What’s Haunting Shirley Jackson? The Spectral Condition of Life Writing

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Notes

¹ Dara Downey has written in-depth about representations of problematic domestic space in Jackson’s fiction, arguing that “the trend of her work overall is towards an attempt to solve the problem of enclosed domestic space, to negotiate its tendency to vacillate between functioning as a refuge or a prison” (290). Significantly, she understands and reads these spaces as actively threatening to Jackson’s protagonists, because they “[interpolate] women into the confinement and exploitation of rigidly domestic roles” (292). Although Downy focuses primarily on Jackson’s fiction, this dynamic undoubtedly affects the uneasy autobiographical “I” of her life-writing as well.

² Alexis Shotwell points out that one of the reasons why housework is characterized as an eternal, Sisyphean undertaking is that it is “understood not in terms of its outcome – cleanliness – but in terms of the labor properly expended in its execution” (131). The housewife or domestic worker’s expenditure of energy and labor is not a solution to the problem of incessant housework, therefore, but rather perpetuates and extends its own conditions. Domestic work is what one does, but it is also what always remains to be done, a disordering of time which envelops Jackson-as-housewife.

³ Jackson’s awareness of the alien quality of her hands seen through the dishwater is strikingly similar to Judith Butler’s conceptualization of the dissociation between “hand” and “self” that is elaborated in “How Can I Deny That These Hands and This Body Are Mine?”, where she questions “how it is that my hands and my body became something other than me, or at least appeared to be other than me, such that the question could ever be posed whether or not they belong to me?” (8). The principal mechanism for this dissolution of the connection between body and self, which Butler codifies as an explicitly spectral process, is writing, which this article addresses in its second half.

⁴ Murphy suggests an economic motivation for this, arguing that “[i]f the true complexity of Jackson’s status as a working, independently creative force in her own right and a housewife had been emphasized to her readers it would surely have punctured the sense of solidarity her work inspired in the ordinary middle-class housewife … and therefore have rendered her work less commercially successful” (“Gothic undercurrents” 245–6).

⁵ Laura Marcus is not the only theorist whose work lends itself to a spectral reading of life-writing. Hélène Cixous is alert to the two-in-one logic that defines the auto/biographical in her observation that “[a]ll biographies like all autobiographies tell one story in place of another” (177). For Cixous, all (life-writing) narratives are singular yet plural, with the story that is overwritten by the one which tells it in its place (like the surface text of a palimpsest) becoming spectral: it is still there, still being told, but is not visible or (at least immediately) apprehensible. In a different register, Linda Anderson has voiced concern over a pattern in theorizations of life-writing which sees non-presence as the position and fate of women’s autobiographical voices, a “fear of women again being consigned to an ‘unrecoverable absence’” (83). This might be thought of as the terminal stage of spectral autobiography, whereby the subject has become so thoroughly de-realized that it becomes impossible for her to ever be re-animated as an agential or authorial presence. These ghostly conceptualizations of the autobiographical self as plural, fragmented, or at risk of being absented, demonstrate some of the productive contiguities between life-writing criticism and theories of spectrality.

⁶ However, even statements like these are shadowed by her admission that the world of her writing is a “delusional” one, “full or fairies and ghosts”. The supernatural is a powerfully recurrent constituent in all parts of Jackson’s writing process.

⁷ Dorothy Dodge Robbins writes about the haunting effect of Rebecca’s “R” on the psyche of her nameless successor, describing how the “omnipresent and weighty R of Rebecca” overwrites the narrator’s “absent and consequently weightless name” (70). Writing is figured explicitly as the means by which Rebecca persists as a spectral presence, in turn de-substantializing the presence and influence of her replacement.

⁸ Friedan criticizes Jackson along with Jean Kerr and Phyliss McGinley for denying “the satisfying hard work involved in their stories, poems and plays. They deny the lives they lead, not as housewives, but as individuals” (57).