I examine the ways in which reading in the classroom is a social practice and how that social practice can produce nuanced student texts that reflect a rich understanding of what has been read. In ...doing so, I also consider how the reading environment allows us to manipulate and embody texts in ways that allow for a more detailed understanding than the individual and solitary reading practices that seem to be prized in our society.
In The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson interplays repression and fear inside a “normal” world, reshaping the modern Gothic novel. In this article, I trace key moments in the text where the ...perceptions of her complicated protagonist, Eleanor Vance, appear without the mediation of the narrator, via verb tenses, punctuation/formatting choices, and quotation. Many of these moments, I argue, occur in narrative spaces that are more quotidian than Gothic (some not even chilling at all). With the periodic narrative freedom, which I call bare thoughts, this recalibrates the division between imaginary and reality while opening up possibilities for another, hybrid genre for Hill House. Eleanor's entrapment by the quotidian Gothic and her occupation of the liminal space between reality and fantasy offer a new way to read Jackson's novel as a narratologically revolutionary text.
Shirley Jackson’s, ‘The Lottery,’ is without doubt her most famous work. It is one of the most anthologized short stories in America. However, despite the popularity of the short story, very few ...critics have attempted to delve deeper into the story’s meaning. Those few critics who have attempted to prove the story’s message have done well in the sense that they have picked up on ‘a’ pattern, but have failed to see that there are also contrasting patterns which cross over and cut through each other. Shirley Jackson deserves far more praise than what she has received for the intricacies, the small details and the well thought out design of the story. When one discovers that Jackson admired William Empson’s, Seven Types of Ambiguities, in which he argues the best authors (such as William Shakespeare) purposely create ambiguities in their writing so that the reader questions and wonders what the author might have meant, one can begin to understand that there is more to Jackson than what critics have argued, and even she herself has said about the story. It is clear that she had an admiration for Empson, as two years before ‘The Lottery,’ she wrote, ‘Seven Types of Ambiguity,’ in which Empson’s book is the coveted object of desire. This 1946 story can be read in two opposing ways. I would argue that ‘The Lottery,’ can be read in five opposing ways. The three-legged stool of the story represents the three pillars or legs of society: economics, politics, and religion. Her story can be read as being anti-capitalist, anti-communist and anti-religious, most specifically making references to Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Jackson has done this to critique the idea that these economic, political and religious traditions were created to benefit humanity. However, over time, these systems have become corrupted by their leaders, so that rather than protecting their people, these structures of society are used to both punish their people and to invoke violence upon each other in the name of that tradition.
Mary Wilkins Freeman and Shirley Jackson, though writing in different time periods, are both invested in recuperating domesticity and using their work to imagine what domesticity removed from the ...context of marriage and children can offer single women. Both authors assert that emplacement within domestic enclosure is essential to securing feminine subjectivity, but their haunted house narratives undermine that very emplacement. Freeman’s stories, “The Southwest Chamber” and “The Hall Bedroom” anticipate Jackson’s more well-known The Haunting of Hill House in the way that unruly domesticity threatens the female character’s emplacement. Their haunted house narratives show that neither Freeman nor Jackson, for all that they are subversive in some ways, wants to dissolve the traditional ideological constructs of domesticity; instead, they want these ideologies to work in the culturally promised patriarchal fashion. Reading their haunted house narratives together reveals the dynamics and tensions of a domesticity that is fluid, entangled, and vibrant and the feminist potential such sites engender, even if the characters and texts in question cannot fully realize that potential.
Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” has been notorious since its first publication in 1948, but rarely, if ever, has it been read in light of its immediate historical context. This essay draws on ...literature, philosophy, and anthropology from the period to argue that Jackson’s story, which scholars have traditionally read through the lens of gender studies, invokes the themes of Holocaust literature. To support this argument, the essay explores imaginative Holocaust literature from the period by David Rousset, whose Holocaust memoir The Other Kingdom appeared in English translation in 1946, anthropological discourse from the period on scapegoating and European anti-Semitism, and critical discourse on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism from the period by Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno. The analysis finds that, in representing the phenomena of scapegoating and death selection in a small town in the US, Jackson’s story belongs to an abstract discourse on Holocaust-related themes and topics that was actively produced at midcentury, as evidenced partly by Rousset’s influential memoir. A master of the horror genre, Jackson could have drawn on her own experience of anti-Semitism, along with her known interest in the study of folklore, to contribute this chilling representation of the personal experience of death selection to a discourse on Holocaust-related themes. As this article shows, the abstract discourse Jackson’s story joined is marked by skepticism about or disinterest in ethnic difference and anthropological concepts. Due to the fact that this article features comparative analysis of Holocaust literature, a sub-topic is the debate among scholars concerning the ethics of literary representation of the Shoah and of analysis of Holocaust memoir. Jackson’s story and its context invoke perennially important questions about identity and representation in discourse about the Shoah and anti-Semitism.
This thesis is a critical examination of a handful of the works of Shirley Jackson. It is an attempt at engaging in critical scholarship that for many years has been relatively lacking. In it, her ...stories “The Summer People,” “Pillar of Salt,” and “The Daemon Lover” are examined alongside her novels Hangsaman and The Haunting of Hill House. This thesis addresses the ways in which Shirley Jackson writes the interior worlds of her protagonists and explores how those interiors are often physically linked to the physical worlds that these characters inhabit. Particularly, this thesis examines how Jackson writes the dissolution of her characters’ fragile interiorities in the face of trauma spurred on by society’s oppression of women. Each section of this thesis attempts to examine how Jackson creates coping mechanisms for these protagonists and how these coping mechanisms fail to provide comfort and safety for her protagonists as their stories progress. By the end of this thesis, it is clear that Jackson’s work is a bleak chronicle of trauma and anxiety. In the starkest terms, she exposes just how few options women have in the face of a society that refuses to allow them to be whole individuals.
The paper discusses Shirley Jackson's first novel, The Road Through the Wall (1948), as governed by two dominant affects: alienation and anxiety. It proves that the fictional middle-class suburban ...community in the novel can be seen as a metaphor for America with its unconscious desires and fears. The uncanny transformation of the setting from a pastoral ideal into a grotesque site of horror is a response to the major anxieties of the 1940s in America and a way to talk about contradictions at the heart of American national narrative.
Jackson is part of a significant strain in American writing by women that attends to houses, housekeeping, and being part of a social polity that emphasizes "proper womanliness." Her work offers a ...rich critique of middle-class white heteropatriarchy, even when she is writing about it most gently. This paper argues that Jackon's fiction makes an important theoretical point: gender is a relational enactment, suturing together mate- rial realities through racialized social relations. Jackson's stories from the fifties can be seen as exemplary of this relational formation of gender. In her work, race, sexuality, class, and gender are made through and with the relations between women and the houses they tend.
Construction at Elizabeth's workplace created a "hole the height of the building, from the roof to the cellar" beside Elizabeth's desk (Jackson 2-3), and as young woman hangs up her coat, she feels ..."an almost irresistible temptation to hurl herself downward into the primeval sands upon which the museum presumably stood" (3). Multiple personality disorder, Caminero-Santangelo states, provided a useful way in which to suggest that working outside the home created, in women, a "contradictory self" that was "a potential threat to the precarious postwar sense of social order" (53). In a move that anticipates Elizabeth's multiple personality disorder in Bird's Nest, as a young woman, Jackson, "took the unusual step of assigning names to her moods, as if they were characters in a play" (50). In preparation for writing Bird's Nest, Jackson "thoroughly researched" the subject of multiple personality disorder (161), research that included consultation with a psychologist at Bennington and her own study of Prince's text (Alessio 124).
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (3) Elaine Tyler May has observed that "the legendary family of the 1950s, complete with appliances, station wagons, backyard barbecues, and tricycles ...scattered on the sidewalks, represented...the first wholehearted effort to create a home that would fulfill virtually all its members' personal needs through an energized and expressive personal life" (11). Like the idealized family units often on popular display in the postwar era, Hill House appears secure against invasion, decay, or destruction...and yet something both familiar and alien haunts it: "within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone" (246). ...the novel ends, with a reprise of its opening paragraph that is aesthetically satisfying but disquieting, as the closure is imprisoning and the refrain seems like a sentence that is to be reiterated interminably.
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