attempt to make them identify with its normative
vision but also its attempt to dissuade them from identifying in any other way”
(63). Perhaps the idea that the house reinforces heteronormativity and repro-
time, with Hugh Crain’s patriarchal figurehead still looming over the inhabit-
ants, is what makes Theodora and Eleanor’s homemaking practices so poignant.
The acts of homemaking that occur between these two signal domestic prac-
tices that cannot exist in real time. They are fantasy, essentially, and in a realm
where keeping time and having a life seem to be valued, unrealizable fantasies
are finally useless. Eleanor’s earlier fantasy about wandering into a “fairyland,
protected poisonously from the eyes of people passing” proves unrealizable (20).
In this fantasy fairyland, she plays the prodigal princess, for whom “the queen
waits, weeping, waiting for the princess to return. She will drop her embroidery
when she sees me . . . And we shall live happily ever after” (20). The most obvi-
ous way to read the queen-princess relationship would be as a mother-daughter
one; given hints of Eleanor’s proclivities, though, the fantasy could underscore
Eleanor’s same-sex desires.
The foil to Theodora and Eleanor’s playful taskmistresses and Eleanor’s fan-
tastical fairyland is the mansion’s caretaker, Mrs. Dudley. She has an obsessive
timing of her own domestic duties which stands in sharp contrast to Eleanor and
Theodora’s easygoing leisure time:

I set dinner on the dining-room sideboard at six sharp. You can serve your-
selves. I clear up in the morning. I have breakfast ready for you at nine. That’s
the way I agreed to do. I can’t keep the rooms up the way you’d like, but
there’s no one else you could get that would help me. I don’t wait on people.
What I agreed to, it doesn’t mean I wait on people.
(27)

In Mrs. Dudley, we see domestic practices as methodical and necessary to the

functioning of the household. Since Mrs. Dudley lives off-site, she is able to leave,
unlike Eleanor, and can remove herself from the strange activities of the others.
Despite her role as “house-keeper,” she is not actually a part of the household.
 148 Jill E. Anderson
Dara Downey, however, recognizes Mrs. Dudley as essential to the functioning of
Hill House as a “polluted space”:

With Mrs. Dudley as its agent, everything in Hill House remains in its
appointed place, and nowhere else, leaving little or no room for alteration or
addition. As a result of this, its malevolence resides . . . in the negative effect
that it has on those who themselves pollute it by violating its boundaries – in
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other words, by adding something that is not proper to it.

(187)

So, as Mrs. Dudley maintains the “proper” orderliness of the home objects and
timing, Theodora and Eleanor disturb it with their unconventional domestic prac-
tices. Using Downey’s reasoning would mean that Hill House’s malice does not
come in the form of the vengeful and tormented ghosts that others imagine reside
there; instead the darkness resides within Eleanor and her queered sense of being.
But the fantasy also reveals just how precarious and liminal Eleanor’s life is.
Significantly, an initial fantasy occurs while Eleanor is en route to Hill House
from her sister’s home, in which she occupies a small room. The fantasies cause
Eleanor, in imagining this “new time,” to dream up other domestic activities
that would go along with her leisure time. Driving past a large, old home in the
town outside Hill House, she spots stone lions flanking the steps, and thinks, “in
these few seconds I have lived a lifetime in a house with two lions in front” (12).
What follows is a detailed description, imagined in the past tense, of the meticu-
lous care she would take of the stone lions and the life she would live out in the
home. Her ability to fast-forward to “having a life” so quickly and to imaging the
small, domestic responsibilities she would have on her own reveal what Bernice
M. Murphy sees as “a very real link between Jackson’s obvious preoccupation
with houses and living spaces and the enormous and rapid changes in Ameri-
can living and domestic patterns which took place the time at which she wrote”
(18). While Hill House is decidedly not suburban, isolated on a hill outside of
the tiny town of Hillsdale, it is important to note Murphy’s insistence that the
“liminal status” of the suburbs, “neither one thing, nor another, but something
in-between – is part of what helps make American suburbia the perfect breeding
ground for fictional expressions of anxiety and unease. Fear breeds in cracks”
(20). For Eleanor, Hill House is simultaneously a relational, transitional space,
between her old life with her mother and sister to her new life, on her own or
with Theodora, and a permanent resting place. When Eleanor, finally at the peak
of her instability and madness, realizes she is home at Hill House, that hominess
is accompanied by a strange set of practices – she declares that she has flown “in
and out the windows” and has danced with Hugh Crain’s statue. She climbs to
the tower on her way to the library at night and continues to goad Theodora about
her future plans. She occupies another liminal space during this time between a
hopeful, almost drunk, joyousness and the terror of knowing that she is becom-
ing even more unstable. These two states of mind coexist in Eleanor, eventually
making her unable to stay at Hill House but ultimately homeless, incapable of
 The haunting of Fun Home 149
being anywhere at all. Eleanor is haunted by her in-between-ness, and it eventu-
ally proves deadly.
Real ghosts also appear to haunt Eleanor. For one, her mother speaks to her
from the grave, attempting to beckon her back to the home from which Elea-
nor always felt alienated. As the caretaker to her now-dead mother, Eleanor is
so accustomed to her mother’s demands and their domestic rhythms that they
invade Eleanor’s sleep. Tricia Lootens sees this “intimacy, which is simultane-
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ously familial and erotic” as the most terrifying aspect of the hauntings:

What happens in Hill House is a process, not merely a “sighting”; a haunt-

ing, not merely a ghost. At its source is the house’s growing knowledge of its
inhabitants’ illusions and of their deadly needs. Hill House’s ghosts are what
Jackson called the “statement and resolution” of its inhabitants’ apparently
insoluble problems; the haunting is personally designed for the haunted. What
Hill House reveals to its guests is a brutal, inexorable version of the “absolute
reality” of nuclear families that kill where they are supposed to nurture.
(151)

Further, Lootens sees Hill House as a novel in which “women are destroyed by
the nuclear family, sexual repression, and romantic notions of feminine self-
sacrifice,” and she argues that the ultimate source of terror in the novel is the
“disintegration of a woman’s personality” (152, 151). It is the separation from her
familial home and nuclear family that allows Eleanor to escape, while simultane-
ously destroying her in the end. If Hill House, at least in the beginning, signifies
freedom, Eleanor is able to form her own family unit: Dr. Montague and company
“were a family, greeting one another with easy informality and going to the chairs
they had used last night at dinner, their own places at the table” (71). I would even
argue that Dr. Montague and company’s reading of the Crain family documents is
a generative act of family formation. Dr. Montague relates the family’s history to
the others as a father would to his children.
But the ghostly mother is deeply ingrained in Eleanor’s psyche, and she
attempts to draw Eleanor back into a world of loneliness and containment from
which she narrowly escapes (only after stealing the car she partially owns with
her sister, who has forbidden it to her). The ghost mother is the embodiment of the
past as well as a personification of Eleanor’s attempts to reconcile herself to her
previous imprisonment within her mother’s home. Despite her desire to write her
own story and to establish a set of domestic practices on her own terms, she is not
just haunted by the ghost mother. Ensconced in Hill House, she is only replicating
her imprisonment, but it seems like imprisonment on her own terms. When Theo-
dora asks Eleanor to tell her about her home, Eleanor crafts an elaborate lie about
living alone in an apartment where “[e]verything has to be exactly the way I want
it, because there’s only me to use it” (64). But it is a poorly crafted lie, and it does
not hold up under scrutiny. Eleanor’s lie further emphasizes her innate aloneness.
Again, Eleanor’s storytelling is instructive of her hopes for future happi-
ness along a route of living that cannot ultimately suit her. In The Promise of
 150 Jill E. Anderson
Happiness, Sara Ahmed explains, “[t]he biography of a person is intimately
bound up with objects. We could say that our biographies are biographies of likes
and dislikes” (27). “The promising nature of happiness,” Ahmed further clarifies,
“suggests happiness lies ahead of us, at least if we do the right thing” (29). Orien-
tation toward the “right” kinds of objects, ones that can be considered as “social
goods,” puts one “in line” with a particular affect or community based on that
affect. One goes “out of line with an affective community,” Ahmed argues, when
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one does “not experience pleasure from proximity to objects that are attributed as
social goods” (41). Eleanor constructs a fantasy of her wanted life, centering on
things like the stone lions mentioned earlier, and white curtains in an apartment
of her own. These objects, to her mind, are “in line” for a young woman. Eleanor
attaches to such fantasies because, as Jackson explains early in the novel, she

could not remember ever being truly happy in her adult life; her years with her
mother had been built up devotedly around small guilts and small reproaches,
constant weariness, and unending despair. Without ever wanting to become
reserved and shy, she had spent so long alone, with no one to love, that it
was difficult for her to talk, even casually, to another person without self-
consciousness and an awkward inability to find words.
(3)

Much of Hill House, then, is about Eleanor’s pursuit of happiness, and “Eleanor,
in short, would have gone anywhere” to find it (4). Just as she is setting out for
Hill House, Eleanor admonishes herself for having “let more time go by,” won-
dering, “what had been done with all those wasted summer days; how could she
have spent them so wantonly?” (10). She comes to consider time and her orien-
tation toward the future and possible happiness in the “miles and hours” of her
“lovely journey” since “[t]ime is beginning in June, she assured herself, but it is a
time that is strangely new and of itself” (11, 12).
Surprisingly, after the first prolonged haunting incident, Eleanor awakes,
thinking,

I am unbelievably happy. Journeys end in lovers meeting; I have spent an all

but sleepless night, I have told lies and made a fool of myself, and the very
air tastes like wine. I have been frightened half out of my wits, but I have
somehow earned this joy; I have been waiting for it for so long.
(100)

It is debatable, however, whether Eleanor’s pursuit of happiness is successful. On

the one hand, she feels for a time the unbelievable joy of belonging to a place and
a family of her choosing, but on the other, she deliberately steers her car into a
tree when she is forced to leave the mansion for her own “good.” Eleanor, despite
her imaginative efforts to engage in domestic practices that help her to craft a
narrative from which she can draw a sense of belonging, finally fails. Her failure,
I would argue, occurs for two reasons: through no fault of her own, having been
 The haunting of Fun Home 151
born in a world that offers women limited options outside of the normative trajec-
tory, the queer, ungrounded Eleanor “must” die; and secondly, because she insists
on the redemptive power of Hill House, an “insane,” horror-inducing place, she
absorbs and is absorbed by its off-ness.
The Gothic revival home in Fun Home is not haunted or horrific in the same
way as Hill House. It is not insane or at odd angles. Instead, the anxieties and
horrors of Bechdel’s work of Gothicism emerge from reflections of the domestic
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practices that occur there. Here, I reference the Oxford English Dictionary’s
definition of horror as a way to invoke elements of Gothic horror fiction perti-
nent to my argument about domestic practices: “A painful emotion compounded
of loathing and fear; a shuddering with terror and repugnance; strong aversion
mingled with dread; the feeling excited by something shocking or frightful.”
Perhaps it is overstating the matter to say that Fun Home is full of loathing,
repugnance, and strong aversions (although these are emotions that Eleanor
clearly feels for her own mother in Hill House). In fact, Stephen King explains,
“The purpose of horror fiction is not only to explore taboo lands but to confirm
our own good feelings about the status quo by showing us extravagant visions
of what the alternative might be” (298). Like Hill House, Fun Home provides its
narrator with a collection of domestic practices that challenges the status quo,
both inside and outside the familial home. To a lesser extent, then, the painful
emotions and shock that Alison feels at her father’s secret life and his eventual
suicide reveal the kinds of domestic practices in which she engages in order to
“have a life.”
Part of this challenge to status quo and stability comes through the hauntings
that occur throughout Bechdel’s memoir. The text is haunted by the likeness of
her father as well as the redrawn ephemera of her family life. Some critics also
argue that the multilayered representations of Bechdel’s literary influences are a
pointed attempt at raising the “low” status of the graphic narrative. While all of
these elements are essential in reading Bechdel’s work as both autobiography and
graphic narrative (or “autographic,” to invoke Gillian Whitlock’s term, to define
the convergence of the visual-verbal techniques used in works of graphic autobi-
ography), my focus on hauntings here borrows from the idea that

the sense of the past that pervades Gothic literature does not encourage the
writer to explain origins in clear relation to end-points in a seamless lin-
ear narrative. Nor does the writer seize on history as a coherent field that is
subject to authorial control. . . . Instead, history controls and determines the
writer. Gothic texts return obsessively to the personal, the familial, and the
national pasts to complicate rather than to clarify them, but mainly to impli-
cate the individual in a deep morass of American desires and deeds that allow
no final escape from or transcendence of them.
(Savoy 169)

For Bechdel, the act of writing about her past and the way that past continuously
haunts Alison’s life is never an orderly, stabilizing task. Crafting a story of her
 152 Jill E. Anderson
personal past follows a nonlinear trajectory of its own, and at times she aligns it
with pivotal moments of national history, like the Stonewall Riot and the Bicen-
tennial, as a way of illustrating Alison’s tenuous but very real connection to past
events. Along these same lines, Hilary Chute argues,

Bechdel’s redrawn archive, then, says more about comics as a procedure of

what I am calling embodiment, and the instantiation of handwriting as a grip-
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ping index of a material, subjective, situated body, than it does about the state
of the archive as a stable register of truth.
(193)

Altogether, this instability contains a marked concern with how one fits in the
narrative of normativity.
Bechdel’s formulation of both a personal, family archive and a queer, public
history handily challenges the public/private split. As Alison travels with her fam-
ily to New York City just a few weeks after the Stonewall Riots, she witnesses
the interplay of “bourgeois vs. aristocratic, homo vs. hetero, city vs. country, eros
vs. art” (102). Unlike Eleanor, Alison is in tune with political events and their
parallels with her own life. She describes the “many heavy-handed plot devices
to befall” her family during the summer of Nixon’s impeachment as a means of
connecting shared, public moments with her own family’s turmoil (155). Alison’s
reference to Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On and its opening lines con-
nect the beginning of the AIDS epidemic to the Bicentennial celebrations in New
York City: “Or maybe I’m trying to render my senseless personal loss meaningful
by linking it, however posthumously, to a more coherent narrative. A narrative
of injustice, of sexual shame and fear, of life considered expendable” (196). So
in this way, Alison’s narrative is not just haunted by her personal ghosts but also
full of the specters of others who have suffered at the hands of homophobia and
ignorance.
Normativity and homophobia are concerns for Bechdel in other bodies of work.
As an early archivist and activist for the lesbian community, Bechdel ran her
groundbreaking comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For for over two decades. In the
cartoonist’s introduction to the 2008 collection The Essential Dykes to Watch Out
For, Bechdel briefly sketches her trajectory from a child who doodled to college
student whose coming-out was facilitated by writers such as Adrienne Rich and
magazines like Common Lives, Lesbian Lives. As Bechdel portrays herself in the
various panels, sifting through old film reels in a huge library full of filing cabi-
nets, trying to locate files of her old work, she directly addresses the reader:

I had set to name the unnamed, to depict the undepicted, to make lesbians
visible, and I had done it! . . . You can’t pin things down without changing
them, somehow. Good lord. How many young women have told me these
were the first lesbians they ever met? That my cartoon characters were – oh,
I can hardly say the words – choke – role models!
(xvii, emphases in original)
 The haunting of Fun Home 153
She further worries: “Have I churned out episodes of this comic strip every
two weeks for decades merely to prove that we’re the same as everyone else?!”
(xviii). Indeed, Bechdel’s concern raises some of the same issues of the various
branches of the LGBTQ movements, the idea that the push for rights associated
with heteronormative life – marriage, childrearing, benefits, and so forth – merely
replicates that same heteronormative life to which many in the LGBTQ commu-
nity stand openly or implicitly opposed. I include this bit from Bechdel’s comic
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collection because it signals a general concern about where lesbians and gays fit
into the structured, established chronobiopolitics, to invoke Freeman’s phrase. In
turn, Fun Home seeks the domestic practices that mark normative family life, with
a family headed by two biological parents who “make” a home to at least facilitate
the façade of normative living. But, as Bechdel points out over and over, Alison’s
family has very little to do with “everyone else.” Unlike Eleanor in Hill House,
who seeks to make a family from the people assembled in the mansion, Alison
illustrates that the very presence of a nuclear family does not actually signal a
normative life.
When Alison describes her familial home as “an artists’ colony,” she is high-
lighting both their familiarity and division: “We ate together, but otherwise were
absorbed in our separate pursuits” (134). This description accompanies a panel
depicting the home’s exterior and bubbles with the shadows of each member of
the household engaged in their own practices – brothers playing guitar or building
airplane models, mother at her piano, father at his renovation work, and Alison
drawing at her desk. This view as an outsider looking in disrupts the narrative of
the family’s artistic pursuits and reminds the reader that they are not, just as Ali-
son is not at times, part of the domestic practices that make this home a home and
this family a family. But as Bechdel hands us the possibility that Alison desires
to run from her familial home, as Eleanor does in Hill House, she argues that that
home and those artistic practices Alison inherits and learns from her family are
essential in the formation of Alison’s narrative:

It’s tempting to suggest, in retrospect, that our family was a sham. That our
house was not a real home at all but a simulacrum of one, a museum. Yet we
really were a family, and we really did live in those period rooms.
(17)

But Alison’s “way of life,” with her readymade family and fairly comfortable,
carefully curated home, is just as fragile as Eleanor’s life as she moves from her
mother’s home to her sister’s and finally to Hill House. The desire to flee seems
to be a logical conclusion for these women who feel imprisoned in their famil-
ial environments. As they enact their domestic practices, though, the need to get
away, to “have a life,” and to write one’s own history is legible only through the
familial bonds.
Alison’s preservation of certain domestic practices highlights the complex,
oppositional practices she performs in order to set herself apart from her family
dynamic. Alison explains, “I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture
 154 Jill E. Anderson
like children and his children like furniture,” after several frames in which Bechdel
illustrates the meticulous and passionate care Bruce takes of his household goods
(14). By opening the narrative with an explanation of Bruce’s obsessive care and
focus on the antique, overly adorned, and florid goods, Bechdel is highlighting
Alison’s disdain for and distrust of an overemphasis on home interiors. Part of this
distrust stems from how “[t]he visual realm is thus experienced by young Alison
as a patriarchal sphere of control – a sphere with which she must negotiate to
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claim her own vision and gender identity” (Lyndenburg 107). For Alison, seeing
and witnessing the curation of her father’s household goods are another way of
experiencing his hold over her personal history. This idea of home as a patriarchal
sphere of control carries another connection to Jackson’s novel. Hill House, as I
mentioned earlier, is “off” and at odd angles, designed and constructed by Hugh
Crain, the long dead but still very present patriarch. The discovery of a huge
marble statue in the conservatory, with Crain as a mythological figure attended
by his two nymph daughters, is a “symbol of protection of the house,” “carefully,
and at great expense, constructed to offset the uncertainty of the floor on which it
stands” (Jackson 79, 80). The statue is a symbol of Crain’s control, much in the
same way Bruce’s drapes and ornate lamps control the way Alison experiences
her home life.
But Fun Home is an important “statement of liberation, in that it suggests that
the lesbian – in constructing her family narrative as well as her own subjectivity –
is free to reverse roles, shatter spatiotemporal limitations, and give birth to herself
through a narrative act of reproduction” (Mitchell). Alison repeatedly queers her
relationship to her familial home and the seemingly stable nuclear family within
it. The prolonged lie perpetuated by her father as well as her mother’s silences
and powerlessness cements her opposition to marriage. “‘[T]he unspoken com-
pact” that she would avoid marriage so that “I would carry on to live the artist’s
life they had each abdicated,” occurs only after Alison witnesses the animosity
and tension within her parents’ marriage (73). As a result, Alison sets up a binary
between people who lead a life driven by artistic pursuits and people who choose
family and domesticity.
Reading and writing take a central position in Alison’s domestic agenda as a
way of bonding with her father. Alison describes her artistic pursuits as obsessive-
compulsive and autographic, and importantly, the first words in her diary are
in her father’s hand: “Dad is reading.” This simple sentence, placed within Ali-
son’s diary and written in her father’s hand, is a symbolic and literal ascription
dedicated to their shared literacy. Like in the artist’s colony frames, “That Old
Catastrophe” closes with a panel that is from outside the home, looking in. Alison
and Bruce are each framed by library windows, lighted from within and outlined
by the home’s ornate shutters and curtains – the careful work of Bruce. Alison is
in the act of writing a check to herself and her father is reading a biography of
Zelda Fitzgerald. The “last, tenuous bond” that closes the chapter is Alison’s hope
and insistence that her father’s death had something to do with her, despite her
suspicion that he had timed it to coincide with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s. Reading and
authorship are, for Alison and Bruce, one way of establishing and sanctioning a
 The haunting of Fun Home 155
familial bond. This emerges not just from the act of Bechdel penning her memoir
but also from the creation and reproduction of a specific archive in Fun Home.5
Bechdel’s archive deserves attention since, according Ann Cvetkovich, “it pro-
vides such a compelling challenge to celebratory queer histories that threaten
to erase more disturbing and unassimilable inheritances” (126). Further, part of
Cvetkovich’s project is to “queer perspectives on trauma that challenge the rela-
tion between the catastrophic and the everyday and that make public space for
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lives whose very ordinariness makes them historically meaningful” (112).

Because she can live in between and has transferable skills (i.e., multiple lit-
eracies), Alison thrives, unlike Eleanor. Eleanor’s experiences with literacy are
limited to reading romance novels to her bedridden mother and crafting her own
stilted stories. When she arrives at Hill House, she remains suspicious of read-
ing, particularly as she avoids the library. Eleanor does not see the library as the
intellectual center of the home but rather as a repository for the materials of her
fear, suspicion, and captivity. Her suspicion of the library is compounded by the
discovery of Hugh Crain’s book. He wrote and illustrated a series of frightening
and grotesque instructions for his daughters, based on biblical excerpts:

Honor thy father and thy mother, Daughter, authors of thy being, upon whom
a heavy charge has been laid, that they lead their child in innocence and righ-
teousness along the fearful narrow path to everlasting bliss, and render her up
at last to her God a pious and virtuous soul.
(Jackson 124)

Crain’s book only reinforces the patriarchal control he still holds over Hill House,
even in death, but the books Alison is surrounded by in her father’s library actu-
ally perform her independence. So even while Bruce’s library in Fun Home is
carefully curated to contain his idea of great intellectual material and Alison even-
tually rejects that version of the canon, it starts her on her own literary discover-
ies. Bruce does not explicitly attempt to rein in Alison with her choice of reading
material. Literacy is autonomy in their family, not the act through which a mother
controls a daughter’s mobility. Consequently, Alison does not have the same asso-
ciation with libraries that Eleanor has. While Hill House’s library is haunted by
stories Eleanor ties to her mother’s abuse, the library in Alison’s home becomes a
space for the cultivation of her own liberation and literacy.
Alison’s literacy is a transferrable skill, which allows her to move from the
domestic sphere to public places. Pointedly, the reading practices that Alison
cultivates outside her familial home are the practices that allow her to craft her
sexual narrative in order to assimilate it with her domestic self. As so many les-
bian authors before her have explained, the recognition of Alison’s lesbianism
takes linguistic form first, as a prominent word in her dictionary. What follows,
through reproductions of literary, biographical, and scientific texts, is Alison’s
own reading practice becoming solidified in her own life as well as the narrative.
For example, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, a decisive work of the
lesbian canon, is marked as pivotal not just for Alison. Alison’s alternative canon
 156 Jill E. Anderson
links her oppositional reading practices and her burgeoning identification as a
lesbian, socially, academically, and physically. In a clear attempt to meld theory
with practice, Bechdel illustrates Alison’s semester spent in bed reading with her
lover – inspired by Alison having overheard someone explain, “Feminism is the
theory. Lesbianism is the practice” (80). Bechdel clearly represents the connec-
tion between Alison’s reading of certain canonical works – The World of Pooh, for
example, and the dictionary – as an oppositional practice set alongside her sexual
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practices. It is essential that her canon is oppositional to her father’s and starts
to take shape outside of her familial homespace. After she discovers her father’s
sexuality and infidelity, she notes, “Home, as I had known it, was gone. Some
crucial structure seemed to be missing, like in dreams I would have later where
termites had eaten through all the floor joists” (215–16). Unlike the artists’ colony
Alison imagines before, a family working together yet separately, the home is
fractured, a “tinderbox,” according to her mother. This fracturing impels Alison
to abscond to the local library as another way to reinforce her reading practices –
this time picking up Kate Millet’s Flying and examining Millet’s participation in
the lesbian community.
Alison experiences this fracturing again in reconstructing her father’s library –
not just the physical space but the objects themselves – in Fun Home. Bruce’s
elaborate play between fact and fiction is pointedly encoded in the space of the
library. The library becomes a site of fantasies that tie Bruce’s sexual identity
and machinations to his pretense to great literacies. Bechdel points out the indi-
cators of the library’s affectation and falseness – statues of Mephistopheles and
Don Quixote, gilded valances, and flocked wallpaper – and then Bechdel illus-
trates Bruce as a “Fitzgerald character.” Bechdel also shows Bruce with copies of
This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby, and later Alison aligns her father’s
suicide with Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” “because its juxtaposition of
catastrophe with a plush domestic interior is life with my father in a nutshell”
(83). Bruce’s canon is illustrative of the long-established white, hetero, masculin-
ist tradition to which Alison sees herself as heir and rebel. Hilary Chute sees this
“narrative conceit of telling and showing a private story through ‘great books’”
as another kind of haunting: “of replication – of generation, of reproduction, of
repetition-only-maybe-with-a-difference” (183). Generating a space in the nar-
rative for Bruce’s library and reading practices allows Bechdel to explore other,
creative types of reproduction.
Map drawing is another pivotal reproduction in Fun Home. Maps destabilize
ideas of public space and private space, because they inscribe Alison’s personal
history and life through outdoor, public spaces. Alison shows the map in her Wind
in the Willows coloring book next to a map of where her hometown is situated
near the Allegheny Mountains. She finds that “the best thing about the Wind in
the Willows map was its mystical bridging of the symbolic and the real, of the
label and the thing itself. It was a chart, but also a vivid, almost animated picture”
(147). This closing of the gap between signified and signifier is for Alison another
important way of recognizing the multivalent possibilities of storytelling. When
she maps the trajectory of her father’s existence, she does so because she is telling
 The haunting of Fun Home 157
his story as well as repeating the link between domestic practice and the outside
world. The map includes his places of birth, childhood, death, and his gravesite
all within a narrow mile and a half diameter. Alison notes, “This narrow compass
suggests a provincialism on my father’s part that is both misleading and accurate”
(30). Later, Bechdel presents the map again, ascribed with Bruce’s trajectory –
BORN, LIVED, DIED, BURIED – and the admission that “my father’s life was
a solipsistic circle of self, from autodidact to autocrat to autocide” (140). She
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connects this to her own tendency toward autobiography, but with a difference,
of course. Because she is not interested in the seeming smallness of her life, she
chooses to illustrate her own narrative as one both deeply preoccupied with the
domestic life of her family and in considerable resistance to it. Put another way,
the drawing and reading of maps allow the reader to see the creation of the physi-
cal space that aids in the telling of the story. Simultaneously, Alison’s narration
of the maps calls attention to the fact that the reader cannot inhabit that same
world themselves – Alison’s or Bruce’s. This recognition is another critical move
to destabilize expectations and categories. Again, it is a creative and generative
involution of a specific domestic sphere that reiterates Alison’s project of identity
formation and family history.
The domestic spheres represented in Hill House and Fun Home are radically
different, but the depictions of big, haunted, Gothic homes which began this
project led me to question how storytelling and history-making are invoked as
a domestic practice. Nina Baym, who most likely coined the term “domestic fic-
tion” in 1978 as a descriptor of women’s writing during the nineteenth century,
explains,

Their fiction is mostly about social relations, generally set in homes and other
social spaces that are fully described. The detailed descriptions are some-
times idealized, but more often simply “realistic.” And, in accordance with
the needs of plot, home life is presented, overwhelmingly, as unhappy. There
are very few intact families in this literature, and those that are intact are
unstable or locked in routines of misery. Domestic tasks are arduous and
monotonous; family members oppress and abuse each other; social inter-
changes are alternately insipid or malicious. Domestic setting and descrip-
tion, then, do not by any means imply domestic idyll.
(26–27)

Both Hill House and Fun Home demonstrate the interpenetrability of domestic
life and public influence, with Hill House becoming the stage for a woman’s
social anxieties made manifest in private hauntings and Bechdel’s home the site
of another young woman seeking stability through the various acts of reading and
writing her family’s history. Besides forming narratives of identity and history,
both authors show the power, however fraught, queering conventions can hold.
Ultimately, even though Eleanor dies when she drives her car into a tree and Ali-
son survives to illustrate more of her life, each woman serves as a marker for the
power of the practice of storytelling and alternative ways of having a life.
 158 Jill E. Anderson
Notes
1 From here, I will refer to the author of Fun Home as Bechdel, and the character who
appears within the text as Bechdel’s alter ego as Alison. Because I do not have the space
here to consider the nuances between the genres of fiction and memoir, I argue from the
position that Bechdel’s text is a work of fiction – based on her life, of course – rather
than a memoir. This generic elision does not significantly alter my reading of Bechdel’s
work in any way.
2 This is not to suggest that other women have not historically engaged in subversive
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domestic practices or rewritten histories from the domestic sphere in order to imagine
alternative acts and communities, or that other feminist authors have not charted the
tensions between domestic practices and their writing career. In fact, in “Experience and
Fiction,” Jackson’s much-cited essay about the craft of fiction writing, she explains the
link between her writing career and her domestic life. After her daughter suggests that
Jackson open a stuck refrigerator door with magic, Jackson “left the refrigerator where
it was and went in to my typewriter and wrote a story about not being able to open
the refrigerator door and getting the children to open it with magic. When a magazine
bought the story, I bought a new refrigerator” (219). Experiences within the home not
only provide Jackson with the material of her work but also convert those experiences
into capital with which to fund that work and household.
3 The genesis of Hill House came from Jackson’s reading of a book of psychic researchers
who experiment with living in a haunted house during the nineteenth century, much like
Dr. Montague and his crew. Jackson claims the group “thought they were being terribly
scientific” with their methodology and reporting of the goings-on (“Experience and Fic-
tion” 225). The book, however, turned out not to be an account of the haunted house but
“the story of several earnest, I believed misguided, certainly determined people, with
their differing motivations and backgrounds” (225). Jackson rightly points out that the
stories of houses are actually the stories of those who inhabit them.
4 One such critic is Holly Blackford, who argues that Mrs. Dudley is actually Eleanor’s
double, in the same way that Mrs. Danvers doubles Rebecca in du Maurier’s Rebecca.
Blackford notes, “the house is a site of desire for young protagonists because it dis-
places their awakening sexual desires and makes female desire both productive and
palatable” (234). Blackford argues that Eleanor’s inability to be alone, her desire to be
intimate with Theo, stems from “the mental effects of the ethics of care” and the time
she has spent taking care of her mother (250). For another, more explicit exploration of
lesbianism in Hill House, see Chapter 7 in Haggerty, George. Queer Gothic. Urbana-
Champaign: U of Illinois P, 2006. Print.
5 For another take on Bechdel’s archive, see: Rohy, Valerie. “In a Queer Archive: Fun
Home.” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 16.3 (2010): 340–61. Project
Muse. Web. 21 April 2014.

Works cited
Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010. Print.
Baym, Nina. Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–
1870. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1978. Print.
Bechdel, Alison. The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008.
Print.
———. Fun Home. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Print.
Blackford, Holly. “Haunted Housekeeping: Fatal Attractions of Servant and Mistress in
Twentieth-Century Female Gothic Literature.” Literature Interpretation Theory 16
(2005): 233–61. Print.
 The haunting of Fun Home 159
Chute, Hillary L. “Animating an Archive: Repetition and Regeneration in Alison Bechdel’s
Fun Home.” Graphic Women: Life Narrative & Contemporary Comics. New York:
Columbia UP, 2010. 175–217. Print.
Cvetkovich, Ann. “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Women’s Studies
Quarterly 36.1–2 (2008): 111–28. Print.
Downey, Dara. “‘Reading Her Difficult Riddle’: Shirley Jackson and Late 1950s’ Anthro-
pology.” It Came from the 1950s!: Popular Culture, Popular Anxieties. Eds. Darryl
Jones, Elizabeth McCarthy, and Bernice M. Murphy. New York: Palgrave MacMillan,
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2011. 176–97. Print.

Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC:
Duke UP, 2010. Print.
Fuss, Diana. “Introduction: Inside/Out.” Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. Ed.
Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991. 1–12. Print.
Haines, Colin. Frightened by a Word: Shirley Jackson and the Lesbian Gothic. Uppsala,
SE: Uppsala U Library, 2007. Print.
Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Live.
New York: New York UP, 2005. Print.
Jackson, Shirley. “Experience and Fiction.” Come Along with Me: Classic Short Stories
and an Unfinished Novel. 1968. Ed. Stanley Edgar Hyman. New York: Penguin, 2012.
219–30. Print.
———. The Haunting of Hill House. 1959. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.
———. Life Among the Savages; Raising Demons. New York: Quality Paperback Book
Club, 1998. Print.
Jacobson, Kristin. Neodomestic American Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2010. Print.
King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. 1981. New York: Gallery Books, 2010. Print.
Lootens, Tricia. “‘Whose Hand Was I Holding?’: Familial and Sexual Politics in Shirley
Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.” Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy.
Ed. Bernice M. Murphy. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2005. 150–68. Print.
Lydenberg, Robin. “Under Construction: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragi-
comic.” European Journal of English Studies 16.1 (2012): 57–68. Print.
Mitchell, Adrielle. “Spectral Memory, Sexuality, and Inversion: An Arthrological Study of
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomedy.” ImageTexT 4.3 (2009): n. pag.
Web. 24 Apr. 2014.
Murphy, Bernice M. The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture. New York: Pal-
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Savoy, Eric. “The Rise of American Gothic.” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fic-
tion. Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle. New York: Cambridge UP, 2002. 167–88. Print.
Wagner, Tamara. “Gothic and the Victorian Home.” The Gothic World. Eds. Glennis Byron
and Dale Townshend. New York: Routledge, 2014. 110–20. Print.
Whitlock, Gillian. “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of the Comics.” Modern Fiction Studies
52.4 (2006): 965–79. EBSCOHost. Web. 29 May 2014.
 10 The tower or the nursery?
Paternal and maternal re-visions
of Hill House on film
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Shari Hodges Holt

Film historian Barry Curtis asserts that “[t]he idea of the ghostly has accom-
panied cinema from its earliest manifestations.” Like other communication
technologies, such as the telegraph, telephone, and radio, “the cinema created
‘phantasms’ – replicas of human beings that had a life of their own” (150–51).
Film’s uncanny ability to preserve and reanimate the dead, its simultaneous exis-
tence in the past and the present, gives it the power to manifest our cultural past
while addressing the cultural present, bridging the gaps of time and space to
present us with preternatural doubles of our own experience. Curtis notes that
“[t]he metaphor of ‘haunting’ has been deployed to explain the ways in which
films can be possessed by the milieu in which they are produced,” acting as
“a sensitive barometer of mood and cultural dispositions” (164). Film adapta-
tions, in particular, have acted as such cultural barometers by providing us with
new ways of reanimating past texts for current and future audiences by adapting
them to new cultural concerns. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House has
inspired two film adaptations that envision the novel’s themes from drastically
different perspectives determined by the cultural climate of each film’s produc-
tion. Both films deal with the fraught nature of female subjectivity addressed
in the novel, but each film’s construction of the haunted house and its attendant
ghosts manifests the gender anxieties that haunted American culture at two dif-
ferent periods in the history of feminism. Robert Wise’s 1963 film The Haunt-
ing depicts patriarchal power as the haunting force of Hill House, while Jan
De Bont’s identically titled 1999 production depicts maternal forces as equally
powerful (and ultimately triumphant). Influenced by the respective ideologies of
second- and third-wave feminism, these cinematic manifestations of Jackson’s
narrative thus reanimate and transfigure the novel’s complicated gender dynam-
ics to meet varying sociopolitical needs.
An overview of the scholarly debate about what haunts Jackson’s famous
edifice may provide an effective introduction to the contrasting perspectives of
these films. Melanie Anderson summarizes one significant critical approach to the
novel, describing Jackson’s haunted house “as a symbol of patriarchal domina-
tion” that finally turns the protagonist, Eleanor Vance, into the ghost she has been
all along because of her social marginalization in a male-dominated culture (200).
Distinguished by a phallic tower rising from the family library, Hill House is a
 Hill House on film 161
patriarchal structure, a reflection of the distorted mind of the paterfamilias Hugh
Crain, who constructed the house as domicile and eventual prison for his wife and
two daughters. The house then develops a history of subsuming and destroying
every woman associated with it (including Eleanor), thus dramatizing, accord-
ing to Anderson, the spectralization of women in a patriarchal culture that denies
them agency (204).
However, several scholars have likewise noted the maternal significance of Hill
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House,1 which, despite its phallic motifs, is described as “all so motherly,” “so
soft,” “so padded,” with “[g]reat embracing chairs and sofas which turn out to be
hard and unwelcoming when you sit down, and reject you at once” (Jackson 154).
From this perspective, the house embodies the desire for maternal love and the
reality of maternal rejection haunting the recently orphaned Eleanor. The novel
begins with Eleanor leaving behind her life as subservient daughter to a dead,
hated mother only to end with her inability to escape from a home that haunts her
with guilt over her mother’s death and her own corresponding need for maternal
affection. The house’s construction in concentric circles (Parks 134) centering on
the womb-like nursery and the ghostly manifestations in which the house seems
to bleed associate it with the reproductive functions of the female body. Respond-
ing to the spectral message, “Help Eleanor Come Home,” written on the walls in
what appears to be menstrual blood, Eleanor finally regresses into a childlike state
during her last night in the house and chases a voice she assumes is her mother’s
throughout the labyrinthine domicile. As Judie Newman asserts, Eleanor’s final
union with the house is a “reabsorption by the mother” that she both resents and
desires (qtd. in Hattenhauer, American Gothic 161), thus dramatizing her fraught
relationship with maternity and her own female sexuality.
The house is also an emblem of family, which, according to Linda Metcalf,
“is the most powerful institution of all” in Jackson’s fiction (154). In a narra-
tive filled with dysfunctional families, the distorted house embodies the twisted
nature of family dynamics, the guilt, codependence, and self-sacrifice too often
clothed in the illusion of domestic happiness. Tricia Lootens asserts that the
novel is about “the ways in which people, especially women, are destroyed by
the nuclear family, sexual repression, and romantic notions of feminine self-
sacrifice” (168). The novel’s terror therefore lies in its depiction of women as
“tied to mother or children, ruled by father or husband, bound by family law and
family romance, [. . .] by the stultifying narrowness of home and the imaginative
failure to construe alternative modes of living” (Metcalf 156). One of the most
nightmarish hauntings Eleanor and Theo experience at Hill House occurs when,
wandering in the estate gardens, they are suddenly compelled down a blackening
path where at “its destined end” they see an uncanny vision of a happy family
picnic, a beaming mother and father at its center, a vision that sends them rac-
ing to the garden walls, “scratching wildly,” “screaming . . . and begging to be
let out” (Jackson 130). Eleanor’s longing for home and family and her converse
terror at this vision of the domestic idyll express women’s complex, conflicted
relationship with the domestic realm as both sanctuary and prison, source of
fulfillment and site of oppression.
 162 Shari Hodges Holt
All of these interpretations suggest that the house acts as a nexus of the com-
plexities of female identity. Eleanor’s death dramatizes her inability to escape not
only patriarchal domination but also female biological and maternal imperatives,
her failure to balance the need for individual independence with the drive for fam-
ily and communal connection, and her ultimate inability to reconcile the complex,
often incompatible demands of female subjectivity. Woman’s problematic rapport
with masculine and feminine models is embodied in the paradoxical image of
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the house as phallic mother, a threatening combination of male power and mater-
nal indulgence represented in the romantic allure and repellent terror of both the
tower and the nursery.
While the novel posits the haunted house as an emblem of tortured female iden-
tity resulting from both paternal and maternal family dynamics, Robert Wise’s
1963 film adaptation The Haunting highlights the novel’s critique of male-
dominated culture by re-envisioning Hill House as an icon of distinctly patriar-
chal dominance. Wise’s Hill House is an edifice of phallic spires, staircases, and
towers in which even the womb-like nursery is transformed into a patriarchal
prison where Hugh Crain infantilizes and incarcerates his daughter, a fate that will
be replicated for Eleanor (Julie Harris) as the house’s final female victim.
Throughout the film, low-angle shots of the mansion contrasted with high-
angle photography of its inhabitants visualize the house’s dominance (see
Figures 10.1 and 10.2).2 Steven Jay Schneider notes that Wise’s camerawork
endows the domicile with “a kind of proto-consciousness,” creating “a virtual
dialogue” between the house and Eleanor in particular by “alternating between
medium shots of Eleanor and location shots of the house itself” (171) (see
Figure 10.3).
One scene frighteningly suggestive of a paranormal sexual assault illustrates
the visual dynamic the film establishes between Eleanor and Hill House. As she
stands outside at the base of the phallic tower, Eleanor’s eye is slowly attracted
upwards (Figure 10.4).

Fig. 10.1 The low-angle perspective of exterior shots of Hill House emphasizes the struc-
ture’s power over its occupants. The Haunting, 1963, Warner Home Video.
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Fig. 10.2 Robert Wise typically photographs the inhabitants of Hill House from a high
angle. Dr. Markway, Luke, Theo, and Eleanor (from left to right) climb the main
staircase, one of the house’s many phallic structures. The Haunting, 1963, Warner
Home Video.

Fig. 10.3 A striking dissolve transition foreshadows Eleanor’s eventual spectralization and
assimilation by the haunted house. The Haunting, 1963, Warner Home Video.

Fig. 10.4 The phallic tower of Hill House attracts Eleanor’s gaze just prior to a ghostly
sexual assault. The Haunting, 1963, Warner Home Video.
 164 Shari Hodges Holt
A sudden bird’s-eye-view subjective shot from atop the tower presents the
house’s perspective of Eleanor. The camera then violently swoops down upon
her, throwing her back into the arms of a waiting male as if the house were forc-
ibly claiming her as lover. The camerawork and composition of interior scenes
similarly evoke the house’s sense of menace toward its tenants. Interior long shots
emphasizing the size of the edifice in comparison to the occupants are contrasted
with tightly framed shots of claustrophobic rooms, while the cluttered mise-en-
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scène evokes a repressive Victorian domesticity filled with motifs of female

imprisonment, including women immobilized as statues, minimalized by inter-
minable corridors and turrets, or trapped as reflections in distorted mirrors (see
Figure 10.5).
In addition, the film makes several alterations to Jackson’s narrative to focus
on destructive patriarchy. The house’s maternal ghostly manifestations, such
as the bleeding walls, are eliminated to emphasize instead the house’s patriar-
chal history. Most notable is the addition of a prologue (narrated by the male
voice of Dr. Markway – the film’s substitute for Dr. Montague from the novel)
visualizing Hugh Crain’s domination of his wives and daughter. The sequence
includes an extended depiction of each wife’s death, the first in a carriage acci-
dent that will be visually echoed in Eleanor’s death at the end of the film, and
the second in a tumble down a phallic staircase (her housekeeping keys land-
ing conspicuously on the floor beside her) that will be paralleled in Eleanor’s
ascent up the tower staircase just prior to her death. The prologue likewise
interpolates a scene of the patriarch imprisoning his daughter, Abigail. A sin-
ister low-angle shot of Crain reading scripture to Abigail over the body of her
dead mother is followed by shots of Abigail in the nursery, where her dolls
have been removed and replaced by her father’s massive Bible. The womb-
like nursery set design, featuring curved ceiling beams on which Crain has

Fig. 10.5 The mise-en-scène of interior scenes frequently parallels Eleanor with images
of female immobility and imprisonment. The Haunting, 1963, Warner Home
Video.
 Hill House on film 165
inscribed an ominously truncated version of Christ’s words, “Suffer the Little
Children,” visualizes the usurpation of feminine space for a patriarchal agenda.
Abigail evidently remains incarcerated in the nursery for the rest of her life,
as is implied by a series of tightly framed superimpositions of her aging face
against the blank background of the nursery pillow, depicting the progression
of time while Abigail remains forever infantilized. In a final foreshadowing
of Eleanor’s fate, the prologue concludes with the suicide of the now elderly
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Abigail’s young female caregiver (who parallels Eleanor’s own caregiver rela-
tionship with her invalid mother). The caregiver’s suicide is prompted in the
novel by female squabbling over ownership of the house, but transformed in
the film into the caregiver’s act of guilt for her failure to respond to the dying
Abigail’s calls for help because she succumbed instead to the seductions of a
male visitor. The caregiver hangs herself, significantly, from the staircase in
the phallic tower.
Destructive male intervention between females is likewise emphasized in the
scene in which Eleanor first asserts her right to leave her family and begin the
journey to Hill House. Having received the doctor’s invitation to join the ghost-
hunting experiment shortly after her mother’s death, Eleanor demands to take
the family car, which she co-owns with her sister. The novel portrays this as a
conflict between the sisters indicating continuing maternal control, as Eleanor’s
sister Carrie refuses the demand, asserting that she is “doing what Mother would
have thought best. Mother had confidence in me and would certainly never have
approved my letting you run wild” (Jackson 7). In the film, however, the major-
ity of the dialogue takes place between Eleanor and her brother-in-law, who, as
the primary objector and obstacle to Eleanor’s independence, is placed between
the sisters as a divisive figure in the center of the frame’s composition, while
sister Carrie remains a model of domestic submission, quietly sewing to one side.
Therefore, Eleanor’s defiance in this scene becomes a rebellion against patriarchal
rather than matriarchal control.
Although Eleanor finally takes the car in a symbolic act of agency and self-
assertion, the sense of female agency is illusory since her journey to Hill House is
controlled by the male doctor, who instructs her through the authority of the writ-
ten word, as she refers repeatedly to his letter for directions. But the “round and
rosy and bearded” Dr. Montague who invites her to the house in the novel (Jackson
43) becomes the decidedly younger, more dashing Dr. Markway (Richard John-
son) in the film, fulfilling Eleanor’s repeated refrain from the novel, “Journeys
end in lovers meeting” in a more literal manner. Whereas in the novel Eleanor’s
hope for affectionate connection with the group at Hill House represents her need
for family, a complex of desire embodied in the paternal figure of the doctor, the
male lover (Luke), and the sister/female lover (Theo), this relational dynamic is
simplified in the film to a romantic attraction between Eleanor and Dr. Markway.
As Steven Jay Schneider notes, Markway’s replacement of Luke as a more viable
romantic interest for Eleanor allows the doctor to assume a hierarchical relation-
ship with her on multiple levels: “not only as scientist-subject, teacher-pupil, and
doctor-patient, but as potential lovers” (170).
 166 Shari Hodges Holt
Consequently, the potential lesbian relationship between Eleanor and Theo
implicit in the novel is accentuated in the film to act as a threat to the normative
heterosexual relationships valued by patriarchy. As Schneider points out, despite
strong indications of her lesbianism, Theo’s sister/lover attraction to Eleanor is
ambiguous at best in the novel, and her growing affinity for Luke as she distances
herself from Eleanor may even suggest her bisexuality. By contrast, in the film
Theo (Claire Bloom) makes deliberate sexual advances to Eleanor while evinc-
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ing a sometimes violent antipathy to the flirtations of Luke (Russ Tamblyn). She
expresses anger toward Eleanor only as the product of jealousy toward Eleanor’s
growing intimacy with Markway. Eleanor, while exhibiting a consistent affection
and growing longing for Theo in the novel, viciously rejects her in the film in
a homophobic diatribe, calling her “unnatural” and “one of nature’s mistakes,”
which is evidently interpolated into the script to connect Eleanor more strongly to
the heterosexual patriarchal figure of Markway (The Haunting 1963). Normand
Lareau notes how the film expresses this character dynamic through the composi-
tion of photography of the two women. Julie Harris, who plays Eleanor, is filmed
in a series of lingering, luminous close-ups as the object of the cinematic (inher-
ently male) gaze, while Claire Bloom as Theo is often placed in the background
or to the side of the composition (Lareau 46–47), sometimes appearing as the
disruptive third element in intimate two-shots of the romantic couple.
The transformation of the doctor into a romantic interest in the film necessi-
tates the transformation of his wife into a romantic rival of Eleanor. In the novel,
the doctor’s wife is a spiritualist, an overbearing motherly figure, who arrives
unexpectedly at the house to disrupt her husband’s ostensibly scientific inves-
tigations with séances to comfort the house’s suffering spirits by letting them
know “that we are thinking of them lovingly” (Jackson 135). In comparison, the
film portrays Markway’s wife (Lois Maxwell) as a skeptic, a usurper of “mascu-
line” rationalism determined to disprove her husband’s investigations. The film’s
depiction of her arrival is dominated by visually unstable three-shots of Markway,
his wife, and Eleanor that often place Markway between the two women as if
they are competing for him. In the novel, the ineffectual feminine and mascu-
line paradigms that plague Eleanor are parodied in the motherly Mrs. Montague
and her hypermacho partner in paranormal investigation, Arthur, as they conduct
bumbling experiments that comically misinterpret the house’s sinister intentions
toward Eleanor. In the film, however, Mrs. Markway plays a much more criti-
cal role in the house’s apparent attempts to claim Eleanor. Upon her arrival, the
overly assertive Mrs. Markway is promptly relegated to the nursery, where she
disappears, apparently kidnapped by the presiding spirit of the house in a ploy not
only to punish the presumptive woman but also to arouse the jealousy of Eleanor,
who has been resisting the house’s ghostly attentions. The romantic rivalry is then
transposed into a rivalry for possession of the house, or rather to be possessed by
the house. Eleanor resents Mrs. Markway as a rival not only for Markway’s affec-
tion but also for the attention of the house, thinking Mrs. Markway has supplanted
her as the object of the house’s desire. The playing of Eleanor and Mrs. Markway
against each other in the final sequences of the film suggests that women have no
 Hill House on film 167
agency of their own but are the pawns of patriarchal power, competing for male
attention.
Her sense that Mrs. Markway has superseded her in the house’s affections cata-
lyzes Eleanor’s climactic final trip to the library’s phallic tower in the film. The
library has both patriarchal and matriarchal associations in the novel. Its role as
the repository of culture, by definition patriarchal, is emphasized by the discovery
there of a book composed by Hugh Crain of scraps from innumerable canoni-
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cal texts orchestrated to teach his daughter proper submission to her father, “the
author of thy being,” and signed in his own blood as a “vital fluid with which I
bind you” (Jackson 126). Yet Eleanor’s final visit to the library evinces the bind-
ing power of the mother as well as the father. Repelled from the library on her
first visit by a smell of mold and decay that she associates with her mother, she is
drawn back on the night before her own death by a voice that she assumes is her
mother’s, which leads her first to the nursery, then past the exterior of the tower,
and back inside to the library. Arriving at the tower staircase, in a moment of
penetration (pun intended), she thinks, “I have broken the spell of Hill House and
somehow come inside. . . . I am home,” she thought, “now to climb.” Through-
out her “intoxicating” climb up the dangerous staircase, feminine and masculine
images of the house unite as Eleanor imagines it nestled in “soft green grass” and
“rolling hills” with its “tower . . . rising triumphantly between the trees” (Jackson
171–72). The consummation of her union with the house as symbol of both father
and mother, however, is interrupted by the arrival of the other ghost hunters.
The film eliminates the guiding voice of Eleanor’s mother in this scene and
instead depicts Eleanor’s trip to the library solely as a union with a demon lover,
sparked by Eleanor’s jealousy of her romantic rival, Mrs. Markway.3 Her ascent
up the dangerous spiral staircase becomes an attempt to reclaim the affections of
Markway (who makes valiant efforts to rescue her, unlike Luke’s reluctant effort
in the novel), as well as an attempt to reclaim the affections of the house, which
leads her upward to the climax through a series of subjective camera shots that,
according to film critic Normand Lareau, “romanticize the ascent for her” (45).
At the top, Eleanor is united with Markway for a brief romantic moment; but in
this case, the climactic union is prevented by the sudden appearance of the rival
Mrs. Markway through an attic trapdoor at the top of the staircase, almost as if the
house had thrown her in Eleanor’s way.
Eleanor’s near destruction prompts the ghost hunters to end their investigations
and send Eleanor away from Hill House against her will, leading to her death
when she drives her car into a tree. The novel depicts Eleanor’s death ambigu-
ously. As she drives away from the “family” that has rejected her, she deliber-
ately aims her car at the tree, thinking, “I am really doing it, I am doing this all
by myself, now, at last,” only to reconsider in the final moments before impact,
“Why am I doing this? . . . Why don’t they stop me?” (Jackson 182). Her ambiva-
lence reflects the inner division that has plagued her throughout the novel between
conventional gender paradigms of masculine assertion and feminine passivity,
independence and communal connection. She is a victim of her own inability
to reconcile the conflicting needs of her nature. The film’s revision of Eleanor’s
 168 Shari Hodges Holt
suicide into a more explicit possession by the masculine spirit of the house (which
is depicted dominating the frame behind her as she drives away into the night) is
perhaps its most significant change in specifying Eleanor as a victim of external
patriarchal control. In another suggestion of the destructive way in which patriar-
chy sets women in competition with each other, the film depicts Eleanor’s death as
a direct result of a second encounter with her rival for Markway’s and the house’s
affections. As Eleanor drives away, the house blocks her exit by again seeming to
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throw Mrs. Markway in her path. Dressed in spectral white (recalling Eleanor’s
own spectral appearance as she flitted around the house in her nightgown in ear-
lier scenes), Mrs. Markway appears out of nowhere and runs in front of the car,
thereby directing it toward the same phallic tree that killed Hugh Crain’s wife
in the carriage accident at the beginning of the film. When Eleanor swerves to
avoid her, the steering wheel suddenly assumes a life of its own and sends the car
careening into the tree while Eleanor screams out her protests. Thus, Eleanor’s
competition for male affection contributes to the house’s ability to wrest control
of her own destiny from her, allowing the house to kill and finally subsume her.
In a concluding visual parallel that brings the pattern of male domination full cir-
cle, the tire of Eleanor’s overturned car recalls the broken wheel of Mrs. Crain’s
wrecked carriage from the film’s prologue. The patriarch has claimed another
victim.
The film’s focus on patriarchal power as the haunting force of Hill House and
its consequent suppression of the novel’s maternal references may result from
the film’s cultural context within the nascence of second-wave feminism. The
adaptation’s simplification of the gender dynamics of Jackson’s novel particu-
larly reflects attempts by the Women’s Liberation movement to locate the blame
for problems with female subjectivity within the patriarchy and the consequent
rejection by many feminists of biological reproduction and the family as the tools
of patriarchal oppression (Birke 2–3). But second-wave feminism’s equation of
female agency with a repudiation of maternity and family would leave women
fraught with conflicting desires. Eleanor’s own conflicting needs for indepen-
dence and domesticity as she is haunted by both the power of the tower and the
comfort of the nursery seem to forecast the fact that, as historian Charlotte Bruns-
don notes, second-wave feminism would continue to be haunted by “a ghost of
past femininities” (40). This sense that something vital had been lost to women
in the rejection of feminine cultural paradigms would lead to a reassessment of
conventional femininity in the postfeminist movement.
While Wise’s Hill House embodies the radical feminist concept of the home
as an inescapable patriarchal prison, Jan De Bont’s depiction of the haunted
house in the 1999 film adaptation of Jackson’s novel is informed by the post-
feminist attempt to reclaim domesticity and femininity, not as mechanisms of
female subordination but as foundations of female empowerment. Although De
Bont’s production is cinematically far inferior to Wise’s, sacrificing suspense for
the overblown spectacle of elaborate CGI effects, the film is culturally intriguing
in its postfeminist approach to Jackson’s narrative. Several striking revisions to
Jackson’s story transform Eleanor from mousy victim to heroic mother figure.
 Hill House on film 169
Dispossessed of her home by the death of her mother, Eleanor (Lili Taylor) is
summoned to Hill House not by the paternal figure of Dr. Montague but by the
spirit of Hugh Crain’s second wife, who – in a significant alteration from the novel –
is revealed to be Eleanor’s great-great-grandmother. There Eleanor regains her
lost maternal heritage by uniting with her grandmother’s ghost to rescue the spir-
its of murdered child laborers, who had been incarcerated and killed in the house
as past victims of Hugh Crain’s industrial ambitions. The home becomes the bat-
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tleground of warring paternal and maternal spirits, as the maternal force attempts
to repossess the domestic sphere from patriarchal exploitation through Eleanor’s
mediation. To exorcise the abusive paterfamilias, Eleanor conflates conventional
gender paradigms by assuming the traditionally “masculine” role of detective
for a maternal purpose. She investigates and exposes Crain’s patriarchal crimes,
finally banishing his spirit from the house in a triumphant assertion of maternal
power that recovers the home as a site for mothering.4
The film’s opening sequence places Eleanor in a much different relationship
to domesticity than in the novel. The novel opens with Eleanor living with
her sister and brother-in-law following the death of her domineering invalid
mother, to whom she devoted eleven grueling years of caregiving. She sees the
Hill House experiment as the first significant event of her life and gateway to a
new existence, an escape from a domestic situation she hates and resents. Con-
versely, De Bont’s film begins with Eleanor fighting not to escape but to keep
the apartment she shared with her mother, from which her brother-in-law, who
“is not even real family,” in Eleanor’s words, is attempting to evict her (The
Haunting 1999). Throughout the scene, her resentment is projected not toward
the dead mother, whom she obviously misses, but toward the uncaring family
members who have exploited her domestic service while denying its worth.
The brother-in-law appreciates the apartment only for its “market value” with-
out recognizing it as the home that Eleanor has established through long and
difficult labor. In a significant change from the novel, Eleanor’s sister offers
her the dead mother’s car in exchange for the apartment in an attempt to entice
her out of the home. In response, Eleanor furiously berates her sister for “tak-
ing away my home and giving me a twenty-year-old car” (The Haunting 1999).
In the novel, Eleanor is forced to steal the car she co-owns with her sister as
an assertion of independence. But in De Bont’s adaptation, Eleanor recognizes
the car as a symbol of false emancipation, an attempt to separate her from
the home she loves. By the time this film adaptation was made, the feminist
movement had offered women escape from the domestic sphere and provided
them with over twenty years of the kind of freedoms that the car represents,
but Eleanor’s situation dramatizes the kind of loss emancipation entailed for
many third-wave feminists, who experienced freedom at the cost of family and
domestic stability.
In a last attempt to remove Eleanor from the apartment, her sister invites Eleanor
to live with them and care for their atrociously spoiled son, Richie, because with
their “busy” lives, they “could use someone to do the cooking and the cleaning”
(The Haunting 1999). The insulting implication of this offer is that homemaking,
 170 Shari Hodges Holt
“woman’s work,” does not carry the importance of work in the public sphere.
“Come live with us, Nell,” her sister pleads. “You have no idea how hard it is out
there.” “You have no idea how hard it was in here,” Eleanor replies, ordering her
unappreciative relatives to “get out of my home” (The Haunting 1999). In Jack-
son’s novel, Eleanor fantasizes about having a home of her own, but the Eleanor
of the 1999 film already has a home from which the uncomprehending forces
of both patriarchy and feminism (voiced respectively by her brother-in-law and
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sister) would drive her.

Eleanor’s hard domestic labor is confirmed rather than belied by the immacu-
late nature of her mother’s apartment, which she has obviously preserved with
much pride. The mise-en-scène throughout the apartment sequence emphasizes
Eleanor’s positive relationship to domesticity despite the strenuous work it has
entailed. The rooms are pristine without being antiseptic, adorned by small
mementos and graced by warm lighting. When she enters her dead mother’s bed-
room, enticed by a gently billowing curtain that she seems briefly to mistake for
her mother’s returning ghost, the affection she holds for her mother becomes even
more apparent in the décor. Implements suggesting the hardships of invalid care –
the bedpan, hospital screen, and IV stand – are counterbalanced by soft, invit-
ing furnishings decorated with gentle pastels and floral prints. An embroidered
sampler, “A Place for Everything, and Everything in Its Place,” hangs above the
headboard of the bed from which an antique locket, clearly a feminine family
heirloom, is suspended. As Eleanor picks up the locket (later disclosed as the
property of Eleanor’s great-great-grandmother, Caroline Crain) composer Jerry
Goldsmith’s musical score uses a soft flute solo to create a nostalgic leitmotif
(titled “A Place for Everything” on the film soundtrack) that will recur through-
out the film as an indicator of Eleanor’s domestic affections. As the flute plays,
Eleanor assumes the maternal identity by placing the locket around her neck while
examining herself in the mirror with a wall plaque announcing, “Home Is Where
You Hang Your Heart,” conspicuously visible beside her. At that moment, an
unexpected telephone call (which the film later reveals came from Eleanor’s dead
great-great-grandmother) invites her to look at the newspaper ad for the “psycho-
logical study” to be conducted at Hill House. Eleanor is about to be evicted from
the home she has worked hard to create, but she will establish a new home at Hill
House through this maternal invitation.
While Eleanor represents the strong domestic woman whose achievements are
undervalued, Theo (Catherine Zeta-Jones) embodies the liberated woman whose
emancipation is overrated. Arriving at Hill House in her black Prada boots and
leather miniskirt with a mound of luggage in tow, she flaunts a contrived material
girl persona and flippant attitudes toward sex, family, and her own career as an
artist. When Theo tells Eleanor that she has joined the experiment at Hill House
to escape romantic problems, Eleanor cuts immediately through Theo’s brash
charm, declaring, “You mean you have trouble with commitment.” Theo replies,
“Well, my boyfriend thinks so; my girlfriend doesn’t. We could all live together,
but they hate each other.” Theo’s ambiguous sexuality in the novel is a marker
of her greater independence in comparison to the neurotically romantic Eleanor.
 Hill House on film 171
But the character’s overt bisexuality in De Bont’s film indicates a casual attitude
toward human relationships that is independent to the point of utter carelessness,
evidently preventing her from establishing any stable human connections. “It’s
hard when you’re the only one at the party,” she tells Eleanor (The Haunting
1999). Thus, whereas Eleanor embodies the loneliness of the homemaker whose
sacrifices go unappreciated, Theo exposes the illusion of the completely liberated
woman, so emancipated from all commitments that she lacks substance and sta-
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bility. Projecting her own lack of definition onto Eleanor, Theo describes Eleanor
as a “blank canvas” (The Haunting 1999), expressing a conventional feminist
stance toward the homemaker, assuming that because she has spent her life in
domestic service, she lacks autonomy.
Psychologist Dr. Marrow (Liam Neeson), the film’s substitute for occult inves-
tigator Dr. Montague, evinces a similarly conventional (in this case patriarchal)
response to Eleanor’s domestic service by branding her with a “classic dependent
personality disorder” when he reads of her years as a caregiver in her psycho-
logical profile. He likewise misapplies the traditional patriarchal label of mad-
ness when Eleanor begins to experience ghostly visitations from the spirits of her
great-great-grandmother and the abused children who haunt Hill House. Unlike
Dr. Montague in the novel, Dr. Marrow has no belief in the supernatural; Hill
House is merely a suitable environment where he can conduct an experiment in
“group fear and hysteria” under the unethical guise of an insomnia study. Evinc-
ing a brutally clinical attitude toward his subjects (at one point, he refers to them
as rats in a maze), he mistakes Eleanor’s strong empathy for neurosis and attri-
butes her paranormal visions to the “self-delusion and emotional instability” of a
“sensitive woman” (The Haunting 1999).
But contrary to her neurotic behavior in the novel and the 1963 film, Eleanor
in De Bont’s adaptation displays the greatest composure, stability, and sincerity
of all the characters involved in the Hill House experiment, and she possesses
the clearest understanding of the house’s haunted nature. The other characters
variously admit to suffering from not only insomnia but also narcissism, panic
attacks, and alcohol and drug addiction, none of which plagues Eleanor as she
is depicted in the film. Instead she embodies the domestic woman who has been
misrepresented by both patriarchy and radical feminism as unstable, weak, depen-
dent, and enslaved.
A significant scene interpolated in the 1999 film tellingly expresses how Elea-
nor has felt trapped by a culture that repeatedly depreciates the domestic sphere.
Upon their arrival at Hill House, Eleanor and Theo examine the massive doors to
the main parlor, which are carved in imitation of Rodin’s sculpture “The Gates
of Hell.” Eleanor notes that in contrast to the Rodin piece, the Hill House sculp-
ture depicts the trapped souls of children (representing Hugh Crain’s child vic-
tims), who are “reaching for heaven.” When Theo, surprised, asks Eleanor if
she has studied art (an obvious reference to Eleanor’s supposed exclusion from
male-dominated Western culture), Eleanor replies, “No, I studied purgatory. I
was there once for eleven years. It’s when your soul is caught between the living
and the dead” (The Haunting 1999). She has existed in purgatory throughout her
 172 Shari Hodges Holt
domestic service, trapped between heaven and hell, life and death, by ideologies
that have failed to give home and family their due importance while demand-
ing of her arduous service for a home that is eventually usurped from her. To
transcend this limbo, she must rescue herself and the children of past domestic
abuse. Therefore, rather than the house claiming her, as it does in the novel and
the 1963 film, the postfeminist narrative of the 1999 film depicts Eleanor actively
and successfully investigating the house’s secrets to purge it of the oppressive
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forces that haunt it and reclaim it as a home. She works throughout the film to
repossess the domestic sphere from a centuries-long purgatory of cultural and
societal misinterpretation. Consequently, she is not the woman who lacks agency
because of her domestic commitment, but rather she is the woman who has been
gravely misperceived as such.
Through her paranormal investigations, Eleanor discovers the house’s his-
tory of domestic exploitation, which features the spectralization of the women
and children of the home by the patriarch. Building the home for his beautiful
first wife with the profits of his textile mills, Hugh Crain “wanted more than
anything . . . a house filled with the laughter of children” (The Haunting 1999).
When each of his wife’s children dies at birth, he takes child laborers from his
factories, incarcerates them in the home, and eventually kills them in a homi-
cidal mania that finally drives his wife to suicide. His second wife, Caroline
(Eleanor’s great-great-grandmother), is able to produce a child, but when she
discovers her husband’s atrocities, she flees the home, taking her child with her.
Her ghost is the motivating force that draws Eleanor to Hill House to expose and
punish its twisted crimes.
This demented ghost story reminds us that the family is the primary “organiz-
ing structure of the Gothic” and that the “Gothic romance is family romance,”
“pervasively organized around anxieties about boundaries (and boundary trans-
gressions)” (Williams 22, 16). The story of Hill House in the 1999 film reflects
the central terror that, according to Ann McGuire and David Buchbinder, informs
popular Gothic narratives of film and television at the turn of the millennium,
the idea that the family is “haunted by a fear of dissolution, of intrusion and
invasion, of ceasing, finally, to be recognizable as a family” (300). The film’s
focus on Hugh Crain’s industrial ambitions as the invading and corrupting force
of the home deconstructs the convenient patriarchal binaries of private and pub-
lic spheres in a manner typical of the Gothic “interpenetration” of perceived
opposites – material and supernatural, past and present, feminine and masculine,
human and technological (McGuire and Buchbinder 302). In fact, the Crain fam-
ily story as recounted in the 1999 adaptation is rooted in the origins of the Gothic
genre, which, as Kate Ferguson Ellis points out, coincided with the rise of domes-
tic ideology, “as the middle-class home, distanced in ideology and increasingly in
fact from the place where money was made, became a ‘separate sphere’ from the
‘fallen’ world of work” (ix). Gothic narratives expose the contradictions inherent
in this “separate spheres” philosophy by providing women in particular with “a
resistance to an ideology that imprisons them even as it posits a sphere of safety
for them” (Ellis x).
 Hill House on film 173
De Bont’s film visualizes the home as a Gothic environment where apparently
stable boundaries have collapsed through the dynamically antithetical mise-en-
scène of the Hill House interior, which is dominated by wild Byzantine mosaics
on floors and walls, distorted funhouse mirrors, and motorized rooms that twist
and turn, thereby suggesting how industrialist Crain has mechanized the home.
The combating paternal and maternal forces of the home are externalized in stat-
ues of powerful guardian griffins and lions (which frequently burst violently into
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life) contrasted with sculptures of crying children trapped in the walls and doors,
straining against imprisonment. Whereas the frozen statues that dominate the
mise-en-scène of Wise’s 1963 film visualize Eleanor’s entrapment in the domestic
sphere, the animated sculptures, portraits, and photographs of women and chil-
dren with which Eleanor interacts in the 1999 construction of Hill House drama-
tize Eleanor’s dynamic agency against the stultifying forces that have turned the
home into a prison. The other characters quickly become terrified of this super-
naturally animated environment, but Eleanor declares,

All my life I’ve been waiting for an adventure, and I thought it would never
happen to me. Adventures are for soldiers or for the women the bullfighters
fall in love with. And here I am, paintings are calling out to me, strange noises
in the night.
(The Haunting 1999)

When she responds to the uncanny voices of the marginalized and abused and
joins forces with her great-great-grandmother to lay to rest Hugh Crain’s ghost
and free the spirits of the children he exploited, she discovers that finally, the
domestic sphere can be the locus of self-fulfilling adventure and heroic action.
She tells the ever-skeptical Dr. Marrow that “it doesn’t matter” if someone is con-
cocting the paranormal phenomena to disturb her. “I can be a victim or I can be a
volunteer,” she declares. “I’m gonna be a volunteer.”
This revision of Eleanor’s character into an assertive psychic detective, who
exposes the truth of the haunted house through her empathy with the dispos-
sessed, places Jackson’s narrative within an intriguing nexus of historical, liter-
ary, and cinematic movements that have expressed women’s concerns. The film
exposes the novel’s intertextual connections to female Gothic and detective fic-
tion, millennial developments in horror and haunted house cinema, and even the
history of the spiritualist movement in American culture. First, the film’s confla-
tion of the novel’s occult investigators – the pseudoscientist Dr. Montague and his
wife, the paranormal medium – into a psychic detective heroine coincides with a
revolution in the detective genre in the 1980s and 1990s. At this time, there was a
“mini-explosion of women detectives” in fiction and film (Klein 231) that rewrote
“the archetypal male detective from a female perspective” (Irons xi–xii), finally
allowing the genre to “address the problems which women face in modern soci-
ety” (Irons xii). As Eleanor searches out clues in old family stories, photo albums,
and journals, the film places her in the amateur detective tradition of “nosy British
spinsters,” such as Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, who were allowed to function
 174 Shari Hodges Holt
in a predominately male genre “so long as they employed the more stereotypically
feminine talents of gossip and intuition” (Klein 3). But Eleanor’s relative youth
and historical position in the film likewise identify her with the “thirty-to-forty-
year old women” who, in the wake of the feminist movement, could no longer
“make the connection with ‘grandmotherly’ Jane Marple” and began at the turn
of the millennium to create professional and amateur fictional female detectives
from a wide variety of backgrounds (Dilley 126–27).
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In particular, this revisionist version of Eleanor shares characteristics with post-

feminist amateur female sleuths who “operate within the confines of ‘feminin-
ity’ and its implications of home, marriage, and children” (Dilley 96), but who
work “to revise the definition” of femininity and endow it “with renewed strength
and meaning” (Dilley xiii). Just as the amateur women sleuths of the 1990s used
detection to strengthen and “reshape their families” (Dilley 116), often extending
the family to include those with whom they may not have biological ties, Eleanor
assumes the role of mother (in one scene she actually sees a pregnant reflection
of herself in one of Hill House’s many mirrors), adopting the spirits of the child
laborers that her great-great-grandfather murdered. In her maternal advocacy of
the abused, she exemplifies another critical difference in the women detectives of
her time, who, unlike the stereotypical male detective, tend to identify more with
crime victims than the criminals they are trying to catch, choosing “to avenge a
victim by caring about the victim,” rather than “becoming like a killer” (Klein
232–33). With their focus on “community . . . connection and responsibility,”
the female detectives of this period work for the restoration of order generic to
detective fiction, not through restoring the patriarchy but through “strengthening
the ties between members of the community or, where necessary, creating a more
equitable community where one did not exist” (Dilley 150).
The depiction of Eleanor as an investigator of family crimes in a haunted man-
sion also underscores the narrative’s connections to the eighteenth-century female
Gothic novel in which the heroine becomes a “female detective who must cope
with madness and imprisonment to solve her own personal mystery of identity,”
often through investigating a male villain’s crimes against female family members
(Nollen 40). The De Bont adaptation particularly evokes the typical female Gothic
plot that Kate Ferguson Ellis has identified as an empowerment fantasy for female
readers that subverted domestic ideology. Such plots hinged on the heroine’s suc-
cessful struggle “to purge the home of license and lust and to establish it as a type
of heaven on earth” (xii), a narrative pattern replicated in the 1999 film adaptation.
These features of both contemporary female detective narratives and early female
Gothic stories are reflected in the film’s climactic showdown between Eleanor and
Hugh Crain’s ghost. When her investigations lead her to a portrait of her great-great-
grandmother, who wears the same locket Eleanor has inherited from her mother,
she decides to assert her maternal heritage in the entry hall of Hill House, where she
fearlessly summons the ghost of Hugh Crain, declaring, “I’m not afraid of you. The
children need me, and I’m going to set them free” (see Figure 10.6).
Emerging from his larger-than-life portrait atop a phallic staircase, Crain’s
ghost swoops down to confront Eleanor before the massive parlor doors sculpted
 Hill House on film 175
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Fig. 10.6 In Jan De Bont’s adaptation, an empowered Eleanor prepares for her confronta-
tion with Hugh Crain atop the phallic staircase. The Haunting, 1999, Warner
Home Video.

to represent the gates of purgatory. When he tries to attack Dr. Marrow and Theo,
Eleanor throws herself in the ghost’s path, telling him, “It’s not about them. It’s
about family. It’s always been about family. Think about Caroline and the children
from the mill; you can hear their voices. They’re my family, Grandpa, and I’ve
come home.” As Eleanor backs to the parlor doors, the purgatory carvings spring
to life and draw her and Crain into the animated bas-relief. After declaring that
“purgatory’s over” and exorcising Crain’s ghost to hell, Eleanor is left hanging
from the gates in a crucifixion pose as Crain’s ghost is led away by attendant
demons. The imprisoned spirits of Crain’s child victims then emerge from the
purgatory bas-relief to ascend to heaven, as Eleanor’s body is gently lowered from
the gates in an image evocative of the Deposition of Christ (Figure 10.7).

Fig. 10.7 Christian iconography transforms Eleanor into a female messiah who sacrifices
herself to defeat the patriarch. The Haunting, 1999, Warner Home Video.
 176 Shari Hodges Holt
The scene ends with Eleanor undergoing transfiguration and ascending to join
her new family, thus concluding Eleanor’s remarkable metamorphosis from patri-
archal victim to female messiah (The Haunting 1999).
This revisionist ending also connects Jackson’s narrative to the subgenre of
occult detective fiction in new ways more appropriate to postfeminist discourse,
particularly in its evocation of the “Christ-like implications” that psychic inves-
tigators assumed in many occult detective narratives of the late nineteenth and
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early twentieth centuries (Tibbetts 345). The film follows the narrative pattern
typical to many stories of paranormal detection in which “the psychic investiga-
tor learns that in his hands rests not just the fate of a case, but that of a soul,” a
realization that often prompts the detective into a paranormal showdown in which
he is “transfigured, as a savior” as he exorcises the threatening supernatural forces
from the household (Tibbetts 345). But while the psychic detectives of these nar-
ratives were exclusively male (e.g., Sheridan Le Fanu’s Dr. Hesselius, Algernon
Blackwood’s John Silence, E. and H. Herron’s Flaxman Low, and William Hope
Hodgson’s John Carnacki), frequently purging haunted homes in order to restore
the male-dominated status quo, Eleanor as female psychic detective meets the
third-wave feminist need for a savior who can reclaim the powers of femininity
for a feminist agenda.
The film’s conflation of Eleanor’s character with the spiritualist medium Mrs.
Montague from the novel likewise highlights the novel’s connections with the
history of spiritualism, the nineteenth-century movement to prove the existence
of life after death through communication with the dead. Jackson’s study of
spiritualist investigations provided part of the inspiration for her description of
the Hill House experiment (Metcalf 149), and the movement bears important
connections to the women’s issues the novel addresses. As transpired in many
spiritualist investigations, the psychic experiment in De Bont’s film becomes as
much a criminal investigation as an attempt at occult communication. Maurizio
Ascari notes that “the link between crime and the supernatural” in the popular
consciousness was fostered by the spiritualist movement, which originated in
New York in 1848 when two sisters, Kate and Margaret Fox, claimed to receive
communications from the spirit of a man who had been murdered in their home
(57). Spiritualism’s rapidly developing transatlantic popularity led to the assim-
ilation of elements of criminal detection and supernaturalism into novels of the
sensation, Gothic, and detective genres throughout the latter half of the cen-
tury (Ascari 58), paving the way for such twentieth-century haunted fictions
as Jackson’s novel. The movement also embodied “the fractured and contra-
dictory nature of feminine subjectivity” (Owen 206) that Jackson’s narrative
interrogates. Most séances and spiritualist experiments consisted of attempts to
contact dead relatives and therefore were conducted in the home (the sphere of
female influence, according to contemporary domestic ideology). Likewise, the
majority of spiritualist mediums were female because of the close connection
of mediumship to cultural constructs of femininity (Braude 23), particularly
“two allegedly feminine traits: sensitivity . . . and an easy reversion to automa-
tism” (Galvan 12), which allowed the medium to contact the dead and act as
 Hill House on film 177
the passive vehicle through which they would communicate. Thus Alex Owen
notes that spiritualism “privileged women” in ways denied to them outside the
movement but did this under the restrictive rubric of feminine stereotypes that
defined women as passive and self-denying (4). The movement was conse-
quently predicated upon the contradictions of the “separate spheres” ideology
that both empowered and imprisoned women in the home, a paradox at the heart
of Eleanor’s struggles in Jackson’s novel and both film adaptations. In the 1999
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film, Eleanor’s success at reconciling “masculine” assertion with “feminine”

receptivity as a psychic medium and investigator is rooted in the spiritualist
movement’s potential for female empowerment, despite its reinforcement of
contemporary feminine stereotypes. Ann Braude points out that spiritualism’s
valorization of women’s spiritual capacities eventually brought it into conjunc-
tion with the women’s rights movement in America (3), while Alex Owen sees
spiritualism as a forerunner of the Womanspirit movement of the late twentieth
century that returned to “matriarchal legend and myth” to celebrate femininity
as a source of power (240–41), an ideology which seems to inform the depiction
of Eleanor in the 1999 film.
De Bont’s adaptation further underscores the novel’s connections with spiri-
tualism through Eleanor’s methods of detection and mediation, which bear
striking resemblance to the investigative techniques of the Society for Psychi-
cal Research (SPR), an organization established in the late nineteenth century
with the aim of providing scientific proof of spiritualist phenomena (Galvan
4). While preparing to write her novel, Jackson purportedly studied a transcript
of an SPR investigation of a haunted house (Metcalf 149). Some of the tools
Eleanor relies on for her investigation of Hill House in De Bont’s film match
mechanisms frequently used by the SPR, particularly photography and telecom-
munication technologies. Jill Nicole Galvan points out that because the rise of
spiritualism in the nineteenth century coincided with the development of new
communication media, it became common to “associate occult modes of com-
munication and projection with technological ones” (8). The uncanny nature
of technologies such as telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, photographs, and
X-rays, which offered means of accessing information from invisible worlds,
made their connection to occult detection natural. In the 1999 film, Eleanor
relies on three of these media for communication with the dead – the telephone,
the phonograph, and photography.
When she is evicted from her dead mother’s apartment, a phone call from
her dead great-great-grandmother invites Eleanor to Hill House. Her explora-
tions of the house bring her to the nursery, which appears to be a replica of her
own mother’s bedroom, where an antique phonograph plays the musical motif
“A Place for Everything,” confirming that Eleanor has finally come home. As
she investigates the family history and discovers that the house is occupied by
her great-great-grandfather’s ghost, she uncovers the truth of his crimes through
examination of factory ledgers that list the child laborers he murdered and family
photographs that reveal the location of their remains. In keeping with the conven-
tions of haunted house films, in which “photographs of previous owners are often
 178 Shari Hodges Holt
early signs that the house is still possessed by other subjectivities and narratives”
(Curtis 124), the photographs of her dead grandparents have the most significant
impact on Eleanor’s investigation. Film historian David Curtis notes the “pow-
erful evidential effect” of still photographs inserted into the moving picture in
many haunted house films, an effect of which director De Bont takes uncanny
advantage in the scene in which Eleanor locates the Crain family photo album.
The album contains nineteenth-century photographs of Hugh and Caroline Crain,
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first featuring pictures of the couple together, with Crain looming over his wife
in a dominant position, followed by a series of portraits of Caroline alone. As a
ghostly breeze flips the pages of the album, still photography becomes cinema,
animating the dead woman, allowing her to tell her story and reveal her husband’s
atrocities (Figure 10.8).5
Finally, consideration of photography’s uncanny revelatory power brings
us back to cinema as a medium for visualizing marginalized perspectives
and communicating the needs and desires that haunt a culture. While Rob-
ert Wise’s 1963 adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House reveals that audi-
ences at the nascence of second-wave feminism were most haunted by the
need to escape the deadly domestic trap, De Bont’s 1999 adaptation reveals
the postfeminist need to recover domesticity from its depreciation by both
patriarchal and feminist ideologies. De Bont’s film places Jackson’s narrative
into the context of a turn-of-the-millennium surge of ghost films that reflected
postfeminist gender crises. The transformation of Eleanor into a triumphant
heroine owes something to the popularity of television shows that featured
powerful female paranormal investigators (e.g., Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
The X-Files, and Medium), indicating a cultural need for females to exer-
cise power without sacrificing femininity,6 while the successful exorcism of

Fig. 10.8 As psychic detective, Eleanor relies on technologies such as photography to

communicate with the dead. The flipping pages of a photo album bring still pho-
tographs to life, allowing Eleanor’s great-great-grandmother to reveal stories of
patriarchal abuse. The Haunting, 1999, Warner Home Video.
 Hill House on film 179
Hugh Crain’s ghost relates the Hill House narrative to many millennial ghost
movies that featured the laying of male ghosts who represented “distant or
absent husbands and fathers” (e.g., Ghost, Always, Ghost Dad, and The Sixth
Sense) (Fowkes 190).7 While such productions indicate that the challenges
of gendered subjectivity continue to haunt us, the differing film adaptations
of Jackson’s novel signify that we continue to turn to past texts to address
these concerns. In demonstrating the novel’s relevance to both feminist and
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postfeminist discourse, the film adaptations speak to the uncanny prescience

of Jackson’s text in foreshadowing the complexity of women’s concerns as
cultural constructs of gender evolve.

Notes
1 For instance, Darryl Hattenhauer claims that Hill House represents Eleanor’s mother,
citing Jackson’s own annotation on a working draft of the novel: “‘leaving house =
betrayal of mother.’” Noting that “[t]he mother is one of Jackson’s most obsessive
themes,” Hattenhauer points out that the problematics of female subjectivity in Jack-
son’s works are often expressed through the female protagonist’s relationships with
phallic and feminized mothers that serve as maternal doubles for the protagonist (Ameri-
can Gothic 161).
2 Robert Wise’s portrayal of Hill House is perhaps indebted to the Gothic trappings of
another famous cinematic edifice, the mansion Xanadu in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane
(1941), which Wise edited. Like Hill House, Xanadu is a manifestation of its patriarch’s
oppressive ego and the imprisoning ideology on which he founds his identity, a parallel
reinforced by the similar camerawork and mise-en-scène depicting both dwellings. But
while Wise’s film focuses on Hill House’s history of subsuming female victims, Welles
allows Charles Foster Kane’s wife to escape her incarceration at Xanadu, leaving Kane
to be assimilated by the prison that he himself created.
3 The 1963 film’s depiction of this scene as the consummation of Eleanor’s marriage to
the patriarchy is implied in the change of the character’s surname from “Vance” to the
more phallically suggestive “Lance.”
4 Darryl Hattenhauer’s analysis of the variations between David Self’s original screen-
play for the 1999 adaptation, Michael Tolkin’s revised script, and the final film indicates
that Self’s initial script took a feminist approach to the narrative, depicting the home as
an inescapable “domestic trap” for Eleanor (“Spielberg’s The Haunting” 259). Despite
transforming Eleanor into the psychic detective who actively uncovers domestic abuse
at Hill House, Self’s screenplay concludes with “Crain’s ghost, not Eleanor, as the win-
ner in the power struggle.” While Eleanor succumbs to “domestic victimhood,” Dr.
Marrow is “rewarded for reproducing the patriarchy” with an endowed university chair
in honor of his unethical experiments in the Crain home (“Spielberg’s The Haunting”
262). The transformation of Eleanor into the victorious postfeminist matriarch of the
finished film apparently occurred during reshoots ordered by executive producer Steven
Spielberg (“Spielberg’s The Haunting” 254). The adaptation’s evolution from Self’s
screenplay to the final film thus reflects the developing postfeminist zeitgeist of 1990s
American culture. Hattenhauer concludes by calling for an analysis of the film’s narra-
tive (particularly “the impulse to make Nell a savior and detective”) using “historicist
methods in tandem with feminism” (“Spielberg’s The Haunting” 264). I attempt such an
analysis by examining the film within the historical context of feminist and postfeminist
developments in Gothic literature, detective fiction, and horror cinema.
5 The film’s use of still photography to reveal the horrors of the patriarchy recalls Jack-
son’s anecdote about accidentally locating a disturbing photo that inspired her depiction
 180 Shari Hodges Holt
of Hill House. Consulting her mother about the history of the house in the photo, she
made the unsettling discovery that her grandfather was the architect, and the townspeo-
ple had deliberately burned down the house (Metcalf 151). The scene is also strikingly
similar to one of the first pieces of nineteenth-century occult detective fiction, Fitz-James
O’Brien’s short story “The Pot of Tulips,” in which the narrator investigates the haunt-
ing of a mansion built by a dead patriarch for his wife. The investigator’s encounter with
photographs of the unhappy couple prompts a ghostly manifestation revealing the man’s
crimes against his wife and child. This scene likewise evokes the nineteenth-century
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phenomenon of “spirit photography” in which the photographer acted as a medium to

produce a family portrait featuring living subjects alongside spectral manifestations of
dead relatives, often in poses of communication. For more on spirit photography, see
Gunning.
6 The casting of Lili Taylor as Eleanor also brings Jackson’s narrative into conjunction
with Taylor’s body of work, particularly another more recent haunted house narra-
tive in which she starred, The Conjuring (2013). Set in the 1970s during the period
of second-wave feminism, the film, like the 1999 adaptation of The Haunting, seems
to express postfeminist anxieties about domesticity. The narrative recounts the “true”
exploits of husband and wife paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren as
they purge a family home haunted by the ghost of a witch who sacrificed her child in
exchange for satanic powers. The ghost has since developed a history of possessing
the female inhabitants of the house and forcing them to murder their own children.
Whereas Taylor plays the maternal defender of children against demonic forces in The
Haunting, her character in The Conjuring succumbs to demon possession and attempts
to kill her five daughters. Mrs. Warren exorcises the ghost by reminding the possessed
woman of her maternal joys and duties. The need to restore the family and the threat to
motherhood from the vengeful ghost that seeks female victims reflect obvious fears of
feminist empowerment.
7 While many millennial ghost narratives (such as the 1999 The Haunting) empow-
ered women, recovering them from spectralization in patriarchal culture, Katherine A.
Fowkes identifies a converse phenomenon of male spectralization in ghost movies of
the period that placed male protagonists in the passive roles of ghosts who before death
were “obsessed or distracted by work, distant from their wives and children and unable
to express their emotions” (194). This cinematic phenomenon could be read as the
result of the feminization of American culture in the wake of the feminist movement, as
women and children demanded a level of emotional involvement from males for which
they were not socialized under patriarchal structures. Hence they became the ghosts of
popular narratives, unable to communicate according to the new cultural expectations.

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The Conjuring. Dir. James Wan. Perf. Lili Taylor, Vera Farmiga, and Patrick Wilson. New
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son: U of Wisconsin P, 2004. 185–206. Print.
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———. “Steven Spielberg’s The Haunting: A Reconsideration of David Self’s Script.”
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fusion of Generic Voices.” Feminism in Women’s Detective Fiction. Toronto, Buffalo, and
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 11 Girl anachronism
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
and the depiction of adolescent
psychosis in Excision (2012) and
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Stoker (2013)
Bernice M. Murphy

When Korean auteur Park Chan-Wook’s English-language debut Stoker was

released in 2013, critics and viewers alike were quick to note the film’s obvi-
ous homage to earlier movies. As screenwriter Wentworth Miller noted, “Stoker
began as a mash-up of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, The Stepfather with Terry
O’Quinn, and bits and pieces of vampire mythology.”1 Those familiar with the
work of Shirley Jackson, however, also will have noted some striking resem-
blances between Stoker and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). As we
shall see, its eerily self-possessed heroine, India Stoker, has much in common
with Mary Katherine (“Merricat”) Blackwood, whose narrative voice is so beguil-
ingly frank that readers at first hardly notice that they have been drawn into the
mindset of a psychotic mass-murderer. Jackson’s sensitive evocation of Merri-
cat’s profoundly skewed worldview remains one of the most compelling depic-
tions of the mentally disturbed teenage girl in American popular culture, and yet
the novel’s obvious influence on later narratives has often been sorely overlooked.
I shall attempt to remedy this state of affairs by discussing We Have Always Lived
in the Castle in relation to two recent films, Excision (2012) and Stoker (2013).
Although neither of the films concerned directly refers to Jackson’s work, both of
them dramatize themes, tones, and anxieties remarkably similar to those featured
in We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Excision and Stoker feature murderous
protagonists whose refusal – or inability – to conform to conventional societal
norms closely resembles that of Merricat.
Female adolescence has, of course, been depicted frequently in horror cinema
as a time during which monstrous deviations from the “norm” take place, but
it also has often been the case that teenage girls are permitted to express rage,
disobedience, and homicidal impulses only when their actions are related to a
supernatural force connected to the perceived “otherness” of the female body. As
Barbara Creed notes of The Exorcist (1973), in an observation that could apply
equally to the many other subsequent on-screen depictions of demonic possession
in teenage girls, it “becomes the excuse for legitimizing a display of aberrant fem-
inine behavior which is depicted as depraved, monstrous, abject – and perversely
appealing” (31).2 One of the most well-known examples of this “monstrous femi-
nine” trope identified by Creed can be found in the form of the downtrodden
 184 Bernice M. Murphy
protagonist in Carrie (1976), who is able to access devastating telekinetic power
after the traumatic onset of her first menstrual period. More recently, feuding teen-
age witches wreak mayhem in The Craft (1996). In Ginger Snaps (2000), a disaf-
fected suburban teen is turned into a jock-murdering beast after being bitten by
a werewolf. Jennifer’s Body (2009) features a high-school murder victim who
returns from the dead as a sexually rapacious predator. In Teeth (2007), radiation
leaks from a nuclear power plant transform a previously conventional teenager
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into a vagina dentata–possessing mutant.3 The supernaturally empowered and

deeply threatening teenage girl is also a staple of Japanese horror cinema, most
famously epitomized in the form of Sadako Yamamura, the vengeful antagonist
of Ring (1998).
What interests me here, however, are horror narratives in which the female
adolescent is rendered dangerous by the kind of decidedly nonsupernatural “aber-
rant behavior” manifested by Merricat. The teenage girl who murders for non-
supernatural reasons is, I would argue, a great deal more threatening to the status
quo than her more fantastically empowered sisters. Most of them, after all, would
never have killed anyone if they had not been granted uncanny abilities by freak
happenstance (The Exorcist, Ginger Snaps, Teeth, Jennifer’s Body) or heredity
(Carrie, Ring, The Craft). By way of contrast, like Jackson’s protagonist, the
heroines of Stoker and Excision violently dispatch family members because their
own unique (and troubling) psychological landscapes, in very different ways,
leave them with no other obvious choice in the matter.
Although the murderous female adolescent in popular culture usually is ren-
dered threatening by dint of her aberrant supernatural abilities, there are some
notable exceptions to this tendency, and unlike Merricat, not every exception is
necessarily mentally ill. While they are both precocious female murderers who
first made it to print within a decade of one another, Merricat’s pathology differs
substantially from that displayed by Rhoda Penmark, the scheming twelve-year-
old sociopath depicted in William March’s best-selling potboiler The Bad Seed
(1954). From the very beginning of Jackson’s novel, it is clear that Merricat is
experiencing psychotic symptoms and finds it extremely difficult to relate to any-
one other than Constance and her feline companion, Jonas. Rhoda, by contrast,
displays glib assurance in social situations, has a notably “mature” demeanor and
ominously tidy appearance, and manifests a total absence of imagination or com-
passion.4 March’s novel hinges on the scientifically unsound premise that Rhoda,
like Jackson’s Hill House, was “born bad.” She is sane, but by dint of her tainted
maternal bloodline, is completely devoid of empathy and morality. Merricat,
unlike Rhoda, cannot morally or legally be considered fully responsible for her
actions: whatever the specific cause of her inability to fully differentiate between
reality and fantasy (a common trait in Jackson heroines), she has obviously been
severely warped by her family circumstances.
For instance, Karen J. Hall (1993) suggests that sexual abuse has caused Mer-
ricat’s break from reality, as well as Constance’s tacit approval of her arsenic-
dispensing actions. However, as Darryl Hattenhauer (2005) notes, the novel
doesn’t provide any firm evidence on this score (207). Jackson does imply that
 The depiction of adolescent psychosis 185
Hangsaman’s Natalie Waite and The Bird’s Nest’s Elizabeth Richmond may have
experienced sexual abuse at the hands of older men, so Hall’s reading is certainly
not out of line with preoccupations found elsewhere in Jackson’s oeuvre. Depic-
tions of homicidal prepubescent and teenage girls in American horror cinema
have tended to feature either Merricat-style psychotics or, less commonly, Rhoda
Penmark–style “Born Bad” sociopaths, although Stoker’s protagonist ultimately
combines elements drawn from the two main types of nonsupernatural teenage
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murderer.
The most well-known depiction of the murderous teenage girl in 1960s popular
cinema came in Pretty Poison (1968), in which Tuesday Weld starred as a schem-
ing psychopath/cheerleader whose all-American looks blind everyone to her true
nature. In Alice, Sweet Alice (1976), a troubled and neglected twelve-year-old girl
is chief suspect in a series of brutal murders (including that of her younger sister).
In The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976), Jodie Foster played a preco-
ciously self-sufficient thirteen-year-old determined to keep out meddling outsid-
ers. In an interesting echo of Merricat’s penchant for poisoning the sugar bowl,
her character’s methods include administering cyanide in cups of tea, accompa-
nied by almond cookies to hide the distinctive flavor. (This contamination of the
“sugar” associated with little girls represents an obvious subversion of the “sugar
and spice” cliché. Many of the most prolific female murderers in the Victorian
era in particular were associated with poison, with the victims often being family
members.) More recently, Hard Candy (2005) featured a sociopathic fourteen-
year-old vigilante whose behavior soon becomes even more disturbing than that
of the predatory pedophile she torments.5
A more obviously Merricat-like character can be found in the home-invasion
movie The Bleeding House (2011), which features an extremely disturbed teenage
girl named Gloria (Alexandra Chando), who later is revealed to be a murderous
arsonist. Like Merricat, Gloria prefers the name she has given herself – “Black-
bird.” Her obvious mental disturbance is underlined by her penchant for pinning
live insects to the walls of her bedroom. She also is, ominously, forbidden from
going near the knife drawer. As in Stoker, much of the tension in the film revolves
around a controlling older man encouraging a teenage girl to fully embrace her
inherently violent “true” nature.
Jackson had a long-standing interest in depicting the inner lives of disturbed
young women and returned to this trope throughout her career. This trend would
reach its apotheosis in Castle, which one critic has memorably described as “not
so much a depiction of madness as a poetic participation in it” (Sullivan 227).
Unstable young women feature prominently in The Bird’s Nest (1956) – a fic-
tionalized psychiatric case study – and in The Haunting of Hill House (1959), but
Jackson’s most obvious precursor to Merricat is Natalie Waite, the protagonist of
Hangsaman (1951). Natalie’s rapid descent into a dangerously dissociative state
(which may be caused by undiagnosed schizophrenia) is hastened by her depar-
ture for college and her unwilling induction into a world in which the officially
sanctioned fate of educated middle-class girls like her is marriage, home, and chil-
dren. It is a prospect that fills her with genuine horror. Natalie is preoccupied by
 186 Bernice M. Murphy
violent fantasies, many of them centered on the murder of her overbearing father.
Though she never acts upon these fantasies – and, if anything, turns her potential
for violence inwards – the implicit threat that she represents to the patriarchal
order is one that will later be violently realized by Merricat.
It has often been argued by critics, including me, that Jackson’s recurrent por-
trayal of female madness is a reflection of the limited range of choices and the
powerful pressures facing American women during the 1950s. Joan Wylie Hall
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has suggested that “imperiled females embody a post war sensibility of dislo-
cation and loss. Their sex, Jackson implies, is no badge of protection; rather it
almost ensures their defeat” (xiv). As Sylvia Hewitt observes, in 1945, American
women, who had played such a vital role in keeping the war machine on the right
track, were more powerful than they had ever been before (151). Yet the years
that followed were characterized by a succession of major losses in the battle
for women’s rights and the firm reinstatement of “traditional” gender stereotypes
(Hewitt 152).
It seems obvious that the women most affected by the decade’s reversion to
“traditional” female models of behavior would be those experiencing adolescence
and early adulthood. After all, they would be expected to conform most enthusi-
astically to these radically redefined expectations of female behavior. It is surely
significant then that while middle-aged housewives frequently feature in Jack-
son’s short stories, her novels tend to focus upon younger, unattached women.6
Even in her panoramic first novel, The Road Through the Wall (1948), Jackson
finds time to focus upon adolescent misfit Harriet Merriam. Natalie Waite is sev-
enteen years old, whereas The Bird’s Nest’s Elizabeth Richmond is twenty-three.
Merricat is eighteen; Constance is twenty-eight. They were twelve and twenty-
two, respectively, when the rest of the Blackwood clan was poisoned. Eleanor
Vance, at thirty-two, is rather older, but, typically, she is emotionally and sexually
immature.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle also represents a novel-length “fleshing-
out” of an intriguing spot of local color dramatized in The Sundial (1956). The
village that the squabbling Halloran family’s founding father chose as the site for
his mansion had, we are told, “been, shortly before his time, very much the sub-
ject of sensational publicity” (Sundial 78). The reason was that fifteen-year-old
local girl Harriet Stuart was believed to have arisen early one fateful morning in
order to bludgeon her parents and two younger brothers to death with a hammer
(Sundial 78). The obvious comparisons with Lizzie Borden are emphasized by the
wry observation that “Fall River, Massachusetts, was nothing to the villagers near
Mr. Halloran’s proposed big house; Harriet Stuart was their enshrined murderess”
(Sundial 78).
The story the locals eagerly relate to tourists drawn to the scene of the infamous
crime runs as follows:

They couldn’t prove it on her see, because no one knew why she did it, and
being fifteen years old and all, she got off. They said at the time it was a crazy
idea she was even put on trial, because no jury in their right minds could see
 The depiction of adolescent psychosis 187
her sitting there, quiet and sad and looking like any young kid, and really
believe she did it.
(Sundial 78–79)

This observation is obviously intended to bring to mind the famous defense

offered by Borden’s attorney: “To find her guilty, you must believe her a fiend.
Does she look it?” (Lincoln 284). The Borden allusions take on extra significance
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when we note that the novel begins and ends with the scenes of probable inter-
familial homicide and that the most likely suspect in the second death is a little
girl – ten-year-old Fancy Halloran.
Borden is the most famous suspected parricide in American legal history, the
so-called Lady with the Axe who has passed into popular legend (Lincoln 19).7
Jackson’s clear interest in the case probably lay in the fact that it allowed her to
implicitly critique the era’s stifling domestic ideology by splitting the “American
Clytemnestra” (Lincoln 19) into two halves: the “ladylike” accused murderer,
Constance, who, after all, “told the police that those people deserved to die,” and
the culprit, Merricat, whose crimes Constance has actively concealed. Therefore
Castle can be considered Jackson’s broad fictionalization of the long and curious
aftermath of the Borden trial, during which Lizzie and her older sister Emma
returned home to Fall River. One suspects from the evidence provided in Castle
that despite the seemingly overwhelming evidence of her guilt, Constance likely
was acquitted because the jury could not bring themselves to believe that a well-
bred young lady from a “respectable” home could have committed such a terrible
crime. The wider social and domestic implications of such an act would seem too
disruptive to be countenanced. Tellingly, it simply does not occur to anyone that
the then twelve-year-old Merricat could have spiked the sugar bowl. Constance is
the only one who knows just how far her little sister’s resentment of the rest of the
family went, and the reason why she did it. (Sibling relationships are also of key
importance in Excision and Stoker.)
Although Lizzie Borden was thirty-two when her father and stepmother were
murdered, Jackson’s Borden surrogates in Sundial and Castle are, as noted, teen-
agers. As suggested earlier, this may well have much to do with the postwar
reimposition of highly conservative expectations for young American women.
This inability – or outright refusal – to “grow up” and engage with the socially
expected models of female behavior is also apparent in Natalie Waite, Elizabeth
Richmond, and Eleanor Vance, but it is particularly acute in Merricat. It is also
a characteristic found in Excision’s deeply disturbed protagonist, Pauline, who
consistently rejects both the stifling notions of “lady-like” behavior foisted upon
her by her nagging mother and the hypersexualized social conformity of her bul-
lying peers. As will become clear later on, Stoker, by contrast, much more actively
engages with the idea of embracing adulthood, even though the heroine is still in
a state of decidedly Merricat-like arrested development at the beginning of the
movie.
Although We Have Always Lived in the Castle takes place six years after the
murders, Merricat has willingly clung to childhood ever since that fateful family
 188 Bernice M. Murphy
dinner. Constance, by comparison, is achingly conscious of the passing years.
Although Merricat briefly mentions attending school in the village before the
murders (in a jarring moment for the reader, in that it is difficult for us to imagine
Merricat ever leading a “normal” childhood), there is no reference to her doing so
afterwards. Until the disruptive arrival of the charmless usurper, Cousin Charles,
she spends her days doing pretty much what she pleases, playing in the fields
around the Blackwood house and erecting protective totems. The only apparent
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interruption comes in the form of her torturous trips to the village for supplies. For
Merricat, the only rules are those which Constance has imposed (she is banned
from handling or preparing food) or self-imposed taboos, such as her intriguing
refusal to enter their mother’s bedroom or to eat in the presence of others.
Although the film’s debt to Jackson is by no means as obvious as that seen in
Stoker, the protagonist of Excision, one of the most interesting on-screen depic-
tions of the psychotic teenage girl in recent years, has much in common with
Merricat. Excision began life as an award-winning 2008 short film, but was later
expanded into a full-length feature by writer/director Richard Bates, Jr. The
film’s ultimately devastating conclusion is telegraphed by the disturbing open-
ing sequence. In it, the protagonist, eighteen-year-old high-school student Pauline
(AnnaLynne McCord) luxuriates in a blood-soaked, hyper-real, and highly sexu-
alized fantasy of death and dismemberment. The sequence establishes that, like
her literary predecessor, Pauline’s inner life is dominated by vivid fantasies of
violent transgression. Just as Merricat’s fervent desire, which is expressed in the
first chapter, to enact poisonous retribution upon the villagers that she perceives
as hateful and “dirty” takes on horrific significance once we realize that her mur-
derous impulses have not previously been confined to the realms of imagination,
so too does the opening of Excision provide vital clues as to the true nature of the
narrative to come.
For instance, Pauline’s status as a high-school misfit is confirmed by her earnest
classroom inquiry as to whether it is possible to “contract an STD from having
sex with a dead person.” Although the query arouses laughter, Pauline’s pathology
goes far beyond morbid curiosity. Just as Castle’s community at large, and even
regular visitors such as Helen Clarke, see Merricat as odd but essentially harm-
less, in Excision, even those closest to Pauline perceive her consistently off-kilter
behavior as eccentricity or defiance, when it actually is symptomatic of something
immeasurably more serious. Indeed, another key similarity between Excision and
Castle is that in both narratives the only person who truly understands the pro-
tagonist is her sister, and in each instance that sister is the center of the main char-
acter’s world. The depths of Pauline’s psychological distress go largely unnoticed
until it is too late.
This is a trope seen in films dealing with female madness as far back as Roman
Polanski’s Repulsion (1965). The beauty and seemingly passive demeanor of
beautician Carol (Catherine Deneuve) are perceived by the men around her as evi-
dence of her docility when in actuality, like Pauline, she is tormented by violent
psychosexual impulses. Even Merricat’s psychological problems exist in plain
sight, but, as noted earlier, because the community simply cannot conceive of
 The depiction of adolescent psychosis 189
a child – and a female one at that – committing such a horrific and apparently
motiveless act, the possibility of her guilt has never occurred to anyone except
for Constance. Merricat’s invisibility to the wider world is confirmed by Uncle
Julian’s chilling insistence that she died in the orphanage six years before, “of
neglect” (93).8
Pauline’s indifference toward conventional social expectations is accentuated,
as is usually the case in these kinds of narratives, by her unkempt physical appear-
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ance. This is another characteristic shared with Merricat, who is happy to run
about the fields in her mother’s old shoes, and positively relishes the prospect
of having to dress up in a tablecloth at the end of Castle. Pauline has long, lank
hair (characteristics she shares with Gloria from The Bleeding House, and India
Stoker), acne, and cold sores. She also has slumping shoulders and a vaguely
masculine stride. Her unfashionable attire is a stark visual contrast to the preppy,
colorful dress of her jeering classmates. Even when forced into a dress so that
she can take part in the Southern social ritual of “cotillion,” she is ungainly. It is
obvious from the outset that Pauline is a constant source of concern and embar-
rassment to her elegant, religious, and socially conservative mother Phyllis (Traci
Lords).9 Her relationship with her long-suffering father Bob (Roger Bart), though
obviously loving, is of much less importance to the narrative.
A tense relationship between mother and daughter also features in Stoker, and
is frequently a significant feature of supernatural and psychotic/psychopathic
teen-girl films, such as Ginger Snaps, Heavenly Creatures (1994), and Carrie. As
has frequently been noted, the troubled mother-daughter relationship is a recur-
rent trope in Jackson’s novels.10 While Castle tends to focus mainly upon the
figure of the domineering father, what information we do glean about Merricat
and Constance’s mother suggests that she was as unpleasant as her spouse. It was
she who insisted that the Blackwood house be fenced off from the surrounding
community. The isolation and snobbery of the sisters clearly started with their
mother’s aversion toward the outside world. Though they show reverence for her
elegant drawing room, there is no suggestion of there ever having been warmth or
love in the relationship Mrs. Blackwood had with her daughters: Constance was
obviously a much more loving (and enabling) mother figure to Merricat.
The first exchange between mother and daughter in Excision involves Phyl-
lis asking Pauline not to eat with her mouth open, because “I raised you better
than that.” While Phyllis abhors discussion of bodily functions and is appalled
by her firstborn’s obvious disregard for grooming and personal hygiene, Pauline
is absolutely fascinated by the abject – a tendency which allows Bates to include
some genuinely challenging (and extremely bloody) sequences. Visually, as well
as thematically, the film straddles an uneasy line between gross-out comedy and
genuine horror.
As is the case in We Have Always Lived in Castle, the eighteen-year-old pro-
tagonist is also coded as an outsider as a result of her unconventional attitudes (or
apparent indifference) toward the opposite sex. Merricat is so obviously unable
to tolerate anyone besides her beloved Constance that even as the latter wist-
fully remarks, “You should have boyfriends,” Merricat tells us that “she began
 190 Bernice M. Murphy
to laugh, because she sounded funny even to herself” (Castle 82). Sex is seldom
explicitly referenced in Jackson – and even romantic attachments are few and far
between (and seldom convincing) in her work – but Stoker and Excision feature
scenes in which the protagonist’s sexual “coming of age” is graphically depicted.
Pauline sets about losing her virginity – more, she declares, as an anthropological
exercise than anything else – by propositioning a boy in her class. Although this
sexual encounter may in part indicate an attempt to “fit in” with her peers, it may
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more likely be a subconscious attempt to explore her unsettling compulsions in

a socially acceptable manner. Indeed, the psychosexual underpinnings of Pau-
line’s mental illness are evident from the very beginning of the film; therefore,
much of Excision focuses upon Pauline’s crude and progressively more disturb-
ing attempts to satisfy these impulses. In contrast, psychosexual compulsions do
not appear to be a motivating factor in Merricat’s behavior in Castle. Merricat
appears to have, consciously or otherwise, completely repressed this aspect of
herself, as though her own psychological and sexual development has been fro-
zen at the age of twelve. She is, however, subject to compulsive behaviors of a
different kind, usually revolving around her belief in various protective “ritu-
als” and her frequent display of obsessive thought patterns related to her fear of
losing Constance, her desire to be “kinder” to Uncle Julian, and her mistrust of
outsiders.
Still it should be noted as well that Pauline’s fascination with the workings of
the human body has another increasingly important cause. Though her low grades
and erratic behavior clearly make medical school an impossibility, she wants to
become a surgeon so that she can save her beloved little sister, Grace (Ariel Levy),
who has cystic fibrosis and will soon need a lung transplant. Just as much of what
motivates Merricat’s more desperate actions in Castle can be traced back to her
deeply possessive love for Constance (her climatic act of arson is, after all, an
attempt to expel the outsider who threatens what she sees as their mutual idyll),
so too are Pauline’s ultimately terrible actions at least partially motivated by her
misguided but earnest longing to “save” her sister.
One of the most interesting things about Excision is that despite the more obvi-
ously lurid aspects of the film, Pauline’s relationship with her family is often
depicted with touching nuance. Even as Phyllis berates Pauline, she worries that
she’s being too hard on her daughter and is privately appalled by the possibility
that she might be turning into her own mother. Furthermore, Bates provides a
reason as to why the severity of Pauline’s psychological distress appears to have
bypassed her parents. The family has for many years been under a great deal of
emotional and financial strain as a result of Grace’s condition, and it seems obvi-
ous that as well as contributing to Pauline’s psychiatric problems, the understand-
able familial focus upon Grace’s illness has left Phyllis and Bob unaware of just
how disturbed their eldest daughter has become.
As we have seen, for Pauline, as for Merricat, the relationship with her sister is
the most important one in her life. Just as Merricat believes that she can always
rely upon Constance (at least until Cousin Charles turns up on the doorstep), Pau-
line’s one comfortable and wholly accepting relationship is with Grace, her sole
 The depiction of adolescent psychosis 191
confidant and defender. As the film progresses and Pauline further alienates her-
self from her mother and the outside world, she becomes ever more fixated upon
the idea that she alone can save Grace. Unlike Merricat, Pauline does display a
degree of self-awareness. She recognizes that she is in urgent need of outside
intervention, at one point even asking to see a clinical psychologist, and she self-
diagnoses “borderline personality disorder” (a condition characterized by erratic
and impulsive behavior, a profound fear of abandonment, paranoia, inappropriate
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behavior, and severe dissociative symptoms).11 Typically, her teachers and parents
interpret her statement as a self-dramatizing attempt to get out of trouble.
There is a telling line later in the film when Pauline’s father, Bob, in a weary
attempt to bridge the widening gap between mother and daughter, says, “Every-
thing she does, she does out of love. Someday you’ll understand.” The tragedy
here is that Pauline and Phyllis are in this respect far more alike than he realizes.
For all of their obvious differences, there is an unmistakable kinship between
mother and daughter that is underscored by the alliterative quality of their names
and by the similar colors of their clothing. Moreover, they both adore Grace and
would give anything for her to be healthy. Pauline’s horrific actions in the last ten
minutes of the film are certainly influenced by her transgressive fantasies of sex
and death, but they are also, crucially, motivated by a genuine desire to help her
favorite person in the world. This means that when Pauline performs her own hor-
rifically misguided attempt at a lung transplant in the family garage, she does so
in the heartfelt belief that she is ultimately bringing about the “miracle” that the
family has been praying for. The “black sheep” of the family will finally make her
parents proud. In words that echo sentiments expressed by her mother throughout
the film, just before she chloroforms Grace in preparation for the ghastly “proce-
dure,” Pauline says to her sister, “You’re not going to understand what I’m about
to do, but someday you’ll thank me.” It’s a statement that brings to mind the final
pages of Castle, wherein Merricat finally succeeds in “saving” Constance from
the outside world.
Castle and Excision do ultimately differ substantially in relation to where they
leave their respective protagonists once the main characters’ most treasured fan-
tasy has been transformed into reality. Tellingly, Merricat’s final assertion is a
declaration of absolute contentment: “‘Oh, Constance,’ I said, ‘We are so happy’”
(214). By way of contrast, the closing moments of Excision explicitly emphasize
the horrific consequences of the protagonist’s irrational actions. The true scope
of the family tragedy we have watched unfold becomes chillingly evident in
the film’s final scene, when Phyllis returns home and discovers what her eldest
daughter has done. We see a shot of Pauline with her head shaved, dressed in a
blood-spattered medical gown, standing above the two crudely mutilated dead
girls, scalpel in hand. She is clearly completely detached from reality: “I know it’s
a mess. It’s just my first surgery; I haven’t perfected my technique yet.” Though
Phyllis initially cries, “What have you done!” she then embraces her daughter,
uttering a single, agonizing scream of horror, grief, and rage. Lords memorably
conveys Phyllis’s effort to grasp what has happened to Grace, as well as her sud-
den realization of the true depths of Pauline’s psychosis. Enclosed in her mother’s
 192 Bernice M. Murphy
arms for the first time in the film, Pauline suddenly seems to take in what has
happened. Whereas Merricat’s violence has resulted in the creation of the insular,
Constance-centric world that she had always desired, Pauline has just killed the
one person in her life who unconditionally loved her. It is a hideous irony accen-
tuated by the film’s conclusion with Pauline’s anguished screams of sudden, gut-
wrenching self-awareness.
Though it shares some intriguing (and even stronger) similarities to We Have
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Always Lived in the Castle, Stoker differs from Excision in many key respects,
not the least of which is that while Bates’s film was a low-budget cult endeavor
with limited distribution, Stoker is a studio production with recognizable actors
and a well-known director. As in Shadow of a Doubt, the focus is on the trou-
bling relationship between a teenage girl and her mysterious uncle. Stoker, how-
ever, fully develops Hitchcock’s subtle suggestion that the pair are in some
sense doubles of one another with an unresolved incestuous attraction to boot.
The film’s premise and character development also strongly evoke Jackson’s
final completed novel.12
Just as Merricat informs us in the second sentence of Castle that she is eighteen
years old, India Stoker’s (Mia Wasikowska) age is emphasized from the outset.
The main plot even begins on her eighteenth birthday, an early indication that the
film is essentially an unconventional female bildungsroman. Park economically
conveys (through the sound of an off-screen car crash) the news that India’s father
Richard (Dermot Mulroney) has been killed on the day that she officially passes
into adulthood. We later find out that this milestone is the reason why Uncle Char-
lie (Matthew Goode) has come back into the Stoker family sphere. He sees India
as a kindred spirit possessed of the same murderous urges and psychological tics
that he has experienced since childhood, and, against his older brother’s wishes,
has “come home” in order to act as malevolent mentor, substitute father figure,
and, possibly, lover to his niece.
The film opens with an elliptical but deeply evocative scene that we later real-
ize is taken from the end of the narrative. Like We Have Always Lived in the
Castle, this is a tale told in retrospect. Just as Merricat’s striking opening lines
lay the groundwork for the revelation that she was the one behind the Black-
wood family massacre, India’s opening (and sole) voice-over establishes her clear
sense of difference from the rest of the world. As she strides confidently across
a rural highway, her progress intermittently interrupted by jarring freeze-frames,
the voice-over runs as follows:

My ears hear what others cannot hear. Small, faraway things people cannot
normally see are visible to me. These senses are the fruits of a lifetime of
longing. Longing to be rescued – to – be completed. Just as the skirt needs
the wind to billow. I am not formed by things that are of myself alone. I wear
my father’s belt tied around my mother’s blouse, and shoes which are from
my uncle. This is me. Just as a flower does not choose its color, we are not
responsible for what we have come to be. Only once you realize this do you
become free, and to become adult is to become free.
 The depiction of adolescent psychosis 193
The rest of the film details the events that have led up to this blood-spattered
roadside interlude.
Like Blackwood farm, the Stoker house is a large and elegantly furnished man-
sion separated from the community by gates and a fence. Prior to the death of
her father, India, like Merricat, appears to spend much of her time wandering
around the large family estate. As the opening credits unfurl, we see her aimlessly
upending tennis balls, running through the grass of a meadow, and lurking in the
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garden next to the stone ornaments, which will later take on distinctly sinister
significance. In these scenes, Wasikowska is clad in a virginal white dress that
resembles the kind of billowy nightgown worn by the classic Gothic heroine-in-
peril.13 It is an impression wholly undermined by the end of the film, when it has
become clear that it is those who cross India who are in danger, and not the other
way around. The effect is only marred by her clunky and childlike shoes, which
she has, suggestively, clearly outgrown. Like Pauline in Excision, India is also
styled in a manner that accentuates her apparent indifference toward conventional
social norms. Wasikowska’s preexisting pallor is highlighted by the character’s
dark brown hair and eyes (rather different from the actor’s usually lighter col-
oring), and she here looks like an older version of Wednesday Addams. This a
similarity highlighted by India’s penchant for old-fashioned, high-necked dresses
and blouses that emphasize the character’s intense self-containment and sense of
restraint. (They may also remind the viewer that Wasikowska had just starred in
screen adaptations of two key texts about Victorian girlhood: Jane Eyre [2011]
and Alice in Wonderland [2010].)
We soon learn that on every birthday prior to her eighteenth, Uncle Charlie has
gifted India with a new pair of shoes made to the same childish design every time.
There is an evocative shot in which we see India lying on her bed, surrounded by
a horseshoe shaped barricade of shoeboxes – one for every year. It’s a detail which
highlights the obsessive nature of both uncle and niece: he sends her the same
present every year, and India, who believes them to be a present from her father,
appears to have worn the shoes that he has gifted her every single day of her life
so far. The shoebox she receives on this birthday is a notable exception, however.
In lieu of footwear, this time it contains an old-fashioned key, which India will
later deploy in order to discover the secrets of Uncle Charlie’s murky past, as well
as of her own true nature.
As in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, therefore, clothing, shoes, and
accessories are of considerable symbolic import in Stoker. One of the first things
that Cousin Charles does after his arrival is to establish himself in the room of
Merricat’s late and unlamented father, John Blackwood, and start wearing his
fine clothing and jewelry. Similarly, Uncle Charlie in Stoker has soon appropri-
ated both his brother Richard’s room and his tennis whites (which are too big for
him – a subtle detail which foreshadows the final-act revelation that Charlie is a
deranged fantasist desperate for his brother’s approval and his place in the fam-
ily). India’s discovery of Richard’s distinctive sunglasses while snooping around
in Charlie’s room (another very Merricat-like activity) sparks the realization that
he staged the car crash that supposedly killed her father. In an echo of Cousin
 194 Bernice M. Murphy
Charles’s calculating bid for Constance’s affections, Uncle Charlie also seems to
have his eye on India’s mother, Evelyn (Nicole Kidman): “I would like to know
my brother’s wife,” he says, during one of their many innuendo-laden conversa-
tions. The ownership of Richard’s leather belt is particularly important. Charlie
uses it to murder his interfering Aunt Gwendolyn (Jacki Weaver) and a teenage
boy who tries to rape India, and he eventually almost kills Evelyn with it. Yet
when we see the belt for the last time, it is tied around India’s waist as a powerful
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symbol of her triumph over Charlie as well as her newfound acceptance of her
own inherently dangerous nature.
Indeed, in contrast to We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Excision, which
feature obviously psychotic teenage girls who appear at times to have little or no
conscious control of their actions (Merricat, like Pauline, is what she is, through
no obvious fault of her own), in an echo of issues raised by The Bad Seed almost
sixty years previously, one of the main questions asked by Stoker is whether it is
desirable – or even possible – to resist a genetic predisposition toward violence.
But unlike Rhoda Penmark, who does display an ability to “fit in” when necessary –
at least well enough to fool adults – and is resolutely, and chillingly “sane,” India
is shown to be “different” in some powerful but indefinable way. Her behavior
at times seems to suggest high-functioning autism or Asperger’s syndrome. She
has an aversion to being touched – even by her despairing mother – and appears
to have a considerable degree of visual and audio hyperacuity (which Park fre-
quently highlights through his use of extreme close-up and exaggerated sound).
Additionally, India has an Usher-esque tendency to focus on minute details and
patterns to the exclusion of the larger picture, a trait that is highlighted during a
high-school art class: everyone else draws what is in front of them, but she creates
an obsessively detailed picture of the barely glimpsed pattern on the inside of the
vase instead. She is extremely articulate, musical, and well read, but has a very
flat emotional affect, and for much of the film appears unable to engage with oth-
ers on a deeper emotional level – with the exception of Charlie, her manipulative
kindred spirit.
It is eventually revealed that Evelyn always felt excluded from the close rela-
tionship between India and Richard, who spent much of their time on hunting
trips. Charlie’s arrival presents Evelyn with what she sees as an opportunity to gain
back something of what she had lost even before her husband was killed. India
even observes, “You look like my father” in one of several key scenes that take
place between the two of them on the central staircase of the house (their shifting
positions provide a visual clue as to who has the upper hand). Similarly, the strik-
ing resemblance between Cousin Charles and deposed patriarch John Blackwood
in Castle helps explain why Constance passively allows him to establish a firm
foothold within the Blackwood home, and cannot bring herself to interfere when
he begins to lay down the law to Merricat and Uncle Julian. In yet another echo of
Jackson in Stoker, within days of Richard’s funeral, Evelyn has virtually installed
Charlie as the new head of the household. Uncle Charlie also resembles Cousin
Charles in that he repeatedly declares his intention to be “friends” with India. “We
don’t need to be friends. We’re family,” she retorts. There is a vitally important
 The depiction of adolescent psychosis 195
difference here, though. Whereas Cousin Charles’s “friendly” overtures in Castle
are obviously bogus – it is soon clear that if he had his way, he would pack Mer-
ricat off to an institution as soon as possible – Uncle Charlie is absolutely sincere
when he says that he wants to be friends with India. His obsession with her drives
the entire plot. Although she initially resists his overtures, it becomes obvious that
as noted previously, the two have much in common.
Like India, Charlie has an oddly timeless quality about him that makes him
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hard to situate in the modern world (the same could also be said of Merricat).
In another echo of Castle, it comes as something of a shock when we realize
that India attends a resolutely normal-looking high school. Though she appears
to have no willing interaction with her peers, she is subject to sexually aggressive
bullying from boys in her class. One of the early turning points in the film comes
when she coolly reacts to the ringleader’s threats by efficiently stabbing him in the
hand with a pencil. India later gazes at the gory shavings with obvious fascination.
Her growing fixation upon blood and violence allies her with Pauline in Exci-
sion, although here, crucially, we have the sense that India is becoming something
rather than being overcome by something. The ends of each film further confirm
this reading. Whereas the final moments of Stoker reveal a newly confident India
setting out to create her own life, as has already been established, Pauline finishes
Excision in a state of abject devastation and complete psychological breakdown.
The sense of growing mutual attraction (and recognition) between uncle and
niece is emphasized by the strikingly shot scene in which the two of them play
Philip Glass’s “Duet” on the piano. Previously, India has always played alone,
but once Charlie sits next to her on the stool and joins in, her almost swoon-
ing response to his presence emphasizes the undertow of erotic tension that has
existed between them from their very first encounter. India’s burgeoning sexual
maturation is linked to her growing infatuation with her uncle and her escalating
willingness to use violence against others. This is highlighted in the scene that
follows. In a jealous (and aroused) reaction to having just watched her mother and
Charlie kiss, India leaves the house in search of Whip, a boy from school who had
earlier defended her from the bullies.
The encounter between the teenagers initially has an eerily romantic quality to
it. The two of them talk in a moonlit playground, as India, clad in another flowing
white dress, slowly whirls round and round the merry-go-round. While doing so,
she says,

Have you ever seen a photograph of yourself – taken when you didn’t know
you were being photographed? From an angle you don’t get to see when you
look in the mirror? And you think that’s me. That’s also me. Do you know
what I’m talking about?

Charlie has obviously sparked in India the ability to look at herself in a new
way, although the ramifications of this do not become apparent until the rest
of the scene plays out. Asked by Whip if “You’re not afraid of being touched
anymore,” she answers, “Please don’t spoil it,” and runs into the woods, clearly
 196 Bernice M. Murphy
wanting him to follow. She kisses him first, and he eagerly responds, but when
she bites his lip (another vaguely vampiric action), he quickly becomes hostile
and tries to rape her. At this instant, Uncle Charlie comes to the rescue, chok-
ing Whip to unconsciousness. There follows an impressionistic scene in which
India relives memories of the incident while showering later that night. Charlie
broke the boy’s neck while she watched, and with her help, he buried Whip on
the Stoker lawn (alongside Aunt Gwen). Though it initially seems as if India is
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traumatized, the scene develops into a fairly graphic masturbation sequence.

India’s “coming of age” has not come about as the result of a sexual encoun-
ter with a boy her own age, but rather as a result of her unmistakably aroused
response to Charlie’s brutal actions and her de facto collusion in his homicidal
behavior (flashbacks suggest that she has already repressed her awareness that
he murdered the family housekeeper).
India’s new sense of self-awareness, as a sexual being and as a potential killer,
is highlighted in the following scene, when she enters her mother’s lush bedroom
while wearing one of the decidedly grown-up looking silk nightdresses she had
previously refused to put on (in fact, mother and daughter are for the first time in
the film dressed alike). In the only moment of physical closeness we see between
them, India slowly brushes her mother’s hair, and a remarkably close-up shot of
Kidman’s red locks leads into a revealing flashback (here, as in his previous films,
Park is a talented visual stylist). We learn – and India herself soon realizes – that
Richard taught her to hunt because he decided early on that she was indeed just
like his brother – a born killer. He decided to channel her latent violent impulses
into hunting because “sometimes you need to do something bad to stop you from
doing something much worse.” In the film’s most melodramatic development, it
transpires that far from being a debonair man of the world, Charlie has only just
been released from a high-class mental institution funded by the Stoker family.
He was placed there as a child because he murdered his younger brother, Jonathan
(who was buried alive on the lawn); as a result, he has no experience whatsoever
of the outside world. It is implied that he was jealous because the little boy was
Richard’s favorite.
Once India discovers the truth, it becomes obvious to her that her uncle is
essentially an overgrown child with deeply unrealistic expectations about their
relationship. Devastated by Richard’s insistence that he never return home or
contact India, Charlie bludgeoned his brother to death and decided to take his
place in the family, because he believes that he and India “share the same blood.”
Though India demands that he leave immediately, Charlie’s ability to smoothly
intervene when the local sheriff (investigating Whip’s disappearance) turns up on
the doorstep appears to redeem him. The boy’s murder seems to have cemented
their relationship. Charlie’s desire to shepherd India through his own twisted ver-
sion of the “coming of age” story is underlined by his final birthday present: a pair
of elegant high heels, a revealing contrast to the childish brogues he had given her
in previous years.
In the scenes that follow, it seems as if India has decided to team up with
Charlie for good and embark for a new life in New York with him. Evelyn
 The depiction of adolescent psychosis 197
finally realizes that they are involved with one another, and in retaliation she
burns the contents of Richard’s study before tearfully denouncing her daugh-
ter. “India – who are you? You were supposed to love me. Weren’t you?” she
asks. India, characteristically, says nothing. Although she seems indifferent to
her mother’s emotional distress, she does, however, decisively intervene when
Charlie tries to murder Evelyn, shooting him in the head with her trusty rifle.
Typically, India’s motives here, like her facial expression, remain tantalizingly
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opaque. Did she shoot Charlie because a part of her does care for Evelyn, or at
least feels that she owes her this mercy? Was he killed in revenge for her father’s
murder? Or did India realize that in order to achieve true independence, she
needs to rid herself of her childish, manipulative, and obsessive “mentor”? It is
impossible to know which possibility is the likeliest, although some combina-
tion of all three may well be closest to the truth.
After burying Charlie next to his victims on the lawn, India pragmatically
appropriates the car, money, and accommodation that Richard had set aside for his
brother and leaves Evelyn and the family estate behind with barely a backwards
glance. As the voice-over with which the film began indicated, she is literally and
metaphorically stepping into Charlie’s shoes. Significantly, she is completing a
transition that Charlie (who, like Merricat, will always be defined by his child-
hood act of murder) was unable to make. India, therefore, differs substantially
from Pauline and Merricat in that by the end of the narrative she has, in her own
estimation at least, become a fully individuated adult.
The final seconds of the story make it clear, however, that this final “step”
involves becoming a cold-blooded murderer. Whatever her motives, India’s
shooting of Charlie saved Evelyn’s life and could therefore be characterized as a
purely defensive act. The same cannot be said of her murder of the local sheriff
on the way out of town, which is motivated entirely by the need to clean up loose
ends. The final shot of the film is a very revealing one: a close-up of India as she
aims her rifle at her cowering victim. The sheriff is already bleeding out from the
gaping neck wound that she inflicted with the secateurs previously wielded by
Uncle Charlie. India has a genuine smile on her face for the first time in the film.
She is, by her own reckoning at least, finally “free” (this is even the final word in
the film, thanks to the song that is playing on the soundtrack as we fade to black),
but that freedom is inextricably bound to her newfound willingness to embrace
her homicidal impulses.
The final moments of Stoker highlight an interesting contrast to Jackson’s dra-
matization of a rather similar plot just over fifty years earlier. Merricat’s actions
ultimately mean that she never has to conform to the stifling expectations of the
cruel and judgmental world around her, which can see only one officially sanc-
tioned path for young women through marriage and motherhood, or in her case,
probable institutionalization.14 The end result, as we have seen, is a situation that
she has always desired – finally, she and Constance can “live on the moon.” Still,
depending on how we read the conclusion, it may not seem like such a desirable
outcome. Merricat’s arson, the villagers’ violence, Cousin Charles’s inevitable
betrayal, and Uncle Julian’s sadly anticlimactic death have meant that Constance
 198 Bernice M. Murphy
has, now, understandably, internalized Merricat’s paranoid worldview. They will
live out the rest of their days as isolated, feared outcasts – modern-day witches,
as Jackson makes clear – willingly hiding in the ruins of their once fine house.
This may well be a much more loving and mutually supportive way of life than
that which they would have had in the outside world, but it is telling that empow-
erment here means concealment and the gleeful embrace of Gothic stereotypes
about “aberrant” female behavior. At the conclusion of Stoker, however, India
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leaves the family home behind and drives off into the big city to live an inde-
pendent life on her own terms. In this, India differs not only from Merricat and
Pauline but also from many of the other homicidal young women featured in
American horror cinema, who are often rendered completely insane, institution-
alized, or dead – usually by their own hands – by the end of the story. The way
in which India’s trajectory differs from Merricat’s may therefore provide some
indication of the greater sense of opportunity being offered to teenage girls five
decades after Jackson’s death. Merricat will happily live out her days as a “witch”
in the ruins of her once fine “castle.” India Stoker leaves home and family behind
in order to pursue her own destiny, free of outside interference and controlling
male relatives, although the nature of the troubling connection this seems to cre-
ate between female empowerment and homicidal violence is one that the film,
perhaps wisely, leaves unresolved. Despite the notable deviations from Jackson
seen in both Excision and Stoker, it seems clear that, like her creator, Merricat
Blackwood continues to cast a long, if often overlooked, shadow over narratives
of this type.

Notes
1 Setoodeh, Ramin. “Whatever Happened to ‘Prison Break’ Hunk Wentworth Miller?”
The Daily Beast. The Newsweek Daily Beast Company Mag., 6 March 2013. Web. 29
July 2014.
2 See also: The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005); The Last Exorcism (2010); The Quiet
Ones (2014).
3 In Misfit Sisters: Screen Horror as Female Rights of Passage (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007), Sue Short notes that in these later films, the female outsider locates
a latent power within herself as she attempts to cope with puberty (2).
4 From The Turn of the Screw onwards, suspiciously well-turned out children are always
a cause for alarm in horror film and fiction. Orphan (2009) provides one of the most
memorable recent dramatizations of this trope.
5 There also have been some notable films featuring twenty-something young women
driven to murder by psychotic urges: the protagonist of May (2002) is a socially awk-
ward loner whose intense desire for companionship is complicated by her fascination
with topics such as murder and cannibalism; Black Swan’s (2010) lead character is
a repressed ballerina with Eleanor Vance–style mother issues whose lurid visions of
Gothic transformation soon take over her life; and an initially more self-assured young
woman also goes spectacularly off the rails in Alyce Kills (2011).
6 The most intriguing “what-if” of Jackson’s sadly abbreviated career is how her unfin-
ished novel Come Along with Me would have developed. The protagonist was a
middle-aged widow whose generous girth and warmly sarcastic narrative voice seemed
to suggest a figure much more at ease with herself than Jackson’s previous protagonists.
 The depiction of adolescent psychosis 199
7 Hattenhauer persuasively characterizes Constance as a “passive-aggressive enabler who
unconsciously uses her cloying sweetness to get the dark Merricat to do the dirty work” (177).
8 Julian’s remarks here may also be a subconscious admission that he sees her as the rest
of the family did. As the “wicked” second daughter in a family that already had the ever-
capable Constance and a “greedy” male heir, Merricat always was surplus to require-
ments. Though she is always resolving to be “kinder” to him – the closest she can ever
come to admit feeling guilty for poisoning him – Merricat and Julian seldom interact.
9 Excision’s critique of the conservative middle-class milieu is slyly reflected in the cast-
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ing: though she has been working in mainstream cinema for years, Lords first came
to national prominence as a porn star. Similarly, the pastor who ineffectively counsels
Pauline is played by cult cinema icon John Waters.
10 For further reading on troubled mother-daughter relationships in Jackson, see: Oppen-
heimer (1988); Newman (1990); Rubenstein (1996); and Hattenhauer (2003).
11 DSM – IV “Diagnostic Criteria for 301.83 Borderline Personality Disorder.” http://
behavenet.com/node/21651. Accessed 1 August 2014.
12 As a quick Internet search establishes, many other viewers have noted the striking simi-
larities between Stoker and Castle, but as of the time of writing, Jackson’s influence has
not been acknowledged by either Park or Miller.
13 Interestingly, some of the prerelease publicity material for Guillermo del Toro’s baroque
haunted house movie Crimson Peak (2015) also depicts Wasikowska as a nightgown-
clad, candle-carrying classic Gothic heroine.
14 For more on Castle as a feminist text, see Lynette Carpenter (1993) and Karen J. Hall
(1993). Hall sees the behavior of the Blackwood sisters as “feminist interventions
against the patriarchy which violates and oppresses them” (111).

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The Craft. Dir. Andrew Fleming. Columbia Pictures, 1996. DVD.
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The Exorcist. Dir. William Friedkin. Warner Bros, 1973. DVD.
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———. We Have Always Lived in the Castle. New York: Penguin, 1962; 2006. Print.
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Palgrave MacMillan, 1990. 120–34. Print.

Oppenheimer, Judy. Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. New York: Ballantine
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Pretty Poison. Dir. Noel Black. Twentieth Century Fox, 1968. DVD.
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 Index
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abduction 4, 14 25; “A Tough Tussle” 26; “A Watcher

adolescence 5, 47, 49, 79, 89, 183–4, 186 by the Dead” 26
agency 18, 35, 42, 44, 48, 50, 72, 93, 95, “Biography of a Story” see Jackson
112, 161, 165, 167–8, 172–3 Bird’s Nest, The see Jackson
Alice, Sweet Alice (1976 film) 185 bisexual 166, 171
alienation 42, 57, 65, 144 Blackwood, Algernon 39, 41–2, 176;
The Alleged Haunting of B— House 38 “Ancient Sorceries” 42; “The Camp of
alter ego 58, 63, 158n1 the Dog” 42; “A Psychical Invasion” 39,
Alyce Kills (2011 film) 198n5 42; “Secret Worship” 39
American Society of Psychical Research Bleeding House, The (2011 film) 185, 189
38–9, 42, 52n8 Borden, Lizzie 186–7
anxiety 10, 22, 35, 44, 72, 90, 106, Borley Rectory 37, 45, 51n4
148 British Society for Psychical Research
apocalypse 20, 34–5, 118 38–9, 42, 52n8
Arents Pioneer Medal 3 Burke, Kenneth 2, 126
aristocracy 84, 60
Askew, Alice and Claude 42, 52n9; Aylmer carnivalesque 67
Vance stories 42, 52n9 Chan-Wook, Park 183; Stoker 5, 183–98,
199n12
Baden-Powell, Robert 41; Scouting for Chaucer, Geoffrey 20, 32; The Knight’s
Boys 41 Tale 20
Ballechin House 37–8, 46, 50–1 Cheever, John 4, 76
barbarism 55 civilization 2, 55
Bascom, William 57, 72n5 Cixous, Hélenè 98, 101, 105; “The Laugh
Bates, Richard Jr. 188; Excision 5, 183–4, of the Medusa” 98
187–95, 198, 199n9 Cleaver, June (TV character) 43
Bechdel, Alison i, 5, 142–5, 151–7, 158n1, Cold War 97–9, 108, 112–13, 116–18
158n5; Dykes to Watch Out For 152; Come Along With Me see Jackson
The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For Commedia dell’arte 81
152; Fun Home (graphic novel) 142–2, Common Lives, Lesbian Lives (magazine)
151, 153–7, 158n1, 158n5 152
Bergson, Henri 99 community 57, 64–5, 67–9, 71–2, 77–83,
Bible 18–19, 80, 94, 155, 164; Old Testa- 86–7, 90–4, 98, 100, 102–8, 116–17,
ment Book of Habakkuk 94 136, 139, 144, 150, 174, 188–9, 193;
Bierce, Ambrose 4, 25–6; In the Midst of academic 125, 130; and Jackson 28,
Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians 129–30; LGBTQ 152–3, 156
26; “The Man and the Snake” 26; “An Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur 41; see also
Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” 26; Holmes, Sherlock
A Sole Survivor: Bits of Autobiography Cowley, Malcolm 2
 202 Index
Cozzens, James Gould 4 fate 12, 14, 33, 59, 77, 93–4, 162, 165,
Craft, The (1996 film) 184 176, 185–7
Faulkner, William 3
Danielewski, Mark Z. 3 feminism 4–5, 42, 51, 102, 108, 112, 116,
De Bont, Jan 160, 168–9, 171, 173–4, 175, 123, 156, 158n2, 160, 168–72, 174, 176,
176–8; The Haunting 169–73, 175, 176, 178–9, 179n4, 180n6, 180n7, 199n14
178, 178, 180n6, 180n7 fertility 47, 55, 58, 131
del Toro, Guillermo 198n13 feudal 77
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detective 35–6, 59–60, 133–4, 169, 173–4, Fitzgerald, F. Scott 154; The Great Gatsby
178; detective fiction i, 4, 40–2, 45–7, 156; This Side of Paradise 124, 126, 156
50, 51n7, 52n8, 52n11, 179n4, 180n5; folklore 1, 54–8, 60, 64–9, 71–2, 72n1,
female detective 174, 176; see also 72n2, 72n3, 72n5, 73n7
psychic detective forest 59, 63, 118
Dewitt, Sarah Hyman 1, 23n1 Franklin, Ruth 1
Diana (goddess) 64 Frazer, James 64–5, 73n8; The Golden
Diana’s Mirror (myth) 64 Bough 61, 63–4, 73n8
domesticity i, 2, 4–5, 7–8, 43, 51n2, 51n3, Freud, Sigmund 55, 72n2, 99, 103
69, 82, 84–5, 87, 89, 91, 97–101, 103, Friedan, Betty 97–8, 103; The Feminine
105–8, 108n1, 108n6, 112–14, 116–17, Mystique 97, 103, 115
121n3, 121n9, 129–30, 134, 143–51, Friedman, Lenemaja 7, 15, 106, 136–7
153–57, 158n2, 161, 164–5, 168–74,
176, 178, 179n4, 180n6, 187 garden 8–9, 30, 59, 64, 79–81, 83, 85, 91,
double 14–16, 22, 40, 60, 91, 135–6, 114, 134, 161, 193
158n1, 158n4, 160, 179n1, 192 Garden of Eden 29, 62, 80
Duke Parapsychology Laboratory 38–9, gender 4, 41, 43, 52n11, 89, 99, 104, 113,
51n6 154, 160, 167–9, 178–9, 186
ghost 3, 29, 35–46, 51n4, 51n7, 52n10, 69,
Edenic 66, 80; see also Garden of Eden 144, 146–9, 152, 160–1, 163, 164–75,
Edgar Allan Poe Award 3 177–9, 179n4, 180n5, 180n6, 180n7
Ellis, Bret Easton: 131; The Rules of ghost hunter(s) 39, 42, 167
Attraction 132 Ghost Hunters (TV show) 43
Ellison, Ralph 2, 131 Ginger Snaps (2000 film) 184, 189
estate 8, 13, 38, 77–8, 82, 84–6, 92–4, Good Housekeeping (magazine) 2, 106,
100–1, 115, 146, 161, 193, 197 111–12, 119
Excision (2012 film) see Bates, Richard Jr. Gothic 3–4, 7, 19–20, 28, 35, 40, 45, 76,
exile 69–70 97–100, 102, 105–8, 108n8, 113, 125,
Exorcist, The (1973 film) 183–4 131, 143–7, 151, 157, 158n4, 161,
“Experience and Fiction” see Jackson 172–4, 176, 179n2, 193, 198, 198n5,
extrasensory perception (ESP) 38–9, 40, 199n13
43–4, 51n6 “Green Grow the Rushes, O” (folk ballad)
60, 62
fairytale 1–2, 4, 46, 48, 51n7, 54, 57, 61–2, gynocracy 100
65, 68–72, 72n2, 73n9, 115, 120
family 7–8, 10–11, 14, 16, 21–2, 27, Hall, Joan Wylie xi, 80, 101, 186
29–31, 35–6, 43, 47–8, 51n2, 51n3, Hall, Radclyffe 155
51n5, 59–62, 65–6, 68–9, 83–5, 87, Hangsaman see Jackson
95n1, 99–102, 104, 112–14, 116–17, Hattenhauer, Darryl 3, 7, 40, 44, 51n2,
119, 121n1, 121n6, 126–30, 134–5, 51n7, 54, 56, 58–9, 62, 65, 76, 103, 106,
138, 143, 145–6, 149–57, 160–2, 165, 112–13, 117, 121n1, 138, 161, 179n1,
167–70, 172–8, 180n5, 180n6, 184–7, 179n4, 184, 199n7, 199n10
190–4, 196–8, 199n8; and Jackson’s Haunting, The (1963 film) see Wise,
personal life 36, 107–8, 129–30, 145 Robert
fantasy 5, 30, 60, 66, 69, 80–1, 88, 108, 115, Haunting, The (1999 film) see de Bont, Jan
133–4, 147–8, 150, 174, 184, 188, 191 Haunting of Hill House, The see Jackson
 Index 203
Heavenly Creatures (1994 film) 189 Faculty Wife” 129; “One Ordinary Day,
Hell House see Matheson, Richard With Peanuts” 26; “The Possibility of
Herrington, H. W. 54 Evil” 3; Raising Demons 106–8, 145;
Hodgson, William Hope (W. H.) 41, 176; The Road Through the Wall 4, 16, 20,
The Casebook for Carnacki the Ghost 36, 51, 76–7, 80, 91–3, 95n2, 126, 186;
Finder 41–2, 176 “Still Life with Teapot and Students”
Holmes, Sherlock 41–2 140n3; “The Story We Used to Tell”
horror 3, 26, 35–6, 40, 42, 59, 63, 90, 97, 108n6; The Sundial 4, 8–9, 13, 20,
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106–7, 112, 121n9, 143, 151, 173, 189, 25–35, 51n1, 56, 76, 145, 186–7; “The
191; in cinema i, 5, 183, 179n4, 179n5, Third Baby is the Easiest” 108n1; “The
183–5, 198, 198n3, 198n4 Very Hot Sun in Bermuda” 128; We
housewife 4, 36, 51n3, 97, 107–8, 111, Have Always Lived in the Castle 1, 4–5,
120, 129–30 27–8, 35, 51n1, 54, 56, 65, 67–8, 70–1,
humanity 4, 28, 30, 34, 56, 119 76, 97–100, 106, 108, 111–13, 116–18,
humor 4, 29, 36–7, 61, 97–105, 107–8, 121n4, 131, 145, 183, 185–95, 199n12,
108n5, 129, 145 199n14; “What a Thought” 108n6
Hyman, Laurence Jackson 1, 23n1 James, Henry: The Turn of the Screw 33
Hyman, Stanley Edgar 2, 36–7, 54–8, Jennifer’s Body (2009 Film) 184
61, 63–5, 67–8, 73n8, 97, 106–7, 112, Johnson, Owen: Stover at Yale 124
126–7, 129–31 Joshi, S. T. 25, 41, 51n2
jouissance 63
identity 7–9, 11, 13–16, 18, 20, 22–3, 38, Journal of American Folklore 60
42, 44, 49, 56–9, 61, 65, 72, 78, 97, Just an Ordinary Day see Jackson
108n1, 112, 116, 143, 154, 156–7, 162,
170, 174, 179n2 King, Stephen 3, 51
initiation/initiation story 57–8, 60, 135,
138 Lacanian mirror stage 9
innocence 33, 80, 87, 155 Lang, Andrew 55
isolation 15, 28, 77, 82, 85, 112, 189 laughter 97–108; and gallows humor 97,
103; and Hélène Cixous 101–2; and
Jackson, Shirley: “Biography of a Story” Henri Bergson 99
1; The Bird’s Nest 9, 12, 17–18, 22, Leave it to Beaver 108
28, 35, 44, 51n1, 185–6; “Colloquy” LeFanu, Sheridan 176
44; Come Along With Me 35, 37–8, legend 4, 54–55, 57, 59, 65, 71–2, 73n10
40, 46, 50, 198n6; “Epilogue: Fame” lesbian 63, 143, 146–7, 152–6, 158n4,
108n1; “Experience and Fiction” 37, 166; apparitionality of 147
158n2, 158n3; “Family Treasure” 138; L’Estrange, Sir Roger: Fables of Aesop
Hangsaman 1, 4, 14, 16, 20, 35, 51n1, and Other Eminent Mythologists 19
54, 57–8, 60, 63–5, 68, 71, 72n7, 123–4, Let Me Tell You see Jackson
126, 128, 133–4, 138–40, 140n1, 185; Lethem, Jonathan 111, 131
The Haunting of Hill House i, 1, 3–5, library 29–31, 43, 49, 69, 114, 121n5, 148,
7, 10–11, 16, 19, 28, 35–40, 42–4, 47, 152, 154–56, 160–61
51, 51n1, 51n6, 51n7, 76, 128, 142–7, Life Among the Savages see Jackson
149–51, 153, 157, 158n3, 160, 178, literacy 154–55; visual 40
185; “Janice” 127–8; Just An Ordinary Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, The
Day 27, 127–8; Let Me Tell You 1, 23n1, 185
51n4; Life Among the Savages 106–8, Lootens, Tricia 51n5, 149, 161
108n1, 129, 145 “The Lottery” i, 1–3, “Lottery, The” see Jackson
5, 26, 35–6, 51n1, 54, 76–7, 80, 90–2, Lyons, John O. 58, 62–3, 139; The College
111, 126; “Louisa, Please Come Home” Novel in America 123–25
3; “The Man in the Woods” 1, 128; “The
Missing Girl” 127–8; “Mrs. Anderson” McCall’s 98
108n6; “The Night We All Had Grippe” McCarthy, Mary: The Groves of Academe
39–40; “Of Course” 129; “On Being a 123
 204 Index
McCarthyism 116 “One Ordinary Day with Peanuts” see
Mademoiselle 106, 129 Jackson
madness 4–5, 10, 21, 41, 106, 145, 148, Oppenheimer, Judy 2, 7, 23n3, 26–8, 36–7,
171, 174, 185–6, 188 44, 54, 56, 68, 71, 95n2, 106, 108, 111,
magic 2, 26, 36–7, 51n2, 55, 61–3, 65, 121n1, 121n3, 140n2
68–70, 72, 73n8, 98, 116–18, 145, Owen, Alex 176–7
158n2 Ozzie and Harriet 108
“Maid Freed From the Gallows” (folk
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ballad) 59 Park Chan-wook: Stoker 5, 183–85,

maps 156–7 187–98, 199n12
March, William: The Bad Seed 184 paternal 36, 43, 78, 162, 165, 169, 173
Marchalonis, Shirley 125–6 patriarchy 43, 99–100, 108n5, 119, 121n2,
marginalization 98, 105, 125, 160 164, 166, 168, 170–1, 174, 179n3–5,
maternal 13, 46, 107, 160–2, 164–5, 199n14
168–70, 173–4, 179n1, 180n6, 184 phallic 43, 68, 160–5, 167–8, 174–5,
Matheson, Richard: Hell House 3 179n1, 179n3; mother 162
matriarchy 100 Porter, Katherine Anne 3
Medusa 98, 101, 108n7 Pretty Poison 185
memory 9, 19, 21, 77, 81, 126 psychic detective 173, 176, 179n4
Mencken, H. L. 26 psychical residue 38
Metcalf, Linda 161, 176–7, 180n5 psychosis 58, 191
Miller, Wentworth 183, 189; see also Park pulp fiction 60
Chan-wook
Millet, Kate 156 queer 143–8, 151–2, 154–5, 157–8
misanthropy 4, 25–8, 32–3
misogyny 25 race 113
Modernity 77, 79, 82, 84, 93 Raising Demons see Jackson
Murphy, Bernice M. 35, 63, 91, 99, 105, rape 4, 11, 14, 16, 21, 60, 63, 132, 194,
106, 121n1, 148 196
myth 2, 4, 19, 41, 54–8, 61–2, 63–5, 68–9, Reader’s Digest 95n1, 119
71–2, 72n2–3, 72n5, 73n8, 77, 80, Real, the (Lacanian) 63
118–19, 154, 177, 183 repression 13, 51n5, 55, 60, 69, 112, 135,
149, 161
National Book Award 3 Repulsion 188
Nemerov, Howard 131 Rhine, J. B. 39
neodomestic 5, 144 Rhine, Louisa E. 39
neurosis 171 Richardson, Samuel 4, 7–10, 12–23;
Newman, John Henry: The Idea of a Clarissa 10–12, 16–17, 19, 21; Pamela
University 123 7–8, 13–14, 16–20, 22–3; Sir Charles
Newman, Judie 37, 161 Grandison 7–8, 14, 18, 23
New Yorker, The 1–2, 111, 126, 128 Ring, The (Ringu) (1998 film) 184
New York Times Book Review 3 ritual 1–2, 4, 10, 19, 21, 26, 54–62, 64–73,
nihilism 103 79–80, 89, 91–2, 134–5, 189–90
North Bennington (Vermont) 27–8, 126, Road Through the Wall, The see Jackson
130–1
sacred 57, 64, 71, 73n10, 83, 85
occult 4, 36–8, 40–2, 45–7, 50–1, 52n9, Salinger, J. D. 2
76, 111, 121n9, 171, 173, 176–7, San Francisco, California 77, 82
180n5 Sarton, May: The Small Room 124, 126
occult detective fiction 4, 40–2, 45–7, 50, Saturday Evening Post, The 3, 95n1
52n9, 176, 180n5 savage 55, 67
Oedipal 61 Savoy, Eric 151
O’Hara, John 4, 76 schizophrenia 185
Oliver, Mary 131 seduction 4, 11, 58, 63, 71, 165
 Index 205
“Seven Types of Ambiguity” see Jackson uncanny 2, 8, 35, 40, 68, 76, 98, 160–1,
Shakespeare, William 19; Hamlet 16; The 173, 177–9, 184
Rape of Lucrece 16; Twelfth Night 19 University of Mississippi 131
Shilts, Randy: And the Band Played On unreliable narrator 70, 112
152
Showalter, Elaine 125 vampire 42, 62, 178, 183
Siddons, Anne Rivers: The House Next Van Gennep, Arnold 57
Door 3 victimization 42, 77, 91
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Societies for Psychical Research 38–40, Victorian 40–1, 87; homes 142–3, 164;
42, 52n8, 177 literature 40–1, 193; domesticity 164;
spectralization 161, 172, 180n7 female murderers 185
Spiritualism 176–7; role of women in Vidal, Gore 26; Kalki 28
176–7; and Kate and Margaret Fox 176 violation 14, 17, 21
Spock, Benjamin 107 voodoo 36
Stoker see Park Chan-Wook
Stonewall Riots 152 Waldman, Anne 131
Straub, Peter: Ghost Story 3 Walpole, Horace: The Castle of Otranto
suburbia 93–4, 148 28
subversion 18, 58, 65, 90, 101–2, 116, 185 Waugh, Evelyn 26
Sundial, The see Jackson We Have Always Lived in the Castle see
supernatural 3–4, 28, 31–2, 35–52, 55, Jackson
128, 142, 145–6, 171–6, 183–5, 189 Welden, Paula Jean: influence on Jackson
superstition 56–7, 68–9 127–8; influence on Tartt 131
Swift, Jonathan 4, 26 West, Nathanael 26
Syfy (TV network) 43 Whyte, William H.: The Organization Man
Symbolic, the (Lacanian) 63 79, 93
Syracuse University 3, 54, 127 Wise, Robert: The Haunting (1963) 160,
162–5, 168, 173, 178, 179n2–3
Tartt, Donna 4, 131–2, 140 witchcraft 22, 36, 51n2, 65, 111; witched-
Teeth (2007 film) 184 like sounds 7
Telepathy 38–9, 47 Wolfe, Tom: I Am Charlotte Simmons
Thackeray, William Makepeace: Vanity 124
Fair 20 Woman’s Day 95n1
Tin-tin (game) 19, 80 Woman’s Home Companion 2, 106
trauma 8, 13, 17, 21–2, 50, 54, 57, 60, Womanspirit movement 177
63–5, 133, 135–6, 155, 184, 196 World War II 43, 82, 97
Turn of the Screw, The see James, Henry
Tylor, E. B. 55 Yates, Richard 76