48- ] American Literature - Shirely Jackson

48- ] American Literature

Shirley Jackson

1916–1965 

Shirley Jackson, in full Shirley Hardie Jackson, (born December 14, 1916, San Francisco, California, U.S.—died August 8, 1965, North Bennington, Vermont), American novelist and short-story writer best known for her story “The Lottery” (1948). She was an American writer known primarily for her works of horror and mystery. Over the duration of her writing career, which spanned over two decades, she composed six novels, two memoirs, and more than 200 short stories.

Jackson graduated from Syracuse University in 1940 and married the American literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. They settled in North Bennington in 1945. Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957) are witty and humorous fictionalized memoirs about their life with their four children. The light comic tone of those books contrasts sharply with the dark pessimism of Jackson’s other works, whose general theme is the presence of evil and chaos just beneath the surface of ordinary everyday life. “The Lottery,” a chilling tale whose meaning has been much debated, provoked widespread public outrage when it was first published in The New Yorker in 1948. Jackson’s six finished novels, especially The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), further established her reputation as a master of gothic horror and psychological suspense.

Writing career

"The Lottery" and early publications

In 1948, Jackson published her debut novel, The Road Through the Wall, which tells a semi-autobiographical account of her childhood growing up in Burlingame, California, in the 1920s. Jackson's most famous story, "The Lottery", first published in The New Yorker on June 26, 1948, established her reputation as a master of the horror tale.[43] The story prompted over 300 letters from readers,[44] many of them outraged at its conjuring of a dark aspect of human nature,[43] characterized by, as Jackson put it, "bewilderment, speculation, and old-fashioned abuse".[45] In the July 22, 1948, issue of the San Francisco Chronicle, Jackson offered the following in response to persistent queries from her readers about her intentions: "Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village, to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives."[46]

The critical reaction to the story was unequivocally positive; the story quickly became a standard in anthologies and was adapted for television in 1952.[47] In 1949, "The Lottery" was published in a short story collection of Jackson's titled The Lottery and Other Stories.[48]

Jackson's second novel, Hangsaman (1951), contained elements similar to the mysterious real-life December 1, 1946, disappearance of an 18-year-old Bennington College sophomore Paula Jean Welden. This event, which remains unsolved to this day, took place in the wooded wilderness of Glastenbury Mountain near Bennington in southern Vermont, where Jackson and her family were living at the time. The fictional college depicted in Hangsaman is based in part on Jackson's experiences at Bennington College, as indicated by Jackson's papers in the Library of Congress.[49][50] The event also served as inspiration for her short story "The Missing Girl" (first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1957, and posthumously in Just an Ordinary Day [1996]).

The following year, she published Life Among the Savages, a semi-autobiographical collection of short stories based on her own life with her four children,[51] many of which had been published prior in popular magazines such as Good Housekeeping, Woman's Day and Collier's.[47] Semi-fictionalized versions of her marriage and the experience of bringing up four children, these works are "true-to-life funny-housewife stories" of the type later popularized by such writers as Jean Kerr and Erma Bombeck during the 1950s and 1960s.[52]

Reluctant to discuss her work with the public, Jackson wrote in Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft's Twentieth Century Authors (1955):[53]

I very much dislike writing about myself or my work, and when pressed for autobiographical material can only give a bare chronological outline which contains, naturally, no pertinent facts. I was born in San Francisco in 1919 [sic] and spent most of my early life in California. I was married in 1940 to Stanley Edgar Hyman, critic and numismatist, and we live in Vermont, in a quiet rural community with fine scenery and comfortably far away from city life. Our major exports are books and children, both of which we produce in abundance. The children are Laurence, Joanne, Sarah, and Barry: my books include three novels, The Road Through the Wall, Hangsaman, The Bird's Nest and a collection of short stories, The Lottery. Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.

"The persona that Jackson presented to the world was powerful, witty, even imposing," wrote Zoë Heller in The New Yorker. "She could be sharp and aggressive with fey Bennington girls and salesclerks and people who interrupted her writing. Her letters are filled with tartly funny observations. Describing the bewildered response of The New Yorker readers to 'The Lottery,' she notes, 'The number of people who expected Mrs. Hutchinson to win a Bendix washing machine at the end would amaze you.'"[8]

The Haunting of Hill House and other works

In 1954, Jackson published The Bird's Nest (1954), which detailed a woman with multiple personalities and her relationship with her psychiatrist.[54] One of Jackson's publishers, Roger Straus, deemed The Bird's Nest "a perfect novel", but the publishing house marketed it as a psychological horror story, which displeased her.[55] Her following novel, The Sundial, was published four years later and concerned a family of wealthy eccentrics who believe they have been chosen to survive the end of the world.[56] She later published two memoirs, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons.

Jackson's fifth novel, The Haunting of Hill House (1959), follows a group of individuals participating in a paranormal study at a reportedly haunted mansion.[57] The novel, which interpolated supernatural phenomena with psychology,[58] went on to become a critically esteemed example of the haunted house story,[43][59] and was described by Stephen King as one of the most important horror novels of the twentieth century.[60] Also in 1959, Jackson published the one-act children's musical The Bad Children, based on Hansel and Gretel.[61]

Critical assessment

Lenemaja Friedman's Shirley Jackson (Twayne Publishers, 1975) was the first published survey of Jackson's life and work. Judy Oppenheimer also covers Shirley Jackson's life and career in Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson (Putnam, 1988). S. T. Joshi's The Modern Weird Tale (2001) offers a critical essay on Jackson's work.[94]

A comprehensive overview of Jackson's short fiction is Joan Wylie Hall's Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction (Twayne Publishers, 1993).[95] The only critical bibliography of Jackson's work is Paul N. Reinsch's A Critical Bibliography of Shirley Jackson, American Writer (1919–1965): Reviews, Criticism, Adaptations (Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001).[96][97] Darryl Hattenhauer also provides a comprehensive survey of all of Jackson's fiction in Shirley Jackson's American Gothic (State University of New York Press, 2003). Bernice Murphy's Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy (McFarland & Company, 2005) is a collection of commentaries on Jackson's work. Colin Hains's Frightened by a Word: Shirley Jackson & Lesbian Gothic (2007) explores the lesbian themes in Jackson's major novels.[98]

According to the post-feminist critic Elaine Showalter, Jackson's work is the single most important mid-twentieth-century body of literary output yet to have its value reevaluated by critics.[99] In a March 4, 2009, podcast distributed by the business publisher The Economist, Showalter also noted that Joyce Carol Oates had edited a collection of Jackson's work called Shirley Jackson Novels and Stories that was published in the [100][101] Library of America series.[102]

Oates wrote of Jackson's fiction: "Characterized by the caprice and fatalism of fairy tales, the fiction of Shirley Jackson exerts a mordant, hypnotic spell."[103]

Jackson's husband wrote in his preface to a posthumous anthology of her work that "she consistently refused to be interviewed, to explain or promote her work in any fashion, or to take public stands and be the pundit of the Sunday supplements. She believed that her books would speak for her clearly enough over the years".[104] Hyman insisted that the dark visions found in Jackson's work were not, as some critics claimed, the product of "personal, even neurotic, fantasies", but, rather, comprised "a sensitive and faithful anatomy" of the Cold War era in which she lived, "fitting symbols for [a] distressing world of the concentration camp and the Bomb".[105] Jackson may even have taken pleasure in the subversive impact of her work, as indicated by Hyman's statement that she "was always proud that the Union of South Africa banned 'The Lottery', and she felt that they at least understood the story".[105]

The 1980s witnessed considerable scholarly interest in Jackson's work. Peter Kosenko, a Marxist critic, advanced an economic interpretation of "The Lottery" that focused on "the inequitable stratification of the social order".[106] Sue Veregge Lape argued in her Ph.D. thesis that feminist critics who did not consider Jackson to be a feminist played a significant role in her lack of earlier critical attention.[107] In contrast, Jacob Appel has written that Jackson was an "anti-regionalist writer" whose criticism of New England proved unpalatable to the American literary establishment.[108]

In 2009, critic Harold Bloom published an extensive study of Jackson's work, challenging the notion that it was worthy of inclusion in the Western canon; Bloom wrote of "The Lottery", specifically: "Her art of narration [stays] on the surface, and could not depict individual identities. Even 'The Lottery' wounds you once, and once only."[109]

Works

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (December 2016)

Novels

The Road Through the Wall (Farrar, Straus, 1948) , Hangsaman (Farrar, Straus and Young, 1951) , The Bird's Nest (Farrar, Straus and Young, 1954) , The Sundial (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1958) , The Haunting of Hill House (Viking, 1959) , We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Viking, 1962) , Shirley Jackson: Four Novels of the 1940s & 50s, ed. Ruth Franklin (Library of America, 2020)

Short fiction

Collections

The Lottery and Other Stories (Farrar, Straus, 1949) , The Magic of Shirley Jackson (ed. Stanley Edgar Hyman; Farrar, Straus, 1966) , Come Along with Me: Part of a Novel, Sixteen Stories, and Three Lectures (ed. Stanley Edgar Hyman; Viking, 1968) , Just an Ordinary Day (ed. Laurence & Sarah Hyman; Bantam, 1996) , Shirley Jackson: Novels & Stories (ed. Joyce Carol Oates; Library of America, 2010) , Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings (ed. Laurence & Sarah Hyman; Random House, 2015) , Dark Tales (Penguin, 2016)