Jackson, Shirley, 1919-1965
from Literature Online biography

American short-story writer and novelist, is perhaps best remembered for her short story, 'The Lottery'. Jackson's particular craft lies less in horror, gore, or the supernatural than in the psychological and the evils hidden in everyday life. Jackson masterfully used the gothic to explore the dark side of American society. Throughout her life she was a staunch critic of social norms that limited opportunities for women, and she wrote against intolerance, bigotry and racism with chilling insight.

Jackson was born on 14 December 1916 in San Francisco (she claimed to have been born in 1919, but her biographer Judy Oppenheimer asserts that she did so in order to appear younger). Her mother, Geraldine Bugbee Jackson, and her father, Leslie Hardie Jackson, cultivated an upper-middle-class lifestyle of upward social mobility; Jackson spent her youth in Burlingame, an affluent suburb of San Francisco. From an early age, Jackson found herself at odds with her parents' expectations and, in particular, her mother's obsession with appearance. Having long struggled with obesity, Jackson did not live up to her mother's expectations as to how a young woman of her social standing should look. Her strained relationship with her parents grew into an outright loathing of what she saw as the superficiality, intolerance and snobbishness of suburban California. This lifestyle and the people who lived it would become the subject of her first novel, The Road through the Wall (1948).

In 1933 the Jackson family moved to Rochester, New York. Shirley Jackson attended the University of Rochester from 1934 to 1936 and then left school to try and forge a career as an independent writer. In 1938, however, she returned to her studies, and two years later she graduated from Syracuse University (in Syracuse, New York) with a BA. While at Syracuse she wrote continuously, publishing several of her short stories in campus publications and serving as the fiction editor of the campus magazine The Syracusan. With fellow student Stanley Edgar Hyman, Jackson inaugurated the Spectre, a radical student paper, in 1939. Even though the publication was discontinued a year later in response to pressure from the administration, Jackson gained the support of prominent literature professor Leonard Brown, whom she considered a mentor. She married Hyman in 1940, and the two moved to New York City, where Jackson continued to write. In 1941 she had her first short story, 'My Life with R.H. Macy', published nationally in the New Republic. Lawrence, the first of the couple's four children, was born in 1942. After the birth of a second child, Joanne, the young family moved to Bennington, Vermont, where Hyman taught at Bennington College. Living the life of faculty wife and mother did not keep the unconventional Jackson from writing and publishing her short fiction.

Undoubtedly her best-known story, 'The Lottery' tells of a small New England town's annual draw that leaves the lottery's 'winner', Tessie Hutchinson, dead -- stoned by members even of her own family. Set on a pleasant summer day, the story derives its particular horror from the juxtaposition of a community's murder of one of their own with the calmness with which the narrative reveals the horror of the ritual. The lottery is simply another social event in which the community participates, on a par with 'the square dances, the teen club, the Halloween program'. The initial banter among congregating members, Tessie Hutchinson's casual explanation for her lateness ('Wouldn't have me leave m'dishes in the sink, now, would you, Joe?'), and the use of children to select the smoothest and roundest stones for the ritualistic killing create a sense of normality. When the story was first published in the New Yorker in 1948, it triggered a flood of public outrage and hundreds of cancelled subscriptions from readers who objected to Jackson's characterisation of the darker side of human nature.

Existentialist in tone and decidedly pessimistic in its depiction of the terrible things that ordinary people are capable of, 'The Lottery' explores a community's unwillingness to question a tradition whose origin hardly anyone in the town remembers. This story reflects Jackson's own experience of living in a small New England town, exposed to bigotry and prejudice as the wife of a Jew and as someone who revelled in excess (she drank, smoked and over-ate) rather than conformity. Similarly, Jackson's The Road through the Wall, published the same year as 'The Lottery', is a disturbing portrait of the moral decay and hypocrisy that lurks behind the facade of a suburban neighbourhood in California. By the end of the novel, two children are dead, one by murder and the other by suicide.

In her second and third novels Jackson explores mental illness and how environments that demand conformity and conventionality can drive people to disassociate from reality. Hangsaman (1951) focuses on 17-year-old Natalie Waite, a highly intelligent student enrolled in a selective women's college. At a moment when she is most anxious about her body image, Natalie meets a young woman named Tony, who becomes her constant companion. The narrative raises doubts as to whether Tony is real or just a projection of Natalie's imagination. The Bird's Nest (1954), considered a finer literary achievement than Hangsaman, was based on extensive research of an actual case. It depicts the complete psychotic breakdown of 23-year-old Elizabeth Richmond, who, during the course of the narrative, splits into Beth, Betsy and Bess. The protagonists of both books represent what would, in Angela Hague's words, become a staple of Jackson's fiction: 'women who, lacking any sense of self or ability to function in the world outside the home, begin to fragment and dissociate when forced to act independently' ('"A Faithful Anatomy of Our Times": Reassessing Shirley Jackson', in Frontiers, 2005). In Jackson's award-winning short story 'Louisa, Please Come Home' (1960), a young female character tries to break with her own identity by running away, only to be returned to parents who are unwilling or unable to recognise Louisa for who she is.

In Eleanor Vance, the protagonist of Jackson's best-known novel, The Haunting of Hill House (1959), the writer explores the breakdown, and ultimate suicide, of her female character in a setting that resonates through most gothic fiction: the haunted house, an isolated manor that is also identified as 'not sane'. Four lonely characters come together to study the presumed hauntings of Hill House. Eleanor, an unmarried woman who has spent most of her life taking care of her sick and domineering mother, is revealed to have the most vulnerable sense of self and thus is the most susceptible to the house's 'seduction'. Jackson employs supernatural elements in The Haunting, but it is not simply a horror story. A number of critics read it in the tradition of the female gothic, which explores houses as fundamentally dangerous and destructive places for female heroines; houses, in gothic fiction by women writers, are rarely 'homes'. The popularity of The Haunting of Hill House is sustained primarily by two film adaptations. The 1963 version, entitled The Haunting and featuring Julie Harris as Eleanor, is considered a classic. The 1999 Hollywood blockbuster remake stars Lili Taylor as Eleanor.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), Jackson's final completed novel, is set on an isolated estate. The narrative is told from the perspective of Mary Katherine Blackwood six years after she, then 12 years old, poisoned four members of her family. The novel creates an eerie portrait of a killer's psychosis in the context of a family dominated by men in which young Mary Katherine felt like she had no role other than servant. The novel marks, in the words of feminist critic Lynette Carpenter, Jackson's 'most radical statement on the causes and consequences of female victimization and alienation' ('The Establishment and Preservation of Female Power', Frontiers, 1984). The novel became a best-seller and was adapted for Broadway in 1966, though the play did not meet with commercial success.

Jackson also wrote numerous essays and reviews; a one-act play entitled Bad Children (1958); a children's book called The Witchcraft of Salem Village (1956); and two semi-autobiographical domestic comedies, Life among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1956), in both of which she chronicles her own family. While writing We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Jackson had begun to suffer from ill health. On 8 August 1965 she died suddenly of heart failure; she was 48.

Jackson's work received only limited critical attention during her lifetime. The Haunting of Hill House was nominated for a National Book Award in 1960. A year later she received the Edgar Allan Poe Award for 'Louisa, Please Come Home'. Syracuse University awarded her the Arents Pioneer Medal for Outstanding Achievement in 1965. A year after her death, she was again awarded the Edgar Allan Poe Award, for her story 'The Possibility of Evil', which was published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1965. Many of Jackson's stories were published in women's magazines, such as Good Housekeeping, McCall's, Ladies' Home Journal and Mademoiselle; some scholars, including Lynette Carpenter and Angela Hague, have argued that this contributed to the lack of critical attention to her work. In the preface to the posthumously published short-story collection The Magic of Shirley Jackson (1965), Stanley Hyman writes that he believes his wife to have been misunderstood by contemporary readers and critics alike. The 'fierce visions of dissociation, of alienation and withdrawal' with which she characterised postmodern society, he believed to have been 'a sensitive and faithful anatomy of our times' and not a manifestation of her personal neuroses, as often suggested by her contemporaries.

The first important book-length study of Jackson's work, Lenemaja Friedman's Shirley Jackson, appeared in 1975. Thirteen years later Judy Oppenheimer published the most comprehensive biography to date of Jackson's life, Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson (1988). An almost 20-year drought of critical attention ended with the publication of Joan Wylie Hall's Shirley Jackson: A Study of Short Fiction (1993), a critical survey as well as an attempt to rekindle academic interest in Jackson's work. In recent years there has been an increased critical interest in Jackson's use of the gothic, largely on the part of scholars of genre, feminist, and queer studies. In his Shirley Jackson's American Gothic (2003), Darryl Hattenhauer aims to establish Jackson as a significant gothic writer but also argues that her work can only be understood fully from a variety of theoretical perspectives. Feminist critics, who have resurrected Jackson's significance in the context of her gothic fiction, read her work as a critique of gendered domesticity. Roberta Rubenstein's 'House Mothers and Haunted Daughters: Shirley Jackson and the Female Gothic' (Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 1996) offers a comprehensive reading of Jackson's female characters and their often ambiguous relationships with their mothers and families, which leave these characters alienated, isolated, and bereft of an autonomous sense of self.