Writing through the Walls: Shirley Jackson, House/Wife

Shirley Jackson’s writing career was haunted by questions of genre. The mid-century New England writer is best known for her eerie novels about women whose selves splintered under the pressure of the houses they inhabited—a story famously told in The Haunting of Hill House (1959). But she also wrote humorous sketches of family life for popular women’s magazines, selections of which she collected into the memoirs Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957). As Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin (2016) observes, this supposed schism bothered critics, who regularly commented on Jackson’s split writer/housewife persona. But Jackson’s memoirs sound some of the same uncanny notes as her fictions—a new family home “insists” that the furniture is arranged just so—and her fictions derive their creeping dread from the writer’s experiences of the everyday violence of small-town life and the patriarchal family form. Shirley Jackson’s generic dexterity results in a body of work that depicts the family home as a locus of warmth, comfort, imagination, constraint, and entrapment—an undecidability mirrored in the writer’s own struggles with agoraphobia near the end of her life. Beginning with “an expanded concept of the autobiographical signature or trace” (Brophy and Hladki 2014, 6), this paper reads across the generic seams of Jackson’s writing. Articulating key scenes from her memoirs with details from her two final novels—Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)—I frame Jackson as reaching towards a new “home” capacious enough to give her multiple, conflicting selves room to breathe. Following Marlene Kadar (1992), I argue that Jackson’s writings “manifest various subject-locations for the self to inhabit” (131). By endlessly revising the story of a woman and a house, she conjures “witchy” new feminine subjectivities—and worlds inventive enough to house them.