Not a Refuge Yet: Shirley Jackson’s Domestic HauntingsDara Downey

only way out is writing please god help me please help meand do not show to anyone do not show to anyone somedayplease god help me do not show to anyone because locked.

i have been thinking of these pages as a refuge, apleasant hiding place.

this is not a refuge, these pages, but a way through, apath not charted; i feel my way, but there is a waythrough. not a refuge yet. on the other side somewherethere is a country, perhaps the glorious country of well-dom, perhaps a country of a story. (Hattenhauer, 2003:27)

As the above quotations, taken from Shirley Jackson’s private

writings, suggest, her work is fraught with the tensions

surrounding the concept of refuge, the difficulties in truly

creating one, and the fear that such a refuge might prevent

progress or development. In particular, the trend of her work

overall is towards an attempt to solve the problem of enclosed

domestic space, to negotiate its tendency to vacillate between

functioning as a refuge or a prison. Most urgently, Jackson’s

work articulates the fear that the spaces inhabited by her

female protagonists are not merely beyond their control, but

are themselves controlling these isolated, beleaguered women.

It is in this spatial dynamic that the Gothic nature of

Jackson’s regrettably slight body of fiction can be

identified. In her first novel, The Road Through the Wall (1948),

the anxieties and hypocrisies of a small town are exposed and

intensified by the apparently violent death of a small child,

as it becomes increasingly evident that the knocking down of a

wall is blamed for allowing undesirable elements into the

previous peaceful area. Rather more explicitly, inhabiting an

unsympathetic college dorm and working in a crumbling,

uninspiring office, sends the respective heroines of her

second and third novels, Hangsaman (1951) and The Bird’s Nest

(1954), spiralling into devastating psychic disequilibrium.

It is but a short step from here to the terrors inspired by

the actively malevolent eponymous mansion in The Haunting of Hill

House (1959), which ultimately (and quite literally) drives the

troubled Eleanor Vance to suicide. What Hill House also makes

clear, however, is the almost irresistible lure of home and

all that it stands for, the possibility of both safety and

self-determination that contemporary domestic ideology

insisted came automatically with ownership. Indeed, it is in

transforming the home into just such a refuge, tentatively in

her pre-apocalyptic family satire The Sundial (1958) and almost

triumphantly in her final finished novel, We Have Always Lived in the

Castle (1962), that the Gothic possibilities of the fictional

world she evokes are arguably most fully realised. In

reversing the power dynamic, so that the community of

suspicious townsfolk fearfully worship rather than torment

them, the Blackwood sisters in Castle re-appropriate the home’s

dual status as fairy-tale refuge and Gothic prison,

transforming it into an impenetrable if ruined fortress while

transforming themselves into the very malevolent supernatural

beings that terrorise more conventional heroines. The

movement of Jackson’s two most overtly Gothic novels is from

pessimism (even despair) to a kind of optimism that, far from

dispelling the Gothic gloom of the earlier work, goes so far

as to claim it as a site of independence and empowerment.

“I live in a dank old place”: Jackson’s Re-Telling of the

Domestic Myth

Born in the suburb of Bulingame, California in 1916, Shirley

Hardie Jackson later moved with her family to Rochester, New

York, and remained in New England for the rest of her short

life. At university, she met and subsequently married Stanley

Edgar Hyman, and the couple moved to North Bennington,

Vermont, where Hyman worked at the local girls’ college as a

professor and literary critic. The “family chronicles,”

light-hearted stories about life with her four children in

small-town New England, later collected in Life Among the Savages

(1953) and Raising Demons (1957), were initially published

lucratively in magazines including Vogue, Woman’s Day, Playboy

and The New Yorker (which published her most famous, or at least

notorious, story, “The Lottery,” to critical acclaim and

public uproar in 1948). As the titles of these works

indicate, Hyman’s professional interests in anthropology, and

the “Myth and Ritual” school of literary criticism that it

spawned, overlapped with Jackson’s own fascination with magic

and witchcraft, an interest that lead to the publication of

her work for children, The Witchcraft of Salem Village in 1956.

Her engagement with the supernatural was not, however, merely

borrowed from her husband, nor did it function merely as a

sort of window-dressing for fiction that was, at heart,

realist. Indeed, she often employed otherworldly horror as a

means of drawing graphic attention to the darker aspects of

everyday life – a life which, in mid-century suburban America,

was characterised by crushing conformity, a normality that

insisted so loudly that bourgeois suburban life was the

unquestionable ideal, that it became an oppressive force

(Jancovich, 1996). As Frances L. Restuccia puts it, “the

gothic aspect of a woman’s life […] is all in its normality”

(1986: 247), since, as Eugenia De Lamotte contends, “the

extraordinary confinements of romantic heroines […] signify

the ordinary confinements of women’s lives,” so that “in

symbolic form Gothic interiors were the daylight world,

apprehended as nightmare” (1990: 178 and 151). As a narrative

tool, then, the supernatural allowed Jackson to create vivid

images of what domestic life is like for women, and of the

dangers and terrors inherent in such a life, rendering

explicit the lurking horror that suburban life both created

and denied. As she herself remarked, the supernatural seemed

to her to be “so convenient a shorthand statement of the

possibilities of human adjustment to what seems to be at best

an inhuman world” (Oppenheimer, 1988: 125). Critics such as

Darryl Hattenhauer (2003) assert that “all of Jackson’s

characters who appear to be in touch with the supernatural are

either delusional or foolish” (11), and indeed, the focus of

much critical engagement with her work has been on the

psychological disturbance of her characters. However, it is

vital to recognise the extent to which Gothic tropes are

employed in her fiction as a means of giving graphic form to

the way in which the external, material world interpolates

women into the confinement and exploitation of rigidly

domestic roles.

As Betty Friedan argued in The Feminine Mystique (first published

in 1963, a mere two years before Jackson’s sudden death of

heart failure), the pressures to conform to a rigidly defined

bourgeois standard were felt most practically by middle-class

housewives. The constant presence of the stay-at-home wife

and mother provided a centre of order and stability that

suburbia otherwise lacked, ensuring that the home continued to

function during the day when men were at work and children in

full-time education. One of the consequences was a sort of

mythologisation of housework, as the basic activities of

cooking and cleaning took on an importance that bordered on

the sacred. Inevitably, any failure to perform these tasks

regularly, tirelessly and to an increasingly high standard

became the target of explicitly Gothic language and imagery.

In 1932, a Good Housekeeping article stated optimistically that

“light is the eternal enemy of pathogenic germs,” cautioning

that they “will live for long periods in dark places,”

conjuring up, for the already overworked housewife, an image

of lurking monsters inhabiting corners if she did not perform

her many duties adequately (qtd. Horsfield, 1997: 164). More

explicitly, as early as 1918, an advertisement for Lysol asked

“Do you live in a haunted house? Is your house germ-haunted?”

and asserts confidently that “It is, and so is every home that

is not regularly disinfected.” The paragraph instructing the

reader on how to use the product is entitled “How to Banish a

Ghost,” and advises that it should be used in almost every

part of the home in order to prevent infection and disease

(qtd. Horsfield, 1997: 103). Such language exploited

housewifely guilt and the struggle to “fit in” by positioning

them as America’s only defence against the forces of darkness,

figuratively ridding their country of ghosts by keeping it

literally clean.

Combining a full-time writing career with her equally

demanding and time-consuming role as a faculty wife and mother

of four children, Jackson was no stranger to the mind-numbing

futility and drudgery of domestic tasks. As Hattenhauer

notes, her husband “bought her a dishwasher (with her money)

because her labour was worth so much more as a writer. She

wrote to her parents, ‘stanley [sic] said he figured it was

costing us a couple of thousand dollars a day to have me wash

dishes.’” Hattenhauer observes that, rather than reducing

Jackson’s workload, “The effect of this attitude was to make

the household income even more Jackson’s responsibility, and

she therefore had to spend more time writing, especially her

most profitable production, the domestic narratives for slick

women’s magazines” (18). This uneasy juxtaposition of roles

was carried through thematically and tonally into her writing

itself, which is notoriously difficult to pin down within the

confines of any one genre, a state of affairs that has done

little to alleviate the relative obscurity into which her work

has fallen. As Lynette Carpenter puts it, “traditional male

critics could not, in the end, reconcile genre with gender in

Jackson’s case; unable to understand how a serious writer of

gothic fiction could also be, to all outward appearances, a

typical housewife, much less how she could publish housewife

humor in Good Housekeeping, they dismissed her” (Carpenter,

1988: 143). More unsettling still, this scandalous mingling

of generic material can often be identified within individual

stories and novels. In particular, readers and critics alike

have responded with confusion and even hostility to works like

“The Lottery” which, rather than presenting a familiar world

invaded by malevolent and alien supernatural forces (as was

common in contemporary Hollywood cinema), depict these forces

(in a myriad of guises) as an inherent part of the everyday

life of 1950s America. However, as Jessamyn Neuhaus notes,

“Fans who wrote to Jackson rarely commented on the supposed

contrast between her domestic humor and her other writings;

perhaps they knew better than the average literary critic the

areas of overlap between horror and homemaking” (2009: 117-

18).

Nevertheless, she actively exploited this queasy juxtaposition

as a means both of courting media attention for her writing

and of maintaining some genuine privacy behind the public

image she concocted for herself. Constantly surprising people

with her motherly appearance, she liked to suggest that her

writing was at once a form of escape from, and an integral

part of, her daily housework. In a culture which had produced

Fritz Leiber’s 1953 novel, Conjure Wife, in which the wives of a

group of university professors are revealed to be practicing

witchcraft in secret, reviewers and interviewers seized

eagerly on assertions of this nature. Famed for tarot

readings which were, allegedly, “so accurate that several of

her friends nervously refused to let her tell them their

fortunes,” and even for an ability to converse with cats,

Jackson herself claimed, according to one particular

interviewer, to be able to “break a man’s leg and throw a girl

down an elevator shaft. Such things happen, she says! Miss

Jackson tells us all this with a smile but she is not joking:

she owns a library of two hundred books.” She herself

asserted – in a set of defiantly playful autobiographical

notes that she gave to her publisher prior to the publication

of The Road Through the Wall – that “I have a fine library of magic

and witchcraft and when I have nothing else to do I practice

incantations” (qtd. Oppenheimer, 1988: 189 and 139). Indeed,

she also made a point of using her home life as a (at least

partially ironic) means of furthering her reputation as a

witch, positing her supernatural powers as merely extending

her domestic prowess. In Raising Demons, she notes how

Every time I picked up something I put it down againsomewhere else where it belonged better than it did inthe place where I found it. Nine times out of ten I didnot notice what I was picking up or where I was puttingit until sometime later when someone in the family neededit; then, when Sally said where were her crayons I couldanswer at once: kitchen windowsill, left. (The Magic ofShirley Jackson, 1966: 726)

That this is more than merely good-humoured self-mockery –

indeed, that it subversively rewrites the housewife role – can

be inferred from the autobiographical notes mentioned above,

in which she announces, “I live in a dank old place with a

ghost that storms around in the attic … the first thing that I

did when we moved in was make charms in black crayon on all

the door sills and window ledges to keep out demons and was

successful in the main … […].” Immediately before this, she

declares “I am tired of writing dainty little biographical

things that pretend I am a trim little housewife in a Mother

Hubbard stirring up appetising messes over a wooden stove”

(qtd. Oppenheimer, 1988: 139). This statement implicitly

associates everyday domestic tasks with the preparation of

ingredients for a spell. Even as she disavows the image of

herself as “trim little housewife,” she invests that image

with the very witchiness that she defines against it. What

this does is to bestow a decided slipperiness upon Jackson’s

public image, rendering it is all but impossible to prise

apart the “real” housewife and the “fairy-tale” enchantress.

According to Oppenheimer, Jackson herself encouraged the

confusion over how she wished herself to be perceived; “She

liked to pretend she was a witch; she liked to make people

believe it; at the same time she liked to poke fun at the

entire business, and at the very people who believed her so

literally” (139). In this way, Jackson succeeds in

constructing a radically unstable public persona, conforming

to the domestic feminine ideal while subverting it from

within.

As Mary Douglas argues, nineteenth-century anthropologists

theorised magic and witchcraft as unofficial forms of power, a

version of “ritual which is not part of the cult of the

community’s god” (1986: 18). Through magic, the individual

could take the actions and indeed the results of ritual into

their own hands in a manner which rejected the authoritative,

sanctioned methods and conventions associated with

priestcraft. In Margeret Horsfield’s terms, “Housecleaning

[...] cannot brag of a long, well-documented history” (3). It

is, therefore, what Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi refers to as “a

tenacious belief system for which there is cultic ritual but

essentially no mythos,” and which is obscured by “the

articulated visible masculine edifice of culture” – in other

words, it functions in precisely the same counter-cultural

manner as magic (1982: 94). To figure housework as witchcraft

therefore allows Jackson to mobilise it as an oppositional

category, in Ross Chambers’ (1991) sense of working within

while subtly resisting the dominant status quo. It takes

advantage of the extent to which housework is at once the way

in which a woman exercises control over the spaces in which

she spends almost all of her time, and the most visible aspect

of her circumscription within those spaces.

What I would like to argue in the remainder of this essay is

that Jackson’s most famous novels – Hill House and Castle – can be

seen as constituting two very different responses to the

problematic relationship between women and domestic space in

mid-century America. Hill House graphically images the ability

of a house to tyrannise over its occupants, first seducing and

then destroying Jackson’s heroine, but refusing to permit her

to make it her home. Castle, on the other hand, re-appropriates

the domestic Gothic by dramatizing Jackson’s alignment of

housework with malevolent witchcraft. Doing so eventually

allows the central female characters to transform their home

into a place of privacy, warding off intruders with its

fearsome reputation. Jackson’s Gothic home, therefore, goes

from being a site of danger for a woman to one of safety,

without jettisoning the atmosphere of supernatural darkness

that traditionally characterise such structures.

“Never Meant to be Lived In”: The Haunting of Hill House

Hill House is essentially a novel about a haunting rather than a

haunted house, offering a coded commentary on the pernicious

effects of domestic ideology upon those who buy into the fairy

tale that the single-family dwelling both embodies and

perpetuates. This is first hinted at in the incantatory

opening lines, which are repeated almost verbatim at the end,

and which proclaim ominously that

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanelyunder conditions of absolute reality; even larks andkatydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House,not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holdingdarkness within; it had stood so for eighty years andmight stand for eighty more. Within, walls continuedupright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doorswere sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the woodand stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there,walked alone. (Jackson, 1996: 227)

What follows is a detailed account of Eleanor Vance’s journey

to this foreboding mansion, having been invited by one Dr.

Montague to take part in an investigation into the alleged

hauntings in the house. What is striking about the scenes of

her arrival at Hill House is the amount of space devoted to

the figure of the apparently mundane housekeeper, Mrs. Dudley,

in what seems to be an abrupt transition from Gothic narration

to realist diegesis. Subsequent events, however, suggest that

Mrs. Dudley is in fact a key figure if we are to comprehend

the house’s relationship with the women who inhabit it. The

jokes made by Eleanor’s fellow participants – the charming,

psychically gifted Theodora and Luke, the spoilt, feckless

heir to the estate – figure the housekeeper as working

compulsively, mechanically performing tasks imposed upon her

more by the house itself than by her own standards. One of

the peculiarities of Hill House is the way in which every door

swings mysteriously shut, even when left propped open. When

the group discovers this, Theodora says, with characteristic

flippancy, “‘Mrs. Dudley did it yesterday, […] because she’d

rather shut them herself than come along and find them shut by

themselves because the doors belong shut and the windows

belong shut and the dishes belong – ’ She began to laugh

foolishly [...]” (Jackson, 1996: 303-04). If Theo is correct

in her estimation, it would imply that the house forces Mrs.

Dudley to submit to its demands, to become complicit in its

ability to unnerve and disorient those who occupy it.

As Rabuzzi suggests, any domestic routine in which “Nothing is

ever left half done: everything is always put neatly back in

place before a new task is begun” is “demonic,” a state of

effective possession where “the performer is so submerged by

her ritual tasks that she hardly continues to exist apart from

her work. Instead of the balance between worker and task […]

the task swallows up the performer instead” (1982: 116-17).

Hill House is, as both Dr. Montague and the events of the plot

make clear, itself demonic, mad, bad and gleefully cruel, and

a particularly dangerous place for a woman, enforcing the

endless, all-consuming labour demanded by domestic ideology.

Mrs. Dudley is, after all, only a housekeeper, a caretaker who

leaves as soon as she can, attached to the house only because

she works there. Not her home, the house demands her labours,

leaving little room for her own volition – the condition, in

other words, of many women toiling endlessly in homes that

they could never hope to own for themselves.

In the situation of Mrs. Dudley should, moreover, be read a

warning, foreshadowing what will happen to Eleanor. As

Bernice M. Murphy observes, “Eleanor is so out of place in a

society that can project only one particular path for a young

woman – that of wife and mother – that she becomes the perfect

victim” (2005: 11). This happens, I would argue, not because

she rebels against these roles, but because she yearns – in

vain – to step into them. At the age of thirty-two, having

spent much of her adult life tending to her ailing mother, her

most fundamental longing is for a place of her own. Hill

House entices her with promises of a tranquil, comfortable

existence, the possibility of independence from her sister, of

somewhere finally to belong. Most insidiously, it convinces

her that it actively wants her. When Dr. Montague shows them

the nursery, in the doorway of which is an inexplicable cold

spot, she tentatively suggests that “‘It doesn’t feel like an

impartial cold,’” adding “‘I felt is as deliberate, as though

something wanted to give me an unpleasant shock.’” Similarly,

after she and Theo spend a terrifying night huddled together

as something pounds relentlessly on the door of Theo’s

bedroom, she remarks that it had seemed as if “‘it wanted to

consume us, take us into itself, make us a part of the house,

maybe – ’” (Jackson, 1996: 307-08 and 320). Added to these

comments is the appearance of her name in huge, possibly

bloody letters on the walls of the house and in the

communications that Mrs. Montague receives through her

planchette, all of which leads Eleanor to believe that it is

singling her out for special treatment.

Indeed, she begins to think that she herself is the origin of

the phenomena. On the second night that Hill House hammers on

its own doors, she thinks, “I am disappearing inch by inch

into this house,” and later thinks “it’s inside my head [...]

it’s inside my head and it’s getting out, getting out, getting

out – ” 363-64). The effect intensifies until she eventually

takes on the role of the ghost haunting Hill House, running

around the dark corridors and banging on the doors, just as

the amorphous manifestations have previously. This time,

however, Eleanor is no longer frightened, but euphoric; Hill

House has recruited Eleanor to do its work for it, convincing

her that it is giving her a home in the process: “I am home,

she thought, and stopped in wonder at the thought. I am home,

I am home” (Jackson, 1996: 385). The narration itself,

however, undermines her certainty, emphasising that she has

failed to comprehend is the distinct difference between

“incorporate” and “consume.”

This failure of comprehension reaches critical mass when her

increasingly erratic behaviour (including her self-destructive

insistence on climbing the tottering staircase in the library)

leads Dr. Montague to compel her to leave. As she bids them a

reluctant goodbye, she looks up at “the amused, certain face

of the house, watching her quietly” and gazing down on her

“confidently,” leading her imagine that it is waiting for her

and that “no one else could satisfy it” (Jackson, 1996: 391).

A minor re-reading changes the tone of these words, however:

the house is “confident” that it has tempted her to destroy

herself utterly for its sake, and “amused” because it knows

all too well that what she expects and what will happen are

far from convergent. It would seem, therefore, that only Hill

House’s desires, and not Eleanor’s, are fulfilled when,

instead of driving out of the gates and back to her lonely

life living with her sister and her sister’s family, she

commits suicide. We are told,

I am really doing it, she thought, turning the wheel tosend the car directly at the great tree at the curve of

the driveway, I am really doing it, I am doing this allby myself, now, at last; this is me, I am really reallyreally really doing it by myself.

In the unending, crashing second before the carhurled into the tree she thought clearly, Why am I doingthis? Why am I doing this? Why don’t they stop me?Jackson, 1996: 394)

Eleanor’s final act is profoundly ambiguous, as it can be

interpreted both as a desperate effort to escape and as a

deluded attempt to stay, presumably as the ghost that Hill

House has convinced her she can become. In either case, it is

a failure. Her final thoughts, far from articulating a joyful

homecoming, undermine any sense of individual agency and

volition. It is equally clear that, if she hopes to haunt the

place, thereby making it her home for all eternity, she has

been bitterly disillusioned, not least because the opening

lines of Hill House reappear almost unchanged at the end of the

novel. The first of two film versions, Robert Wise’s The

Haunting (1963) (the second being Jan de Bont’s 1999

adaptation), alters the final line to “and we who walk here,

walk alone,” implying that Eleanor has joined the spectres

inhabiting Hill House. Conversely, the novel’s final

repetition of “and whatever walked there, walked alone”

suggests that Hill House remains in precisely the same

condition in which it was at the beginning: nothing has been

added to the house by the blood sacrifice of Eleanor’s death.

Indeed, as an early passage informs us, this is a house

“without concession to humanity” and was “never meant to be

lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope”

(Jackson, 1996: 294). Tricked by the fairy-tale of inhabiting

not merely a house but a home, she is ultimately rejected and

ejected by Hill House, and is therefore denied a place in

which she might finally belong.

“No Trespassing”: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Jackson’s final completed novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle,

goes some way towards battling against this abusive

relationship between women and houses, refiguring the Gothic

house as a refuge, a site of control and safety for women

rather than of exposure and imprisonment. Primarily, it does

so by focusing in on the association of housework with

malevolently supernatural female figures discussed above, and

by taking the potentially subversive moment at which Eleanor

very nearly herself becomes the ghost haunting Hill House as a

narrative jumping-off point, rather than as the enactment of

failure and closure. It is in this way a far more optimistic

text about the opportunities held out by the Gothic for women

seeking to break free from – or, more accurately, radically

reinterpret – their assigned roles within the home.

According to Horsfield, housewives often associate cleanliness

with a sense of security (1997: 143 and 150). As Douglas puts

it, “Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a

negative movement, but a positive effort to organise the

environment. [...] In chasing dirt, in papering, decorating,

tidying we are [...] positively re-ordering our environment,

making it conform to an idea. [...] it is a creative

movement, an attempt […] to make unity of experience” (1996:

2). In particular, when that cleaning is not what Rabuzzi

would call “demonic” – that is, when a house does not demand

more and more from the housewife without any of the attendant

satisfactions of security or homeliness – then cleaning can in

fact act as a means whereby women carve a space for themselves

out of the otherwise patriarchal home, permitting a

relationship between woman and home which does not result in

her being engulfed by it. Specifically, this is achieved by

figuring the housewife as a witch, as is the case with Mrs.

Halloran, the great matriarch of The Sundial, who dreams that she

is the cannibalistic owner of the gingerbread house in “Hansel

and Gretel,” a dream which is portrayed as the expression of a

deep-seated desire for

A place of my own, […] a house where I can live alone andput everything I love, a small house of my own. Thewoods around are dark, but the fire inside is bright,[…]; over the fireplace are the things I put there. Iwill sit in the one chair or I will lie on the soft rugby the fire, and no one will talk to me, and no one willhear me; […]. Deep in the forest I am living in mylittle house and no one can ever find me. (Jackson, 1958:120).

In precisely the same way, the female characters in Castle

exploit the fear that they arouse in the villagers who live

near their house in order finally to achieve the privacy that

has been compromised as a result of that very fear.

As is revealed at the end of the novel, ten years before the

narrative begins, Merricat, the first-person narrator, who

wishes that she had been born a werewolf, has poisoned her

entire family except for Constance, leaving the only other

survivor, their Uncle Julian, as a doddering invalid. The

resulting scandal among the inhabitants of the nearby village,

caused not least by the court case in which Constance was

tried but not convicted, has led to so strong a social stigma

being attached to the family and the house that Merricat only

leaves the house once a week to do the shopping, and Constance

never goes out at all. This defensive routine is broken,

devastatingly, when their odious Cousin Charles comes to stay,

and attempts to persuade Constance to become romantically

involved with him, to rejoin the world and to put both Uncle

Julian and Merricat into care, the latter being, to his

unsympathetic and pecuniary eyes, an uncomfortably odd child

standing in the way of his plans to inherit the family

fortune. Even worse, Charles sleeps in their father’s room

and moves things that have, since the deaths in the family if

not long before that, occupied fixed, almost sacred positions

in the house, their father’s pipe, which Charles insists on

smoking, being the most vexing to Merricat’s highly developed

sense of order.

In an effort to banish Charles’ disruptive presence, Merricat

first scatters earth and twigs on the furniture of his usurped

bedroom, and then sweeps the still-smouldering pipe into a

waste-paper basket. Inevitably, the result is a raging house-

fire, finally giving the villagers an outlet for their dislike

and fear, as they gleefully aid in the destruction of the

mansion rather than putting out the fire to save it. They

begin, quite spontaneously, to throw rocks at the windows,

breaking dishes and ornaments, tearing curtains and spilling

food, soiling and smashing everything the sisters have worked

(as the opening sections inform us in some detail) so

diligently and carefully to keep clean and intact. They taunt

the girls, implying that their house should have been burnt

down long ago, interrogating them mockingly about the deaths

in their family, and final surrounding them, dancing around

them and singing doggerel verses made up by the village

children about the poisonings. They even go so far as to

threaten to throw Merricat and Constance back into the house

and watch them burn, and are only prevented from doing so when

Merricat leaves the centre of the circle they have formed

around the girls, approaching a group of the villagers who

start back in irrational fear, allowing the sisters to escape

to Merricat’s hiding place among the trees around the house.

As is suggested by the blind terror that Merricat inspires, it

would be erroneous to interpret the narrative as establishing

her and Constance as helpless victims of the villagers’

persecution. They tidy what they can of their burnt and

vandalised home, though most of the upstairs no longer exists,

and Merricat erects barricades and boards up the windows. The

sisters then refuse to emerge from the mutilated remains of

the house, and, gradually, the men from the village begin to

leave baskets of food prepared by their wives on the doorstep

at night, often with notes attached, saying “‘This is for the

dishes,’ or ‘We apologise about the curtains,’ or ‘Sorry about

the harp’” (Jackson, 1996: 525). As Murphy contends, the

offerings of food are “inspired more by fear than by remorse,”

since “the sisters have become the witchlike, shadowy figures

they were always believed to be, and the villagers fear some

sort of preternatural vengeance” (2005: 123). This is most

clearly articulated in the way in which, after the fire,

Merricat’s figurative language, which associates housework

with witchcraft from the very beginning of the novel, begins

to be substantiated and given greater weight on more concrete

diegetic registers.

As already indicated, Merricat devotes much of the beginning

of her narrative to describing in loving detail the sister’s

unswerving cleaning routine, which entails an almost

ritualistic visiting of each room in the house. On one

occasion, after she and Constance have finished what she

refers to as “neatening” the house, she describes them as

“carrying our dustcloths and the broom and dustpan and mop

like a pair of witches walking home” (Jackson, 1996: 461).

Even more explicitly, Constance’s exceptional cooking skills,

which have led to her rather than Merricat being accused of

the mass poisoning, prompt her sister to exclaim, “‘Old witch!

[.. ] you have a gingerbread house.’” On this occasion,

Constance replies, “‘I do not, [...] I have a lovely house

where I live with my sister Merricat’” (Jackson, 1996: 466).

In the wake of the destruction of their home, however, when

Merricat ponders “‘I wonder if I could eat a child if I had the

chance,’” Constance does not dismiss what she says, but merely

states, “‘I doubt if I could cook one’” (Jackson, 1996:531).

What this exchange highlights is the way in which, while

Constance may have teetered on the brink of being convinced by

Charles and their neighbours into returning to “normality,”

both girls have now embraced wholeheartedly the sinister image

that the villagers have always imposed upon them.

Indeed, their behaviour after the fire serves to heighten the

suspicion that had previously led village children to taunt

Merricat on her shopping excursions. What has changed is the

fact that suspicion has become fear, and the villagers’

leering curiosity has been transformed into a profound sense

of unease, ensuring that the sisters now have far more

privacy. Never seen again by anyone, they rapidly gain a

reputation as supernatural beings, “ladies” who live in

darkness, who see and hear everything, evoked by parents to

frighten children into obedience, but also a source of

numinous dread for adults. In one conversation that Merricat

overhears, a “bad” woman tells two children, looking at them

“evilly,” “‘They never come out except at night, [...] and

then when it’s dark they go hunting little children.’” She

ghoulishly proclaims that the “ladies” in the house force-feed

poisoned candy to little boys, and eat little girls. While

her friend scoffs and tells her to hush, the man with them

says apprehensively, “‘Just the same, [...] I don’t want to

see the kids going too near that house’” (Jackson, 1996: 526).

The villagers’ longstanding distrust of the sisters has

therefore been transformed from curious suspicion into a

fearful shrinking from unknown supernatural terrors that

borders on worship.

No longer bothered by prying visitors, the sisters spend much

of their days crouched behind the front door, looking out

through two glass panels, reminiscent of arrow-slits, that

cast lines of light along the dark hallway. Indeed, as a

house, the Blackwood house in a sense no longer exists, but

has been replaced instead by a Gothic castle, which

externalising both the fear that the villagers have always

attached to it and the defensive nature that its inhabitants

seek more than ever to convey. Merricat notes that “We

learnt, from listening, that all the strangers could see from

outside, when they looked at all, was a great ruined structure

overgrown with vines, barely recognisable as a house.”

(Jackson, 1996: 531). Because, from the outside, it appears

to be very much a place of danger and dread, it is now, in

Jackson’s terms, “a place of safety,” precisely because its

Gothic sneer is turned outwards towards intruders rather than,

as in the case with Hill House, inwards towards anyone foolish

enough to try to live there.

Having thus succeeded in turning the Gothic castle very much

to the advantage of her housebound heroines, it is more than a

pity that Jackson’s final novel, Come Along With Me, was left

unfinished at her death. Collected by Hyman in a posthumous

collection of stories of the same name, and adapted for the

screen in 1982 by Joanne Woodward, this fragment gestures

towards even greater possibilities for freedom through the

adoption of the witch persona, via the figure of a newly

widowed middle-aged woman exploring the limits and extent of

her long-suppressed taste for the supernatural. While one can

only speculate, it is tempting to see this novel as having

abandoned the Gothic house altogether, in favour of an actual

embodiment of the malevolent supernatural that would leave her

female protagonist never bereft of a Gothic refuge in which to

hide and from which to exercise control over the world she

inhabits. Jackson may not quite have attained this dark

sanctuary in her writing, but the legacy of her attempts to

reach it remains one of the richest sources of pleasing fear

in American literature.

References

Carpenter, L. (1988) “Domestic Comedy, Black Comedy, and Real

Life: Shirley Jackson, a woman writer.” In A. Kessler-Harris

and W. McBrien (eds.), Faith of a (Woman) Writer. New York:

Greenwood Press, 143-48.

Chambers, R. (1991). Room for Maneuver: Reading (the) oppositional (in)

narrative. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Davidson, C.M. (2004) “Haunted House/ Haunted Heroine: Female

gothic closets in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” Women’s Studies (33),

pp.47-75.

DeLamotte, E.C. (1990). Perils of the Night: A feminist study of nineteenth-

century gothic. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Douglas, M. (1996). Purity and Danger: An analysis of the concepts of

pollution and taboo. London: Ark.

Friedan, B. (1992). The Feminine Mystique. London: Penguin, 1992.

Hattenhauer, D. (2003). Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. New York:

State University of New York Press.

Horsfield, M. (1997). Biting the Dust: The joys of housework. London:

Fourth Estate.

Hyman, S.E. (ed.) (1966). The Magic of Shirley Jackson. New York:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Jackson, S. (1996). The Masterpieces of Shirley Jackson. London: Raven.

Jackson, S. (1958). The Sundial. London: Michael Joseph.

Jancovich, M. (1996). Rational Fears: American horror in the 1950s.

Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.

Murphy, B.M. (2005). Shirley Jackson: Essays on the literary legacy.

Jefferson and London: McFarland.

Neuhaus, J. (Summer 2009) “Is it Ridiculous for me to Say I

Want to Write?: Domestic Humor and Redefining the 1950s

Housewife Writer in Fan Mail to Shirley Jackson.” Journal of

Women’s History (21:2), pp.115-37.

Oppenheimer, J. (1988). Private Demons: The life of Shirley Jackson. New

York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.

Rabuzzi, K.A. (1982). The Sacred and the Feminine: Towards a Theology of

Housework. New York: Seabury Press.

Restuccia, F.L. (1986) “Female Gothic Writing: Under cover to

Alice.” Genre (18), pp.245-66.

Biographical Note

Dara Downey lectures in the School of English, Trinity College

Dublin, Ireland, and is currently researching late nineteeth-

century American women’s ghost stories and material culture.

She has published on American Gothic writers including Edgar

Allan Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henry James, Shirley

Jackson, Stephen King and Mark Z. Danielewski.

Abstract

Herself a full-time housewife, the critically neglected writer

Shirley Jackson exploited for her body of Gothic fiction the

intense pressures on middle-class women in post-World-War-II

American to conform to exacting standards in the unpaid

housework which increasingly consumed all their time and

mental energy. Famous for her story “The Lottery” and the

novel The Haunting of Hill House, Jackson’s writing repeatedly

evokes Gothic domestic spaces, and in doing so articulates the

complex relationship between women and the home at mid-

century. While Hill House dramatises this relationship in a

manner that establishes the house as villain and women as its

victims, We Have Always Lived in the Castle offers the possibility of

inhabiting the Gothic home as a refuge rather than as a

prison.

Key Words

Refuge, prison, domestic, housewife, witch, Gothic,

supernatural, privacy, safety, ghost, housework

Further Reading

Bailey, D. (1999). American Nightmares: The haunted house formula in

American popular fiction. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State Popular

Press. This is a lively and often insightful study of the

American haunted-house genre.

Chandler, M. (1991). Dwelling in the Text. Berkeley: University of

California Press. A comprehensive study of the domestic motif

in American fiction, with a particular emphasis both on

women’s issues and on haunting.

Cowan, R.S. (1983). More Work For Mother: The ironies of household

technology from the open hearth to the microwave. New York: Basic. A

useful survey of the housewife role through the centuries.

Engelhardt, T. (1995). The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the

disillusioning of a generation. New York: BasicBooks. A good

introduction to time period and its anxieties.

Jackson, S. (1968) “Biography of a Story.” S.E. Hyman (ed.)

Come Along With Me: Part of a novel, sixteen stories, and three lectures. London:

Michael Joseph. This provides an account of the controversy

surrounding her most famous short story, “The Lottery”.

Jones, D., McCarthy, E., and Murphy, B.M. (eds.) (2011). IT

Came From the 1950s: Popular culture, popular anxieties. Basingstoke and

New York: Palgrave Macmillan. This eclectic collection

provides a solid context for Jackson’s work, as well as

containing my essay on her engagement with contemporary

anthropological thinking.

King, S. (1994). Danse Macabre. London: Warner. Includes the

enlightening perspective of a fan and fellow horror writer,

and an interesting reading of Hill House.

Murphy, B.M. (2009). The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture.

Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Fundamentally

informed by Jackson’s work, this juxtaposes interpretations of

her fiction with sustained analysis of cognate texts and

issues.

Reinsch, P.N. (2001). A Critical Bibliography of Shirley Jackson, American

Writer (1919-1965): Reviews, criticism, adaptations. Edwin Mellen Press:

Lewiston, Queenston and Lampeter. An invaluable guide to what

has been written by and about Jackson.