MODES OF QUEERING IN THE WORKS OF SHIRLEY JACKSON

A thesis presented to the faculty of the Graduate School of Western Carolina University in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English Studies

By

Daniel Abraham Acocella

Director: Dr. Travis A. Rountree

Assistant Professor of English Studies
English Studies Department

Committee Members: Dr. Emily Naser-Hall

April 2025
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would first like to thank my thesis committee. Dr. Travis Rountree was incredibly supportive of

me during this entire process, his guidance and expertise were invaluable during the formative period of

my writing, my archival research, and revision. I do not believe I could have requested a more informed

or wiser Jackson scholar than Dr. Emily Naser-Hall; this thesis would not have been possible without her

aid and support. My committee’s feedback and contributions were incredibly helpful, and more so than

anything I want to thank them both, not just for the aid they gave me in my writing process but for

helping me get to know a figure like Shirley Jackson just a little better.

I would also like to thank both Ruth Franklin, author of A Rather Haunted Life, and Library of

Congress archivist Patrick Kerwin for their aid in my research. There is little chance that I would have

found those vital documents and references without their aid.

I would then like to extend my most heartfelt thanks to my partner, Clairissa Hitcho. You read

every chapter, passage, and sentence before anyone else did, and were often the only reason I felt self-

assured enough to send it to my committee. I owe my both the gumption necessary in finishing this thesis

and the confidence needed to begin it to you. You are, as always, my first and most valued reader.

It is only due to the support of the myriad professors of the English department that I was granted

the opportunity to pursue this thesis and develop my ideas. Of equal importance are my fellow graduate

students, who were there at every turn to bounce ideas off of and give me invaluable advice and reading

suggestions.

Lastly, I would like to thank Western Carolina University and all of its staff for supporting me in

my writing. In that, I would like to extend a specific thank you to the custodial staff. No matter how late I

seemed to be on campus, in class, or working, you were all there far longer and later. I would have

accomplished none of what I have without the aid of everyone listed here, but I fear no one would

accomplish anything without you all.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ........................................................................................................................................................ iii

Introduction ................................................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter One: Queering Domesticity: The Gothic House as a Queer Haven and Predatory Lie ................... 6
Foundations of the Gothic House.............................................................................................................. 6
The Sundial: A Reckoning with Authority, Patriarchal or Not ................................................................. 8
The Haunting of Hill House: Domestic Predation .................................................................................. 12
We Have Always Lived in the Castle: Isolation and Queer Safety ........................................................ 15
The House: Real and Imagined ............................................................................................................... 19
Chapter Two: Jackson’s Lost Girls: Exploring Unreality and Queering Mental Health ............................ 25
The Birds Nest: More than One Yet Less than Oneself .......................................................................... 29
Hangsaman: Broken Women in Neat Little Boxes, Left to Their Own Devices ................................... 35
Come Along with Me: A Light at the End of the Tunnel ........................................................................ 43
Chapter Three: Banal Suburbia Cast as the Original Sin .......................................................................... 475
Middle Class Anxieties and Suburban Hierarchies............................................................................... 486
Toddie: The Other and the Queer Made Manifest .................................................................................. 55
Archival Queerness: An Extratextual Reading of Tod and Contemporary Suicidality .......................... 59
Chapter Four: Jackson’s Queered Monster’s and Monstrous Queers ......................................................... 65
The Lesbian Double: Seductress, Destroyer, and Simply You ............................................................... 67
Writing Around the Word ....................................................................................................................... 69
Yearning Inscribed .................................................................................................................................. 73
James Harris: The Monster with Many Faces ......................................................................................... 76
Jackson in the Larger Picture .................................................................................................................. 80
Stanley Hyman: Husband, Editor, and Critic .......................................................................................... 83
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................................. 86
Works Cited ................................................................................................................................................ 90

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 ABSTRACT

MODES OF QUEERING IN THE WORKS OF SHIRLEY JACKSON

Daniel Abraham Acocella, M.F.A. Western Carolina University (April 2025)

Director: Dr. Travis Rountree

This thesis explores the significance and influence of Shirley Jackson’s fiction in the genre of queer

horror. Primarily, it identifies the specific ways in which queering is practiced in Shirley Jackson’s work.

The four queering practices in Jackson’s work that this thesis investigates are the queering of domestic

ideals within traditional femininity through the subversion of gothic tropes, the role and significance of

mental health in Jackson’s queered characters, Jackson’s critique of American suburbia, and the different

modes of applied monstrosity to queered characters and ideals. When relevant to understanding the

greater context of queer literature or other genres, such as the Gothic, comparative analysis is also

employed.

In tandem with this analysis, the thesis includes extra-textual context and biographical

information to allow for a better understanding of the complications that Shirley Jackson’s inclusion in

the canon of queer literature presents. This information is included because Jackson’s stated stance on

queerness is at times at odds with her reputation and role in the genre. The inclusion of information which

could be deemed contradictory to the larger goals of queer literature is not included in the analysis to

defame her or argue that she should not hold the place which she does, but to allow greater insight into

the way that external factors might have affected her work. This information is primarily sourced from

documents in the Library of Congress’ archives and supplemented by Ruth Franklin’s and Judy

Oppenheimer’s biographies. This inclusion aims to recognize queer literature as a growing and reactive

genre.

This thesis does not provide an answer or conclusion on Jackson or her influence on queer

literature or horror. It surveys her works, identifies significant practices and modes, and further elaborates

iii
on past scholarship and works to better allow and encourage other scholars and theorists to contribute to

the discussion.

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 INTRODUCTION

Shirley Jackson (December 14, 1916–August 8, 1965) is best known for her short story “The

Lottery” as well as her last two novels, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the

Castle. Stanley Hyman, Jackson’s husband, in the preface of her posthumous collection, The Magic of

Shirley Jackson, described her work as “a sensitive and faithful anatomy of our times,” with accordingly

“fitting symbols for our distressing world” (viii). He goes on to note that Jackson “was always proud that

the Union of South Africa banned ‘The Lottery,’” and “she felt that they at least understood the story.”

Jackson’s work was an endeavor in perpetually investigating the odd, nonsensical, cruel, and queer, and

this thesis investigates her lineage and effect within the genre.

Jackson is a prolific figure in both queer literature and the horror genre and has been highly

influential to many contemporary Queer horror authors such as Carmen Maria Machado, Helen Oyeyemi,

Mona Awad, and Caitlyn Kiernan as well as other authors such as Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Tremblay, and

Stephen King, who once praised her as “the master of the modern horror story” (Downey & Jones 214).

There has been a renewed interest in her both popularly with the installment of The Shirley Jackson

Awards in 2007, multiple recent adaptations, the posthumous publication of Dark Tales in 2016, and

critically with the special issue in Women’s Studies focused on her and the recently created journal Shirley

Jackson Studies which published Queer(ing) Jackson in the summer of 2024. This thesis examines the

place of Shirley Jackson’s work in the tradition of queer literature as well as the effect that her time and

environment had on her and writing.

Jackson’s significance to the genre of queer horror is itself a vital study but compounding that is

the issue of her self-ascribed dislike of being categorized as a Queer author, an issue that has already been

analyzed at length by Colin Haines in “Frightened by a Word”: Shirley Jackson and Lesbian Gothic. It is

a facet of her legacy that is disheartening and necessitates an analysis of her work that includes a level of

biographical context which this thesis engages in by both referencing the research done by Jackson’s

biographers Ruth Franklin and Judy Oppenheimer, as well as incorporating those primary sources found

in the Library of Congress archives The Shirley Jackson Papers and The Stanley Edgar Hyman Papers.

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Jackson often employed unconventional grammar and syntax, especially in her personal documents.

Unless otherwise stated, these characteristics have been maintained when quoted. Jackson specifically

forewent capitalization, a quirk she picked up from her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman. Other

unconventional textual characteristics or inclusions that cannot be maintained will be identified with a

footnote.

When interpreting Jackson in the context of queer literature, it is necessary to incorporate and

locate Jackson’s work within the broader scholarship regarding Queer populations and culture. The

primary source used for this will be Hannah McCann’s and Whitney Monaghan’s Queer Theory Now

which assesses the current state of Queer scholarship and catalogues the history of Queerness: politically,

culturally, as well as in a theoretical context that accounts for adjacent studies such as gender, feminism,

race, and poststructuralism. The primary practice being analyzed here is queering, which is the attempt to

deconstruct essentialist theories and accepted cultural conventions, specifically around heteronormative

and patriarchal ideals. These normative ideals must be rooted out and analyzed in alternative contexts

because they are the fundamental grounding upon which current discourse takes place and constitute the

basis for continued and unrecognized injustice.

While the practice of queering can be used to analyze any powerful or authoritative institution,

the primary goal of this thesis will be to survey those ways in which Shirley Jackson’s works achieve this

in the context of women and populations that are queer in regards to their sexual or gender orientation. To

differentiate between the use of the word queer, the capitalized “Queer” will be used to refer those

persons and populations which are not heterosexual and/or whose identity does align with normative

conceptions of gender whereas the uncapitalized “queer” will be used when denoting the different

multitudes of marginalized and othered populations and individuals.

In analyzing the practice of queering the focus must then shift away from predominate

understandings and conceptions and look instead to what Judith Halberstam has identified as an

alternative history, “a history associated with loss and debt” which looks instead to the narratives of

oppressed groups and peoples rather than the mainstream and the “generational logics and temporalities”

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that “extend the status quo in a way that favors dominant groups” (123). The theoretical basis and

exigence for the study of queering is that it functions as a purposeful opposition to heteronormativity and

assumed norms within society and culture. As Cathy J. Cohen formulates in her essay “Punks,

Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics” the practice of opposing or

queering the normative is essential to understanding how it is ingrained within underlying systems and to

identifying the ways in which oppression manifest. She asserts that it is only within this opposition that “a

space where transformational political work can begin” and that “if there is any truly radical potential to

be found in the idea of queerness and the practice of queer politics, it would seem to be located in its

ability to create a space in opposition to dominant norms” (440). In this creation of space the

consideration must be made in regards to the heteronormative culture that currently exists at the time of

reading Jackson’s works and that which existed when she was writing.

José E. Muñoz, in his book Cruising Utopia: The then and there of Queer Futurity establishes a

theoretical framework for evidencing queer readings and interpretations of works written under the

domineering influence of heteronormative culture that this thesis adopts. He argues that “Queerness has

an especially vexed relationship to evidence” as “historically, evidence of queerness has been used to

penalize and discipline queer desires, connections, and acts” (65). He identifies the current and past

heteronormativity and straightness as “a gatekeeper” that “will labor to invalidate the historical fact of

queer lives—present, past, and future.” The solution he presents is “queering evidence” itself and

forgoing “traditional understandings of the term” evidence, and instead “suturing it to the concept of

ephemera” explaining that ephemera is a “trace, the remains, the things that are left, hanging in the air

like a rumor.” This thesis specifically identifies that ephemera in Jackson’s work: those vacancies in

Jackson’s scenes, narrations, and characterizations that would have contained some overt and concrete

queerness and attempts to reify them in the context of both the published text and, when possible,

Jackson’s personal life and writings.

In locating and contextualizing queerness in both the concrete and ephemeral, Sara Ahmed’s

conception of queerness by means of deviation from heteronormativity is used as a guiding principle to

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understand and identify those artifacts of queerness that Jackson both uses to critique heteronormativity

and at times to align her work with the normative. As Ahmed explains “to become straight means that we

not only have to turn toward the objects that are given to us by heterosexual culture, but also that we must

‘turn away’ from objects that take us off this line” going on to explain that “the queer subject within

straight culture hence deviates and is made socially present as a deviant” (21). The existence of the

deviant or the Other, then functions as the first criterion in establishing any character, practice, or theme

in Jackson’s work as queer. While there are several notable characters identified as Queer in either the

published text or Jackson’s drafts, those objects whose categorization is more ambiguous are identified as

queer when they align with this conception of queerness as a deviation from the normative. Beyond

identifying objects of interest, the function and motive behind Jackson’s use of discrete objects,

ephemeral or not, will of course be primarily identified based on the text, but also the culture in which she

was working, archival documents, and her personal circumstances.

This thesis identifies and analyzes four primary modes in which Shirley Jackson queers

heteronormative society, while contextualizing the effect of each practice and their relative subversion as

it relates to the circumstances of Jackson’s environment and personal life.

The first chapter examines the patriarchal conception of domesticity and the ways in which

Jackson subverts these ideals using the trope of the Haunted House. Jackson’s novels The Sundial, The

Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle will be the primary artifacts of analysis

in this chapter, as the house is the catalyst and narrative center of each of these works. This chapter will

identify the ways that Jackson has subverted the traditional ideal of the Haunted House in the Gothic

tradition and used those same ideals to critique heteronormative ideals of the domestic.

The second chapter analyzes Jackson’s characterization of mental health as it relates to the

Gothic’s use of it as a trope and plot device. Each of Jackson’s novels and many of her short stories

contain a central character, who suffers from mental illness to some degree but most notable of these

works are her novels Hangsaman, The Bird’s Nest, and The Haunting of Hill House which will be the

primary works analyzed. Specifically, this chapter will be investigating the proposed causation of mental

4
illness in the Gothic genre and Jackson’s work, and the way in which these different uses reflect an

understanding of mental illness functions.

The third chapter examines Jackson’s first and most overlooked novel, The Road Through the

Wall, and the way it queers American suburbia and illustrates the ostracization and harm that the culture

inflicts upon queer and Queer people. It also analyzes the ways that society, specifically White middle-

class culture, subtly ostracizes and others queer populations to perpetuate historical oppression, even

while avoiding more overtly bigoted and violent practices.

The fourth chapter explores Jackson’s use of the Monster and the ways she both subverts and

reinforces the normative and traditional conception of it, as it relates to queerness in the horror genre. The

primary works being analyzed in this chapter are her collection The Lottery: The Adventures of James

Harris and Hangsaman. It specifically looks at her use of the Monster and how it functions as both a

symbol for a conservative fear of queerness and the ways in which queer people have been harmed and

alienated by the normative culture in her work. This chapter will also be the primary location in which

this thesis will deal with Jackson’s stated dislike of being categorized as a Queer author, those revisions

she possibly made to her works because of this dislike, and those factors which might have played a role

in the development of her perspective.

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 CHAPTER ONE: QUEERING DOMESTICITY: THE GOTHIC HOUSE AS A QUEER

HAVEN AND PREDATORY LIE

The latter three of Shirley Jackson’s six novels employ a version of the archetypal Haunted

House, those works being The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House, and her final novel We Have Always

Lived in the Castle. In each of these works, Jackson takes clear inspiration from the Gothic tradition,

through both the inclusion of characteristically supernatural aesthetics and intractable past wrongs or sins

that torment characters. It is the contention of this chapter that her construction of each house and setting

subverts the normative ideals and traditional usage of the Haunted House, and that through this

subversion she queers traditional perspectives of femininity and domesticity. In this subversion, Jackson

identifies and explores the damage that heteronormative and patriarchal standards can have on women

and queer populations. While the patriarchy and heteronormativity are recognized in the narratives as

conventional, Jackson characterizes them as a haunting presence as opposed to the natural order of things.

This chapter will furthermore investigate Jackson’s issue with the patriarchy, as it can further illuminate

her intentions, or lack thereof, regarding her characterization of key characters and settings.

Foundations of the Gothic House

To understand the ways in which Jackson subverts the Haunted House as a trope, it is necessary

to establish how it has historically functioned within the Gothic tradition. The Gothic, while now most

associated with the confrontation of a past wrong or sin often manifesting as a supernatural entity or

event, originally takes its name from the architectural characteristics of its setting. The setting is of the

utmost importance, as the Gothic, whether it revolves around a castle or a mansion, is well-equipped to

and often finds itself investigating the sins of the rich and/or powerful. Often though, the Gothic focuses

on the wrongs of the individual rather than the larger systems of power and authority that allowed them to

happen, as seen in The Castle of Otranto.

For better or worse, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto is widely accepted as the origin of

the Gothic novel. The narrative at first centers on the current ruler, Manfred, and his quest to maintain

power in the face of supernatural elements attempting to displace him and his lineage from their position

6
of authority. The supernatural appears rather ostentatiously at the very beginning of the narrative, as

Manfred’s son and heir, Conrad, is killed by a giant helmet that has mysteriously fallen from the sky and

crushed him on his wedding day, “he beheld his child dashed to pieces, and almost buried under an

enormous helmet, an hundred times more large than any case ever made for human being, and shaded

with a proportionable quantity of black feathers” (Walpole 17). It is revealed that Manfred’s grandfather

had wrongfully usurped power and that supernatural events are occurring as a means for the kingdom to

right itself. At the conclusion of the novel, Manfred abdicates his position and allows Theodore, the

rightful heir, to take power.

Following the death of Conrad, Manfred’s plot to maintain power revolves around the dissolution

of his marriage to his current wife, Hippolita, and remarriage to Isabella, the former fiancé of Conrad and

daughter of Frederic, a potential political ally. This perverse course of action is prevented when Theodore,

the actual heir, instead marries Isabella. While Manfred is depicted as a dictatorial ruler who is rightfully

usurped, the resolution does not take place within a great upheaval, but a return to the status quo and

unchallenged patriarchal power.

A work of almost equal influence in the Gothic tradition is Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the

House of Usher” which centers on the experience of the unnamed protagonist’s visit to Roderick Usher,

an estranged and sickly friend who is the latest patriarch in his family’s distinguished lineage. It is

revealed that the illness Roderick and his sister suffer from and the decay of the home are due to the

history of incestuous relationships in the Usher lineage. The story concludes with the collapse of the

Usher house and the death of Roderick and his sister, the last two remaining Ushers. The Haunted House

can here be understood as the supernatural consequences of past wrongs, with those subject to the

haunting being forced to either confront those moral failings or be killed, as is the case with Manfred and

Roderick respectively.

As is understood in both Walpole’s and Poe’s works, gender identity and sexuality have an

intrinsic link to power and authority. Queer theory is distinct from both postmodernism and

poststructuralism, as it is necessarily tied to both sexuality and gender identity (McCann and Monaghan

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7-8). The maintenance of power is inseparable from the continued adherence to heteronormativity, as only

in this context are men, through the patriarchy, given the inalienable right to power and authority. In both

works the Haunted House functions as an otherworldly extension of normativity reaffirming the rightful

place and power of the patriarchy and heteronormative tradition. The queered actions of the characters

who dwell in these houses instigate supernatural events, which either return the setting to the previous

status quo or destroy the perceived aberration. Manfred opposes the established order as he and his

ancestors have usurped the position of authority that Theodore and his line had held, and Roderick and his

ancestors oppose normative ideas of sexuality as they engage in incest. Both have broken away from what

is deemed as appropriate or acceptable behavior and rather than society stopping them, the supernatural

intercedes. They are the target of these otherworldly forces, but it is portrayed as justified as they have

contradicted the established order and strayed from normative behavior. The hauntings are depicted as a

necessity to reassert the normativity, and the queer actions of the characters are portrayed as the true

catalyst of the horror.

The Sundial: A Reckoning with Authority, Patriarchal or Not

Jackson subverts this dynamic throughout the last three of her larger works, the first being The

Sundial, wherein the attainment of power and pursuit of control itself is queered. The house, while

identified by the characters as a shelter against a hostile outside world, functions as a prison confining the

characters by the conclusion. The catalytic event within the novel is the death, and possible murder, of

Lionel, the acting patriarch of the Halloran family. Following his death, the family falls under the control

of Lionel’s mother, Orianna, more often referred to as Mrs. Halloran, the suspected murderer and wife of

Lionel’s senile and immobile father, Richard. She first plans to exile everyone that she can from the

estate, but after hearing the message that Aunt Fanny, her sister-in-law, received from the ghost of her and

Lionel’s father becomes convinced of an impending nuclear holocaust. Following this, Mrs. Halloran’s

yearning for solitude dissipates, and she attempts to keep everyone that she can within her home so that

she can use them to begin a new world following the apocalypse.

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 The novel is much more direct than Jackson’s other works in its commentary, as Richard Pascal

points out “it openly essays to comment upon contemporary social issues and delusions and to pronounce

upon their implications for the nation” (82). Despite the way Jackson “brazenly replicate[s] those

[trappings] of the early English Gothic tradition as exemplified by the novels of Walpole, Reeve, and

Radcliffe” (Pascal 83), the novel’s focus is staunchly American and investigates the “anxieties about

challenges to the dominant patriarchal ideologies of domesticity and gender” (82). Mrs. Halloran’s ascent

to power, and subsequent bid for independence, is only made possible by a power vacuum, a unique set of

circumstances that allow a woman to attain authority which was atypical of the 1950s, the time period in

which Jackson wrote The Sundial. Characteristically of that time, Mrs. Halloran was previously denied

her autonomy and had no choice but to be subservient to her husband, and then following the onset of his

senility, to her son Lionel. Unlike Manfred though, her motivation lies not only in the attainment of

power but the procurement of independence. Her first instinct is accordingly to exile every member of the

household, including Maryjane, her daughter-in-law; Fancy, her grandchild; Miss Ogilvie, her maid; and

her close personal servant Essex. The only character to survive this purge is her sister-in-law, Fanny,

whom Mrs. Halloran wishes to exile to another building on the estate. Mrs. Halloran’s goal is, in essence,

to upend her household, shirk her role as the matriarch, and fade into a comfortable spinsterhood. This

urge is quickly curbed when Fanny is visited by the specter of her and Richard’s late father, who warns

her of the impending nuclear apocalypse: “From the sky and from the ground and from the sea there is

danger; tell them in the house. There will be black fire and the earth turning and screaming; this will

come,” explaining that this house will be the only haven, and instructing Aunt Fanny to tell the other

residents, “Do not fear, the father will guard the children” (28). The specter of patriarchy past haunts the

household, which is on the brink of fracture to reassert the necessity of authoritative rule.

The inscription on the titular sundial sums up the fears of the house’s inhabitants quite well

“WHAT IS THIS WORLD?” (Jackson 13). The death of Lionel, whether purposeful or not, has created

an entirely novel set of circumstances for each character as they all have a greater degree of autonomy

and power to make decisions, with this power though, they are all forced to confront the uncertain

9
prospect of a new future. The upheaval of the previous authority creates the opportunity for a kinder and

more just system, but the chaos that ensues shortly after Mrs. Halloran’s announcement of her plans

illustrates the power of entrenched authority and perceptions as well as the tenuous nature of progress.

Whether intentional or not, Mrs. Halloran usurps authority, and despite her first attempt to deconstruct the

system, is quickly cajoled to reassert it. The characters seclude themselves from the harshness of the

world around them and recreate the system they sought to escape, at one point even describing the

impending apocalypse as an “open, clear-cut invitation to the Garden of Eden” (40). Their discrete

recreation of hierarchy and authority even if intended to contradict past traditions, normative thoughts,

and attitudes, has created an environment that exerts the same authority and oppression on the inhabitants

as before.

Before the establishment of the more visible contemporary Queer culture, Jackson was critiquing

the establishment and consequences of the yet-to-be-founded concept of homonormativity. As McCann

and Monaghan explain, the “new homonormative advocacy aimed to maintain these foundations and aim

for ‘equality’ within an existing system” (157-158), a perspective and course of action that they attribute

to the “fear that other sexual outsiders will demand inclusion” (Seidman 160-161). This approach to

advocacy and analysis is in rather explicit opposition to the approach outlined by McCann & Monaghan

which is to attempt to “deconstruct the assumptions underlying heteronormativity (such as discrete

sexuality categories and the gender binary)” (157). The critique within The Sundial deconstructs the very

same heteronormative conceptions and institutions that later Queer advocates fought for. Jill E. Anderson

explains how the faulty conceptual basis results of their proposed new world results in “queer failure,”

Fanny’s prediction actually initiates a number of queer “failures” in the novel: the
subjugated, yet powerful, knowledge of Fanny’s prediction which becomes the novel’s
queer, disciplining norm; her anti-patriarchal vision of the future, which further secures
and sanctions her “spinsterhood”; a perception of time that eschews progress and
biological family and instead formulates inheritances that lie outside of the accepted
circulation of goods; an affective domain within the home in which emotions and
reactions run in unexpected, counterproductive ways; and a home space in which queer
domestic practices circulate freely, running counter to the accepted, fixed, normative,
dominant domesticities of the Cold War. (115)

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 As Judith Halberstam explains in “The Queer Art of Failure” the concept of “failure” itself in any

given environment is rooted in the dominant ideology, “failure can be counted in that set of oppositional

tools” which when considered not as a failure to achieve but as a willing “refus[al] to acquiesce to

dominant logics of power and discipline” (88). This is especially notable as the group’s hierarchical

perspective on who they will and will not save from the impending nuclear fire necessitates a conception

of relative value between individuals. There are those less and more worthy, a conception taken straight

from traditional understandings of capitalism, a dynamic which makes a great deal of sense given the

Halloran’s affluence and Jackson and Hyman’s distaste for capitalism. Free market economics would

seem to champion hard work and merit, but in effect develops a cast of “winners and losers, gamblers and

risktakers” that are seemingly as arbitrarily chosen as those that are selected to survive in the Halloran

estate (Halberstam 88). This failure of the dominant model then constitutes the ephemeral characteristic

that Muñoz, indicates as necessary in queer readings, as the characters’ distinct attempt to recreate a

hierarchal model and subsequent failure results in an implicit condemnation of the system.

These characters represent the antithesis to Muñoz’s conception of “hope” as they perpetuate “the

acute failures and dangers of the present,” the “‘normal’, ‘straight,’ ‘white,’ or ‘capitalist’ time” (xiv).

The characters of The Sundial function as a stark warning to Muñoz’s “utopian imaginary” which he

argues is necessary “to activate queer and minoritarian ways of being in the world and being-together.” It

is this imaginary that is necessary “to survive the shattering experience of living within an impossible

present,” but it is in that same vein, the imaginary which allows the same oppression and hierarchical

systems to be recreated even while the queered populations are “charting the course for a new and

different future.” With this understanding then, the “failure” of Mrs. Halloran is not in her inability to

recreate a functional patriarchal system of authority and maintain her power, but a failure in supplanting it

and instituting an alternative idea of society. This is signaled not only by her wearing a crown, a classical

symbol of authority, but in the fundamental conception of their new world not as something new, but a

revitalization of the old in their new “Eden.”

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 It is within this new Eden that the old systems and ideals are recreated, quite fragrantly the first

priority identified by the group is the further propagation of the species, an almost immediate return to the

value placed on heterosexual sex and being. As Sara Ahmed identifies, the way deviation is defined

changes, but that principle by which it is measured is everlasting, “the straight line would be that which

moves without any deviation toward the ‘point’ of heterosexual union or sexual coupling” further

expounding that “any acts that postpone the heterosexual union are perverse” (78). It is casually brought

up by Mrs. Willow and goes unchallenged, “and of course it’s not really a trouble, but we need a virgin”

but agree that the further propagation of the species is necessary and thus the value of heterosexuality, a

traditional Christian conception of it at that, is identified as a primary value for their new society (63).

The novel concludes with Mrs. Halloran’s death, wherein she appears to have fallen down the

stairs, the exact same way Laurence had, which signals the mere surface-level alterations that have been

made to the system. Despite being an individual limited by the patriarchal system, Mrs. Halloran

perpetuated it once she was in a position of power. In much the same manner as Manfred, Ms. Halloran

installed herself as the authority, but in contrast to The Castle of Otranto, no rightful ruler is identified,

the cycle continues, and the harm caused by the system goes unchallenged. At the conclusion of the

novel, Fancy, Mrs. Halloran’s granddaughter, takes her grandmother’s crown, placing it on her head and

dancing, alluding to a continued perpetuation of oppressive authority and similar entrapment. As Pascal

explains, the house is a microcosm of a much larger society, and the current status quo “will perpetually

intrude, with the “current world” remaining “the measure of all fantasized new ones in that they will all,

upon being tested, be forced to come to terms with it” (98). The haunting of the Halloran estate appears as

it would traditionally: a force acting on behalf of normative and patriarchal culture. Jackson subverts it

here, illustrating how larger normative culture is the malevolent and perverse element itself.

The Haunting of Hill House: Domestic Predation

Jackson’s most famous novel, The Haunting of Hill House, further expounds on this idea of the

Haunted House’s supernatural component functioning as an arm of normative culture. However, as

opposed to the creation and corruption of an environment, the novel instead focuses more intimately on

12
the experience of the individual, Eleanor, and her attempt to find a place of safety and acceptance. The

house in this iteration becomes a much more nefarious symbol, as the ill fate of Eleanor is not caused by

the ignorant cultivation and perpetuation of a malignant system as Mrs. Halloran’s death is in The

Sundial, but by an overtly predatory force that has lured her in with the domestic promise of comfort and

acceptance.

Following her mother’s death, Eleanor seizes upon the opportunity of freedom that Dr.

Montague’s invitation to the paranormal study presents. On her journey to Hill House, Eleanor fantasizes

about a free and independent life, “she might never leave the road at all, but just hurry on and on until the

wheels of the car were worn to nothing and she has come to the end of the world,” but immediately

beforehand, Eleanor in the same reflection imagines the very opposite, that “she might make her home

forever in East Barrington or Desmond or the incorporated village of Berk” (Jackson 14). Following her

mother’s death, Eleanor finds herself in a liminal space, leaving her past life and foreseeing two distinct

possible futures, both of which instill excitement and anxiety in equal measure. Her eventual choice to go

to Hill House reaffirms her search for something beyond what she had previously known, somewhere

where she could grow into a different person, “During the whole underside of her life, ever since her first

memory, Eleanor has been waiting for something like Hill House...Eleanor, in short, would have gone

anywhere” (Jackson 4). Eleanor does not find this at Hill House or in Theodora, the primary subject of her

affection, “I’ve never been wanted anywhere” Eleanor proclaims after her proposal to move in together is

rejected by Theodora (Jackson 197).

Hill house like the Halloran mansion offers this sanctuary and acceptance but in the same stroke

dooms its characters to the horrors of domesticity, a fact that Jen Cadwallader identifies in the scene of

the spectral picnic that Eleanor and Theodora encounter in chapter six, explaining that the “duality at the

heart of Jackson’s depiction of family: picnics become both idyllic heaven-like spaces in which women

may escape the confines of patriarchal society, at the same time that they reveal the potential horrors of

motherhood” (886). The house as a Gothic trope is subverted, the supernatural forces of the house are not

active due to some transgression on Eleanor’s part, as is the case with Roderick Usher. The supernatural

13
forces, as opposed to a rectifying force acting on behalf of normative ideas of decency and propriety, are

depicted as a malicious trap. During the first night that the group spends in Hill House Dr. Montague

explains the behavior of the house pointing to one of the more recent inhabitants.

Hill House has a reputation for insistent hospitality; it seemingly dislikes letting its guests
get away. The last person who tried to leave Hill House in darkness—it was eighteen
years ago, I grant you—was killed at the turn in the driveway, where his horse bolted and
crushed him against the big tree. (61)

Eleanor in her last moments does realize this manipulation, but it is of course too late, and the novel

concludes with her meeting the very same fate as the individual mentioned by Dr. Montague.

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.
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? (232)

While it is clear that she has been influenced by the supernatural presence, she is also the only character

who is vulnerable enough to be influenced to this degree, and that is largely attributable to her past life

and isolation. The other characters have, in their past, been able to find some form of acceptance, with

Theodora specifically having a past relationship with what can be assumed to be a woman.

Eleanor, despite being an adult, has stagnated in her development and has a childlike conception

of adulthood and relationships, which is on full display in her interaction with the young girl she

encounters during her drive trip Hill House, “don’t do it, Eleanor told the little girl; insist on your cup of

stars; once they have trapped you into being like everyone else you will never see your cup of stars again”

(18). Hill House offers a perceived alternative to everything Eleanor has known and normative

expectations of women, but unbeknownst to her, by committing suicide and choosing to remain at Hill

House for eternity, she wholly submits herself to this symbol of patriarchy and domesticity.

Eleanor’s primary reason for stealing her sister’s car and going to Hill House was not some

psychic pull from the house itself but the possibility of finding a place where she could live more fully

and authentically, and she sees this same struggle in the girl and her cup of stars. Eleanor is trapped by her

mother and the societal expectation to take care of her, and only at the age of thirty-two does she find

herself able to strike out on her own: she is given another chance to insist on her cup of stars. By the

14
conclusion of the novel though, those fantasies and opportunities have been forgotten and Eleanor once

again finds herself bound to a place that has rejected her. While Eleanor’s epiphany points towards this

failure to find her sought after place, the rather infamous concluding line of the novel confirms it “silence

lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone” (233).

Eleanor had found no refuge in Hill House or solace with Theodora, and as she suspects shortly before

dying, she has acted against her own will and interest. The house, while seemingly promising safety, was

the very thing Eleanor was running from.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle: Isolation and Queer Safety

This same desire to find reprieve from normative society takes center stage in Jackson’s next

novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle as the two main characters are forced to isolate themselves and

create queer utopia of sorts for themselves, or at least some facsimile of it. A place that is offers a reprieve

for patriarchal norms and expectations that would allow the two central characters, Merricat and

Constance, to focus on and find fulfilment in their relationship which is perceived as irregular by the

village. Merricat and Constance are sisters who have been ostracized by the nearby village in their family

home, the Blackwood manor. Aside from their Uncle Julian, who like Mr. Halloran is wheelchair bound

and senile, they reside in the house alone due to the mysterious poisoning of their parents years before.

The villagers largely blame Constance, the older sister for this, but as is hinted at throughout the narrative

and revealed at the conclusion Merricat is actually responsible. By murdering her parents Merricat

removes patriarchal authority which facilitated their abuse from their life, allowing Constance and her to

create a space for themselves, even if means they ostracized from the nearby village, which is

representative of the larger patriarchal culture that empowered their father. The sisters are queered by the

villagers for their rejection of patriarchal authority and heteronormativity, but by the close of the novel

neither sister craves acceptance within this system. They wholly reject the village and normative culture

and instead find refuge and safety in each other. As complete shut-ins and recluses, Merricat closes the

novel with the proclamation “‘Oh Constance,’ I said, ‘we are so happy’” (Jackson 214).

15
 The narrative of a queer struggle to find a place of safety and acceptance becomes only more

intimate and able to support the self-identification of queer audiences with Jackson’s use of first-person

narration, which Haines explains,

Insofar as Merricat is the first-person narrator of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the
reader is located “inside” her perception and ordering of events. As a reader of this text
(implied or not), my identification with this or any first-person narrator proceeds, at least
initially, from a position of self-identity, which is to say sameness. (176)

As Jackson’s focus hones in further on an individual experience, the fraught nature of the queer

experience and the function of the Gothic house as a queer environment becomes more concrete. As

opposed to the characters being preyed upon by any supernatural forces, Merricat and her sister

Constance are seen by the villagers as the entity haunting the house due to the murder of their parents

before the events of the novel. While Merricat was the one who poisoned their family, the townspeople

assume that Constance is the actual murderer, with the act becoming folkloric. The children of the village

have even concocted a rhyme “Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea?/ Oh no, said Merricat,

you’ll poison me./ Merricat, said Connie, would you like me to go to sleep?/ Down in the boneyard ten

feet deep!” (22-23).

Jackson’s final work entirely subverts the role of the Gothic house, as opposed to a force that

reasserts normativity, the queered characters do find a real refuge in the house. Rather than the catalyst of

the haunting, their “past sins” function as a means to create a shelter. Charles, their cousin, and suitor of

Constance, instead emerges onto the scene as the force reasserting normative heterosexual norms and

patriarchy into their lives. Charles is characterized as a clear parallel to John, Merricat and Constance’s

father, who is suggested to have sexually abused Merricat and possibly Constance.1

In this context, the house of We Have Always Lived in the Castle can be interpreted as an

inversion of the typical American household wherein male authority was championed and abuse was

normalized. Similar to Theodora’s sexuality. This facet of the narrative was significantly more explicit in

1
Refer to Karen J. Hall's “Sisters in Collusion: Safety and Revolt in Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the
Castle”

16
earlier drafts wherein the narrative still centered on Constance and Merricat, in this earlier draft named

Jenny. In this version the two plotted to murder Constance’s husband, because as Jackson put it “they are

going to kill him because he is a boor I think” (Franklin 435). While the relationship was not intentioned

to be of a lesbian nature, the rejection of heteronormativity and patriarchy was all the more

straightforward here. One example being found in the previous description of the significance that the

possessions which littered about the Blackwood home held “it was comforting to know that nothing

would be moved, it was safe. perhaps constance and I both thought that an accidental jostling of our

mother’s tortoise-shell comb would bring the house tumbling onto our heads” (Franklin 443). In the final

version, there is no mention of their mothers items or their significance specifically, rather a more

ambiguous explanation of how all the items have accumulated, “as soon as a new Blackwood wife moved

in, a place was found for her belongings, and so out house was built up with layers of Blackwood

property weighing it,” (Jackson 2). Both passages point to a significance in the feminine lineage within

the Blackwood family, but whereas the published passage points to a commodification of women as a

consequence of the patriarchal structure, the version in the previous draft specifically identifies feminine

authority as the bedrock of the house and family. Neither passage is more effective, but the more specific

identification in the former passage does allow a greater insight into the concepts that motivated Jackson,

which seem to be the queering of traditional familial structures and the construction of an alternative to

them wherein the feminine authority is championed.

This elimination of the patriarchal power can be further seen in the unsolved murder of Charles

Bravo, which rather infamously inspired Jackson’s writing of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. While

the facts of the case are rather ambiguous, it involved the poisoning of Charles, with many suspecting his

wife Florence along with their maid. Between Jackson’s depiction of Cousin Charles and the sympathetic

illustration of the poisoning on Merricat’s part one could make the assumption that Jackson was

empathetic to these women’s plight, if in fact they did poison Charles Bravo.

Despite Jackson’s revisions, the rejection of marriage as a faulty patriarichal construct and

damaging institution for women remains the underlying motivation of Merricat’s attempts to banish her

17
cousin. Haines explains that while Jackson’s characterization of Charles matches the hero in traditional

gothic narratives his place in this narrative is inverted, “Charles in a move that would appear to reverse

the narrative of lesbian abjection, [is] cast in the role of the “ghost” (179). This move, while playing on

the Gothic most clearly subverts the resolution of Le Fanu’s Carmilla, wherein the lesbian seduction of

Laura by her vampiric ancestor is thwarted by her father and Doctor Hesselius, an inspiration of Stoker’s

Van Helsing.

Merricat, who is often aligned with the supernatural, whether it be by her placing of charms

around the property or her wish to be a werewolf early in the novel, is cast in the role of the savior. She

kills her father, exiles Charles, and saves Constance from Jim Donell and the rest of the villagers at the

novel’s conclusion. While Jackson’s inversion of Carmilla and the father is clearer, she also subverts

Doctor Hesselius as both he and Jim appear at first as the saving force for Constance and Laura,

respectively. Jim, despite his earlier harassment of Merricat, arrives at the scene of the fire to assumedly

put it out and possibly save the house. He, of course, does not do this and unmasks himself as the villain

by taking off the hat that designates him as the fire chief and authority able to put a stop to the calamity,

“very carefully he put up his hands and took off his hat saying CHIEF and while everyone watched he

walked slowly down the steps and over to the fire engine” (153). He allows the fire to continue and

joining the townspeople who have gathered to torment Constance and further destroy the house, “then he

bent down, searching thoughtfully, and finally, while everyone watched, he took up a rock. in complete

silence he turned slowly and then raised his arm and smashed the rock through one of the great tall

windows of our mother’s drawing room” (154). This reversal subverts the role of patriarchal authority in

the Gothic, reconfiguring it as a means of enforcing and protecting the status quo, punishing those

queered characters who would transgress. He takes part in the destruction of the symbolic queer sanctuary

as an act of revenge for the murder of their father.

The burning of the house does not function as the same cleansing act that the destruction of the

Usher house does, instead it is the transgression that allows the development of the more archetypal

Gothic house and haunting. Following the fire, Merricat and Constance resume their residence in the

18
house and isolate themselves entirely, living primarily in the basement, with the village now viewing

them as truly folkloric entities,

Women cannot live self-sufficiently under the law of the father, nor are they supposed to
transgress his law. Constance and Merricat must be represented in a way which will serve
a function in the patriarchal system; they become witches, monsters used to frighten
children by day and adults by night back into the boundaries of acceptable, obedient
behavior (Hall).

As in The Sundial, they become isolated shut-ins, but as opposed to victims of the specter of a past

patriarch who has manipulated them into reenacting the same authoritarian practices of normative society

within the house, Merricat and Constance become the haunting presence of past ills committed by a

normative and patriarchal society.

Despite the similarity in literal circumstances, Merricat and Constance find the refuge that past

characters have sought, as Colin Haines argues “happiness occurs, but only after the villain has been

vanquished, [and] the sisters have proclaimed their mutual love to each other” (179). Jackson’s use of the

Gothic house and continued focus on the attempt to find refuge in it or isolate oneself are paralleled by

her fixation with houses in real life and later acute agoraphobia.

The House: Real and Imagined

Jackson had always had an architectural interest in houses, and while writing The Haunting of

Hill House, went as far as to write to her mother asking her for pictures of the houses that her great-great-

grandfather had built in California which themselves had several “eerie tales that surround[ing] them”

(Franklin 17), Jackson explaining that “all the New England are the kind of square, classical type which

wouldn’t be haunted in a million years” (17). The influences of these houses on her description of both

the Halloran Mansion and Hill House are evident as both mirror the Gothic Victorian style and

nonuniform design of the houses her great-great-grandfather constructed (Franklin 19).

Beyond Jackson’s interest and her family’s history in house design and construction, her adult life

and homemaking have an even clearer connection to the focus on houses and characterization of the

domestic. Jackson’s husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, is recorded as having referred to their new home as

“Castle Jackson” when talking to Ben Zimmerman, a former fraternity brother, and Jackson herself

19
writing in a letter to her mother saying that their new house on Indian Hill Road was “so pleasant, and so

comfortable” (Franklin 274). It is a connection to her last two titles, which while seemingly tenuous is

bolstered by the described hauntings of a previous wife who inhabited her home that Jackson claims she

experienced in her memoir Life Among the Savages, “That his Wife, a Female of nervous disposition and

easily excited, almost into Frenzies by Supernatural Manifestations, has at several separate times been

troubled by the Night Mares, as of a Personage whispering into her Ear secrets of Horror” (239). 2 Beyond

this, Jackson’s son Laurence Hyman, in an interview with Ruth Franklin, Jackon’s second biographer,

attests to these supernatural happenings, reporting that the music box would play of its own accord “It

would start to play ‘Carnival of Venice’ at four o’clock in the morning” (Franklin 15). Whether or not

these were contrived by Jackson for the sake of her book or to entertain her children, the Haunted House

and the supernatural were a fixture not only in her fiction but in her life as well.

Beyond this, the characterization of the houses and the issues they symbolize in the narratives

acutely mirrors those Jackson faced in domestic life as well. Jackson found neither solace nor

companionship in the home and domestic life she built and further found that she was limited and trapped

by it. Jackson desperately wished to be a homemaker and mother, and in fact, she took great pride in it,

but with that came abuse and the limitation of the other facets of herself. Beyond the near-prolific level of

philandering that her husband Stanley engaged in, he purportedly sexually abused her on at least one

occasion and thrust the entirety of the domestic labor and responsibility of child-rearing on her despite her

more successful career (SJP-LOC Box 37 Folder 3).

Jackson did not revile domestic life but found herself constantly butting up against the limitations

that it put on her. She did not see it as necessary to live up to the societal standards of cleanliness that her

husband held or to put the upkeep of her home above her writing practice. As Franklin describes it,

Jackson’s “creative mind thrived amid the chaos of her own desk and who had no qualms about leaving a

2
The document Jackson includes is contained in the appendix of Life Among the Savages and employs alternative
spellings, these characteristics have been amended for readability, but all other structural and syntactical
characteristics have been maintained.

20
sink full of dishes or a floor unswept if she needed to get back to her typewriter,” even if it did “become

an eventual source of conflict in the marriage” (80). Stanley was despite his support of Jackson’s writing,

the variety of man who “stayed in bed until late morning or early afternoon,” while “Shirley would get up

earlier to prepare coffee for him” (148).

Jackson encountered these same limitations from other people as well, which she illustrates in her

memoir Life Among the Savages, where she recounts the birth of her third child, Sarah. Before giving

birth, Jackson recounts the conversation she had with a clerk who asks what her occupation is, which

Jackson answers by saying that she is a writer, to which the clerk responds by saying “I’ll just put down

housewife” (68). It is for this reason that Franklin identifies Jackson’s work as investigating and

exploring the particular

kinds of psychic damage to which women are especially prone. It can be no accident that
in many of these works, a house—the woman’s domain—functions as a kind of
protagonist, with traditional homemaking occupations such as cooking or gardening
playing a crucial role in the narrative. (3)

That said, Jackson took distinct pride in her housekeeping, and in an unpublished essay titled “Lines for

the Kitchen Door” made her disdain for those other housewives who would look down on her quite

evident (SJP-LOC, Box 14, Folder 3). In the document, she outlines a proposed test for psychologists to

give to housewives which she notes, “of whom I account myself one.” She does this despite the document

opening with the statement, “it has long been a contention of mine that the psychologists, with their

unerring instincts for the information nobody uses, have entered into combination against the

housewives.” Jackson goes on to describe a myriad of categorizations that she has developed for the other

wives who she has entertained, lambasting those mothers who either fuss over the children, making a

show of their single-mindedness, or those who would attempt to reorganize her house deigning to know

better. She settles on only one type of guest whom she wholly approves of Mrs. Nine, a “dream character”

who “is another mother, with the same jaundiced eye, the same cynical sneer.” In her descriptions of these

women, Jackson prides herself on mothering and housekeeping, but not in the conventional sense;

instead, she develops an alternative and significantly less restrictive ideal of motherhood to strive for.

21
 While the idea of motherhood is subverted and redefined here, the perceived fundamental

importance of it is not, as “the childless character,” the woman most closely resembling Jackson’s

different heroines receives the most abuse, with Jackson going as far as to identify her as “the worst

person I know.” She describes how this woman coddles and dotes upon the children of others, inserting

herself in an unwelcome fashion. While her intended audience here is almost certainly different from that

of her fiction, this essay likely being intended for the readers of her memoirs and Good Housekeeping, the

infantile nature of the “childless character” and her preoccupation with others’ children bears a glaring

resemblance to Eleanor, who is similarly an ostracized figure constantly looking in and seeking

acceptance. The juxtaposition of these portrayals, even when identified as a necessity in appealing to the

two distinct audiences, is jarring.

The bitter heart of the contradiction lies in the dual perceptions of domestic life that Jackson held,

the first being the happiness and unity that Jackson portrayed in her autobiographical work but never

found in her own life. The second is the stark and lonely reality that she found herself in, which she

expressed in her fiction. James Egan explains this rather succinctly, identifying her work as an

“expression of an idyllic domestic vision or the inversion that vision into the fantastic and Gothic,” with

“vision” serving a rather profound role in his analysis, as the idyllic domestic life proves to be just

fanciful as Jackson’s dark subversion of it (15).

While The Haunting of Hill House is the most expansive depiction of this dynamic, her short

story “The Daemon Lover” tackles the issue much more directly. The protagonist is the fiancé of Jamie

Harris, a moniker only slightly different from James Harris, the recurrent character and antagonistic

presence in much of Jackson’s short fiction. The woman is wholly estranged from her fiancé but needs to

keep up the appearance of the courtship or suffer the consequences of societal ridicule and rejection.

Harris, as he often does, vanishes, and the young woman desperately seeks to find him but is instead

repeatedly confronted by different characters who reaffirm her fears of the mockery, ostracization, and

danger she faces as a single woman. She finds herself in great peril, and the story concludes with the eerie

sentence affirming her seemingly never-ending search for him and the perceived safety he represents:

22
“She came on her way to work, in the mornings; in the evening, on her way to dinner alone, but no matter

how firmly she knocked, no one ever came to the door” (Jackson 28).

This fate contrasts with that of Tessie Hutchinson, the central character in Jackson’s most famous

work, “The Lottery,” who is designated by the narrative as the sacrificial lamb following her husband,

Bill’s drawing of the marked paper in the first round. Jackson here animates the drive for achieving

domesticity and explores the hollowness of its promised safety. Women are led to believe

heteronormative domesticity is the answer, but once achieving it they find that they have not escaped the

expectations and dangers inherent to normative society, but simply subjugated themselves to the

individual embodying it: her husband. This is the exact horrific seed that her myriad Gothic houses grow

from, they are the only place which her heroines believe might shelter them, but they easily then become

the prison they become trapped within and the primary setting for subjugation. With this conception, the

exorcism of Charles and the total isolation in We Have Always Lived in the Castle becomes the only

plausible solution to this terrible predicament. More so than any other facet of her narratives, it is this fear

that parallels Jackson’s own life.

Jackson was not always preoccupied with isolationism, as in the beginning of her marriage she

greatly enjoyed venturing out of her home. She had a particular affinity for her different vehicles, and

became “increasingly attached to her cars, especially a series of tiny Morris Minors that she began to

acquire in the late 1950s,” and found that it was “also a way to assert her independence from Stanley”

(Franklin 275-276). She similarly found freedom in the different writers’ conferences she would attend,

most notably the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, which she was initially invited to by John Farrar, co-

founder of the conference and her editor (Franklin 216). These excursions and her freedom were not only

curbed by her domestic responsibilities, but eventually her acute agoraphobia as well.

Mirroring Eleanor, Constance, Merricat, and the motley crew of the Halloran estate, Jackson

found herself quite unwilling to and, at a certain point incapable of, leaving her home. While Jackson was

writing We Have Always Lived in the Castle in 1963, the film adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House,

The Haunting premiered. She required Stanley’s help in leaving the house to go see it, as she had been

23
housebound for over a year and was incapable of leaving on her own (Franklin 426-427). Jackson had

been suffering from delusions that prevented her from going to the post office or the grocery store, and

found that even the ringing of the phone could cause her a panic attack (469). As Jackson described it, “I

have written myself into the house” (427). Unlike her heroines though, Jackson’s struggle while extended

was not permanent. She gradually got better, and after being able to perform errands and venture out of

the house as she had before, she began to look further. In her diary, she recorded dreams of leaving and

exploring the “great golden world,” and how she looked “forward every now and then to freedom and

security (and i do mean security by myself)” (Franklin 478). Further evidencing her penchant for writing

her own struggles into the narrative, Jackson’s next book, Come Along with Me, centered on a woman

leaving her home and life to live independently. Beyond her agoraphobia, Jackson struggled with her

mental health throughout her life, a theme that continually appears throughout most of her work and is a

central characteristic in the queering of her characters.

24
 CHAPTER TWO: JACKSON’S LOST GIRLS: EXPLORING UNREALITY AND QUEERING

MENTAL HEALTH

This chapter focuses on Shirly Jackson’s second, third, and fifth novels Hangsaman, The Bird’s

Nest, and The Haunting of Hill House, primarily analyzing how each renders mental illness and how that

reflects both her own and mainstream culture’s perception of it. These works for the most part frame

mental issues as consequences of a greater system that perpetuates harmful ideologies and cultivates an

environment that others queer individuals. In each work, the mental illness that each heroine suffers from

is identified as having stemmed from a specific trauma they experienced, usually at the hands of older and

predatory men. This chapter will first examine the artifact that is most prevalent in the discourse

surrounding mental health in Jackson’s fiction, the characterization of Eleanor’s interiority in The

Haunting of Hill House, and then the past tradition that Jackson is pulling from in her exploration in

Hangsaman and The Bird’s Nest.

Possibly the most famous passage from Shirley Jackson’s collection of works, is the opening of

The Haunting of Hill House,

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute
reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House itself, not
sane, stood against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and
might stand for eighty more. Within, its walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors
were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone
of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. (1)

The first sentence of this passage works masterfully to foreshadow the core conflict brewing within

Eleanor: her inability to make sense of the world around her and her place within it. Reality or at least the

reality of her life itself is a maddening prospect. The second and third sentences then foreshadow the

harm Hill House will cause Eleanor. It is not sane and will, at least in Eleanor’s case, exacerbate the

mental and emotional issues she is dealing with. The reader is told this from the start and then reminded

again at the conclusion, as Jackson finishes her novel with the same last two sentences from the first

paragraph. In a sense, this first paragraph is the novel in miniature, with Eleanor’s plight being contained

25
wholly within that first sentence. Eleanor is not well, but her actions and motivations are natural given her

circumstances and queer place within society.

Each and every one of Jackson’s heroines are faced with this same predicament: they are the

Other, their reality and the life that society and those individuals around them has dictated is utterly

contradictory to their being. It is a conflict that Jackson revisits in each of her major works of fiction. This

focus is not just understandable given the circumstances of Jackson’s personal life, but in line with the

Gothic tradition that Jackson situates her work in; beyond the mansions and estates and even the

supernatural, Jackson’s keen exploration of mental health is what most firmly plants her oeuvre within the

Gothic tradition. As is the case with her use of the Haunted House, she has subverted the conventional

understanding of madness and mental illness, configuring it as a rational response to an irrational reality.

As opposed to many Gothic predecessors, this irrational reality is not some great secret whose utterance

has the potential to unravel one’s mind, but the very same circumstances faced by her readers.

This difference is most apparent in comparing Jackson’s depiction and handling of madness with

the proverbial poster boy for literary madness, Lovecraft. The significance ascribed to Lovecraft could be

described as “for better or worse,” but in his case, I would decisively say it is most definitely for the

worse that the world has bestowed this distinction upon him. His work abounds with madness, with many

of the significant characters breaking down when confronted with the truth of a world beyond their

understanding. He situates people as small and insignificant, incapable of understanding the vast and

chaotic universe they inhabit. The horror lies in the vastness of this reality and the inability of people to

comprehend it. As Lovecraft explains it in Supernatural Horror in Literature, “The oldest and strongest

emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown” (12). While

the adage may spark some sense of intuitive truth, its wisdom is far from all-encompassing. As Jackson

and authors of her ilk demonstrate in their work, those same feelings of powerlessness proliferate quite

readily in the real and familiar world, most often founded on the same racist, misogynistic, and

homophobic ideals that Lovecraft harbored, or, as Jackson explained it, “the demon in men’s minds which

26
prompts hatred and anger and fear, an irrational demon which shows a different face to every generation,

but never gives up in his fight to win over the world” (Franklin 361).

A more illustrative comparison would be to Charlotte Perkins Gillman and her 1892 short story,

“The Yellow Wallpaper.” Here, the narrator Jane’s madness is not rendered in the abstract with its origin

occluded by otherworldly forces but animated with a grueling realism and brutally simple catalyst: the

obstinance and ego of patriarchal systems, specifically medicine which John, her husband and doctor, can

be interpreted as a symbol of. Madness here does not just occur; it is a symptom that develops due to a

continual infantilization and denial of autonomy. Jane is trapped both figuratively by John’s controlling

and patriarchal attitude and literally within the attic that he has confined her to for her treatment. Despite

her attempts to convince him that she is well and should be let out, John maintains that he as a physician

knows best. It is then, only through madness and unreality that Jane can envision a way to be free. She

imagines that the hallucinatory woman trapped within the wallpaper has somehow escaped and claims to

see her outside, through the window:

I think that woman gets out in the daytime! And I’ll tell you why—privately—I’ve seen
her! I can see her out of every one of my windows! It is the same woman, I know, for she
is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight. I see her on that long
shaded lane, creeping up and down. I see her in those dark grape arbors, creeping all
around the garden (Gilman 30).

This fixation eventually leads to the conflation of Jane and this woman in her mind, as her imprisonment

in the room and the woman’s in the wallpaper become one and the same. Jane, in her madness, is ecstatic,

believing herself finally to be free: “‘I’ve got out at last,’ said I, ‘in spite of you and Jane! And I’ve pulled

off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!’” (Gillman 36). Feminine madness is configured here as

a symptom of an oppressive culture, with the affiliate unreality serving as an escape from a reality that

denies autonomy.

Jackson’s fiction tweaks the paradigm of madness in a similarly unique way, boldly presenting

reality as the horror, and her protagonists as unwilling or incapable of accepting or truly escaping it.

Jackson does not conjure a monster lurking just out of sight, or a tome of maddening knowledge hidden

on a dusty and forgotten shelf in her fiction. She presents a brightly lit room filled with a banal and

27
inescapable evil, and a girl firmly planted in the center, desperately attempting to cover her eyes. Reality

is self-apparent but so deeply incongruous with the nature of her characters that it manifests in the same

way as the unspeakable horrors and supernatural aspects which proliferate in the Gothic tradition. Jackson

does not present insanity or mental illness as the consequence of transgression, but a rather

understandable reaction to a reality that demands a conformity that the character cannot bear.

This dynamic between mental illness and perceived sin bears a rather stark resemblance to those

issues that Jackson faced in her own life as she too dealt with mental illness, including but not limited to

her agoraphobia. During her writing of The Bird’s Nest, she recounts a hallucination of a “tall man with

strange light eyes. He looked at her in a friendly way, and she felt glad to see him,” but then continues to

say that “she should not have anything to do with him,” knowing that “it was a ruse, leading her into a

trap. But in some way she wanted to be trapped” (Franklin 346). Jackson did not have the greatest faith in

psychiatry, believing it to be “a little bit like Christian science” and wrote that the tranquilizers her doctor

prescribed her for her anxiety kept her “stupid but still frightened all the time” (Franklin 470). Her

hallucinations and dealings with psychiatrists mirror the two protagonists that this chapter primarily

focuses on: Natalie from Jackson’s second novel, Hangsaman, and Elizabeth from her third novel, The

Bird’s Nest.

Each of Jackson’s protagonists, in turn similarly deal with some similar variety of mental illness

that originates from their othering. They are fundamentally queer, not in their explicit sexuality, but in the

same way that Queer People are: they are ostracized from the mainstream and suffer due to their not

fitting the societally mandated mold. Unreality, or the act of creating an alternate perception that

contradicts the conventional reality presented, is then the only available recourse. Mental illness and the

creation of unreality is in this perception presented as the natural response to a society and world that

undermines the nature of an individual. As Wyatt Bonikowski explains it, Jackson’s work centers this

experience within the genre, “anxiety is made Gothic: the psychological experience of insecurity finds its

objective correlatives in haunted houses, spectral presences, and demonic visitation, all of which suggest

the violent eruption of the unknown into the known, the unconscious into consciousness” (66). If one is

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willing to entertain the notion offered in the previous chapter that the Sundial, We Have Always Lived in

the Castle, and The Haunting of Hill House explore the pursuit of the queered character to find reprieve or

escape the confines and limitations of normative society, then Jackson’s two former novels The Bird’s

Nest and Hangsaman can serve as a closer inspection of the precise “psychic damage to which women are

especially prone” to when forced unnaturally to conform to normative culture (Franklin 3). While this

“psychic damage” proliferates in all of Jackson’s work, The Bird’s Nest and Hangsaman serve as rather

interesting case studies of her early efforts of this inquest, as they simultaneously feature it more

prominently and give the reader some insight into her intentions and earlier conceptions of it.

The Bird’s Nest: More than One, Yet Less than Oneself

Jackson’s attempt to explore this psychic damage is most pronounced in her third novel The

Bird’s Nest which centers on Elizabeth, a woman who is revealed to have split personality syndrome due

to the trauma of her mother’s death and the neglect she experienced before that. Despite Elizabeth’s

condition being identified as stemming from this traumatic event, the characterizations of her alter egos

(Betsy, Beth, and Bess), and the way they express previously suppressed urges and needs closely aligns

with the Betty Friedan’s conception of the Schizophrenic Split from her book The Feminine Mystique.

Friedan explains the split as an event precipitated by a culture that limits women to domestic duties and

upholds conventional femininity, disallowing women the ability to actualize and attempt to fulfill, or even

formulate, personal goals. In a rather glaring parallel to Jackson’s life with the aforementioned clerk who

filled in “housewife” when she said that she was an author, Friedan describes the culture with a

description of women at the time, “they gloried in their role as women and wrote proudly on the census

blank: ‘Occupation: housewife’” (14). More overtly, Friedan writes the following of Jackson and other

women of the time:

a new breed of women writers began to write about themselves as if they were “just
housewives,” reveling in a comic world of children’s pranks and eccentric washing
machines and Parents’ Night at the PTA. “After making the bed of a twelve-year-old boy
week after week, climbing Mount Everest would seem a laughable anticlimax,” writes
Shirley Jackson (McCall’s, April, 1956). When Shirley Jackson, who all her adult life has
been an extremely capable writer, pursuing a craft far more demanding than bedmaking,
and Jean Kerr, who is a playwright, and Phyllis McGinley, who is a poet, picture

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 themselves as housewives, they may or may not overlook the housekeeper or maid who
really makes the beds. But they implicitly deny the vision, and the satisfying hard work
involved in their stories, poems, and plays. They deny the lives they lead, not as
housewives, but as individuals. (50)

While Jackson does not identify this same root cause of the split in The Bird’s Nest, Elizabeth

stands as a stark representation of the smothering effect that normative society can have on

women, especially those who depart from conventionality.

In Elizabeth there is represented that fundamental urge to retreat from a reality that is antithetical

to one’s own personhood. The novel, quite in line with Jackson’s other long-form fiction, begins with the

description of a building, the museum in which Elizabeth works in, explaining how it is foundationally

flawed and perhaps simply wrong. The foundation beneath the building is failing and the floors are tilted;

every other employee finds no real issue with it, simply attempting to “repair, patch together, to

reconstruct” rather than build “anew” (2). Only Elizabeth is made audience to the fundamental flaw

within the building as it is described that a hole or shaft was necessarily created in her office for the

carpenters to repair the foundation: “She came to work on Monday morning to find that directly to the left

of her desk, and within reaching distance of her left elbow as she typed, the wall had been taken away and

the innermost skeleton of the building exposed” (3). Elizabeth can see down through this previously

hidden space into the rest of the museum and hear the other employees. Upon looking into the shaft,

Elizabeth is seized by “a swift sense of dizziness and an almost irresistible temptation to hurl herself

downward into the primeval sands upon which the museum presumably stood” (3). If the symbolism was

not already outright apparent, Jackson goes further writing “It is not proven that Elizabeth’s personal

equilibrium was set off balance by the slant of the office floor, nor could it be proven that it was Elizabeth

who pushed the building off its foundations, but it is undeniable that they began to slip at about the same

time” (2). Jackson then concludes the section with the first intrusion of Betsy, the most prominent of

Elizabeth’s three alternate personalities

“dear lizzie,” the letter read, “your fools paradise is gone now for good watch out for me
lizzie watch out for me and dont do anything bad because i am going to catch you and
you will be sorry and dont think i wont know lizzie because i do—dirty thoughts lizzie
dirty lizzie” (3).

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 Elizabeth, or at least her primary personality is shown throughout the novel to have been for the

majority of her life in a state of dramatic dissociation, with a rather immediate explanation being given as

to why, “Since the death of her mother four years before, Elizabeth had spoken intimately to no person,”

with her coworkers finding her “blank and unrecognizing” (4). Her characterization parallels quite closely

that of Friedan’s diagnosis of women at the time, with one quote from an interviewee reading, “I feel as if

don’t exist” (20). It is for this reason that these alternates manifest in Elizabeth because , as Caminero-

Santanlego explains “multiple personalities can be understood as a demand for the recognition of

subjectivity,” the “absolute powerlessness of one who cannot completely claim the ‘I’ for herself,” by

obfuscating those parts of herself she becomes vacant, and these other aspects of herself take on a life of

their own (58).

This predicament is drawn quite clearly from Jackson’s own life, as in her lectures on writing she

asserts “I don’t think I like reality very much,” going on to explain that “I don’t understand people

outside; people in books are sensible and reasonable, but outside there is no predicting what they will do.

(Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings 383). In writing Jackson found a way to

express this distance, this detachment from her own reality, a way to carve out and inspect “this

compound of creatures I call Me” (xxii).

It is then in understanding the well from which Jackson is drawing that we must contend with the

dissimilarity in causation and proposed solution between the book and reality. The Bird’s Nest does not

diagnose society or the greater culture as responsible for the split that occurs within Elizabeth, but

identifies instead her perceived abandonment by her mother. This is most apparent when her alternate

personality, Betsy, a name born from her childhood nickname, escapes from her Aunt Morgen and travels

to New York to search for her mother, despite her being long since dead:

“My name is Betsy Richmond,” she whispered, “and I am going alone to New York
because I am easily old enough to travel alone. I am going to New York on a bus by
myself and when I get to New York I am going to a hotel in a taxi. My name is Betsy
Richmond, and I was born in New York. My mother loves me more than anything. 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).

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It is the failure of Elizabeth’s mother to perform her domestic duties and protect Elizabeth from Robin her

mother’s boyfriends abuse as Betsy claims “Robin did everything bad” (90), that is singled out as the

originating cause of Elizabeth’s mental illness, rather than the overarching culture which informs both the

cultural expectations of women and the abuse they are subject to. This becomes only more apparent as a

catalytic moment for Elizabeth’s feeling of rejection is revealed to be a moment of othering she

experienced in her adolescence, where she is made to feel as if she is a burden to her mother. She

remembers overhearing a conversation between her mother and Robin during a beach outing “I stayed

away too long,” Betsy thought, and she gathered up her shells in the popcorn box and walked fast,

because she was cold, and she heard Robin saying, “Leave the damn kid with Morgen next time” (92).

Robin’s role in Elizabeth’s trauma is further alluded to as she explains that the only way in which she was

able to be rid of him was by threatening him that she would tell her mother of his abuse saying “Because I

said I’d tell my mother what we did” when asked “But then why did Robin run away?” by a man she met

when she had ran away to the city (115). It is on the way there that she reflects that “thinking

of Robin always made her very nervous,” so nervous in fact, that she asks a bus driver if he is Robin (90).

Robin seems to haunt Elizabeth at every turn, fueling her anxiety and perhaps causing her split as when

the man she meets in the city begins to display worrying behavior, she claims that he too is Robin and

again runs away:

“My dear child,” he said, coming silently up behind her, “do come back inside; I promise
you I only want—”
“It’s Robin,” she said, and ran again, going in and out between people, not wondering if
they saw her or thought she was strange, listening only to hear if he was following her.
She came to a corner and turned, and went into a lighted doorway into an endless bright
store (116).

While the identification of Robin’s abuse does function as a clear identification of the consequences of

patriarchy and a condemnation of its inherit violence, the usage of originating trauma itself aligns

Jackson’s narrative with conventional patriarchal conceptions of female identity as it “posits the female as

a passive non-agent, to whom things happen from the outside” (Carmen-Santangelo 56). As Judy

Oppenheimer explains it, Jackson’s “research had convinced her that a multiple personality needed to

32
have an act of sexual abuse as its cornerstone,” even if “it probably pained Shirley to be that specific,

even once” (164). This paternalistic ideal is only furthered in Elizabeth’s eventual curing, as her

psychiatrist, Dr. Wright, is successful in his merging of her personalities and reintegration into society.

This contradiction lies not in the focus on reintegration or actualization, but in the benevolence of a male

medical authority and the ease which this fuller version of Elizabeth is able to integrate into society,

facers of the story that contradict both Jackson’s own espoused view on medicine and the past queering

done by Gillman in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” There is nothing “wrong” with the predominating culture in

The Bird’s Nest which expects her to conform, but rather Elizabeth’s inability to do so, even given its

originating from both male violence and the expectation of women which harmed her own mother.

In conceptualizing mental illness and the obstacles it poses to those individuals possessing one as

disability, there exists a multitude of models and understandings, but the predominating two are the

medical and social models, the former being the assumed and historically prevalent one. As Zosia Zaks

explains in Disability and Society “the fundamental assumption of the medical model is that the bodies

and brains of disabled people are tragically abnormal and that disabled individuals are responsible for any

consequences of their presumed or actual incapacity” while the social model “blames barriers and

inequities in society for disabling human beings” (3234) which if applied to the Jackson’s fiction presents

a rather decisive split.

As opposed to the opening sentence of The Haunting of Hill House which identifies “reality” or

the prescribed conditions and expectations queered individual’s need to abide by as the maddening force,

The Bird’s Nest instead professes the intractability of exterior circumstances and the necessity of the

modifying the individual as is made starkly apparent by Dr. Wright’s explanation of Elizabeth’s condition

following her recovery,

The human creature at odds with its environment,” he said, “must change either its own
protective coloration, or the shape of the world in which it lives. Equipped with no magic
device beyond a not overly sharp intelligence;” and the doctor hesitated, perhaps lost in
wonder at his own precarious eminence, “intelligence,” he went on firmly, “the human
creature finds it tempting to endeavor to control its surroundings through manipulated
symbols of sorcery, arbitrarily chosen, and frequently ineffectual. (255)

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The disparity in Jackson’s conception of mental illness is rather stark. Elizabeth is configured as a quirk,

her illness is an unnatural malignancy that must be corrected whereas Eleanor is the tragic victim of Hill

House, a culture that has smothered her, with her mental turbulation being a natural consequence of the

oppressive nature of her societally mandated role. It is significant then that there is no trauma that Eleanor

has experienced aside from that of being a woman, seemingly Jackson no longer felt the need to abide by

the accepted psychiatric understanding of the time and instead in The Haunting of Hill House, her

penultimate novel illustrated a personal understanding of society and the ways in which it harms women,

which given the evolution of the psychiatric field since seems to hold a greater and more prescient truth.

Elizabeth is allowed to actualize, is made whole and happy, and then accepted by the greater society,

whereas Eleanor’s disassociation is caused by it and when she attempts to piece herself together is

ensnared by a predatory force and rejected by those, she sought to find acceptance from.

This absence of criticality for authority does not rob The Bird’s Nest of any subversive elements,

as the reintegration of Elizabeth supports a wider view of women as multifaceted and greater than just the

roles and perceptions ascribed to them. As Caminero-Santangelo points out the “capacity of multiple

‘positions’ to coexist simultaneously in a way precluded (and therefore repeatedly elided or obscured) by

dominant ideology that offers a theoretical site for the disruption of dominant discourses” (78), thus

Elizabeth’s reintegration into a complex being who defies any one categorization is itself a subversive

move in the context of the multiple personality narrative and post-war gender politics. This is underscored

by Dr. Wright’s original intention in the narrative, which was not the reintegration of Elizabeth’s

personality, but the carving out and domination of what he viewed as the most desirable personality, the

same course of action pursued in the far more popular novel The Three Faces of Eve published three years

later. This course of action pursued in The Three Faces of Eve falls succinctly in line with the medical

authority and cultural limitations which The Bird’s Nest defies as even if they are not identified as cause

or aggressor, their intention is to reduce Elizabeth and mold her into the form most convenient to them.

As Carmen-Santangelo explains the “Postwar representations of female multiple personality seem to have

participated at some level in the reconfiguration in the reconfiguration of women’s roles through the

34
depiction of contradictory selves that could not coexist in a healthy “normal” woman” (78). Carmen-

Santangelo goes on to illustrate this theory with an example from a story in Ladies Home Journal which

depicts a woman in mental distress because she could not handle her professional and domestic

responsibilities. Stories and accounts such as these are of course, whether intentional or not, works of

propaganda. They are meant to support the return of women to the domestic sphere after having found a

new sense of autonomy during World War Two when they were not only able to, but encouraged, to take

jobs, especially those in manufacturing which were traditionally viewed as masculine.

The Bird’s Nest presents an issue then, as it absolves the patriarchy of its role in the creation of

systems which harm women. It necessarily supports the conditions in which mental illness is further

propagated, the demonization of mental illness, and infantilization of women. In the same stroke, it then

also supports a new ideal of femininity which supports queerness to a degree, recognizes the effect of

violence perpetrated by men like Robin, and grants some sense of autonomy for women. The novel is, in

this way, standing in no man’s land. Providentially though, Jackson’s previous novel, Hangsaman,

signals a different direction, one which her subsequent works follow.

Hangsaman: Broken Women in Neat Little Boxes, Left to Their Own Devices

While each of Jackson’s novels deal with the conflict between internal perception and the

external reality created by normative culture, Hangsaman is, more so than any of her other novels, an

extended exercise in illustrating the internal experience of living in unreality. The Bird’s Nest while the

most straightforward and concretely preoccupied with Elizabeth’s mental state largely deals with her as

an artifact of mental illness, Hangsaman on the other hand gives little quarter to outside perception with

the entirety of the novel being immersed in the protagonist, Natalie’s, internal world and personal

perspective of reality. Much like the Bird’s Nest the mental illness depicted in Hangsaman results from a

discrete trauma that proverbially ‘breaks’ Natalie’s mind. In retracing this thread of trauma induced

splitting from her next novel, The Bird’s Nest, Jackson makes two quite significant alterations: the first of

which being the complete and uninterrupted perspective of Natalie even before the inciting event, and the

second being the nature of Natalie’s traumatic experience, which is decidedly more violent and explicit.

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 In a dynamic similar to Elizabeth the catalytic event which causes the onset of Natalie’s delusion

is a sexual assault at the hands of one of her father’s peers during a dinner party he is holding, but in the

case of Hangsaman this event is made much more explicit and is continually identified as the one true

fundamental reason behind Natalie’s split. She is seventeen years old and is preparing to go to an all-girls

college that her father, Mr. Waite, selected for her. As Brittany Spelling explains it in the special issue of

Women’s Issues, while the novel traces Natalie’s first year away from home at the all-girls college, in a

mode similar to the bildungsroman, the story is in a larger sense arguably Jackson’s “most methodical

investigation of sexual violence in all of her work” (844). Before the assault occurs Natalie already lived a

rather secluded and internal life, describing herself as having “lived completely by herself” claiming that

she has mentally “visited strange countries, and the voices of their inhabitants were constantly in her ear”

(4). She goes on to explain that she “felt that she had been truly conscious only since she was about

fifteen” living in an “odd corner of a world of sound and sight past the daily voices of father and mother

and their incomprehensible actions” (3) only having recently discovered “a person called Natalie,

existing, charted” and “most obscurely alive” (3-4). She has only recently become cognizant of herself

and taken ownership of her identity and is on the verge of a new freedom and autonomy apart from her

parents, whom she holds a great disdain for and fear of becoming. This is illustrated in a flamboyant but

disordered way during the party as Natalie’s mother chides her, “I keep telling you to watch out who you

marry. Don’t ever go near a man like your father” (34), before launching into a monologue

“First they tell you lies,” said Mrs. Waite, “and they make you believe them. Then they
give you a little of what they promised, just a little, enough to keep you thinking you’ve
got your hands on it. Then you find out that you’re tricked, just like everyone else, just
like everyone, and instead of being different and powerful and giving the orders, you’ve
been tricked just like everyone else and then you begin to know what happens to
everyone and how they all get tricked, Everyone only knows one ‘I,’ and that’s the ‘I’
they call themselves, and there’s no one else can be ‘I’ to anyone except that one person,
and they’re all stuck with themselves and once they find out they’ve been tricked, then
they’ve been tricked and maybe the worst of it is that it isn’t like anything else; you can’t
just say, ‘I’ve been tricked and I’ll make the best of it,’ because you never believe it
because they let you see just enough about the next time to keep you hoping that maybe
you’re a little bit smarter and a little bit...” (35)

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Despite Natalie’s great fear being that she could become trapped in a boring and oppressive marriage

precisely in the way her mother describes, Natalie responds, “Mother, please stop. You’re not making any

sense.” Natalie, who despite this whole time having been both preparing for the party and narrating a

conversation with an imagined detective, thinks her mother is nonsensical. Natalie, her derision for her

father notwithstanding, refuses to entertain the idea that the horror described by her mother is true, that

she too could be a victim of this same patriarchy, the more likely scenario being that her mother crazy or

“had a little bit too much to drink and nothing to eat.” Natalie then escapes back to the party “the party

going on without me, people laughing and making noise while I sit up her in the silence and this thin bad

voice going on” that “bad voice” being her mother.

It is dynamic that mirrors one of Bonnie Burstow’s more famous passages “father and daughter

look down on mother (woman) together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point.

They agree that she is not bright as they are, cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the

daughter from the mother’s fate” (12). It is a dynamic that is further illustrated, as only the page before

Natalie desperately tries to appease her father in front of his guests “knowing from experience that it was

unwise to answer her father at one of his own parties, since not even his family were at that time safe

from practiced witticisms,” she is nonetheless subject to public humiliation by her father’s recalling the

story of her defecating out on the lawn as a child (33).

It is during this dinner party, which is in her mind the first step into adulthood and the event

which she sees as the opportunity to be who she wants, trying on a multitude of different identities, and

gain some autonomy, that she is assaulted. Having escaped both her mother, who is sobbing upstairs, and

her father, who is still conversing with guests, Natalie is finally given the space to perform her adult self

in a conversation with a party guest only ever referred to as “the man.” It is with this man she is able to

banter and exchange barbs, and feel as if she is not the “silly girl not yet in college” (39). It is an ill-fated

encounter though, as this man lures her out to the nearby forest, the same forest she played in as a child

“encounter[ing] knights in armor,” where the man mocks her, saying “Tell me what you thought was so

wonderful about yourself,” and then assaults her. The violence is not described as Natalie’s narration cuts

37
off with the fearful thought “Oh my dear God sweet Christ, Natalie thought, so sickened she nearly said it

aloud, is he going to touch me?’ (43), to pick back up the next morning where she feels violently ill trying

to erase the memory

I will not think about it, it doesn’t matter,” she told herself, and her mind repeated
idiotically, It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, until
desperately, she said aloud, “I don’t remember, nothing happened, nothing that I
remember happened.”

It is then, from this point on, that there occurs a slip between Natalie’s exterior reality and her interior

unreality, which, while elaborate and detailed, were discreet experiences. As Spelling posits, “there is

something inherently vulnerable in this liminal state, especially for young women of sexual maturity,

which could explain why Jackson repeatedly features characters at this stage of life while stressing their

exposure to predation” (835). The assault occurs rather significantly in a place that Natalie had previously

viewed as safe, and perhaps sacred, a place which becomes the setting for her assault when she is not yet

an adult but only preparing to become one.

Natalie is now, at this point in her life, more so than ever a target of the patriarchy and the

predatory individuals who populate it. The greater majority of the novel is devoted to exploring just how

this trauma and state of existence affect her. The acute effect that Natalie’s assault has in the narrative

aligns quite closely with the cold war sexual anxieties that Elaine Tyler May has identified in her book

Homeward Bound, as “Fears of sexual chaos tend to surface during times of crisis and rapid social

change” (90). Natalie’s rape then not only functions as a violation of her autonomy but as a way in which

to other her in regards to heteronormativity. While it may go without saying, Natalie’s lack of consent

would not impede her othering as it relates to the what May identifies as the “national obsession after the

war” with “nonmarital sexual behavior” (91). As May identifies sexual othering was rampant at the time,

“The Republican Party national chairman, Guy Gabrielson, claimed that “sexual perverts...have infiltrated

our Government in recent years” and through manipulation the “sexual excesses or degeneracy” of the

time “would make individuals easy prey” for such things as “communist tactics” or other similarly

maligned groups (91). It then stands to reason that Natalie not only feels violated and disempowered due

38
to her assault but feels distinctly marked as the other during “the atomic age” which harbored a distinct

and obsessive “concern about sexual order” (90), which she now feels she fall outside of.

Moreso than in The Bird’s Nest, Jackson demonstrates how mental illness and the retreat into

unreality are not just precipitated by a traumatic event but by the reality of a culture and society that

persistently undermines and threatens an individual and their autonomy. As opposed to the multiple

alternate personalities that control Elizabeth, Natalie is possessed, almost literally, by Tony, a fellow

student and possible hallucination who functions as her double in a distinct way from that of Elizabeth’s

alternate personalities. Tony’s purpose is not as clear-cut as the alternate personalities of The Bird’s Nest,

as she is depicted as separate from Natalie even if she is the culmination of her unreality. As opposed to

adolescent feelings of abandonment, Natalie’s unreality and invoked by a violation of her autonomy and

self-authority by an older man in a position of power and authority. It is not only this more present and

explicit violence, but the shame and need to disassociate that causes a split within Natalie, as unlike

Elizabeth, Natalie is utterly alone. In place of a caring aunt, there are two unhappy and distant parents,

and instead of a bumbling but earnest psychologist, Natalie finds only another predatory figure in her

salacious professor, Arthur Langdon. Contradicting The Bird’s Nest, Jackson seemingly upends that

idealized paradigm of mental health and care for one instead rooted in real life, one focused on illustrating

the effects of violence and ostracization.

Despite Jackson’s repetition in using trauma as the originating event in Hangsaman, the

environment of Natalie’s college environment functions to contradict the ideal of the medical model

operative within The Bird’s Nest. Natalie finds similarly predatory men and a recurrent reminder of the

unhappy marriage of her parents that she so desperately wishes to avoid. Both systemic issues are

represented in her English professor, Arthur Langdon, a figure with a glaring similarity to both Natalie’s

father and Jackson’s husband, who five years previous to the publication of Hangsaman had worked at

Bennington, an all-girls college. Arthur is a figure who while at first purporting to be a supportive teacher

and modern man is shown to entirely disregard his responsibility and instead take advantage of his

position to engage in a sexual relationship with students.

39
 These two characteristics are deeply connected as exemplified by Arthur Langdon’s wife, also

named Elizabeth, who is a former student of his. She invites Natalie into the home during a drunken

encounter and confides that she “never realized what I was getting into, marrying my English teacher ...

Sometimes I could cry” (81). Natalie, in a moment mirroring her earlier disconnect with her mother,

envies Elizabeth’s marriage despite her obvious misery: “you didn’t finish college before you married?”

asked Natalie with interest, here was an achievement to be envied” (80). One of the primary sources of

Elizabeth’s discontent is her husband’s obvious and flagrant sexual interest in his students, which is

demonstrated by Athur after he enters the home and announces that he is having two students come over

for drinks during Elizabeth’s conversation with Natalie. These students, Anne and Vicki, are despised by

both Natalie and Elizabeth, with Natalie feeling an intense jealousy immediately upon meeting them

“[she] saw with the irritation she was beginning to know as jealousy that they were both lovely” (86).

Later on, after Arthur has gone off with Anne and Vicki, a significantly more inebriated Elizabeth

repeatedly proclaims to Natalie “I want to die” and “I want to be Anne” which Natalie agrees with saying

“I wish I were Anne” (134). After helping Elizabeth home, Natalie then attempts to rejoin Arthur, Anne,

and Vicki only to find the lights off in their room which she had expected “without question’ (136),

alluding to an otherwise unstated knowledge on Natalie’s part that Arthur had even while in his own

home with his wife, been intending to sleep with two students.

Tony first appears during a dreamlike hallucination that involves Natalie following after a young

girl in a forest, resembling the same one that she was assaulted in, only to lose sight of her and in

searching sees in the “moonlight a figure coming toward her” which inspires a “sudden horrible shock”

within Natalie (143). This figure is revealed to be Tony, but as is the case with much of the book the line

between the unreal and the real is at best blurred, whether she is symbolic of the man who assaulted her,

the girl she was following, another Natalie (it is at this point in the narrative that she begins to refer to

herself as we), or even the figure itself is unclear. Tony’s role only grows more unclear throughout the

narrative as she oscillates between rescuing Natalie from undesirable situations and manipulating her into

them.

40
 This is most evident during a party at the Langden’s home wherein Tony proves to be sufficient

reason for Natalie to escape the unending and anxiety inducing conversation of the party. Upon exiting

the home, Natalie discovers Tony and the two talk briefly before Tony leaves. While Natalie describes the

interaction as “almost companionable” (148), but the interaction bears a significant resemblance to her

interaction with the man at her father’s party, as is signaled by Elizabeth’s worry at seeing Natalie outside

with a mysterious person. Unlike that night, Natalie is sought after by someone else, a woman who

despite being a “faculty-wife” is much closer to a peer, saying “I came looking for you,” and “I wanted to

make sure you were all right” (149). Upon reentering the home Natalie notes “Arthur seems hardly to

have stopped for breath” during her or his wife’s absence again mirroring the lack of attention that

Natalie’s father paid his clearly upset wife or absent daughter, both of whom suffered while he kept face

and amused his guests.

This parallel is furthered still in the novel’s conclusion as Tony again lures Natalie to a place

quite similar to the one of her assault, except in this case it is not simply the outskirts of a party but the

outskirts of town in a far more secluded forest. In much the same manner, it is only at this moment, after

being alone and trapped, that Natalie realizes the intention of the person who led her there. As opposed to

that event though, Natalie is not frozen and asserts herself: “She wants me, Natalie thought with

incredulity, and said again, aloud, ‘I will not’” (214). It is a singular moment of rebellion and self-

actualization, but after asserting herself, Natalie desperately begs Tony not leave her and pleads aloud to a

dark forest “Tony, come on back with me” and in direct contradiction reflects in the same thought that

“she had defeated her own enemy, she thought, and she would never be required to fight again” only to

ask herself “What did I do wrong” (215). Further exploring this contradiction, Natalie proclaims in the

conclusion a sense of hope and a renewed ownership over her identity, but it rings distinctly hollow as

even though Natalie reflects that “as she had never been before, she was now alone, and grown up, and

powerful, and not at all afraid” (218), even though she had only two pages before felt desperately alone

and in a moment of delusion believed “it is my mother, Natalie thought, come to take me home” upon

seeing headlights on the road outside the forest (215). Natalie is not safe or done fighting, as the couple

41
who gives her a ride home remind her “‘Can’t ever tell what’ll happen to a girl alone along there,’ the

man added. ‘Attackers,’ the woman said, and nodded” (216). This contradiction is in line with Natalie’s

overall perception though, as Jackson alludes to Natalie’s skewed sense of the world from the start, even

if simultaneously affirming the rationale behind it. Jackson cultivates this not only by using unreality, but

by invoking the fantastic and supernatural throughout the novel.

Jackson was well acquainted with the occult and was specifically enamored by tarot, and features

it quite overtly throughout the narrative, “Waite” Natalie’s last name being the name for the most popular

variety of deck and the title of the book itself being an allusion to one of the most prolific card “The

Hanged Man.” Emily Banks analyzes the significance of the cards selected by Natalie and Tony when

they read each other, “the Magician, Natalie’s card, is specifically linked to unfulfilled talent as well as

delusional thinking when reversed” (131-132). The idea of reversal and reflection is apparent throughout

the novel, as Natalie repeatedly finds herself and her anxieties reflected in different characters: her mother

in Elizabeth, as well the man who assaulted her in her professor and her father. It is Tony who occupies

both, and as an extension of Natalie, presents a rather muddled picture, but in connecting Natalie’s mental

state with that of the Hanged Man, it is clear that the world she inhabits is itself contradictory. As with the

Hanged Man, Natalie is given the choice between remaining upright and facing a world that is totally

contrary to herself, or inverting herself to exist in a world that is more sensible even if unreal. It is with

this conception that Natalie’s conclusive proclamation can be understood. She is by no means in the same

boat as Elizabeth in The Bird’s Nest but rather in the exact opposite. She has not escaped, cured herself, or

found her place within the world but rather convinced herself that she has defeated her “demon in the

mind” as Jackson calls it in when writing about the novel, while still residing in unreality (SJP-LOC Box

14 folder 30). As Colin Haines explains it, while “Natalie may reject the unwanted imposition of

heterosexuality” she is “necessarily her own “phantom” as well,” she has asserted herself but has not

rectified the fundamental issue and is still plagued by the oppressive force of normative culture and the

effects of her queer identity (125).

42
 As opposed to the hope espoused in The Bird’s Nest, each of Jackson’s subsequent novels follow

in this same vein, with each of her central characters further confining themselves within unreality, dying,

or as is the case with Eleanor dying instead of being forced back into a hostile and unaccepting

conventional world. The Bird’s Nest in this context, seems like a dalliance with hope before allowing the

same cynicism present in Hangsaman to subsume the remainder of her fiction, or it would if not for

Jackson’s last and unfinished novel, Come Along with Me.

Come Along with Me: A Light at the End of the Tunnel

As with all of her work, Jackson transcribed her own life into Hangsaman and in understanding

that, her final unfinished novel can then be seen as a rather hopeful transcription on her part. While the

setting and exact nature of Natalie’s struggle can be said to have taken root in Jackson’s first attempt at

college in Rochester, the more pressing presence was her life while writing the novel and her relationship

with Stanley while he taught at Bennington College, which boldly mirrors the issues that Elizabeth

Langdon faces in her marriage.

Stanley was purportedly never guilty of having slept with his students at Bennington but was by

his own admission, quite eager to do so with former students, traveling across the country at times to do

so and sparing Jackson no detail despite her attempts to make him stop, which he claimed were allowable

under communist principle (Franklin 298-299, 101). Quite similarly to Arthur, he also thrust a great deal

of the domestic labour on to Jackson and made her too feel isolated in their home near Bennington where

she grew rather distrustful of the students, at one point even stating “what I wanted to do most in the

world was invite a few of my husband’s students over for tea and drop them down the well” (Franklin

198). The parallel with Elizabeth Langdon is then even more clear as she makes the feelings about her

marriage clear as she writes to Stanley “you once wrote me a letter (i know you hate my remembering

these things) telling me that i would never be lonely again. i think that was the first, the most dreadful, lie

you ever told me” (SEHP-LOC Box 2 Folder 3).

Further mirroring her life is the anxiety regarding predatory men and the vulnerability of young

women and girls, a well-warranted anxiety given the ideals Stanley espoused in front of his daughter

43
Sarah: “However adamant, female protest was simply foreplay. Women wanted to be forced, and

ultimately their excitement made them receptive, no matter what their claim” (Smith 187).3 Despite Tony

possibly being a hallucination, the anxiety is clearly shown to be symptomatic of a patriarchal society,

wherein the key offenders, Professor Langdon and Mr. Waite, are characterized as closely resembling

Stanley. While the exact nature of this resemblance cannot be hypothesized on, Jackson writes the

following of Stanley while at Syracuse University: “he forced me God help me and for so long I didn’t

dare say anything and only get out of it when I could and now I’m so afraid to have him touch me” (SJP-

LOC Box 37 Folder 3). This account, in many ways matches that of Natalie’s, as Franklin points out that

“Natalie’s violation at the garden party takes in a gap in the text—just as Shirley’s journal entry” does

(156). This proclivity to marry issues of mental health with the mistreatment enacted on female characters

by men abounds in all her fiction, most notably here and in The Bird’s Nest even if there is a “curing” and

reintegration that takes place in the latter.

It is not until her last and unpublished novel, Come Along with Me that Jackson’s fiction again

presents the case of a woman finding some sort of answer or new life, or at least a solution excluding

death or complete isolation. The narrative of Come Along with Me once again mirrors Jackson’s own life,

or at least the trajectory that she hoped for. Jackson died in 1965, but as opposed to writing and dreaming

of isolation, Jackson’s aspirations at the time matched that of her next protagonist, Angela Motorman an

older woman who was going to embark on a new journey alone, just as Jackson was soon hoping to be

given her plans to leave Stanley at the time. In her manuscript she describes not only leaving but escaping

from domesticity, having “no pets, no address books, no small effects to set around on tables or pin on

walls, I had no lists of friends to keep in touch with and no souvenirs; all I had was myself,” which

Franklin describes as “a fantasy of total encumbrance” (478). As it relates to Jackson’s own struggles,

particularly her agoraphobia, the solution lies not in trying to meet expectations of femininity but living

3Preceding quotation is sourced from Janna Malamud Smith’s memoir My Father is a Book and is her recollection
of a conversation she had with Shirley Jackson’s daughter Sarah Hyman, wherein Sarah relayed Stanley’s
perspective on the matter to Smith.

44
independently and for one’s own sake. This is in ardent opposition to Elizabeth in The Bird’s Nest where

it is explained that she needed to change to conform to societal ideals.

Come Along with Me recontextualizes the progression of her work; it does not contradict the

underlying criticism of the patriarchy in Jackson’s previous work but presents an alternative to the

previous nihilism. Angela is not forced to choose between suicide, fallacious conformity, and isolation

but chooses a more substantive solution, living in spite of those aspects that brought her such acute

unhappiness, as Franklin describes it “The narrator’s idiosyncratic, superstition-inflected voice contains

something of Merricat, but a Merricat who somehow managed to grow up, leave the house” (491). The

death of her husband allows Angela to move forward in her life and become a medium in a new city, a

practice that closely aligns with Jackson’s own interest in the occult and supernatural. Even her last name,

“Motorman,” seems to harken back to the freedom that Jackson felt when driving. Of particular note is

that Angela as a protagonist resembles Jackson more closely at the time of writing then any of her

previous heroines, specifically in that she is neither a young adult or experiencing a latent adolescence as

Eleanor is, she is a grown woman with a distinct perspective who does not fear the outside world or

confrontation.

Angela’s self-assuredness and maturity are illustrated earlier on in the novel when she is hailing a

streetcar and readily confronts a taciturn driver, a figure who would have likely cowed her previous

heroines, “‘Lady, he said, ‘I promise you. This streetcar goes to Smith Street every trip. That’s why,’ he

said, and he was not smiling, ‘that’s why it says so on the front.’ ‘You’re sure?’ I was not smiling either

and he knew he had met someone as stubborn as he was so he quit” (7). Angela is striking out into the

world looking to fulfill all of those wishes and wants she’d held onto during her marriage, and with her

husband Hughie’s death she endeavors to do so, as is evidence by her reflection on the confrontation and

dismissal of what her husband would have thought “Hughie would not have thought any of that was

funny. In case he ever does come back asking I will certainly remember not to tell him” (8). This last

novel depicts a woman resisting conformity, leaving domesticity and allowing herself to be a complete

and nuanced being, quite similarly to Elizabeth. As opposed to being granted this opportunity, Angela

45
takes it herself. Angela represents a new breed of narrator for Jackson, one that contends with the world

rather than balks at the prospect of resisting it. It is a clear reflection of Jackson’s own prerogative at the

time as she had both overcome her agoraphobia and was planning to leave Stanley, and as Jackson

described in a letter shortly before her death “leave for a wonderful journey” where she would “meet

many new people” (Franklin 494). It is a journey she seems to have planned both for herself and her

fiction, as Come Along with Me illustrates.

It is a new perspective for Jackson, one that is completely different from that of Hangsaman and

The Bird’s Nest. While those two novels allow some greater insight into Jackson’s understanding of

mental health, it is within Jackson’s first novel The Road Through the Wall that she writes her most abject

critique of heteronormative domesticity, and the violence it enacts on women and queer individuals. It is

The Road Through the Wall that normativity is most fully illustrated and where she most decisively points

the finger at the systems that perpetuate harm on othered populations

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 CHAPTER THREE: BANAL SUBURBIA CAST AS THE ORIGINAL SIN

“The Lottery” is the most famous of Shirley Jackson’s works and remains the predominant

avenue by which the large majority of people are introduced to her. The fame of “The Lottery” did not

however, translate to Jackson’s first novel, The Road Through the Wall, a novel which quite closely

resembles the short story as it focuses on a similar group dynamic or mob mentality which informs “The

Lottery” and similarly leads to the death of the three-year-old Caroline and the suicide of the much

maligned teenager Tod. The Road Through the Wall is one of Jackson’s most disregarded works, perhaps

even more so than her domestic memoirs. As opposed to the ambiguity of “The Lottery,” Jackson creates

a detailed illustration of the different characters and chronicles the way in which each is indoctrinated and

ultimately victimized by the culture of White middle-class suburbia in The Road Through the Wall.

While Jackson herself did not much like her first novel, the image of suburbia serves to found her

unique brand of horror and methods of queering normativity quite well. The novel is at times narrated in

an intentionally plodding but never uninteresting manner, illustrating the insipid evil at the core of

mundane suburban life. While the setting of The Road Through the Wall is specified as Pepper Street,

Cabrillo, California, it is heavily based on Jackson’s own experience growing up in Burlingame,

California (Franklin 29). While The Road Through the Wall concludes in the gruesome and shocking

death of three-year-old Caroline Desmond and the subsequent suicide of Tod Donald who had been

accused of murdering her, the majority of the novel is focused on daily suburban life of Pepper Street: the

politics of adolescent hierarchies, unhappy marriages, and most importantly ostracization and the effect

which has on different characters. In an interview with Judy Oppenheimer, Jackson’s first biographer,

Sarah Hyman recalls that her mother said, “The first book is the book you have to write to get back at

your parents the book you always had in you” (125). The novel in this context can be understood as a

formative step for Jackson in queering normative culture and exploring the experience and anguish of the

queered and othered.

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Middle-Class Anxieties and Suburban Hierarchies

As opposed to the older teenagers or young adults Jackson focuses on in her later novels, children

are the primary subject in The Road Through the Wall. Jackson uses the children of the novel to illustrate

the subtle yet corrosive effect that the perpetuation of this culture has and the ways it divides and

ultimately harms everyone involved. As Richard Pascal explains, the novel is “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 characters and narrative events by indicating the social and economic forces that have

largely determined them,” with the characters working more as portraits of the effect which greater

cultural forces exert as opposed to objects of examination and analysis themselves (76).

This is foremost illustrated by the disintegration of the friendship between two of the more

prominent characters, Marilyn Perlman and Harriet Merriam. Both are outcasts in the social hierarchy of

the Pepper Street children, Marilyn due to her being Jewish and Harriet because she is overweight. In

each other they find companionship and a degree of reprieve from their social isolation; this reprieve is

short-lived, however, as Mrs. Merriam, upon discovering the friendship, forces Harriet to end her

association with Marilyn. Mrs. Merriam explains, “We must expect to set a standard. Actually, however

much we may want to find new friends whom we may value, people who are exciting to us because of

new ideas, or because they are different, we have to do what is expected of us” before ordering, “in fact, I

insist” that Harriet “see her once more, in order to tell her exactly why you are not to be friends any

longer” (148). Mrs. Merriam’s closing of ranks and adherence to social convention mirrors quite closely

Harriet’s early complicity in the bullying of Marilyn when the students seek to exclude her from the class

Christmas festivities, arguing that she should not take part due to her being Jewish. “Maybe when we all

got together to draw names for the Christmas presents you maybe would think it was nicer of us just not

to put your name in. So you won’t be embarrassed” (17). The inclusion of an outsider, an other,

invalidates the principles upon which the group identity here has been built, meaning that the exclusion of

a queer individual is necessary to maintain the group identity.

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 While Jackson’s husband Stanley being Jewish no doubt influenced the particular nature of

Marilyn’s othering, the same unspoken but ironclad entrenched bigotry is illustrated in her short stories,

“After You, My Dear Alphonse” and “Flower Garden” where Boyd and Mr. Jones, a young black child

and gardener accordingly are covertly othered on the basis of an ambiguous propriety despite the

responsible individuals assuring themselves that they are not racist. Boyd experiences his othering by

being identified as a subject in need of charity by Mrs. Wilson, his friend Johnny’s mother. Mrs. Wilson

insists on giving Boyd hand-me-down clothes but after Boyd tells her that he doesn’t need them she

responds by chastising him, “there are many little boys like you, Boyd, who would be very grateful for

the clothes someone was kind enough to give them” (89). Mr. Jones on the other hand is not just

demeaned but overtly ostracized, as those in the community are unwilling to interact with Mrs. MacLane,

a single mother who has recently moved in and hired Mr. Jones to tend her garden. The other members of

the community stop talking to Mrs. MacLane, and when she asks Mrs. Winning, a woman who had

previously been friendly, why this has occurred, Mrs. Winning pretends that she has no idea what she is

talking about (131). Mrs. MacLane then asks specifically if it is because of her association with Mr.

Jones, which Mrs. Winning pretends to not know what Mrs. MacLane means, asking in response “Why

on earth would anyone around here be rude to you because of Jones?” (132). Mrs. Winning thinks to

herself, “this is dreadful, Mrs. Winning thought, this is childish, this is complaining. People treat you as

you treat them” but never explains what other reasons she and the other community members have for

ostracizing Mrs. MacLane. Racism here is seen as unseemly, but for the most part white suburbanites are

able to assure themselves of their innocence because they are kept separate. There is no need to attack or

even guard against the non-white other when they are kept away. This attitude is exemplified Mrs.

Winning before Mrs. MacLane hires Mr. Jones, “‘The Jones children are half-Negro,’ Mrs. Winning said

hastily. ‘But they’re all beautiful children; you should see the girl. They live just outside town’” (116).

When the bounds of the White middle-class home, community, or class are made permeable, this self-

imposed ignorance is challenged, and the characters ultimately act on same biases and bigotry in a polite

but ruthless suburban fashion, and the other is silently expelled so that uniformity can be restored.

49
 Racism rears its head in The Road Through the Wall, but in a rather different way as, while it is

present, its true purpose is to underscore an even more pervasive classism that endures in the more

purportedly liberal outlook of the younger generation. The key interaction that illustrates this dynamic is

the readiness displayed by Virginia Donald to visit Mr. Lee, an Asian man, for tea due to his perceived

wealth, despite the racist attitudes held by her and Harriet’s parents. In comparison to Harriet, who

unwillingly joins in visiting, Virginia is more than happy to visit the man—that is, until she discovers that

while well dressed, Mr. Lee is not wealthy but the employee of a wealthy man, whose estate he lives on.

Mr. Lee explains that he does not own or rent the building, “not in this neighborhood. They wouldn’t rent

an apartment to me,” which leads to a quick exit on Virginia and Harriet’s part and the immediate

argument between the two, Harriet saying, “‘I told you’ and Virginia responding ‘I didn’t know he

worked there’” (84). The interaction illustrates Virginia’s bigotry, a classist bias that she holds despite her

contention that she is different from her parents.

This facet of critique similarly shares a connection to real life, with Jackson’s class

consciousness. Jackson was critical of capitalism and the inequity that it engendered, and was to some

degree familiar with communism as Stanley was, at their time of meeting, an avowed communist, even if

his “infatuation with communism did not continue beyond his college years” (Franklin 89). Stanley’s ties

to the Communist Party were significant enough that he was a surveillance target of the FBI in 1953

(Franklin 310-312). While Jackson did have some sympathies with communism and the principles it

stood for, it is also possible that Stanley’s early vehemence and particular interpretation had some hand in

her unwillingness to actually join the party or call herself a communist. Stanley’s interpretation and

observing of what he deemed the “communist principles” meant maintaining an open relationship, despite

Jackson’s many pleas to stop (Franklin 101). While a singular detail, it is perhaps illustrative of why

Jackson might have had some misgivings or distrust of it

Beyond any other critique, though, Jackson’s depiction of traditional femininity is most closely

linked to her own upbringing, as Jackson’s mother Geraldine, functioned as an exemplary enforcer of

both feminine norms and a distinct upper class attitude, which are linked in a fundamental level to

50
Virginia Donald’s characterization (Franklin 24). In the same way that Virginia attempted to play the part

of a young wealthy socialite, Jackson’s mother consistently advocated for Jackson to do the same as a

child and later as an adult. As Jackson’s son Barry explained to Ruth Franklin, Geraldine “tried valiantly

to shape her daughter in her image” and “it must have been clear early on that Shirley would not conform

to Geraldine’s ambitions for her” (24-25). Barry explained that “Geraldine wanted a pretty little girl, and

what she got was a lumpish redhead,” and the two had for their entire life been in conflict about

appropriate behavior and image. Sarah similarly identifies that Geraldine “was just a deeply conventional

woman who was horrified by the idea that her daughter was not going to be deeply conventional” (25).

This attitude persisted well into Jackson’s adult life, as illustrated by a response from Geraldine to

Jackson, when Jackson wrote to let her know of the success and critical praise that her final novel, We

Have Always Lived in the Castle had found. Geraldine said little about the novel or its critical reception

and focused instead on her dislike of the picture that Time magazine had published of Jackson writing: “If

you don’t care what you look like or care about your appearance why don’t you do something about it for

your children’s sake—and your husband’s” (Franklin 453). This aspect of Jackson’s life makes the

connection between class and gender in her fiction quite stark; the two fit together as two almost

contiguous aspects of the same performance.

Femininity is rendered here not only as a performance to prove one’s own worth but the worth

and value of one’s family, a way for a woman to prove that she is properly seeing to her family and

fulfilling her domestic roles, roles that are almost entirely founded on class ideals. They are ideals that

Jackson rejected and found limiting as evidenced by her prioritization of her work over domestic duties as

at times she has “no qualms about leaving a sink full of dishes or a floor unswept if she needed to get

back to her typewriter” (Franklin 80). Jackson at the very same time clung to them rather dearly as is

evidenced by her treatment of “the childless character,” who Jackson identified as “the worst person I

know” in her unpublished manuscript “Lines for the Kitchen Door” (SJP-LOC Box 14 Folder 3).

Femininity is in this context a performance that Jackson despises but cannot help but judge others and

herself by.

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 Excepting Ms. Fielding, the reclusive schedule oriented old woman, and Mrs. Martin, a single

mother of two, the women of Pepper Street are mothers and homemakers who cook, clean, and watch the

children, seemingly only leaving their homes to meet with the other women of Pepper Street for activities

such as knitting circles. While The Road Through the Wall predates Jackson’s “Lines for the Kitchen

Door” manuscript, it is clear that her judgment of the different variety of housewives and the expectations

for them had been simmering for some time, likely since her own childhood in California. It is during one

of these knitting circles that the enforcement of feminine norms is put on clear display, when Mrs.

Merriam complains about her daughter Harriet’s unwillingness to learn how to sew with Miss Tyler

insinuating the needlessness of her learning because she will of course “have servants to do everything for

her when she grows up” (123). The women then go on to make jokes about their respective husbands’

ineptitude at household work, joking, “He can’t even boil water” (124). Following this, they complain

about the new generation women, saying that they are poor homemakers and overly flirtatious:

“None of those high-school girls can really do housework.”

“They are terribly inefficient,” Mrs. Donald said, nodding profoundly.
“I had a high-school girl once, for about two weeks,” Mrs. Ransom-Jones said.
“It was awful.” “It was awful,” Miss Tyler said to Mrs. Donald, in a loud whisper. “She
was always making eyes at Brad—Mr. Ransom-Jones.”

The scene ends with a rather telling interaction as Mrs. Donald complains about Virginia and the

difficulties of raising a pretty daughter, to which Mrs. Merriam gives her the advice “not to try to

teach Virginia anything. Anything useful, that is” (125).

The entire scene functions as a miniature of the larger dynamic of perpetuation, as the

women coyly reinforce the infantilization of women, gender roles, and of course, sexual

propriety. Even in their derision they uphold the idea that they should be responsible for the

domestic responsibilities, that their husbands should focus on their work, and that their daughters

should strive to find a successful man who offers an equal if not greater quality of life to which

they receive. The key to doing so that they develop domestic capabilities and learn to be

subservient to their future husbands. This model of traditional femininity, like most of the ideals

that predominate the culture of Pepper Street, relies heavily on hierarchal thinking that demands

52
that some individuals be rejected so that the individuals in the larger group can reaffirm their own

validity and place within society. The women in the group insult, degrade, and distance

themselves from the generation of their daughters to make their adequate performance of their

own roles all the more apparent.

While there are decisively more and less sympathetic characters, there is no monster or even

antagonist, rather an oppressive culture perpetuated by almost every character as they remain unwilling to

challenge the status quo for the sake of themselves or others. The core conflict arises from the titular road

that is being constructed through the wall which divides Pepper Street from the less affluent area outside

of it. Despite the residents of Pepper Street themselves being cordoned off by an actual gate from the even

wealthier suburbanites with their clubs and estates beyond Pepper Street, the residents see the new

construction as the opening of the gate to the metaphorical barbarians, those less affluent Californians

who could not buy entry on to Pepper Street. It is however not enough for the residents of Pepper Street to

separate themselves from the wider world, as to ensure homogenous conventionality they must purge

those queered individuals within their own ranks, those women and men who do not adequately conform

to heteronormative ideals of gender and the traditional family. This is most evident with Tod as he is

literally singled out for murder and commits suicide, but this purging and ostracization happens at all

levels. A key moment where this made evident is the coded language in which Mr. and Mrs. Desmond

decide that they should not include Marilyn in their proposed Shakespeare plays.

“Wondering what?” Mr. Desmond said. He was writing down, “Virginia Donald—
Juliet.” “The Perlman girl,” Mrs. Desmond said. “Marilyn.” “What about her?” Mr.
Desmond asked. “We’re going to have everybody, you know.” “I wouldn’t want to see
her left out,” Mrs. Desmond said. “She seems to be a very sweet girl. But if you read
something like The Merchant of Venice, isn’t there . . . wouldn’t it be apt to embarrass
her?” Mr. Desmond stared for a minute, and then he said with some discomfort, “I see
what you mean, yes.” He turned the pages of the book quickly, read a few lines, turned a
page and read a few lines again. “You’re absolutely right,” he said. “I’m glad you thought
of it in time.” (Jackson 77)

They at no point say that Marilyn shouldn’t be included because she is Jewish, but simply allude to her

difference, and on that basis decide not to. This same ostracization occurs in school and at the hands of

53
children as explained earlier, but it is this subtle othering that Jackson depicts here that so accurately

illustrates the way in which suburbia perpetuates the exclusionary politics of the past even if there are no

slurs being thrown or overt identifications of otherness as a basis for disincluding an individual. It is the

same force that it is operative in Jackson’s aforementioned short stories, “After You, My Dear Alphonse”

and “Flower Garden.” The forces that support these exclusionary politics are often hidden, but through

queering suburbia and recontextualizing this conversation and its language, those operative forces are

revealed, and the divisive attitudes are laid bare. It this culture itself, and the divisive ideals inherit in it,

that is then the monster in The Road Through the Wall.

The white-collar office jobs of the men, the knitting circles and housekeeping of the women, and

the safe streets for the children to play on are all founded upon the social hierarchy that distinguished the

residents as separate and more deserving than those outside the wall. This separation and hierarchical

understanding of the world is precisely the ideal of monstrousness that Jeffrey Cohen identifies in the

third of his “Seven Theses,” which begin his book Monster Theory. Cohen identifies the Monster as the

“harbinger of category crisis,” explaining that the monster is a “form suspended between forms that

threaten to smash distinctions” (6), these distinctions are precisely those differences upon which the

characters predicate their understanding of the world and their middle-class identity. There is no monster,

but Pepper Street is characterized as being one small piece of a much greater monster, similar to Hobbes’

leviathan wherein the social contract and cultural hierarchy are necessary to keep the peace or in this case

maintain the current status quo of polite and respectable suburbia. The conclusion of the novel confirms

that these fears and anxieties are unfounded and based solely off a predetermined ideal of the world that

has no basis, as each resident and family, excepting of course the Desmonds and Donalds, the two

families whose children die, either continue life as it was or simply move away. Jackson underscores the

utter lack of change by highlighting the repaving of the road as the most distinguishable alteration,

symbolizing the insignificance of the changes which ignited the anxiety of the Pepper Street residents,

writing that the “pavement in the new street was fresher and shinier than the pavement on the old Pepper

54
Street block, it was always less satisfactory for roller-skating, being made of some material slightly more

slippery” (194).

The leviathan is imagined, but as an abstraction, it is made manifest by the shared perception of

the Pepper Street residents. As Elaine Tyler May points out in Homeward Bound, the “American way of

life, post-World War 2 was embodied in the suburban nuclear family” and that even if those standards of

life described in The Road Through the Wall were not “universal” they existed “as a cultural ideal” which

“countless postwar Americans to strive[d] for,” attempting to make it their reality by “liv[ing] by its

codes,” codes that are specifically predicated on individual merit by virtue of belonging to a specific

group, the White middle-class. Jackson subverts the ideal of categories, configuring them as containers

for the discontent and fear that is unleashed when they are disturbed, rather than just the distinctions that

allow normativity to persist. While each and every resident is penned in and oppressed by the White

normative culture of Pepper Street, each character holds some greater idea of what their stature is, even if

they are in some way lesser than another individual or family. This precludes one character in particular,

Tod Donald, or “Toddie,” who occupies the absolute lowest rung of the hierarchy and is the younger

brother of James, the star athlete, and Virginia, the meanspirited and quite popular tastemaker of the

Pepper Street children.

Tod: The Other and the Queer Made Manifest

Tod is rejected by every child on the street and represents the utter isolation and queerness that

drives every other resident to perform their roles. He is othered to the point of acting out to get attention,

going as far as to throw stones at the other children:

Tod was afraid to throw any more pebbles in that direction and faced directly around to
throw at the girls. He was possessed of as strong a desire for punishment as he had ever
achieved, but he wanted more for his penalties than tapping George Martin on the ankles
with a pebble. (36)

Beyond adolescent indiscretion, the reader is further led to believe that Tod is in some way

dangerous, as he sneaks into the Desmond home and spends a significant amount of time going through

Mrs. Desmond’s room and belongings. Mrs. Desmond is one of the most envied figures on Pepper Street

55
as she is a young and attractive mother of a three-year-old who seems to fulfill all her domestic duties

with ease. At a knitting circle she is identified as more proficient than the other women at those

conventionally feminine task such as embroidery, a more gentile and delicate characteristic in comparison

to the other women who are darning socks: “it would have been incongruous for Mrs. Desmond, with her

small delicate hands always so near Caroline’s blond head, and her pale face so like Caroline’s, to sit with

great socks or spools of darning cotton on her lap” (37-38). Tod is then intruding not only on the domain

of a woman or mother, but the individual who embodies femininity more so than anyone else in the

community, and he even goes as far as to pour her perfume onto his hand and smell it:

He picked up a perfume bottle and lifted out the top. The scent was overpoweringly
sweet, and he poured some out into his hand before he stoppered the bottle and put it
back. Then his hand smelled of the same overpowering sweetness, and with his hand up
to his face he walked across the room and opened the door on one side of Mrs.
Desmond’s bed (67).

As Patrycja Antoszek interprets it in “The Suburban Unhomely,” this act is perverse, representing Tod’s

sexually demented nature and the vulnerability of women in this community and culture to people like

him:

In what reads like an allusion to a sexual act, Tod enters the wardrobe, “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,” speaking
out loud “all the dirtiest words he knew” (Jackson 2013, 67). This uncanny penetration of
the feminine interior is also a symbolic confrontation with the repressed maternal – as
Tod moves through the house he sees his own reflection in a number of mirror-like
surfaces as if he has returned to the Lacanian Imaginary (17).

Pascal similarly labels the act as “a protracted act of voyeurism” (88), but this interpretation of Tod’s

behavior and certainty of his guilt in the murder of Caroline notably overlooks a later event that gives

greater context to Tod’s characterization. A later passage allows for a radically different interpretation of

this scene. It is revealed in the text of two manuscripts written by Tod that he was possibly acting upon

gender dysphoria rather than some hostile and threatening sexual proclivity:

Text of two manuscripts found at the creek, late in the summer, by Tod Donald:

In ten years I will be a beautiful charming lovely lady writer

without any husband or children but lots of lovers and everyone
will read the books I write and want to marry me but I will never

56
 marry any of them. I will have lots of money and jewels too.

I will be a famous actress or maybe a painter and everyone will

be afraid of me and do what I say. (164)

This passage can be read as a small but vital insight allowing Tod to be understood not as a predator lying

in wait, but as a fundamentally othered individual who is scapegoated for his Queer identity. In this

reading, Tod is forced to conform to the culture of Pepper Street but is wholly incapable of performing his

prescribed role. His identity is rendered false, and is in a sense is forced to act out in order to reaffirm his

existence.4 The reader is made an accessory in this: until this scene, it is likely that they have shared

judgments and perceptions of Tod that the other characters have, the same judgments which founded his

ostracization and rejection from the community. The manuscripts are never remarked upon again and no

other character gains this insight into Tod. Only the reader is privy to the full spectrum of Tod’s being and

struggle.

The pinnacle of the novel’s conflict and the ultimate expression of the category crisis is the

murder of Caroline, the three-year-old daughter of the Desmond family. It is a shockingly violent

occurrence injected into a story that largely revolves around the humdrum life of suburbia and the

comparatively insignificant indiscretions of White middle-class families. It is a short-lived but white-hot

eruption of violence and depravity suddenly interjected into mundane,

She was horribly dirty; no one had ever seen Caroline as dirty as she was then, with mud
all over her yellow dress and yellow socks and, of course, Pat understood perfectly, what
was all over her head must be blood, unconvincing as it looked in the flashlight. It was
absolutely unthinkable at the creek, not twenty feet from the fallen log Pat could walk
across, and the really dreadful thing, lying right there next to her as though it might be
hers, was the rock with blood on it; part of the creek, belonging to it, a rock which had
probably been sitting there as long as Pat had been coming to the creek, a rock he might
have stepped over or lifted with his two hands. (185)

Tod, having discreetly absconded from a dinner party involving most of the Pepper Street families, which

precedes the search for Caroline, is seemingly the only character left unaccounted for; he is quickly

identified as the culprit because the residents were unable to find him whilst searching for Caroline. When

4
The pronouns He/Him are used here when referring to Tod in accordance with those used by Jackson in the novel.

57
confronted Tod’s family does little in his defense, calling for the Desmond’s immediately, already sure of

their son’s guilt and happy to serve him up as the culprit: “As his mother and father and sister started up

the stairs James yelled again, “Virginia, get the Desmonds, hurry!” (187). Following the residents’

discovery of Tod, he is pulled into an interview with the responding police officer, where he is confronted

with the seeming inevitability of his blame. Before Tod ever speaks, the officer states “This is a serious

thing. I want you to realize that. Tell me how you killed that little girl” before continuing without Tod’s

response, “‘Listen, sonny,’ the policeman said, ‘we’re going to put you in jail’” (188). Jackson then twists

the knife, describing Tod’s suicide by hanging in the brief period where he is left alone by the officer.

When he came back Tod was dead. He had taken a piece of clothesline from the kitchen,
and his own chair to stand on, the one he sat on every night at dinner. Hanging, his body
was straighter than it had ever been in life. The policeman stood for a minute just inside
the door, looking at Tod and flipping his thumbnail across the papers he still held in his
hand. “Well,” he said in a great gusty breath, and, finally, “That settles that,” he said
(188-189).

The identity of the murderer or circumstances of Caroline’s death are never revealed, the reader

never even learns if it was in fact a murder or if it was an accident as Pat, another teenager, hypothesizes:

“Like she fell against this rock and hit her head, and Tod saw he couldn’t help her and got frightened, and

no wonder” (192). Whether it was a stranger, another resident, or even just carelessness in Caroline’s

supervision, the unknown monster remains safe, hidden within the social strata of middle-class whiteness.

As Jeffrey Cohen has identified in his second thesis “The Monster Always Escapes,” there is no putting

an end to the monster: “We see the damage that the monster wreaks, the material remains (the footprints

of the yeti across Tibetan snow, the bones of the giant stranded on a rocky cliff), but the monster itself

turns immaterial and vanishes, to reappear someplace else” (4). The grotesque nature of the crime is

antithetical to the presumed principles of the culture, but it is for that exact reason that it is able to so

deftly able to hide within it, the unbending propriety of this culture wholly rejects the notion that such an

act could be performed by an accepted individual or allowed under its supervision, and when it occurs the

othered and queer are inevitably held responsible. It is a dynamic with a glaring similarity to Pepper

Street’s ignoring of Fredericka and her search for her sister Beverly who has an unspecified disability,

58
which the residents of Pepper Street view as a grotesque and undesirable element in their community as

evidenced by Mrs. Tyler’s comments regarding her, saying that Beverly “should be in an institution,” that

it would in fact be “The kindest thing you could do is get her locked up” (153). Beverly is for the most

part kept at home, but when Frederica is not there to supervise her, she takes some of the money that her

mother left out and walks outside where she meets Virginia and Mary who seize upon the opportunity to

take advantage of her and take her into town where they have her buy them ice cream, candy, and jewelry.

While this occurs, Frederica frantically searches for her sister but is continually met with obstinance or, as

is the case with Mrs. Tyler, unhelpful comments as she attempts to pry into the family’s life and blame

Frederica and her mother:

“Did she have any money?” Miss Tyler asked. “I guess so,” Frederica said. She looked at
Mrs. Ransom-Jones for confirmation. “She never goes unless she has money.” “You
shouldn’t let her have money, then,” Miss Tyler said gently. “I don’t let her have it.”
Frederica almost wailed. “I can’t watch her every minute.” “And your mother?” Miss
Tyler asked. “She was asleep,” Frederica said. She moved uncomfortably. “Please,” she
said, “if you know anything about her...?” “Does your mother always sleep?” Miss Tyler
asked. With her quiet voice, and the soft touch she gave the words, they sounded
sympathetic. “She sleeps a lot,” Frederica said. “I don’t know what she does.” (155)

The failure of Pepper Street to supervise and come to each other’s aid is then mirrored in the

death of Caroline, as meets a fate that well could have befallen Beverly due to the same lack of parental

supervision and care, as Frederica reflects on during the search: “Mr. Desmond was twisting his hands

and looking up and down the street eagerly. That’s no way to find her, Frederica thought wisely; you

never find someone who’s running away by just standing there” (183). This reflection from Frederica

works further to illustrate how the culture’s attitude allows and perpetuates the violence enacted on

vulnerable individuals, queered or not. It is only Frederica who has experience in this situation, and by

virtue of their previous lack of care and shunning of Beverly, they find themselves woefully unprepared

to organize and search for Caroline.

Archival Queerness: An Extratextual Reading of Tod and Contemporary Suicidality

While transgender identities were not discussed in Jackson’s time as they are today, Jackson had

a multitude of gay peers who were family friends of the Hymans, including Herbert Weinstock and Marc

59
Blitzstein who was murdered in 1964 by a group of three sailors after he had “propositioned” one of them

(Franklin 360). While Blitzstein’s murder occurred sixteen years after the 1948 publishing of The Road

Through the Wall, it is rather clear that Jackson was aware and sympathetic to oppression that Queer

people, or at least gay men, faced at the time. This is evident even in her earlier personal writings:

when i first used to write stories and hide them away in my desk i used to
think that no one had ever been so lonely as i was, and i used to write
about people all alone. once i started a novel about a poet who lived
all by himself and poeple used to be afraid of him, but i never finished
the novel because i found out5 about insanity about then and i used to write
about lunatics after that. i thought i was insane, and i would write about
how the only sane people are the ones who are condemned as mad, and how
the whole world is cruel and foolish and afraid of people who are different. 6 (SJP-LOC, Box 14,
Folder 12)

Shortly after she qualifies in the same note that, due to her experience, she wants to write about her

experience specifically by focusing on the struggles of lesbians:

my friend was so strange that everyone,

even the man i loved, thought we were lesbians and they used to talk about
us, and i was afraid of them and i hated them. then i wanted to write
stories about lesbians and how people misunderstood them.

Jackson’s struggle with being othered and her perception of queerness, as it is reflected in Tod and his

suicide, is only further solidified within this document as she explains that she “had a friend and she was

kind to me, and together we were happy. she introduced me to a man who didn’t laugh at me because i

was ugly and i fell in love with him and tried to kill myself” along with her description of a boy that her

and her friend bullied who bears a significant resemblance to Tod, as she describes him as “horribly

deformed. i don’t know hw old he is, or anything about him, but he is dreadful to look at, and yet he likes

himself, and stands looking in the mirror all the time, and he is very rude and very conceited.” She

continues, describing the altercation that ensued:

5 The word “out” was seemingly added later as it is typed in the space between the fourth and fifth of the excerpted
passage her.
6
This document is most likely written during Jackson’s time at Syracuse University or shortly after, as she is typing
in all lowercase, a quirk she adopted from her husband Stanley early in their relationship (Franklin 97) but was
typed on grey paper instead of the yellow lined paper that she almost always wrote on following the publication of
“The Lottery” (Franklin 173). This is speculation based on the content, tone, and aforementioned typographical
characteristics, but no exact year or range can be ascribed to this manuscript with certainty.

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 he looked at
her and laughed and she said ‘go away or i’ll put ketchup in your hair’ and
he said for her to shut up too. and she looked at me and i looked at her
and then we grabbed him and i held him while she put ketchup in his hair
and then she held him and i put ketchup in his hair and i rubbed it in
until she let him go and he got up and ran out of the restuarant with his
hair all dripping ketchup. and the girl and i laughed and shook hands and
she said ‘i’m so glad we did that.’
and i was glad too and that’s what I want to write this story about only i
don’t know quite where to begin it [sic].

The way Jackson has inscribed her own experience in The Road Through the Wall is at times akin to a

disordered transcription of her own life. The breaking point between her experience and her fiction is

most prominent in the concluding death of Caroline and subsequent suicide of Tod. Jackson characterizes

suburbia as fundamentally flawed and harmful and while there exists no concrete answer to Caroline’s

death it would be rather out of character of Jackson and the novel to identify Tod, the ultimate other, as

the sole perpetrator of this violent and evil act as Antoszek has in “The Suburban Unhomely.” Jackson

has intentionally created a level of ambiguity regarding Caroline’s murder and Tod’s character so that

there is no answer. That said, a former draft of the novel can offer some insight into Jackson’s intentions

here. In this earlier draft of the novel, Tod’s aforementioned manuscripts play a much more significant

role in the narrative. They are found surrounding the body of Caroline, in this earlier draft named

Suzanne, by the police and attributed to Tod as a vital piece of evidence.

The exact nature of this plotline is unclear, as except for the inclusion of the manuscripts

themselves, it was cut from the narrative in subsequent revisions. That said, within this previous draft, it

is heavily insinuated that Tod was framed for the murder or that the police were falsifying evidence to

more easily find Tod guilty:

mrs desmond had not been informed of the horrid extent of the crime; near the child’s
body was a cleverly concealed, recently dug hole, far too small for burying the body, but
lined with stones and containing two manuscripts,7 now in the hands of the police. text of
the notes, of course widely reprinted, was: “in ten years i will be a beautiful charming
lovely lady writer without any husband or children, and everyone will read the books 1
write and want to marry me but i will never marry any of them. i will have lots of money
and jewels too.”
and:

7 Jackson had crossed out “manuscripts’ and with a pencil written “notes.”

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 “i will be a famous actress or maybe a painter and everyone will be afraid of me and do
what i say.” the second was in a different handwriting, but in the newspapers it showed
up in the same black print. (SJP-LOC Box 27 Folders 5&6)

The handwriting by no means exonerates Tod but is illustrative of the same intent of the police

officer in the final version of the novel, even if there the damage is done out of incompetence and

uncaring rather than by a malicious forgery and planting of evidence. It is important to note here

then just how dismissive the police were to Queer populations during the cold war period, as

David K. Johnson notes in The Lavender Scare that among those characteristics that the federal

government was suspicious of during the Cold War period Queerness was the most dangerous as

unlike the alcoholic or the talkative, homosexuality “was, always a security risk” (8). He goes on

to note it was also “perhaps the easiest such offense to prove,” as it was “the only one of the three

to be illegal” (8). The criminality of queerness and the view that it poses a security risk against

communism then, as Johnson explains works in “automatically enlisting every police force in the

nation in its enforcement” (8). The police, the force that most directly enforces societal norms are

wildly irresponsible and quite callous to Tod’s suicide in both versions, almost glad to see him

dead as it allows them to conclude their efforts. In the published novel, the police officer simply

says “That settles that,” when he discovers Tod hanging in the kitchen (189). This reading is in

stark contrast to the conventional interpretation of Tod and the assumption of his guilt, a

perspective exemplified in Pascal’s reading of the juxtaposition that exists between Caroline and

Tod:

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 (89).

While Pascal does later note that the matter of Tod’s guilt is “murky” and the treatment of him

by the neighborhood does constitute a “sanctioned victimization of designated domestic Others”

(91), it is perhaps because of this variety of interpretation that Stanley Hyman, Jackson’s

husband, described her work as profoundly misunderstood in the preface of her posthumous

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collection The Magic of Shirley Jackson. He identified her work not as the “fierce visions of

dissociation and madness, of alienation and withdrawal, of cruelty and terror” or “personal, even

neurotic, fantasies” but as “quite the reverse: they are a sensitive and faithful anatomy of our

times, fitting symbols for our distressing world” (viii). His view is indicates that her work’s true

intention may lie not in the creation of terrors but the investigation and depiction of terrifying

realities present in real systems.

The Road Through the Wall, even if it is the least popular of her novels provides one of

the most prescient identifications of harm in contemporary society: the marginalization of Queer

communities and subsequent psychological harm it causes. As Johnson points out this was “an

era known for the phenomenon of ‘naming names,’” and the consistent marginalization and

targeting of Queer people that most people of the time were relatively ignorant of due to an

‘almost total anonymity of the thousands of gay men and lesbians touched by the purges’” (38).

This anonymity and the lack of voice given to those accused and maligned “allowed a fantastical

image of sexual perverts to reign without the countervailing weight of any reference to reality.

Gays, even more than Communists, were phantoms, ciphers upon whom could be projected fears

about the declining state of America’s moral fiber” (38). It is a campaign whose consequences are

still being felt acutely today.

In Queer communities, specifically the transgender community, mental health is an issue

of immense significance. Suicide has been, and continues to be, a malignant and pervasive issue,

and since it has been recognized there has been the continuous urge to label it as symptomatic of

Queer orientation. As progress has been made and rights gained, this idea has lost even the

illusory footing it once had, as the Trevor Project identifies in its 2024 survey, the 54% of

transgender and nonbinary youth who found their schools gender affirming had markedly lower

rates of attempted suicide (Nath et al. 2). This statistic is still extremely notable considering that

they reported that 46% of transgender and nonbinary youth seriously considered or attempted

suicide (Nath et al. 2).

63
 Mental health and self-harm are complicated issues with causes that cannot simply be explained,

but it has been made abundantly clear that the systems which support the oppression, harassment, and

rejection of Queer identities is inextricably linked to self-harm and mental illness present in Queer

communities. When The Road Through the Wall was published in 1948, this was already self-apparent

even without surveys and data, and Tod is a clear illustration of the violence enacted upon Queer

individuals that are othered, rejected, and ultimately blamed for the ongoing issues present in such a

system.

Despite this, there still remains the question of Jackson’s use of the monstrous as it relates to

queerness and sexuality in her greater collection of works, as Tod’s portrayal, while prescient, along with

Tony are only one facet of Jackson’s use of the monstrous.

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 CHAPTER FOUR: JACKSON’S QUEERED MONSTERS AND MONSTROUS QUEERS

The most fundamental issue and contradiction in a queer reading of Shirley Jackson is

unfortunately Jackson herself. Queering Jackson is a process that is rather dissimilar from that of other

authors. Jackson has in turn expressed the same sentiment that has touched the hearts of contemporary

Queer authors, the urge to explore identity and the way culture has othered queer individuals, and then

later an utter revulsion at the idea of her work being viewed as pertaining to sexual Queerness. The first

perspective was expressed while she was a student at Syracuse university in a document she titled “notes

for a story on the grotesque” wherein she definitively expresses her wish to write about queerness and the

way she personally related to it, explaining her relationship with two female friends, stating

my friend was so strange that everyone, even the man i loved, thought we were lesbians
and they used to talk about us, and i was afraid of them and i hated them. then i wanted to
write stories about lesbians and how people misunderstood them. and finally this man
sent me away because i was a lesbian and my friend went away and i was all alone. (SJP-
LOC Box 14 Folder 12)

The wish that she explains in this statement is one that she quite arguably pursues in her fiction,

specifically in The Road Through the Wall, Hangsaman, The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have

Always Lived in the Castle. It is a feature that is notably scaled back in each one of these works during the

drafting stage, with the exception of Hangsaman, the novel at the center of the letter where Jackson

expresses the opposite view later in her life, specifically explaining her distaste for being categorized as

an author of Queer literature.

This letter is focused primarily on Jeanette H. Foster’s book Sex Variant Women in Literature in

which Hangsaman is referenced. Jackson disabuses Foster quite ardently of her Queer interpretation,

stating that she rather disliked her novel being categorized as, in Jackson’s words, an “‘eerie’ novel about

lesbians,” explaining “I happen to know what hangsaman is about. i wrote it. and dammit it is about what

i say it is about and not some dirty old lady at oxford” (SJP-LOC Box 14 Folder 30). Jackson later in the

letter goes on to explain her dislike, writing that she was “frightened by a word. i am frightened by a word

because it tells me i am frightened” that word being “lesbian.” This letter serves as the central impetus for

Colin Haines’ masterful analysis, “Frightened by a Word,” the title of which is itself sourced from this

65
letter. This anxiety and contradiction pose an issue to scholars such as Patrycja Antoszek who addresses it

in “Haunting Feelings: Shirley Jackson and the Politics of Affect” and finds the letter to be a rather

peculiar reflection of Jackson’s work, describing her oeuvre as a “documentation of the affective

landscape of 1950s America” and “a counternarrative to the dominant discourse” (852). In that same vein

though Antoszek identifies the letter as simultaneously reflecting Jackson’s personal “exploration of the

tension between the need to articulate some of the most problematic feelings and the constraints of

signification, between the unrepresentable and the need to represent” (852). This dynamic is not only

necessary to unpack to understand Shirley Jackson and her work within the context of her time, but to

understand the evolution of Queer literature as a discrete genre that has been founded on supplanted

works from various authors and developed in spite of historic oppression.

Authors writing Queer literature have historically been forced to make their writings more

ambiguous to conform to heteronormative ideals or, as is the case for Oscar Wilde and similar writers,

forced to modify their work as not to contradict said ideals, or at least not in an explicit manner. Wilde’s

revisions of The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1891 for example largely served to remove the “homoerotic

subtext of the novel” and in many ways resembles those revisions that Jackson’s works underwent

(Beasley 10), namely The Haunting of Hill House, wherein Jackson made the sexuality of Theodora far

more ambiguous. Jackson removed scenes where “Theodora’s lesbianism is openly discussed and the

attraction between the two clearly acknowledged” (Lootens 162). The key difference is that Wilde was

censoring his work due to the distinct legal and punitive repercussions that he would, and of course

eventually did, face for homosexuality during the nineteenth century. In contrast though, Jackson’s

revisions were not made in response to legal repercussions but due to an inner turmoil and cultural

trepidation. Endeavoring to calculate whom to lay blame on, the author or culture, is unproductive but in

light of Jackson’s two espoused views it is imperative to understand the relationship when attempting to

locate her work in the larger tapestry of Queer horror and understand how her ideas of the monstrous and

grotesque function in relation to it.

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The Lesbian Double: Seductress, Destroyer, and Simply You

Tony is the companion and eventual antagonist to Natalie, the protagonist, in Jackson’s second

novel, Hangsaman. It feels only appropriate to deal with her first, as she is the monster that caused

Jackson her most pronounced consternation on the subject and which animates this entire issue. Tony is

one of the numerous examples in Jackson’s fiction of what is known as the lesbian double, a term which

is often perceived as having been founded on the presence of the doppelgänger in the Gothic tradition but

is itself the core of the trope, as works like Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla worked to established the device.

The lesbian double is a term with a decidedly Freudian bent, as it specifically deals with the idea of a

shadow self and physical manifestation of repressed urges, a facet of the novel that Jackson seemed to

detest but admitted, even if only to herself. In the unsent letter Jackson writes the following in response to

her own assertion that Tony’s being a woman was coincidental, and the lesbian subtext was a byproduct

of needing to make Tony female because Natalie was attending an all-girls college “(let me whisper) i

don’t really know anything about stuff like that. and i don’t want to know. yes yes don’t interrupt. i know

i know i know. i read freud.” Jackson’s claim that she does not want to know anything about lesbianism

and then subsequent invocation of Freud is a perhaps self-deprecating but tacit admission that her stated

distaste for the subject but continual contact with it aligns with Freud’s theories on repression and the

interplay between fear and repression, an idea which itself closely mirrors the Gothic, specifically with

the Vampire.

Tony, despite never being labeled a vampire, so closely matches Le Fanu’s Carmilla in behavior

and symbolic meaning that it scarcely matters. Both characters latch onto their respective heroines,

provide them with the companionship they seemingly desire, and then ultimately work to weaken them

before completing some ulterior goal, which is to the seeming detriment of the subject. It is a dynamic

present in both works but, as Elizabeth Signorotti explains, in the context of Carmilla the “female

homosocial bonds potentially carry tremendous power to subvert or demolish existing patriarchal kinship

structures,” this subversion of course being contradicted in the conclusion of the novella by the efforts of

Laura’s father and Dr. Hesseliuss, a primary inspiration for Stoker’s Van Helsing (609). Hangsaman

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though renders this dynamic as overtly monstrous, with Natalie herself thwarting her vampiric double. As

is the case with The Bird’s Nest, the heroine’s self-asserted victory, in lieu of being rescued, does itself

function to contradict the predominate ideal of a necessary patriarchy and champions an autonomous

feminine power. In doing so, the dynamic Jackson employs still casts queerness and the departure from

heteronormativity as grotesque with Tony’s lesbianism not only being culturally transgressive but

personally so in regards to Natalie’s autonomy, an attribute formerly attributed to the man who had

assaulted her during the party.

In understanding both Tony and Carmilla as lesbian doubles, there lies a key difference: the

mirrored aspects between Laura and Carmilla are extensive but Laura at no point rejects her advances and

even those advances are themselves not identified as grotesque, but either a simultaneous course of action

or at worst a ploy to hide Carmilla’s predatory motivations. The kinship between the two and Carmilla’s

predation are at odds with each other, but in Laura’s perspective they are distinct, as explained in the

conclusion of the novella in which Laura explains that Carmilla, though dead, “returns to memory with

ambiguous alternations sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend” with

Le Fanu concluding the work, writing “often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step

of Carmilla at the drawing room door” (96). The rejection of the mirrored self here is not founded within

the disparate sexualities but in Carmilla’s violent intentions; the two aspects are overtly presented as

distinct, with Laura being incapable of reconciling her feelings for Carmilla. Tony though, is rejected

specifically on that basis, as Natalie proclaims, “I will not” repeatedly when she believes that “she wants

me” (214). In viewing this encounter as juxtaposed with the man who had assaulted her, Jackson

characterizes Queer sexuality as violent, with Jackson herself even describing the conclusion as “barely

escaping a lesbian seduction” (SJP-LOC Box 45 Folder 7). As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen explains it in

Monster Theory, “the monster stands as a warning against exploration of its uncertain demesnes,” an

uncertainty and new territory that Natalie recoils from and rejects (12).

If Tony is indeed a hallucination or some variety of figure which represents Natalie’s interior, she

then illustrates Cohen’s assertion quite well, as he explains “monsters our are children,” and that despite

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being pushed “to the farthest margins of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the world

and in the forbidden recesses of our mind” they will “always return” (20). In understanding the Monster

in this way, as the Other and queer made manifest, the rejection of Tony, this shadow self of Natalie, is a

rather conservative reaction, an attempt to reassert her belonging in a heteronormative and patriarchal

system. It is this system, though, that has birthed this anxiety in Natalie and that Jackson criticizes so

frequently within her work.

Despite Foster’s inclusion of Hangsaman in Sex Variant Women in Literature, Tony, the most

concretely sexually Queer character, is then characterized in accordance with Jackson’s own stated beliefs

in the letter and functions an ardent refutation of a sexually Queer reading of the work, or at least not one

in support of lesbianism. Tony is the monster, and unlike even Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, whose

monstrousness and sexuality are not entirely synonymous, Tony’s sexual advances are identified as that

most grotesque act, that act which Natalie is most afraid of. There is a boundary then in Jackson’s work, a

boundary between the want for companionship and romantic involvement, the latter of which is rendered

grotesque. In an odd twist though, it is the very obfuscation of lesbian characterizations in Jackson’s other

works that seems to allow Jackson to render her queer characters as more sympathetic and human.

Writing Around the Word

Of almost equal importance to Queer representation in Queer literature is the critique,

dismantling, and refutation of heteronormative ideals, specifically that of patriarchal power. As McCann

and Monaghan explain it, Queer theory has historically “situated itself as challenging normativity —

particularly heteronormativity — in society” with the goal of dismantling the “pervasive and largely

invisible heterosexual norms that underpin society” with that most prominent norm being the presumption

of the normative family unit and its inherent rightness (11). This identification by means of opposition to

the dominant norm is purposeful as it is the unified opposition to these norms which creates a

collaborative effort and group identity across the greater Queer multiplicity. As Estaban Muñoz posits in

Cruising Utopia when critiquing the contemporary bent toward individualist advocacy, like that

undertaken by Evan Wolfanson, a lawyer who pursues the specific legalization of same sex marriage.

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Muñoz argues that “Wolfson cannot critique the larger ideological regime that represents marriage as

something desirable, natural, and good” and that “his assimilationist gay politics posits an “all” that is in

fact a few” that ignores other identities. Muñoz that Wolfanson’s call for unity is disingenuous, writing

that “it goes almost without saying that the “all” invoked by the gay lawyer and his followers are

normative citizen-subjects with a host of rights only afforded to some (and not all) queer people” (21). In

positioning a character against these norms, specifically against the normative family unit, then that

character can be read as queer by means of this opposition. This is an approach which Eve Sedgwick

argues, in Epistemology of the Closet when analyzing Between Men, originates from the specific way in

which homosexuality has been defined, the “arbitrary and self-contradictory, nature” inherit to it being

“defined in relation to the rest of the male homosocial spectrum” (185). Sedgwick argues that this

characterization itself has “been an exceedingly potent and embattled locus of power,Thi” influencing

“those that define themselves, not as homosexual, but as against the homosexual” (185). If applying

Cohen’s theory, monsters represent a “kind of alterity” that is “inscribed across (constructed through) the

monstrous body, but for the most part monstrous difference tends to be cultural, political, racial,

economic, sexual” (7). This threat of being perceived as a deviant is the very method by which normative

culture convinces those who deviate to ostracize those who exist further from the origin of normativity.

Merricat then symbolizes a version of the monster that recognizes this dynamic and wishes to be

more monstrous in order to better oppose normativity. She is characterized as monstrous and the opponent

of heteronormative conventions: “I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a

werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length” (1). Merricat even

laments her decidedly human form, thinking “but I have had to be content with what I had” (1), she

wished that her body were granted the violent capabilities needed to defend her and Constance from the

village, their cousin Charles, and the insidious normativity that would oppose the relationship between

her and Constance. Despite her possessiveness over Constance and the murdering of her parents, Merricat

is continually championed throughout the narrative, with her fear and inhibitions regarding the village

being validated as they do attack the Blackwood home in the conclusion, in a scene highly evocative of

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the burning of the windmill in James Whale’s Frankenstein. Most validating of Merricat’s disposition and

exclusionary queerness is the repeated confirmations that Cousin Charles was indeed underhanded in his

motivations with Constance, the most flagrant being his inadvertent admission to wanting to steal the

money left to the sisters, when he laments “all that money” in the novel’s final pages when Constance and

Merricat remain silent and unyielding to his attempts to enter the home following the attack (210).

We Have Always Lived in the Castle was inspired at least in part by the famously unresolved

poisoning of Charles Bravo in 1876, in which both his wife Florence and their housekeeper were

suspected, as Jackson writes in her unsent letter “these two devoted women who live together and kill the

husband of one of them. well? i can say over and over that it is the charles bravo murder in 1821 8 but

who will care?” Despite this, Jackson chooses to cast Constance and Merricat as sisters, as doing so

seemingly allows her to focus on their wholly aromantic bond. It is a choice that Jackson herself puzzles

over in the unsent letter, writing further about her use of Charles Bravo as an inspiration, “but who will

care? i mean, why choose that plot in the first place?” It is a question that alludes to some wherewithal on

Jackson’s part that she is purposefully engaging with the subject because of the very queerness that she

rejects in Foster’s view of Hangsaman. This assertion is further supported by a later characterization of

the work in the letter, as Jackson explains that Constance and Merricat are “two halves of the same

person, and must i then suspect that? together they are one identity, safe and eventually hidden: do they

hide because they are somehow unnatural? am i never to be sure of any of my characters?” This reflection

on her characters would lead one to believe that Jackson was in fact working herself up to be more overt

in her characterization but as the characters in the published novel prove, that was not the case, a move

foreshadowed by the very next sentence in the letter, where Jackson explains that “if the alliance between

jenny9 and contance is unholy then my book is unholy and am writing something terrible.” There is not a

concrete representation of sexual queerness in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but there exists that

ephemeral vacancy, the same core exploration of existence as the ostracized Other, and a critique of

8
Charles Bravo was not poisoned in 1821, but in 1876 (Bridges xv).
9
At this point in Jackson’s drafting phase Merricat was named Jenny.

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normativity. The two are monstrous, but as opposed to a rejection of the double as is Hangsaman,

Constance and Merricat embrace each other, rejecting conventionality and the idea of marrying a man just

as Merricat rejected the family unit and dominance of a patriarch when she poisoned her mother and

father.

It is that same impetus upon which Eleanor is acting in her pursuit of Theodora in The Haunting

of Hill House, who is in the published novel sexually ambiguous, even if heavily insinuated to be a

lesbian. This ambiguity allows a measure of safety, a safety to fully explore the yearning for

companionship that Eleanor harbors, her wish to engage in a female-centered relationship. Eleanor tries to

make this a reality by proposing to Theodora that the two of them move in together, not even asking but

telling Theodora that she is “‘back with you, back home. I’—and Eleanor smiled wryly—‘am going to

follow you home,’” a proposal roundly rejected by Theodora, “I am not in the habit of taking home stray

cats” (196). It is a yearning for home, a real and true home where one’s queerness is accepted, that is

echoed in each of Jackson’s works. It is this rejection that Jackson identifies as the presence that haunts

Hill House, an answer to Eleanor’s yearning that has proven false and impossible. Only through

obfuscation, the erasure of concrete sexual Queerness and definite attraction, is Jackson able to break

open and examine this need for female companionship without anxiety. It is a move that Jackson even

projects onto Gale Wilhelm in the novel We Too are Drifting, as she writes in the letter that the novel

is about the tragic star-crossed love affair between a sweet girl named victoria and an
enchanting, completely convincing female artist named jan, and i thought then as i think
now that the reason the whole thing is so convincing is because the author (who had her
dreams, too) wrote it correctly and then went through and changed he to she throughout.
jan is a sweet boy and any girl would love her. but there wouldn’t have been any book
there if she had been called he.

It is an interpretation based solely on Jackson’s own practice, allowing some assumptions to be made

about Jackson’s own perception of her characterizations, specifically in Hangsaman. She invokes the

double here as something not intrinsically sexual but spiritual, even if scorned by society.

In the relationship between Theodora and Eleanor, Eleanor both longs for companionship with

Theodora and imagines a reinvented version of herself, one empowered by their relationship.

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 She’s much braver than I am. Unexpectedly—although it was later to become a familiar
note, a recognizable attribute of what was to mean “Theodora” in Eleanor’s mind—
Theodora caught at Eleanor’s thought, and answered her. “Don’t be so afraid all the
time,” she said and reached out to touch Eleanor’s cheek with one finger. “We never
know where our courage is coming from.” (45)

Romantic and sexual gratification have been obscured, but in its place, the female-centered relationship

offers something far more significant: actualization. In rejecting her duties to her mother and stealing her

sister’s car, Eleanor had already begun her rejection of a self aligned with conventional ideals, but it is in

Theodora that she begins to see a braver, new version of herself. In much the same way as Sheridan Le

Fanu’s Carmilla, it seems as if the refusal to deal with the “word” directly provides the necessary space to

render these characters in a more complete manner, not as the monster which she had previously depicted

Tony as in Hangsaman. The patriarchy remains the antagonistic force, but the opposing queerness,

rendered as monstrous and grotesque previously, is championed in these other works, even if by means of

ambiguity.

Yearning Inscribed

It would be inappropriate to theorize or assume in regards to Jackson’s personal life, and this

analysis will instead take Jackson at her word when she describes her intent with the relationship between

Constance and Merricat. Jackson explains that they are “two halves of the same person, and must i then

suspect that? together they are one identity, safe and eventually hidden” (SJP-LOC Box 14 Folder 30).

With this in mind, the location from which this queerness originates is the search for a feminine

relationship that will make the sisters, as Jackson imagines it, whole. What Jackson is exploring is not, in

her words, romantic but an altogether deeper connection that is still queer in the normative context of

female friendships at the time. It is a yearning for companionship that is acutely mirrored in Jackson’s

own life.

Jackson’s self-acknowledged loneliness can be identified as early as twelve years old when she

published a short poem titled “The Pine Tree” which Franklin summarizes as the story of a pine tree who

lives in a “lonely wood” and is sad because “no one ever notices me” (33). The most prominent female

friends in Jackson’s life are Jeanne Marie Bedel, nicknamed Jeanou at Rochester by Jackson; Elizabeth

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Young, another friend made while at Rochester; and Jeanne Beatty, a long-term pen pal whom Jackson

did not ever seem to meet in person. Jeanou is most likely the first of the two friends that Jackson

identifies in her “note for a story on the grotesque.”10 Jackson claims Jeanou and her were so close to that

her peers believed them to be lesbians: “my friend was so strange that everyone, even the man i loved,

thought we were lesbians.” The second friend, most likely Elizabeth Young, is the primary focus and the

one with whom Jackson torments a “little boy named luke” who she describes as “horribly deformed.”

The exact natures of these friendships are not clear, but they clearly meant a great deal to Jackson as is

evident in an ode Jackson wrote about her friendship with Jeanou titled “Saga” which reads “Slightly

mad, we were, / we two—/ I, so very Irish/ and you. / Laughing , stealing, gay, / Bad, too— / I, so very

Irish / and you. / mad we were, and glad, / to be— / you, a true parisian, / and me. / mocking , happy ,

broke , / and free ,— / you, a true parisian, / and me. / Silly you, / Idiot me, / gay Jeanou, / and crazy lee /

Comprenez-vous, / ma cherie?”11

While Jackson explains that it is Jeanou whom she was rumored to be in a relationship with, it is

the second, Elizabeth Young, about whom Jackson writes the following, “sometimes now when i think of

the things we did i get very uncomfortable.” It is a line that inspires many questions, but when put into

context with the preceding passage “i became eccentric and i found another friend and we used to wander

around the city being crazy, and i would wear my hari12 flying and always be laughing and my friend

would laugh and she wore her hair in little curls all over her head. sometimes we did things like going to

see santa claus and asking him for a rosebush” seems a clear parallel to the exploits of Natalie and Tony

in Hangsaman and might very well have been another instance of her transcribing her own life into her

fiction as she did her upbringing in the California suburbs into The Road Through the Wall.

10
This assumption is made due to Jackson’s writing “my friend went away and i was all alone” in the document
which aligns with Jeanou’s returning to France in 1935 (Franklin 60).
11
The last two lines of the poem are in French and can be translated to “do you understand, my dear?”
12 There is a mark left in pencil on “hari” most likely meaning that the I and R should be switched so that the word

reads as “hair.”

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 Jackson finds a similar kinship later in life with Jeanne Beatty a fan of hers who started an

ongoing correspondence with her in the 1960s. This correspondence amounts to over sixty pages and

involved the two discussing the lives of their children, their husbands, and quite significantly Jackson’s

writing, specifically that of We Have Always Lived in the Castle which at the time of their relationship,

she was still writing (Franklin 80). While Jackson’s responses to Jeanne are not publicly available,

Jeanne’s letters to Jackson are. In one such letter Jeanne’s interest in Jackson’s work is illustrated by her

asking if Jackson Natalie’s last name “Waite” took inspiration from Arthur E. Waite, creator of the Waite

deck of Tarot, which prefigures analyses such as Emily Banks’s “Elusive Allusions: Shirley Jackson’s

Gothic Intertextuality” discussed in chapter 2 (SJP-LOC, Box 4, Folder 8). Jackson received a great deal

of mail from readers, but the correspondence she maintained with Jeanne is wholly distinct. While it is

impossible to say definitively, it seems that Jackson viewed her as an individual she could truly connect

with, someone that might make up for the void in her relationship with Stanley as evidenced by a letter

she wrote to him at the time, “you once wrote me a letter (i know you hate my remembering these things)

telling me that i would never be lonely again, i think that was the first, the most dreadful, lie you ever told

me” (SEHP-LOC Box 2 Folder 3).

Any greater understanding of Jackson’s work that can be gained from these documents is then

further compounded by her reprioritization of feedback during her drafting. Previously, Stanley had been

her first reader and critic, but he had with The Haunting of Hill House ceased in that role. While Stanley

did not read her penultimate book, refusing “to read her manuscript: he found the concept of ghosts too

frightening” (Franklin 420), Jackson did not prioritize his feedback with We Have Always Lived in the

Castle either, instead looking to individuals such as Jeanne and her daughters, quite possibly because they

better understood the “domestic arts, which Constance performs to perfection” and the actual value that

they had as well as the “female power and creativity” that was for too long “bottled up too long, turn

lethal” as Franklin put it (450-451). Jackson even claimed that Merricat and Constance were based on her

own daughters, an indicator perhaps of how prescient the anxieties of the sisters from the novel were in

Jackson’s own life (Franklin 450). It seems then in this context, that Jackson very well may have not been

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writing about lesbianism, but a connection and oneness she experienced with and was looking for from

women.

Jackson’s fear of the word lesbian does pose some consternation, but in dissecting these parallels

between her real life and fiction, the contradiction between her letter disparaging Foster and “a note on a

story for the grotesque” seems to soften. In both that indefatigable urge to write about and express that

need for feminine connection is still just as strong, even if her endeavor to write about women as “two

halves of the same person” is not identical with her early stated urge to “write stories about lesbians and

how people misunderstood them.” It is still that same impetus though, to find meaningful connection

exclusive of that most binding institution of marriage by which her heroines are ever threatened. It is

another variety of queer love, even if not romantic in nature, it still queers the heteronormative and

presents an alternative conception love and acceptance. Jackson’s work presents a contradiction in that

the queerness that she rendered grotesque and monstrous in Hangsaman is, when stripped of overt sexual

queerness, the very thing that her characters yearn for. It is a contradiction that looms over her work, but

as Colin Haines explains, that though “her express comments regarding lesbianism as pertaining to her

work will remain conflicted” Jackson’s fiction still functions to “expose the lesbian abject as a

representation, as an issue of who sees what, how, and why they see what they do” (226), or that despite

her comments in her letter, Jackson’s work is devoted to exploring the queer and the othered. To better

understand Jackson’s conception of the queer monstrous and grotesque it is vital to understand her more

traditional use of the monster, the most significant of which is the elusive James Harris.

James Harris: The Monster with Many Faces

In locating the origin of this erasure of sexual queerness, the role of men is thus necessary to

articulate, as in both We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House Cousin Charles

and Luke accordingly both play the same role, that of the intruder or trespasser on an otherwise sanctified

and pure female relationship. Luke is a particularly notable intrusion as Jackson herself explains in the

letter that it “is luke i am afraid of then luke must be the character i have always called the devil” and then

later identifies Luke as “the bad one, the one i have always wanted to write about, the secret devil,” a

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statement that could very well be in reference to that same Luke she writes about in “a note for a story on

the grotesque.” The importance that Jackson assigns to Luke does not at first match up with his actual role

in The Haunting of Hill House but in understanding the underlying conceit of his character he can be seen

as the force that opposes that sought Home and yearning for companionship that motivate her different

heroines. The correlative in We Have Always Lived in the Castle is almost certainly Cousin Charles, as

she claims Luke “cannot be killed off because the next book will be about him too,” and then even with

Hangsaman Jackson explains “the girl tony in hangsaman is the first imperfect luke.” It is in Jackson’s

very first book though, that she first conjures this “secret devil” in James Harris, a character that

embodies the monstrousness more concretely than Jackson ever seems to portray again.

While heteronormative ideals and the patriarchy are conjured as monstrous in most of Jackson’s

longer fictions, James Harris stands alone; he is a real and material manifestation of the symbolic and

systematic inclusions in The Road Through the Wall and The Sundial. While James Harris is remolded

and introduced in characters such as Tony, Luke, and Charles, even in his first debut he appears as a

myriad of characters throughout the different stories in Jackson’s collection The Lottery, which is most

often referenced without its original subtitle, “The Adventures of James Harris.” Harris is an elusive

figure repeatedly popping up in different forms to torment characters, often by presenting a promise of

safety, acceptance, or autonomy that is ultimately revealed to be impossible. As literary critic Wyatt

Bonikowski explains it when analyzing Jackson’s short story “The Daemon Lover,” “Jackson’s demon

lover tales and the ‘James Harris’ ballad she draws on portray women not as ‘not-all’ in the Symbolic but

rather ‘not at all’ within it” meaning that Jackson has subverted the original meaning of Scottish ballad,

also titled “The Daemon Lover” (71). The original ballad warns married women of the dangers of leaving,

whereas Jackson instead identifies a “alternative to the restrictive domesticity of their lives” (Bonikowski

71). Bonikowski continues, positing that

Jackson’s characters discover only the destructive side of jouissance13, their subjection to
the Thing. In repetitively emphasizing the destruction of female characters in these short

13“Jouissance” is most often left untranslated due to a perceived loss of meaning in English. In the original
Lacanian perspective, it roughly denotes the pain brought upon one by an excess of pleasure. Feminist theorist

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 and brutal stories, Jackson highlights both women’s knowledge of jouissance,
externalized and embodied in the demon lover, and the lack of place for feminine
jouissance; because of this lack of place, knowledge can only be knowledge of the
inevitability of destruction.

Following this, Bonikowski goes on to clarify that Jackson is not attempting to illustrate the dangers of

the exterior world “but so they might recognize the destructive nature of an idea of marriage that confines

a woman’s desire within the most rigid parameters” (74). James Harris is in these stories a real and

physical demon, an embodiment of that “demon in the mind” which Jackson claims is the real conceit of

Hangsaman, explaining that it is the demon that “finds guilts where it can and uses them and runs mad

with laughing when it triumphs” (SJP-LOC Box 14 Folder 30). Harris is one and the same as that

immutable and perpetually oppressive force that leads to the murder of Tessie Hutchinson in the

collection’s titular story, a nonsensical and predatory force that, despite its ancient origins, still haunts

contemporary culture.

Harris is the manifestation of the malignant masculinity that is operative in Jackson’s longer

fiction, and in turn represents the different aspects of the patriarchy that have bound women and made the

use of violence and oppression against queered populations permissible. He at times appears as a strident

and controlling man, as in “Of Course,” where he dominates both his family and the new neighbors. He is

then also a more modern man in “Elizabeth,” where he appears to be the avenue for the protagonist to

obtain a new autonomy and freedom, which is subtly revealed by conclusion to be a pipe dream as he

does not wish to help her in achieving. In each story he appears, in some more overtly than others, but in

each Harris represents an alternative facet of masculinity, each of which in some way perpetuates

patriarchal institutions.

Harris’ omnipresence and the patriarchal need for control and dominance that he embodies can

then function as a possible answer to puzzling anachronism of Jackson’s most famous story, “The

Lottery.” It is the perpetuation of antiquated ideals that seems most apt when understanding the collection

Hélène Cixous recontextualizes the idea in The Newly Born Woman, identifying this excess instead as origin of
feminine creativity.

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and Jackson’s work through a queer lens. The time in which the story takes place is irrelevant, despite the

social progress seemingly made or the new household gadgets which promise the easing of domestic

labor, the continual domestic entrapment of women and violence enacted on them will be excused, as it

was never the necessity of woman in a domestic role that caused its institutionalization but the reaffirming

of masculine authority. It is for this very same reason that Jackson concluded The Lottery: The

Adventures of James Harris with the original ballad “The Daemon Lover” for women are still being

dragged down to Hell by the promise of safety, safety from a danger concocted by the very institutions

that promise refuge. It is a criticism that spans each of her larger works, but which she only truly

manifests as the monster with James Harris, an at times literal demon, that exists perpetually within the

periphery of the collection.

James Harris then embodies a variety of monstrosity, altogether different from any other in

Jackson’s legacy. There is no subversive move as there is with Tod, Tony, Luke, or Cousin Charles: he is

a true and traditional monster. While Jackson subverts the meaning of the original ballad, he still

functions as the monster traditionally does. Harris is not an othered and abused figure like Tod that forces

the audience to confront preconceived notions, some Freudian shadow self like Tony, nor even a

recontextualization of the patriarchal hero figure as Luke and Charles are, but rather just simply evil and

malicious. It is not until The Haunting of Hill House that Jackson again includes such a decidedly evil and

malicious figure in her fiction, and even there, the presence that haunts the house is never decidedly

identified. This depiction bears significance because when considering Jackson’s characterization of

queerness and her espoused views in the letter regarding Foster’s analysis of Hangsaman, a spectrum of

monstrousness with a clear division between the overtly evil and the exploration of queer characters

emerges. It is this opposition that most closely links her to the ideal of a unified queerness as articulated

McCann, Monaghan, Muñoz, and Sedgwick. To best understand the dynamic that influenced these two

disparate characterizations and the contradictions at the core of Jackson’s dealing with queerness it is

imperative then to understand the environment Jackson inhabited and was writing in, as even though this

division does exist it is a rather subtle one, quite dissimilar to other writers in the genre.

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Jackson in the Larger Picture

It is first worth acknowledging that authors such as William Faulkner, who came before Jackson,

and contemporaries like Flannery O’Connor, did write and explore queerness in a more definitive way

and without the same qualms that Jackson did. Faulkner’s novel Go Down Moses has an explicit focus on

the harm inherent in heteronormative marriage, as illustrated by Sophonsiba’s need to find a husband and

the subsequent coercive attempt to try to force Buck to marry her and prefigures a significantly more

complex characterization of Queer characters than what was common at time. As Catherin Kodat

explains, in “Making Camp” Faulkner’s characterization is not an altogether revolutionary depiction, as

“ultimately, to the extent that Faulkner’s fiction can be said to adopt a public posture toward

homosexuality, that posture is probably best described as queerly tortured” (1003), with all the study and

analysis on the part of scholars his depiction of queerness and homosexuality is “hardly anomalous but,

on the contrary, utterly typical” (1004). She goes on to explain later however that even if Faulkner is

engaging in a rather milquetoast explorations with Brownlee, whose behaviors are “typical” of

“homosexual” characters in twentieth-century fiction both “homophobic and gay-friendly” there is a

subversive element in aspects such as the “novel’s refusal to stigmatize Uncle Buddy” explaining that it is

this nuanced approach to “his “feminization,” and “his insouciant refusal to accede to the demands of the

dominant order, and his irrepressibility” which is “most salient” (1004). Beyond even just place of

Faulkner in the preceding literary tradition and his influence, we know that Jackson was not just

cognizant of his work but was, at least in part inspired by him, as her unpublished short story “Go Down

Faulkner” demonstrates.

Jackson inserts Faulkner himself into the story as a participant in a conversation with Buck and

Bubbles as they watch the Sartoris funeral procession. During the discussion they repeatedly come back

to the topic of foxes and Black people, an aspect of his fiction which is equally complicated as Arthur

Kinney points out when examining the lack of depth given to Faulkner’s Black character even though

“Faulkner knew that race was central and unavoidable” in his fiction and exploration of his home (107),

or as Kinney quotes from Jean Stein, Faulkner’s “own little postage stamp of native soil” (57). It is an

80
aspect of Faulkner’s fiction that Jackson is seemingly much more comfortable discussing as explained in

the previous chapter with her two stories, “After You, My Dear Alphonse” and “Flower Garden.” This is

all to say that the conditions of the twentieth century did not pose an impossible hurdle for Queer

exploration, an idea further supported by O’Connor’s work with her short story “A Temple of the Holy

Ghost” being published only two years before Hangsaman in 1951.

O’Connor was not only publishing at the same time as Jackson but was, to some degree, running

in the same circles, as Robert Giroux, an editor at Brandt & Brandt, worked with both Jackson and

O’Connor. O’Connor’s dealings with queerness runs the gambit as she masterfully explores mental

health, race, and disability in a way quite similar to Jackson at times. O’Connor is altogether much more

definitive in her dealings with sexually Queer representation and support, as evidenced by her short story

“A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” published in her first collection A Good Man is Hard to Find. The story

takes clear aim at the cultural ideal of religion and queerness being distinct and contradictory forces as an

unnamed twelve-year-old girl is entranced by the related experience of four Christian teenagers who

encounter an intersex individual, that O’Connor only ever refers to as the “Hermaphrodite” performing at

a fair. The Hermaphrodite is a member of the fair’s “freak show” but as opposed to the entertainment

provided by the likes of the “monkeys and the fat man” the Hermaphrodite and their performance is

described in a decidedly reverent and spiritual manner (90). Similarly to some more traditional Catholic

masses in the early twentieth century, the Hermaphrodite’s audience is divided by sex, with men on one

side and women on another. The Hermaphrodite runs between each though as they give what can only be

called a sermon, as the audience is described: “the men more solemn than they were in church, and the

women stern and polite, with painted-looking eyes, standing as if they were waiting for the first note of

the piano to begin the hymn” (94). The Hermaphrodite preaches the benevolence of God and the need to

accept all people, even those that fall outside of those categories of conventional understanding. They

state “God made me thisaway and I don’t dispute hit,” and that their body is a “temple of God” and that

“If anybody desecrates the temple of God, God will bring him to ruin and if you laugh, He may strike you

thisaway. A temple of God is a holy thing. Amen. Amen” (94-95).

81
 It is a characterization of intersexuality that fits firmly into Cohen’s ideal of the monster in his

third thesis, “The Monster Is the Harbinger of Category Crisis.” In their “refusal to participate in the

classificatory ‘order of things,’” monsters “present a wholly alternative conception of the liminal and

uncategorisable,” the Hermaphrodite is distinct from the “disturbing hybrids” Cohen identifies but still

does “resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration” (6). O’Connor’s Hermaphrodite

then “resists any classification built on hierarchy or a merely binary opposition” and represents that

“visible edge of the hermeneutic circle itself” functioning as “an invitation to explore new spirals” and

“new and interconnected methods of perceiving the world” (Cohen 7). The Hermaphrodite functions in a

similar way to Tod; the othered status of both undermines the preconceived notions of heteronormativity

and contradict the prevailing systems of logic.

In much the same fashion as Jackson, O’Connor also drew upon her own experience and

othering, as Sally Fitzgerald explains that the story was written after O’Connor discovered she had lupus

and she puts forth the theory that the child protagonist of the story was largely based on O’Connor

herself, explaining that the character is “very like the half-grown Flannery she recalls in letters,” the

“sharp eyed girl, tooth-braces glaring, who from her lofty perch on her own ‘smartness’ observes the

people of her world with such amusement and scorn” (431). The girl’s journey then is representative of

O’Connor’s “own disquieting acceptance of the destiny,” in the face of the “painful experience of seeing

her own disfigurement,” with the Hermaphrodite functioning as a symbolic embrace of unconventional

bodies and proposed support of the unconventional as a way of better understanding both the world and

oneself. It is this shared inscription of personal experience that makes Jackson’s hesitancy around

lesbianism that much more important to grapple with, as that particular queer identity, the one most

applicable to her and resonant with her own experience is the one she has an aversion to. In light of

Faulkner and O’Connor’s work both before and during Jackson’s career, it is necessary to investigate

those factors beyond the macro, the effect of that person closest to her, her husband Stanley.

82
Stanley Hyman: Husband, Editor, and Critic

Jackson was not seemingly averse to gay people at large, as both her and Stanley were close

friends with Herbert Weinstock, who was openly gay, and Robert Giroux, whom Jackson worked with as

an editor amicably. It is significant though, that given Jackson’s Queer content and yearning for close

female friendships, that those Queer individuals she is recorded to have had an association with were all

men. Jackson’s protagonists are in every case othered and queered, but it is only Tony who is

characterized as truly monstrous in her queerness, with Tod being depicted as a maligned and ostracized

victim to a degree. It is this acceptance of alternative Queer identities that makes Jackson’s derision of

lesbianism all the more confounding. The answer then might lay not in Jackson’s discomfort with that

Queerness that Foster ascribes to her, but the way in which it infringes on that identity that Jackson had,

for her whole life struggled with: her role as a woman.

As explored in chapters one and three, Jackson had her fair share of qualms with the edict of

domestic femininity and explored that mental fracturing that the normative ideals of femininity cause.

This categorization of her work then stands as the clearest pronouncement of her departure from that

identity she felt so trapped by but so desperately wanted to embody. A pronouncement that her husband

mocks her for, as Jackson dictates in the unsent letter, “‘a sex deviate,’ said stanley with

amusement. ‘variant. and we’ve been married for nineteen years and if you’re trying to say – ‘ha ha,’

said stanley. ‘i’m going back to sleep. wake me if you find out what you did’”.

Stanley’s influence on Jackson’s work cannot be definitively stated, but it is clear that he often

acted as her first reader and most incisive critic, a fact that Franklin illustrates when cataloguing some of

his editorial behaviors with Jackson which includes his correcting of her personal notebook

He was opinionated, bossy, and dismissive of Shirley’s taste in literature, preferring the
modernists to the nineteenth-century writers she adored. And he turned the full force of
his critical acumen on her, belittling her pitilessly, just as her mother had. In one of
Shirley’s notebooks, he corrected her use of the abbreviation “cf.” in a memo—to herself.
A draft of one of her college poems displays his merciless annotations, culminating in
“Marx knows [Stanley’s substitute for “God knows”] you ain’t no poet.” (Franklin 99)

83
Stanley had reinforced Jackson’s domestic status, so often abandoned her for the company of other

women, and, in his own work, namely his unpublished article “Sex and the Sinful Girl” disparaged the

sexual expression of women within literature. The article at first largely focuses cataloguing the ills of

contemporary “sexy novels,” which lacked the “engaging innocence” of the “spicy” novels” he was

familiar from “my youth” (SEHP-LOC box 24 folder 6). Following this Hyman explains the ills of

William Burrough’s Naked Lunch, an admittedly explicit book, which Hyman describes as “nasty and

boring,” his images as “inept” and Burroughs himself as “terrible writer” with “no feeling for language.”

Hyman cites the lack of “formal principle[s]” operative in the work as a key reason for its poor quality.

Hyman later reviews Rosalind Erskine’s The Passion Flower Hotel, describing it as a humorous work

before concluding that “just below the surface” it is in fact a “Black Book.” Hyman explains that “the

joke is that boys are backward, timid, frightened, reluctant, passive, and afraid of physical contact; while

girls are forward, brave, brash, eager, active, and lecherous as minks” and proclaims that “ultimately I

think it as nasty as the others.” At one point Hyman interrupts his own analysis with the sentence “Portrait

of the Lesbian Madam as a Young Girl” which appears to be a joke comparing Erskine’s novel to James

Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a work Hyman assumedly assigns some greater literary

merit. Despite Hyman’s ardent support of Jackson’s writing, he had a rather conservative view of

femininity and what constitutes appropriate public expression.

Jackson’s Queer erasure in this light would appear not to be her simply being “frightened by a

word,” the tendency to grow more conservative as one ages, or even just the consequences of a

heteronormative culture at work, but the consequences of Stanley’s editorial role and traditional

conception of marriage. Unless one is willing to credit him as responsible in some way for the brilliance

of Jackson’s work, one cannot claim that he is responsible for the erasure of the explicit sexuality of

characters in her work either. A rather clear piece of evidence in this is the ambiguity of Theodora’s

sexuality in The Haunting of Hill House which Jackson injected into the novel while drafting. This

contradicts the previous assertion as Stanley refused to read the book. That said, the motivation behind it

does correlate quite clearly with his own espoused views on female sexuality.

84
 We are then left at a crossroads. Even if understanding Jackson’s use of monsters and the

grotesque as a way not only to queer patriarchal standards but explore her own anxieties, anxieties

exacerbated by Hyman in her personal life and work, we must still reckon with her place in the literary

tapestry of Queer Horror and its contemporary authors.

85
 CONCLUSION

In “Frightened by a Word” Colin Haines argued that “these works by Shirley Jackson will never

obtain to a (sub-) genre of lesbian Gothic as long as the category of ‘the lesbian writer’- writer identifying

as, and writing to a community circumscribed by ‘lesbian’ is upheld” because Jackson was “a non-lesbian

writer,” and “her express comments regarding lesbianism as pertaining to her work will remain

conflicted” (226). It is an assertion that is well-founded but overlooks a key component of Jackson’s

oeuvre: the role that it could play as an artifact illustrative of a writer in conflict with both their queerness

and their environment. As these different modes of queering demonstrate Jackson was an ardent critic of

the patriarchy and heteronormativity, but deeply conflicted and anxious about her own place within these

institutions. Jackson’s personal struggles and the way they manifested in her work can function as a way

to better understand how these institutions oppress and manipulate queered writers and individuals. In

understanding that, we can also work then to understand not only the pivotal role that her work had in

progressing the genre but the way in which contemporary authors, such as Caitlín R. Kiernan, Mona

Awad, and Carmen Maria Machado have continued in her legacy and recontextualized her work.

Caitlín R. Kiernan, a three-time Shirley Jackson award nominee, is an illustrative example of

Jackson’s influence. Not only have they followed Jackson’s legacy, but referenced her numerous times,

rather overtly at that, in their novels The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. In each novel, the

respective sets of female lovers are overtly compared to Eleanor and Theodora from The Haunting of Hill

House with The Drowning Girl specifically borrowing Jackson’s refrain, itself stolen from Shakespeare,

“journeys end in lovers meeting.” Kiernan though, works to recontextualize this refrain a second time as it

relates to Queer love, mental illness, and suicidality. In The Drowning Girl, which Publisher’s Weekly

described as evocative of “the gripping and resonant work of Shirley Jackson,” the protagonist Imp is in

many ways a mirror of and foil to Eleanor as she similarly struggles with mental illness, suicide, her

relationship to her dead mother, a latent adolescence, and a burgeoning Queer relationship. Kiernan has

subverted these themes though, not as the predeterminant characteristics of a doomed individual but as

facets of a contentious but ultimately feasible life. In a move quite similar to Jackson, Kiernan employs

86
fairy tales and folklore as a central metaphor with the option given between “the Road of Needles or the

Road of Pins” (155), neither of which are pleasant but notably does provide a discrete avenue to self-

acceptance and actualization in a hostile world. In The Drowning Gir,l Kiernan reimagines Eleanor in a

hopeful light, even if the world she inhabits is no less dangerous or predatory. Imp is here more overtly

Queer than Eleanor, and by virtue of her Queer relationship more capable of contending with a world that

so vehemently others her.

In a similar vein to Kiernan, Mona Awad’s debut novel Bunny responds quite directly to

Jackson’s Hangsaman as it similarly follows Samantha, a young woman dealing with the social

complexities of college, in this case an elite graduate creative writing program, and her creation of a

double in Ava, though in Bunny the double is neither imagined nor predatory. Awad responds to the

fundamental premise of Hangsaman with an altogether more hopeful and supportive vision. She does not

reject the critique of traditional femininity that Jackson presents, but recontextualizes it in a way that

champions the double as an illustration of a positive female connection, one that can contradict the social

mandates surrounding traditional femininity. In an interview with Amy Sutherland for the Boston Globe,

Awad explains that she is particularly drawn to the figure of the outsider saying “one of the reasons I’m

drawn to horror is that the protagonist is usually an outsider who is lonely and vulnerable” going on to

explain that she is drawn to Horror specifically because it “makes heroes out of outsiders.” She then

claims that Eleanor is the “ultimate outsider” and that the “novel is an incredible exploration of what

horror can do.”

Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House and Her Body and Other Parties, and

2017 winner of the Shirley Jackson award has gone on record describing the influence Jackson has had

on her and the genre as a whole. She explains that this influence began before having ever actually read

any of Jackson’s work, saying that despite having not yet read The Haunting of Hill House, readers of a

short story she was writing continually compared it to the journey to Hill House that Eleanor embarks

upon in the beginning of the novel. Machado goes on to point out, “It makes sense: It’s the second-hand

influence you get when the authors you have read have already internalized the work of someone like

87
Jackson” (Fassler). Machado states that she almost immediately read The Haunting of Hill House

afterward and goes on to explain how moved she was by the passage wherein Eleanor sees the young girl

at the country restaurant and wills her to, “insist on your cup of star” (Jackson 18). Machado remarks,

“There absolutely is a gendered element to it—this is an exchange between a woman and a girl, after all.

Women are much less allowed their indulgences, in life as well as in fiction.” This theme is not recurrent

in her fiction, but the very beating core of it. Each story in Her Body and Other Parties is an innovative

exploration of the oppressive control exerted upon women, whether it be their appetite, appearance,

bodies, or minds. The first story, “The Husband’s Stitch,” is a reimagining of the folkloric story “The Girl

with the Green Ribbon” or simply “The Green Ribbon,” establishes this immediately, first with the

unnecessary titular procedure the protagonist undergoes for her husband’s sexual pleasure after giving

birth, and then again when her son finally convinces her to allow him to remove the green ribbon. The

protagonist finds that the “good” man she found possesses that same sense of ownership over her that all

men seem to, and in a subversive move has the original act of transgression and violation from the

folklore enacted upon her not by her lover but by her son.

Even in light of Jackson’s influence, her espoused views on her works’ queerness cannot and

should not be ignored, but neither should her effect on these authors and her overall contributions to the

genre. As Haines’ identifies, Jackson’s work “expose[s] the lesbian abject as a representation, as an issue

of who sees what, how, and why they see the way they do” (226), and in doing so allows for the creation

of that “space in opposition to dominant norms,” that Cathy J. Cohen argues is necessary for

“transformational political work” to occur (438). In queering dominant culture but disallowing herself the

ability to belong to Queer counterculture itself, Jackson becomes exemplary of that effect which

oppressive culture exerts on possible allies and unified voices: it divides, under threat of ostracization and

othering. In much the same way as those residents of Jackson’s Pepper Street in The Road Through the

Wall, Jackson occupies the same position and predicament wherein advocacy would likely mean her own

ostracization. This does not excuse her comments but allows readers to better understand the ways in

which Jackson’s heteronormative upbringing, marriage, and the predominant culture likely affected her.

88
The tradition of Queer literature is itself a narrative of resistance and oppression, and the ways in which

the consequences of heteronormativity and the patriarchy have been wrought upon authors and readers are

a key aspect of it. Jackson then as an author and individual represents both, as she queered the ideals and

expectations of normative culture but simultaneously fell victim to those anxieties it inflicted on Queer

communities and queered individuals.

89
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