Shirley Jackson (1919-1905). Biography and creativity

Shirley Jackson’s works have aroused controversy among scholars, many of whom doubt their lasting importance, but no one denies that they have had a significant cultural impact on generations of Americans. With this impact and the renewed interest in her works in mind, Jackson warrants consideration as a great postwar American writer.

Jackson’s early life was relatively uneventful. Born in San Francisco on December 14, 1919 (a number of accounts erroneously cite 1916 as her birth year), Shirley Hardie Jackson was the daughter of Geraldine Bugbee Jackson and Leslie Hardie Jackson, a child born into “comfort, pleasant surroundings, and social position, but to parents who never truly knew what to make of her, not in childhood and not throughout her entire forty-eight [sic] years” (Oppenheimer 11).

When she was six years old, the Jacksons moved from the Ashbury Park section of San Francisco to Burlingame, a suburb some 16 miles to the south of the city. Throughout her childhood, Jackson kept journals and wrote poetry, with existing entries as early as 1932, when she was 13 years old. Although the Jackson family moved to Rochester, New York, when Shirley was 16, the early years in California made a lasting impression. Further, as Oppenheimer points out, Jackson’s early diary entries reveal an “increasing interest in superstition and the supernatural,” with Jackson noting which days are lucky and unlucky and attributing spiritual portents to periods of time (19).

In 1934, soon after moving to Rochester, Jackson enrolled at Syracuse University, where she studied two years before leaving to dedicate her life to writing full time. After a two-year hiatus, Jackson returned to Syracuse in 1938 and graduated in 1940, during which time she published fiction and nonfiction in campus publications and met Stanley Edgar Hyman, with whom she founded a campus magazine called The Specter. This academic partnership continued throughout Jackson’s life; she married Hyman in 1940 and raised a family as Hyman pursued a career as an academic. In the same year, upon graduation, the two moved to New York City, where just one year later Jackson’s first publication of note, a short story based on her experience working at Macy’s department store called “My Life with R. H. Macy,” appeared in the New Republic, the publication for which Hyman served as editorial assistant.

Notably, her story “Come Dance with Me in Ireland” was selected for inclusion in Best American Short Stories, 1944.. During the five-year period in New York, Jackson continued to publish short stories; gave birth to a son, Laurence; and a daughter, Joanne; and moved to Bennington, Vermont—the academic and spiritual locus Jackson knew the rest of her life—in 1945. Although Hyman and Jackson returned to New York for one year in 1949, and Jackson did publish the story for which she is best known during this significant year when Hyman accepted a post with the New Yorker, Bennington remained their home.

With Hyman a faculty member at Bennington College, the couple knew many of the leading scholars, editors, and fiction writers of the middle of the 20th century. These include the eminent novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison, and the literary critic Kenneth Burke. During their Bennington tenure, Jackson also worked as a substitute teacher for Hyman’s creative writing course. The Bennington years were fruitful, filled with books and children.

The works for which Jackson is best known date from this period: “The Lottery,” was published in the New Yorker on June 28, 1948, and Jackson’s first novel, The Road through the Wall, came out in 1949, in addition to The Lottery, or, The Adventures of James Harris, a collection of short stories that included its title piece. “The Lottery,” a gothic story of a New England town that sacrifices one of its members for the feast of new corn, propelled Jackson to fame; The New Yorker was flooded with letters demanding an explanation for this horror story.

Although late in life Jackson would lecture on this strong public reaction and even parody the letters the New Yorker received, she refrained, as do many fiction writers, from making many comments about the purpose and meaning of this dark story. Nevertheless, influential critics continued to comment on her work, perhaps most significantly some 10 years later when Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren used “The Lottery” as a model in their famous work of literary criticism, Understanding Fiction (1959).

Throughout the 1950s, Jackson continued to raise children and to write prolifically, turning out short stories, the novels Hangsaman (1951) and The Bird’s Nest (1954)—both portrayals of psychological abnormalities and disturbance—a children’s book, The Witchcraft of Salem Village (1956), and short pieces for Good Housekeeping and Mademoiselle, many of which were included in Life among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957). At the end of the decade, Jackson published three novels that garnered much critical acclaim: The Sundial (1962), a gothic suspense tale; The Haunting of Hill House (1959), a ghost story in which a doctor of philosophy seeks to uncover the darkness lurking in a house for 80 years by inviting guests to stay with him in the house; and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), a story of an agoraphobe and mass-murderess often said to reflect Jackson’s fears and anxieties. In her lecture “Experience and Fiction” collected in Come Along with Me, Jackson describes the genesis for The Haunting of Hill House and for her interest in the supernatural:

I have recently finished a novel about a haunted house. I was [working] on a novel about a haunted house because I happened by chance, to read a book about a group of people, nineteenth-century psychic researchers, who rented a haunted house and recorded their impressions of the things they saw and heard and felt in order to contribute a learned paper for the Society for Psychic Research. . . . I have always been interested in witchcraft and superstition, but have never had much traffic with ghosts, so I began asking people everywhere what they thought about such things, and I began to find out that there was one common factor—most people have never seen a ghost, and never want or expect to, but almost everyone will admit sometimes they have a sneaking feeling that they just possibly could meet a ghost if they weren’t careful—if they were to turn a corner too suddenly, perhaps, or open their eyes too soon when they wake up at night, or go into a dark room without hesitating first . . . (201-202)

Such an interest in the occult has led some to label Jackson as a genre writer, but such an interest also conveys a deep awareness of the reading public and in connecting with the popular reader’s imagination, something Jackson strove for throughout her life. Late in her career, Jackson reviewed children’s books for the New York Herald Tribune, continued to write award-winning fiction, taught at the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference, lectured at schools and universities, and received the Arents Pioneer Medal for Outstanding Achievement from Syracuse University, her alma mater.

Although many critics have relegated Jackson’s to being a one-hit-wonder, a horror writer, and the author of domestic memoirs, Jackson’s work is currently being reassessed, especially in terms of its universal appeal and social significance. One such reassessment is Jonathan Lethem’s 1997 Salon review of Just an Ordinary Day, a posthumous collection of Jackson’s works published by two of her children:

To put it most simply, Shirley Jackson wrote about the mundane evils hidden in everyday life and about the warring and subsuming of selves in a family, a community and sometimes even in a single mind. She wrote about prejudice, neurosis and identity. An unfortunate impression persists (one Jackson encouraged, for complicated reasons) that her work is full of ghosts and witches.

In truth, few of her greatest stories and just one of her novels, “The Haunting of Hill House,” contain a suggestion of genuinely supernatural events. Jackson’s forte was psychology and society, people in other words—people disturbed, dispossessed, misunderstanding or thwarting one another compulsively, people colluding absently in monstrous acts. She had a jeweler’s eye for the microscopic degrees by which a personality creeps into madness or a relationship turns from dependence to exploitation.

Most recently, Angela Hague (2005) has reconsidered Jackson’s writings in light of the condition of mid 20th-century American women:

By focusing on her female characters’ isolation, loneliness, and fragmenting identities, their simultaneous inability to relate to the world outside themselves or to function autonomously, and their confrontation with an inner emptiness that often results in mental illness, Jackson displays in pathological terms the position of many women in the 1950s. But her unveiling of this era’s dark corners is not limited to one gender, for her apocalyptic consciousness, sinister children, and scathing portraits of nuclear families and their suburban environments, her depiction of a quotidian and predictable world that can suddenly metamorphose into the terrifying and the bizarre, reveal her characters’ reactions to a culture of repression, containment, and paranoia. (74)

Hague insists, Her artful use of ambiguity and understatement has obscured the cultural critique her writing presents, and it is time to approach her work with the same critical rigor that recently has been expended on other overlooked and unap- preciated—and sometimes less talented—writers. Rather than being relegated to the obligatory inclusion of “The Lottery” in undergraduate literature textbooks, her fiction should be read as a significant contribution to our understanding of the psychic disruption that has characterized postwar experience. Her “faithful anatomy” deserves a closer look. (90-91)

As a writer who captured the imagination of postwar Americans with the “The Lottery,” wrote on both domestic life and the nature of human evil in varied forms that range from the darkly pessimistic to the light and comic, depicted the individual as object of the social world’s inhuman rituals, and recorded the chilling aspects of the human psyche, Shirley Jackson will not likely be forgotten.