Picnicking at Hill House: Shirley Jackson’s Gothic Vision of Heaven

ABSTRACT

This essay examines scenes of eating, specifically picknicking, in The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, demonstrating that meals in Jackson’s gothic novels capture an irreconcilable 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, subject to the all-consuming, monstrous appetites of her children.

Acknowledgments

My thanks to the Special Collections librarians at the Library of Congress for their assistance, and to the anonymous readers of Women’s Studies for their constructive and thoughtful feedback.

Notes

¹ While this essay focuses on Jackson’s fiction, it is worth noting that this nuanced view of motherhood is present in Jackson’s domestic memoirs, where for every instance she portrays herself as a failure and a fraud, her children rightfully earn their titular monikers: Life Among the Savages (1953), and Raising Demons (1957).

² See for example, Julie Nash, “‘Whatever Walked There, Walked Alone’: The Feminist Supernatural in Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Shirley Jackson, and Fay Weldon” Para-doxa: Studies in World Literary Genres 20: 2006, 173-84, and Judie Newman, “Shirley Jackson and the Reproduction of Mothering: The Haunting of Hill House.” American Horror Fiction: From Brockden Brown to Stephen King. Ed. Brian Docherty. New York: St. Martin’s, 1990.

³ One particularly cruel example: Jackson was interviewed for Time after the successful publication of Castle. Accompanying the article was a photograph of Jackson, whose yo-yoing weight was close to its highest point. Her mother wrote, “Why oh why do you allow the magazines to print such awful pictures of you …. I have been so sad all morning about what you have allowed yourself to look like … You were and I guess still are a very willful child” (qtd. in Franklin 453).