Shirley Jackson, Influences and Confluences

Melanie R. Anderson, Lisa Kröger, Melanie R. Anderson, Lisa Kröger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317055266
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The popularity of such widely known works as "The Lottery" and The Haunting of Hill House has tended to obscure the extent of Shirley Jackson's literary output, which includes six novels, a prodigious number of short stories, and two volumes of domestic sketches. Organized around the themes of influence and intertextuality, this collection places Jackson firmly within the literary cohort of the 1950s. The contributors investigate the work that informed her own fiction and discuss how Jackson inspired writers of literature and film. The collection begins with essays that tease out what Jackson's writing owes to the weird tale, detective fiction, the supernatural tradition, and folklore, among other influences. The focus then shifts to Jackson's place in American literature and the impact of her work on women's writing, campus literature, and the graphic novelist Alison Bechdel. The final two essays examine adaptations of The Haunting of Hill House and Jackson's influence on contemporary American horror cinema. Taken together, the essays offer convincing evidence that half a century following her death, readers and writers alike are still finding value in Jackson's words.

1
“We know only names, so far”

Samuel Richardson, Shirley Jackson, and exploration of the precarious self

Jennifer Preston Wilson and Michael T. Wilson

Shirley Jackson scholars have occasionally noted her interest in eighteenth-century English fiction, but they have done so only in passing. Critic Lenemaja Friedman observes that in The Haunting of Hill House, Dr. Montague, “like Miss Jackson, is fond of the eighteenth-century novel, for he reads Richardson’s novels for relaxation before retiring: Pamela, then Clarissa, and later Sir Charles Grandison” (123). Darryl Hattenhauer adds that “Samuel Richardson was a particular favorite for Jackson, who saw him as ‘an emblem of fairness and love’” (24), while Dara Downey and Darryl Jones delve a bit deeper to argue that “Dr. Montague reads Pamela and attempts to read Sir Charles Grandison as a corrective to the supernatural chaos of the haunted house” (221). Downey and Jones further contend that “Jackson herself looked back to the eighteenth century for a vision of social harmony now vanished, for, in her own words ‘an insistence on a pattern imposed precariously on the chaos of human development’” (221), a quotation which Judy Oppenheimer repeats in her biography of the writer (125). All of these critics, however, move on quickly from the idea of a Richardsonian influence and gloss over the elements of Jackson’s words which we find most interesting: “a pattern imposed precariously on the chaos of human development” (emphasis ours). Nor do their readings note the extent to which the deeply psychological individual and familial conflicts inherent in those eighteenth-century novels, rather than their “vision of social harmony,” are mirrored in Jackson’s fiction.¹

In fact, Samuel Richardson’s and Shirley Jackson’s novels deploy psychologically complex plots of family conflict that are remarkably similar, when stripped of their extraneous historical effects. Their fictions ask questions about the integration of the self within Gothically drawn domestic environments and share a striking repetition of motifs: the use of female character foils to expose fears about the individual’s ability to assert herself against social conventions, a focus on fraught child-parent relationships that shape the heroine’s allegiances in conscious and unconscious ways, and the deliberate staging of conflict within evocative formal settings, such as the summerhouse, to frame significant trials and transformations. This essay will study Richardson’s and Jackson’s heroines who struggle with questions of identity at the most basic psychological levels, including moments of surreal contemplation of one’s own name and awareness of the power of words and human reliance on word formulae – mottoes, adages, proverbs, folksongs, charms, lists, letters – to define and protect the self. The cumulative effect of Jackson’s sustained incorporation of Richardsonian tropes suggests that Richardson’s influence on Jackson operated at even deeper levels than those of style and character development. In the end, Jackson, like Richardson, uses these insights into language to approximate the experience of the traumatized mind.

Jackson followed Richardson at perhaps the broadest level by isolating and examining the individual as a unique formation of specific familial contexts. In Richardson’s novels, which tell the stories of young women in social, physical, and spiritual peril through the letters those women write and receive, the epistolary form provides readers a constant reminder of themes of identity and family through the repetition of the signature line. This refrain reinforces the idea that the exploration of the heroine’s character is the essence of the plot. When Pamela Andrews signs off to her parents in her early letters with such phrases as “Your dutiful and honest daughter” (24), “Your afflicted PAMELA” (27), and “Your distressed daughter” (64), we already see the endurance under suffering that will define her character for generations of readers to come.² Likewise, the signature of “Your once highly favoured, but now most unhappy, kinswoman, CL. HARLOWE” (252) expresses the plot of Richardson’s second novel in a nutshell – Clarissa’s tragedy occurs because the spiritual idealism that distinguishes her ultimately sets her against the greed and tyranny of her nouveau riche family. In Sir Charles Grandison, Harriet Byron is a paragon of honesty and frankness. Her most frequent signature, “Your Harriet Byron” (1.15), conveys her fidelity to those people and principles she has embraced as her own. Each of these Richardsonian protagonists faces a family problem that is emblematized in her name, and thus restated with each letter’s close. For Pamela, the Andrews’ laboring class status prompts Mr. B to pursue her as a potential mistress rather than court her as a wife; Clarissa’s family disallows her a choice of marriage partner; meanwhile, Harriet attains symbolic membership as an honorary “sister” in the Grandison family, but that closeness only furthers love with her already bespoken “brother.” The emphasis on these women’s names acts as a constant reminder of these domestic conflicts.

Familial dilemmas and mysteries entwined with issues of naming and identity also erode the psyches of characters in Jackson’s fiction. The Sundial foregrounds the formative powers of names from the moment one passes the giant ironwork “H” on the front gates of the Halloran estate, which proclaims the family’s fading prominence over the nearby village it once dominated. When the daughter of the original owner, Aunt Fanny, receives an apparent prophecy, she does so within a context of repeated family conflict that leaves her vulnerable to uncanny events. She has been triply traumatized by the recent death of her nephew, an ultimatum issued by her sister-in-law, and an eerie sense that reality is coming unrooted in the garden of the Halloran house, a site featuring a hedge maze shaped in the letters of her mother’s name. From this psychologically fraught setting, she hears a voice calling “FRANCES HALLORAN,” a summons that terrifies her:

This was fear so complete that Aunt Fanny, once Frances Halloran, stood with nothing but ice to clothe her; was there something there? Something? Then she thought with what seemed shocking clarity: it is worse if it is not there; somehow it must be real because if it is not real it is in my own head; unable to move, Aunt Fanny thought: It is real.

(25–26)

Aunt Fanny is positioned precariously between her current identity and her most essential identity as a child, as young Frances. Ironically, she chooses to believe in the call to the child with very self-protective, adult logic. The mature “Aunt Fanny” reasons that in order to be “not mad” what she senses must have substance – the voice must be “real”; the reverberating words “Frances Halloran” can make sense only as a message from someone who knew her in her long-ago past, her father. This process of an adult mind explaining away a nonrational experience occurs again when Aunt Fanny ushers her grandniece, Fancy, up to the rooms housing the furniture of Fanny’s childhood home, an unsettling simulacra of a house-within-a-house. The elderly aunt explains the rules of how the staged house functions, but Fancy, her name itself signifying imaginative power, runs off in boredom (163–64). The closeness apparent in the names of Fanny/Fancy belies this separation, however, and Jackson shows how the child still lurks under the surface of the adult façade. We sense the threatening and imminent mental collapse of a mad Aunt Fanny abandoning herself to a perpetual indulgence in her girlhood space.

In Jackson’s The Bird’s Nest, the name-invoking summons issues in the other direction, from child to parent, but with the same tone of world-shattering urgency. Betsy, one of the multiple personalities that manifest in the heroine, Miss Richmond, seeks her mother in New York, quietly chanting her name in a desperate attempt to stay focused and complete her quest: “‘My mother’s name is Elizabeth Richmond, and my name is Betsy and my mother always called me Betsy and I was named after my mother. Betsy Richmond’” (89). The shared name between mother and daughter is a memento of the affection Betsy remembers from her past, but it also suggests that until she resolves her relationship with her mother, she will not be able to supersede the three other personalities within Miss Richmond and develop on her own as an adult. Marta Caminero-Santangelo analyzes Betsy’s crisis as an attempt to move past the Lacanian mirror stage: “Betsy now views the whole world or at least everyone she meets in New York, as extensions of herself, and the dramatic triangle involving Robin [her mother’s love interest], her mother, and Betsy is replayed again and again” (75). Everything and everyone Betsy turns to – the dictionary in her suitcase, the phonebook consulted on the street, commuters on the bus – are all connected with the mother; her mission is one of memory and language as she confusedly replays the same script, holding on to her mother’s name as a thread to lead her through the maze.

Betsy’s clutching at names represents a cognitive process that is practiced by Jackson’s other characters. Her identification with her same-sex parent, “Elizabeth Richmond,” most immediately resembles the psychology of Aunt Fanny in The Sundial, who negotiates the garden maze by imagining the curves of her mother’s name, Anna, outlined in relief by the hedgerows (95). As a child, Fanny worked relentlessly to lose herself in the maze in spite of the fact that she never could willfully forget its secrets. The primacy of naming rituals and cultivated memories also figures in The Haunting of Hill House, where names and identities are understood by difference, highlighting the arbitrary nature of signs. Luke Sanderson initiates this conversation by reasoning from what he thinks he already knows. He suggests,

“shouldn’t we get acquainted? We know only names, so far. I know that it is Eleanor, here, who is wearing a red sweater, and consequently it must be Theodora who wears yellow –”

“Doctor Montague has a beard,” Theodora said, “so you must be Luke.”

“And you are Theodora,” Eleanor said, “because I am Eleanor.”

(43)

This playful sorting of selves later becomes more sinister as the house repeatedly calls on Eleanor by name. She experiences this appropriation as an assault on the property of her being and cannot understand why she should be singled out from the rest of the company.

Jackson’s insistent use of the name as a key to the mysteries of the self repeats techniques developed centuries earlier by Richardson. In Clarissa, the child is isolated in resistance to the family’s demands that she marry the rich, yet toad-like, Mr. Solmes. As she muses over her predicament, she fears that she will never live up to what she once promised to be, as delineated in her grandfather’s will: “my dearest and beloved grand-daughter Clarissa Harlowe… from infancy a matchless young creature in her duty to me, and admired by all who knew her as a very extraordinary child” (53). These reverberating words of praise defining “Clarissa Harlowe” clash with her immediate disobedience to her family. As Margaret Anne Doody argues, in Clarissa’s resistance to her parents’ choice of Solmes, “[she] is already bricked up in a family tomb. Her mind runs upon burial alive” (Natural Passion 191). Moreover, she cannot remain “beloved” and “matchless” when engaged in secret correspondence with Sir Robert Lovelace, the libertine nobleman who has fallen out of favor with her relations. Richardson’s Clarissa, like Jackson’s Aunt Fanny, finds herself in conflict with the very reality surrounding her. The Harlowe family’s utter neglect of Lovelace and his suit panics Clarissa into fearing his potential retaliation. Her anxiety takes over so entirely that she believes she must accommodate his desire to maintain their communications to prevent bloodshed.

Feeling manipulated into wrongdoing, Clarissa asks her friend Anna Howe, “can I give a sanction immediately to [Lovelace’s] deluding arts? – can I avoid being angry with him for tricking me thus, as I may say (and as I have called it to him), out of myself?” (382). Clarissa is caught in a trap. She implicitly knows that it is her duty as daughter to decline forbidden correspondence, just as Aunt Fanny knows that the likeliest explanation of the voice she hears is her own madness. They both, however, engage in situational thinking to bring about a desired outcome. Clarissa imagines Lovelace’s threats of violence as reality and reasons that she has no option but to write to him. In this way, she is tricked out of her full self. Fanny imagines a voice calling to her and reasons she has no option but to heed it. For Clarissa, the split has tragic consequences. Immediately after her rape, she loses her sense of reason, constantly writing and tearing up her letters. In one paper addressed to her “dear honored papa,” she says that “I don’t presume to think you should receive me – no, indeed – my name is – I don’t know what my name is! – I never dare to wish to come into your family again!” (890). This sense of disintegration continues later when she attributes her declining health to “inward decay” (1276).

Clarissa’s undoing down to the loss of her own name even more strongly presages The Haunting of Hill House, when Eleanor reads the large chalk lettering that materializes on the wall, spelling out “HELP ELEANOR COME HOME” (107). She feels immediately violated by this appropriation of her identity in a way she cannot fully explain:

Those letters spelled out my name, and none of you know what that feels like – it’s so familiar… Look. There’s only one of me, and it’s all I’ve got. I hate seeing myself dissolve and slip and separate so that I’m living in one half, my mind, and I see the other half of me helpless and frantic and driven and I can’t stop it.

(118)

Eleanor struggles to describe how the wall’s possession of the visible form of her name splits her in two, with the material half of her being sliding away and leaving her mind stranded alone. She accuses Hill House of a “divide and conquer” strategy reminiscent of Lovelace’s plan to destroy Clarissa’s “pride of being corporally inviolate” before gaining full possession of his captive (879). These thefts of names thus mark a halfway point to complete loss of self, and the fractured protests of both Clarissa and Eleanor reflect the damage already inflicted.

In the sense that each emphasizes the female struggle to attain and maintain self-possession, Clarissa and Hill House stage an identical contest on one fundamental level: will a woman be brought to consent to her own spiritual destruction, to sign her name to her own ruin? Lovelace reasons that his attempts on Clarissa’s virtue will do harm only if she allows her own seduction, while if she happens to prevail, her virtuous defense will only add to her reputation and glory. This rationale allows him postpone justice to the wronged lady, while he works to bring about his ulterior purpose of gaining a mistress who “will be mine upon my own terms” (886). Eleanor likewise realizes the “game” that Hill House is playing with her in order to dominate and destroy her, but she is unable to resist its seduction:

in the churning darkness where [Eleanor] fell endlessly nothing was real except her own hands white around the bedpost… It is too much, she thought, I will relinquish my possession of this self of mine… “I’ll come,” she said aloud.

(150)

The high-contrast image of Eleanor’s white-knuckled hands desperately clinging amid an infinite fall into darkness signifies her finite capacity for self-possession capitulating to the House’s seemingly unlimited assault. Hill House quiets instantly upon Eleanor’s promise, much as Lovelace does when Clarissa writes to him with a seeming surrender of her earlier unequivocal denial. Clarissa has learned of the depth of Lovelace’s deception and the certainty of his pursuit. By calculating on his worldly interpretation of her words, she commits a slant-lie:

Sir, I have good news to tell you. I am setting out with all diligence for my father’s house. I am bid to hope that he will receive this poor penitent with a goodness peculiar to himself… So, pray, sir, don’t disturb or interrupt me – I beseech you don’t – You may in time, possibly, see me at my father’s, at least, if it be not your own fault.

(1233)

By speaking allegorically of her heavenly father, Clarissa feigns consent and signs her name to a document that suggests an eventual reconciliation wi...