Haunting Feelings: Shirley Jackson and the Politics of Affect

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Notes

¹ I quote from an unpublished document found in Shirley Jackson Papers at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Box 14. Jackson comes across this phrase in a book by Jeannette H. Foster Sex Variant Women in Literature. All quotations from Jackson’s notes preserve the author’s original spelling.

² Shirley Jackson Papers, LoC, Box 14.

³ Shirley Jackson Papers, LoC, Box 14.

⁴ In The Feminine Mystique (1963), Betty Friedan describes the whole generation of women suffering from what she has famously called “the problem that has no name” and refers to a “schizophrenic split,” or the discrepancy between the reality of women’s lives in the 1950s and the image to which they were trying to conform.

⁵ Undoubtedly, the years after the Second World War were the time of multiple political, social and personal tensions. Apart from the overwhelming feelings of loss and “unhomeliness” brought about by the terrible events of two world wars and the trauma of the Holocaust, the late 1940s and the 1950s were commonly described in the U.S. as the age of fear and anxiety. The threat of nuclear weapons and a looming danger of the Soviet intervention were aggravated by other dangers to the American “way of life,” such as homosexuality or, for some, even the possibility of an invasion from outer space. In the “Introduction” to his short story collection Slow Learner (1984), Thomas Pynchon describes the feelings characteristic of the postwar era: “There was never anything subliminal about it, then or now. Except for that succession of the criminally insane who have enjoyed power since 1945, including the power to do something about it, most of the rest of us poor sheep have always been stuck with simple, standard fear. I think we all have tried to deal with this slow escalation of our helplessness and terror in the few ways open to us, from not thinking about it to going crazy from it. Somewhere on this spectrum of impotence is writing fiction about it…” (19).

⁶ See Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 2004.

⁷ The writer’s own accounts of her experience as a mother of four, which she collected in Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957), brought her great popularity and were a significant financial success during her lifetime. Before they were collected and published in book forms, these short, humorous essays on the pleasures and pains of domestic life appeared individually in mass women’s magazines, such as Good Housekeeping or Ladies’ Home Journal, and did a lot to establish Jackson’s reputation as a non-serious housewife writer.

⁸ Apart from Andrew Smith, who acknowledges the importance of Jackson’s nonfiction about domestic life for a more profound understanding of the writer’s oeuvre, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons have been critically discussed, though rather briefly, by S.T. Joshi in “Shirley Jackson: Domestic Horror” in Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy, edited by Bernice M. Murphy, (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company), pp. 237–250 and by Bernice M. Murphy in “Hideous Doughnuts and Haunted Housewives: Gothic Undercurrents in Shirley Jackson’s Domestic Humour” in The Ghost Story from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century: A Ghostly Genre, edited by Helen Conrad O’Briain and Julie Anne Stevens, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010, pp. 229–250. There is also a short chapter devoted to both texts in Lenemaja Friedman’s Shirley Jackson (1975).

⁹ See, for example, Roberta Rubenstein’s “House Mothers and Haunted Daughters: Shirley Jackson and the Female Gothic” and Judie Newman’s “Shirley Jackson and the Reproduction of Mothering: The Haunting of Hill House” in Bernice M. Murphy (ed.), Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy, Jefferson, McFarland and Company, 2005, pp. 127–149 and 169–182.

¹⁰ In her influential essay “The Gothic Mirror,” Claire Kahane uses Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House to demonstrate how a Gothic heroine’s “active exploration of the Gothic house in which she is trapped is also an exploration of the relation to the maternal body” (338).

¹¹ A fascinating analysis of feminine idiom in the writings of Jean Rhys and H. D. can be found, for example, in Deborah Kelly Kloepfer’s The Unspeakable Mother: Forbidden Discourse in Jean Rhys and H. D.

¹² Parts of this section of the essay have already been published in Patrycja Antoszek, “Shirley Jackson’s Affective Gothicism: The Discourse of Melancholia in The Bird’s Nest.” Echinox Journal, vol. 35 (2018), pp. 69–86.

¹³ A reference to a “hole” in the psyche created by melancholia appears in Freud’s letters to Fliess, see Sanja Bahun, Modernism and Melancholia: Writing as Countermourning (New York: Oxford University Press), 2014, p. 54. For psychoanalytical approaches to loss and melancholia see Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” in L. G. Fiorini, T. Bokanowski and S. Lewkowicz (eds.), On Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia, (London: Karnac Books), 2009, pp. 19–34, and Nicholas Abraham’s and Maria Torok’s “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation” in Nicholas T. Rand (ed.), The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, Vol. I., (The University of Chicago Press), 1994, pp. 125–138.

¹⁴ As Jason W. Stevens has noticed, Dr. Wright’s initial supposition that Elizabeth may be possessed by demons bears resemblance to Freud’s interpretation of his famous Dora’s case: “No one who, like me, has conjured up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast and seeks to wrestle with them, can escape to come through the struggle unscathed” (qtd. in Stevens 230).

¹⁵ Shirley Jackson Papers, LoC, Box 20.

¹⁶ Shirley Jackson Papers, LoC, Box 20.

¹⁷ On the other hand, as Xavier Aldana Reyes has demonstrated, elusive and permeable as the term may be, the Gothic, and especially Gothic horror is probably the only literary genre capable of creating “somatic and instinctive reactions” as readers “experience the horrific vicariously by aligning themselves with the victims in the text as well as their corporeality” (19). The purpose of horror literature has always been to shock, disturb or disgust, and “[e]ngaging in the ways in which a gothic text aims to create a number of affects on its viewers/readers is… tantamount to exploring the phenomenological aspects of fear, dread, shock, and suggestion” (Reyes 19). Thus, Jackson’s choice to make use of Gothic imagery in her fiction was not only an attempt to write the authors’ own suppressed feelings into the text, but also a way of creating an affective experience in the readers, of making sure that the disturbing feelings she sought to articulate resonate with the audience inviting them to “reenac[t] their own fears, anxieties and losses” (Flatley 90).