“What a Complete and Separate Thing I Am”: Introduction to Rethinking Shirley Jackson

There may soon come a time when it would be appropriate for me to write “Shirley Jackson needs no introduction” and leave it at that. As recent adaptations of The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle have premiered on streaming services and as Elisabeth Moss has portrayed Jackson in Shirley, a biopic of Jackson in the style of a Jackson short story, familiarity with her name and work are on a definite upswing – even acknowledging that her name has never been entirely unfamiliar, especially to those traumatized middle school students who read “The Lottery” each year. Ruth Franklin’s definitive biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, has likewise helped expand interest in Jackson since its publication in 2016, “reposition[ing] her as a major artist” whose exclusion from the American canon is in need of rectifying (Showalter np). As Benjamin Dreyer puts it: “[Jackson]’s one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century and, except by the coterie of those of us who idolize her, woefully underappreciated” (44n†). Dreyer is the copy chief at Random House and acted as copy editor for Jackson’s posthumous collection Let Me Tell You(2015), one of several archival projects spearheaded by her children Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman Dewitt that have emphasized Jackson’s range beyond her most famous story. “Paranoia,” the first work included in Let Me Tell You, could be said to have inaugurated this flurry of activity, appearing in The New Yorker in 2013. It was her fourteenth work to appear in the magazine, and the first to appear there posthumously.

All of this represents the energy of the moment that led to the issue of Women’s Studies that we’ve devoted to her work. Begun as a panel at the American Literature Association Conference, sponsored by the Shirley Jackson Society and instigated by Jill Anderson (whose new edited collection with Melanie Anderson is reviewed later in this issue), it would be fair to group us with that coterie of Jackson devotees who are woeful at her marginalized status. The authors in this issue are largely early- and mid-career researchers, who were buoyed in the 2000s by Jackson scholarship from Darryl Hattenhauer, Bernice Murphy, and Colin Hains, in addition to the enthusiasm of Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates – indeed, Murphy’s own collection Shirley Jackson: Essay on the Literary Legacy follows the same impulse of reconsidering Jackson that we are following here. Like these other critics, we want to see her placed as central to the canon, rather than a minor writer as Lenemaja Friedman originally cast her in a 1973 study of her work. This “rather condescending attitude toward Jackson’s writing,” as Murphy labels it, “hinge[s] on two (rather predictable) characteristics” embedded in Jackson’s fiction: Jackson is a popular writer “whose work could often be considered fun” and “the fact that Jackson was not afraid to venture beyond the boundaries of strictly realist fiction” (Murphy 5). This attitude still persists even as the academy has begun taking Gothic and other genre writing more seriously over the last few decades.

Friedman can be slightly forgiven her condescension as the first critic to attempt to tackle the wide range of Jackson’s output in a time when many of her stories had never been collected or remained unpublished due to Jackson’s early death. It’s harder to offer that grace to Harold Bloom, who published an introduction to Jackson’s work intended for American high school students in 2002. The book, as part of a series of “comprehensive research and study guides” to “major short story writers,” “questions whether [‘The Lottery’], although commonly anthologized, will ultimately be regarded as canonical” (Bloom 8). Bloom’s summation of Jackson’s work seems less condescending than patronizing, with all the implications of the word:

There is a long American tradition of Gothic narrative, whose masters include Hawthorne, Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor. But these are masters and disturb us more profoundly than Jackson can, because they portray the complexities of character and perplexity without which we cannot permanently be moved. As fabulists, the masters of American Gothic carry us on a journey to the interior. Jackson certainly aspired to be more than an entertainer; her concern with sorceries, ancient and modern, was authentic and even pragmatic. But her art of narration stayed on the surface, and could not depict individual identities. Even “The Lottery” wounds you once, and once only. (Bloom 9–10)

I’m not going to gloss over the fact that this “comprehensive” study guide of Jackson relies on two of her nearly 300 short stories and one of her six novels, with no room to discuss her domestic memoirs, essays, lectures on writing, plays, poetry, and children’s books. This mismatch between Bloom’s promise and delivery is the fundamental error which leads him to his mistaken critical appraisal of Jackson’s work: namely, that an introduction devoted entirely to “The Lottery” can substitute for an introduction to Jackson herself.

But Bloom is of course not alone in making this error. As Jackson herself puts it in “Biography of a Story,” she had “been assured over and over that if it had been the only story I ever wrote or published, there would be people who would not forget my name” (Jackson). Such assurances take on an ironic note after Jackson’s early death, when “The Lottery” becomes ever-present in literary anthologies and textbooks of American fiction and “move[s] from the canon of American twentieth-century fiction directly into the American psyche” (Homes x) while leaving most of her other short stories in cultural obscurity. To make Jackson, who published nearly a dozen other pieces in The New Yorker in the same decade as “The Lottery,” synonymous with one story, no matter its genius, becomes a kind of refusal to engage with the breadth of her work – probably because it would be too unsettling to do so. This refusal is partly a product of Jackson’s own efforts; the only collection of short fiction that she herself published was titled for and anchored by “The Lottery.” Its position as the final story in the collection creates a cumulative effect whereby each tiny cruelty inflicted by Jackson’s characters on each other seems inevitably to build toward one fatal moment. If the conclusion of all of Jackson’s fiction is “The Lottery,” the collection seems to ask, then why not read that and be done with it?

The answer is, of course, the non-conclusive nature of so much of Jackson’s work. This is how I understand Eric Savoy’s assertion that Jackson’s style is to take the reader right up to, but not into, the Lacanian Real; speaking of her domestic writing, Savoy argues that “Jackson’s prevailing comic realism stretches toward a never-realized Gothic potentiality” and “indeed, the reader is often positioned so as to be just about to see such a calamity” (829). This style of “just about to see” permeates Jackson’s oeuvre; thus The Haunting of Hill House is a ghost story in which we never see any ghosts, and the final fate of “The Summer People” is left to come after the story ends. The ending of “The Lottery” might then be considered an anomaly in Jackson’s work, a definitive ending which makes it more graspable and therefore more popular. Indeed, its deployment within the first three Jackson collections supports this view; in The Lottery and Other Stories, it is the final work; in the posthumous The Magic of Shirley Jackson (1966), it is the final story in the short story section, and the cover makes clear the draw of the story, proudly proclaiming the book contained “eleven short stories – including the world-famous The Lottery”; in the posthumous Come Along With Me (1968), it is the final story in the collection, followed only by a single essay about writing.

The first two collections after Jackson’s death were selected and published by her husband Stanley Hyman, a midcentury literary critic of some renown, and in placing “The Lottery” as he did, he merely follows from Jackson’s own deployment of the story to sell fiction. As Ruth Franklin reveals in her biography, “The success of ‘The Lottery’ had spurred Farrar, Straus to ramp up its efforts on behalf of the new book, which was now to be titled The Lottery so as to capitalize on the author’s new notoriety … The collection would include several extremely accomplished stories that she had written the previous year but had not yet been published (The New Yorker turned them all down) … ” (Franklin, Rather Haunted 252). Franklin discusses the active work that Jackson put into collecting The Lottery and the meaning behind its original subtitle The Adventures of James Harris (252–257): Jackson weaves her Satan analogue James Harris throughout the collection in such a way that the otherwise unrelated stories become a singular, thematic whole. Joan Wylie Hall’s categorization of The Lottery as a short-story cycle and her argument that Jackson’s revisions “strengthen the interrelatedness of the collection” support this view, as does her revelation that the 1975 reprinting “eliminates Jackson’s text divisions” making the “stories seem to be chapters of a bizarre novel,” with, of course, “The Lottery” as its conclusion (4, 3). This means that even the stories which are more characteristic of Jackson’s ambivalent style – “The Intoxicated” or “The Witch,” say – lose their ambiguity through the choices made in printing the collection. We might say that these editorial framings and reprintings take the historical fact of Shirley Jackson, author of The Lottery and Other Stories, and create an author-function (to use Michel Foucault’s term) of “Shirley Jackson” as “author of ‘The Lottery’ and other stories.”

It’s clear, however, that this relationship between Jackson’s other work and “The Lottery” which has ossified in the decades since her death is contrary to her own practice. If we look at the publication of the short story “Charles,” published in Mademoiselle in 1948, included in The Lottery in 1949, then printed again as part of the 1953 memoir novel Life Among the Savages (and, incidentally, the other short story Bloom discusses), Jackson’s understanding of her writings’ varied and flexible potential is clear. The polyvocal nature of “Charles” as a story – that is, at once a piece for a women’s magazine, a chapter in “The Lottery” story cycle, and a small slice of domestic memoir – reflects the story’s theme of multiple/imaginary personality as well as Jackson’s ability to effortlessly shift between writerly poses and contexts. In order to understand her contribution to American literature, then, we must first understand her works outside their post hoc relationship to the author-function that I’ve just outlined. But here I’m coming perilously close to making the fundamental error myself. It’s very difficult to not write about “The Lottery,” which perhaps says more about the power of the short story than Bloom was willing to admit. Our approach to Jackson needs to shift beyond the critical parameters instituted by the afterlife of “The Lottery,” and if we end up unsettling ourselves (or the canon) as we shift, so much the better. Suffice then to say that this issue “Rethinking Shirley Jackson” is an attempt to expand the terms that define critical conversations around Jackson, to move past the things we think we know about her work.

To that end, this issue begins with an article that focusses on Jackson’s critically neglected life and domestic writing. Robert Lloyd’s article, “What’s Haunting Shirley Jackson? The Spectral Condition of Life-Writing,” destabilizes the notion of a singular “Shirley Jackson” for critics to locate, emphasizing instead the plural nature of her subjectivity. While the notion of a multi-faceted self is thematic in much of Jackson’s oeuvre, Lloyd argues that the material reality of Jackson’s work as a housewife renders her writerly self as a spectral, haunting presence in her domestic writing. Jackson’s inability to truly separate her two selves within her autobiographical sketches renders her as a ghost haunting herself.

The autobiographical Jackson also haunts Caroline Speller’s article “‘I mean, it’s not anything serious, ever, is it?’: Predatory Teacher-Student Relationships in Shirley Jackson’s Let Me Tell You and Hangsaman.” Jackson’s experience as a faculty wife with an adulterous husband complicates themes of sexual violence – particularly in terms of consent and harassment – in her novels and short fiction. Reading these stories of male predation within the historical context of the 1940s and 50s, Speller argues that Jackson’s rhetoric attempts to tease out a nuanced understanding of victims, emphasizing the difficulty of being the cheated-on wife as well as the preyed-upon student, while directing the blame for this sexual violence squarely at the predatory male teachers/husbands.

If politics is personal in Speller’s essay, Patrycja Antoszek’s article “Haunting Feelings: Shirley Jackson and the Politics of Affect” takes on the macro-level politics of midcentury America and the Cold War. Following from Jackson’s husband’s sense that her work diagnosed social anxieties rather than her own personal neuroses, Antoszek argues that Jackson not only offers an alternative affective landscape of 1950s America, but that her work also presents readers with a counternarrative to the dominant discourse of prosperity in the wake of World War II.

The Cold War is also the focus of Emily Banks’s article “[Fall]ing [Out] of Line: The Sundial’s Apocalyptic Queer Futurity.” Banks takes one of Jackson’s characteristically insular novels, set almost entirely in and around the domestic home, and demonstrates the way that threats of nuclear devastation and the accompanying fallout shelter and the potential in the space program open up radical possibilities for queering social structures. By becoming empowered in their own domestic entrapment, women in The Sundial are able to free themselves from hetero-patriarchal oppression by outliving it.

This issue’s final article from Jen Cadwallader, “Picnicking at Hill House: Shirley Jackson’s Gothic Vision of Heaven,” takes Jackson’s role as a mother in a new direction from previous scholarship, emphasizing that what we have long thought of as domineering [s]mothers are themselves victims of heteropatriarchal oppression. By analyzing the picnic scenes of Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Cadwallader reveals that even the idyllic elements of motherhood and housewifery are always subject to appetites beyond the mother’s control.

In our book review section, we have something a little different: a book forum on Darryl Hattenhauer’s monograph Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. Published in 2003, Hattenhauer’s work on Jackson necessarily looms large in Jackson scholarship as one of the relatively few books that takes her writing seriously as art. As part of our goal in “rethinking” what Shirley Jackson scholarship looks like, Robert Lloyd, Joan Passy, and Eric Savoy each re-read Hattenhauer and wrote a new review of the work, looking at it from this moment of Jackson Revival. What is it that this work offers us? What is worth keeping? What needs rethinking? These reviews were then exchanged, and each person responded the other two, teasing out potential avenues of further inquiry, thinking, or research. Where do we go from here? What might rethinking get us? (Here I’d like to thank the V21 Collective for the example of this format in their Collations Book Forum series!)

Lastly but not least, Chiho Nakagawa has reviewed Shirley Jackson and Domesticity: Beyond the Haunted House, edited by Jill E. Anderson and Melanie R. Anderson, which is newly published from Bloomsbury. Thinking past haunted domesticity in Jackson scholarship is certainly a new direction and it’s a privilege to include this review in this issue.

It only leaves me to thank all of the contributors and peer reviewers who have made this issue possible, as well as the Shirley Jackson Society, Women’s Studies, and also our editor Lauren Hartle who approached me to put this issue together. Shirley Jackson is one of the reasons I wanted to go to graduate school in the first place, so getting to offer her an introduction (even one that still mostly about “The Lottery”!) has been a supreme privilege. Thank you all.