SHIRLEY JACKSON

(1919-65)

BACKGROUND

  • born in San Francisco
  • mother = housewife
  • father = lithograph co. employee
  • childhood = prolific writer (journal)
  • colleges in New York
    • Rochester U.
      • left due to depression
      • wrote at home (1,ooo words per day routine)
    • Syracuse U. (1937-40)
      • met future husband
        • (Stanley Edgar Hyman)
      • published in school literary magazine
  • full-time writer;
    • writer, mother of 4
    • Vermont
    • Stanley = noted literary critic, professor

 BACKGROUND

  • 1948:
    • national attention for "The Lottery"
  • 1962:
    • breakdown
    • unable to write
  • 1965:
    • died of cardiac arrest (46)
    • left unfinished novel
      • published posthumously, Come Along with Me
  • 1996:
    • crate of unfinished stories found
    • published as Just an Ordinary Day
  • 6 novels
  • numerous short stories
  • children book
  • 2 memoirs (Life Among the Savages)

THEMES

  • *the essentially evil nature of human beings:

    • "Humankind is more evil than good.  The mass of men is profoundly misguided, seemingly incapable of enlightenment.  Lacking either the capacity to reason or the strength to act upon moral convictions, their lives are dictated by habit and convention.  They often behave with callous disregard of those around them."

    • (Martha Ragland in Dictionary of Literary Biography)

  • post-World War II:

    • "Her fierce visions of dissociations and madness, of alienation and withdrawal, of cruelty and terror ... are a sensitive and faithful anatomy of our times, fitting symbols for our distressing world of the concentration camp and The Bomb."

    • (**World War II**) (Stanley Edgar Hyman, husband)

STYLE

(1) domestic comedy:  humor, family life

(2) modern gothic:  suspense, macabre,

  • *ironic twists

  • black humor

  • some supernatural

  • *mostly, makes the abnormal seem normal

    • (M. Night Shyamalan movies, Stephen King)

  • female victimization, alienation

  • "If she used the resources of super-natural terror, it was to provide metaphors for the all-too-real terrors of the natural" (Stanley Edgar Hyman, husband, English professor)
  • "documentary of anxiety" (Shirley Jackson on her works)
  • the comic with dark side

GOTHIC

  • GENRE:  modern gothic fiction
  • GOTHIC TRAITS:

    • bloody, wild, barbarous tale

    • of long ago

      • (Middle Ages, distant past)

    • tales of mystery, horror

    • supernatural

    • haunted “house” conventions:

    • medieval castles

    • decaying mansions

    • with secret passages

    • dungeons

    • doom & gloom atmospheres

    • sullen, craggy landscapes

    • spooky

    • ghosts

GOTHIC

  • persecution of beautiful maiden by obsessed & haggard villain

  • explored the dark and irrational side of human nature

    • (not NEO-CLASSICAL)

    • egoism

    • perverse impulses

    • nightmarish terrors that lie beneath "civilized" (controlled, ordered) surface of the conscious mind

* Shirley Jackson's TWISTS on Gothic formulas:

  • GF: 

    • supernatural = explained away as merely human evil plots; heroine is saved by the male hero

  • SJ: 

    • supernatural = real, unexplainable;

    • heroine is completely vulnerable, un-rescued;

    • evil force = supernatural, alien, triumphant

LINKS LINKS