Picture this: someone sitting at a desk, a cigarette hanging from the corner of their mouth. Eyes alight, skimming through the words stamped on a sheet of paper fitted between the typewriter’s handles. This is what most people would picture when imagining their favourite author in the process of The Craft, as writing is often referred to, but there’s something different about this scene in particular: the silence is constantly broken by cheerful cries of children and static interruptions from a husband’s television show in the other room, causing a sudden shift from the pensive atmosphere to an almost homely one. In the room is not a man but a woman, Shirley Jackson.

            During her lifetime, she gained considerable recognition from novels like We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House, which were recently made into famous TV series, as well as numerous essays and critiques published in magazines. She’s still regarded as “the Queen of Horror” due to the influence her writing had on other authors of the genre, notably Stephen King, who, on different occasions, praised her works and called them a great source of inspiration for his novels.

            A recurring theme in all of her stories is womanhood. Tales of clever women, unruly children, and forgotten wives are at the core of Shirley’s imagination, but also her life. She married Stanley Hyman, a literary editor, soon after finishing college, and they began working on their own ‘nuclear family,’ the definition given to the ideal fifties American family. In this conception, prevalent in countries weakened by WWII, the father would always be the provider for everyone, while the mother looks after the household and children. Though women weren’t encouraged to do anything more than that, Jackson quickly affirmed herself as the family’s breadwinner by publishing short stories and cookery advice in various magazines, earning more than Hyman and also taking care of their four children. Quoting her son, Laurie ‘’She did work hard. She was always writing, or thinking about writing, and she also did all the shopping and cooking. The meals were also on time.’’

            In fact, the beating heart of both her works is women and her experiences as one, especially during a historical period where, as Jackson told in one of her essays, you went to the hospital to give birth and answered ‘writer’ when the nurse asked your occupation, just for her to smile and write ‘housewife’ in the blank space. She explored, along with the reader, how the evil (and good) within people transforms us from the beginning of our lives, and gave us an honest look into a woman’s life, once she is surrounded by noisy children, a house that seems to have a penchant for turning itself into a mess, and an absent husband. At times, she does so with a healthy dose of humor and casualness, mostly in her personal writings, while in her fiction, she turns her fears, as a wife, mother, and human being, into nightmares for the reader to partake in, without having to use ‘loud’ words as others did. Shirley Jackson simply tucks us into bed and makes up one story after the other, until we can’t sleep, not because of the occasional violence found there, but because we, as women, could actually find ourselves in the situations she describes.

Chapter One: Childhood

            To understand why we become what we are, Jackson observes how children interact with their surroundings. Our first encounters with the outside world shape us from the smallest ‘Hello, how are you?’, and she knew that well. We see this in, arguably, her most famous story, after The Lottery, ‘The Witch’: it lets the reader peek into what seems to be a normal scene, that of a mother riding a train with her two children, a baby girl and the eldest, Johnny. He’s curious, insisting that he saw a witch standing outside, until an elderly man walks into their cabin. At first, he entertains Johnny, asking questions, once the little boy points at his mom. We learn that the man, too, had a sister, which he describes as ‘so pretty and so nice’, and that he gave her everything he could. In the story’s climax, the stranger confesses that he ‘bought her a rocking-horse and a doll and a million lollipops, and then I took her and I put my hands around her neck and I pinched her until she was dead.’ Gruesome descriptions of what he did to the girl follow, exhibiting a general distaste for womankind hidden beneath his actions, until Johnny’s mother forces the man to flee. This story shows that children, girls particularly, are the easiest victims, and also that kids can spot evil instinctively.

            We often question whether humans are inherently evil, born to act despicably for the sake of deriving pleasure from it. Yet, Jackson argues that we are the ones to be blamed for such behaviour and should take full responsibility for it.

Chapter Two: Youth

            For Shirley, a woman’s youth is a moment of loss, meant to understand who she truly is. It’s a confusing period for some, while for others it represents the affirmation that yes, you can learn how to be yourself, even if it’s often unaccepted.

            This concept is explored in ‘We Have Always Lived in the Castle’, where eighteen-year-old Mary Catherine ‘Merricat’ Blackwood lives with her older sister, Constance, in their mansion, isolated from the suburban town nearby. Their parents died six years before from arsenic poisoning under mysterious circumstances, revealed later in the book, leaving them alone with their disabled uncle. Constance is agoraphobic, forcing Merricat to be the one to go downtown grocery shopping once every week. There, she is met with the constant judgment of people, both towards her family history and herself as a person: Mary is passionate about nature, magic, and literature, which grants her mistrust from the townfolk, who are certain she killed her family. The book is written from her viewpoint, and the rising anger she feels for those who make fun of her every time is clear: Merricat doesn’t scream at the kids on the street who insult her or talk back at the adults, instead choosing to ignore them. She knows who she is and doesn’t let herself be influenced by strangers, loves her routine with her sister, but it looks as if things refuse to stay as they are, as change keeps barging into her life, whether she wants it to or not. Adolescence is a period where we need to learn not only to affirm ourselves in an increasingly harsh world, but it’s also a moment of understanding of who we are and what we are willing to accept and get through to have a good life as ourselves, not what others want us to be.

            While Merricat is fighting to preserve her identity, seventeen-year-old Natalie Waite from ‘Hangsman’ has already fallen prey to judgment. She’s about to go to university and feels suffocated by her parents’ expectations, particularly her father’s, a turbulent writer, who tries to impose his ideals and personality on Natalie. Her mother’s an alcoholic, never attempting to fight against her husband’s tyranny, which forces the young woman to balance her dysfunctional home life with a newborn sense of transformation that is growing within herself. Even when she manages to move out and go to college, the hopes of being able to finally grow her individuality vanish, as student life is different from what she had pictured: her peers ignore her, and Natalie realizes that she finds other girls shallow and self-centered; the vivid imaginary world she previously built to escape her home life isn’t enough anymore. Her grades drop due to loneliness creeping back in, and she chooses not to say anything about her mental state, as, during that time, women who experienced any kind of temporary psychosis or visions due to health issues were sent to asylums, where, if recovery wasn’t achieved, inhumane treatments like lobotomy were performed. After a long period of confusion, Natalie confronts her past fears and suddenly feels like that impending’ sense of change present before going to college had turned true, for the better, as she is now an adult, herself.

            Both novels show how our society tends to isolate and ostracize those deemed different early on: Mary Catherine’s kind who refuse to subject themselves to the rules, all while looking after their interests, are whispered to be witches (a common theme in Jackson’s works, result of her lifetime passion for the occult) and even murderers, destined to be persecuted forever. Women like Natalie, who believe that hiding their true selves will spare them from being looked down upon, soon conclude that people have an innate ability to spot variations in patterns, and that women will be the first to feel the teeth of societal constraints around their necks, no matter what they do to avoid it.

Chapter Three: Adulthood

‘‘I’m Joyce Duncan. I used to be Joyce Richards.’’

‘‘Yes?’’

‘’Don’t you remember me?’’

‘’No.’’

‘’I used to live next door. […] Don’t you remember?’’

‘’Can’t remember everyone, you know.’’

‘’Well, I remember you.’’

            This passage from The Lie perfectly encapsulates how it feels to look back on your early life once you’ve gone through fundamental changes like marriage. In this short story, the protagonist Joyce decides to go visit her hometown soon after getting married, hoping to rediscover that part of herself she left there and see how old acquaintances are holding up. To her disappointment, everyone, even the old neighbor who had seen her grow up, seemed to have completely forgotten who she was and looked at Joyce as if she were an annoying phantom coming to their door just to pester them. Most female characters in Jackson’s novels are tied together by the same two elements: marriage and motherhood, not because she adhered to the previously mentioned idea that ‘’Girls ought to get married, […] Keeps them out of trouble.’’ As Joyce’s neighbor says, but because she felt the need to explain how radically her life had changed after becoming both a mother and wife, without hiding beneath the filter of utter perfection she was expected to place over her stories.

            Men, and not women, were the elusive figures in Shirley’s imagination: The Daemon Lover describes just that, a young woman desperately searching for her husband on their wedding day. She goes around asking strangers if they’d seen a man resembling her lover, to which most sneer at her rising desperation and redirect her, yet she never finds him. If she were a man, the constant questioning for a lost wife would be welcomed as caring, not a pitiful attempt at being loved.

            Jackson doesn’t expose the lives of only one ‘type’ of mother, but goes as far as finding maternal traits in Constance, Merricat’s older sister, who, after their parents’ passing, looks after the house and younger sibling, trying to advise and be there for her at every step. Sometimes, the women in her books are striving to control the uncontrollable, like Mrs. Walpole in ‘The Renegade’, who unsuccessfully tries to make sure everything in her life, children, house, husband, etc., is in place, only to end up being the victim of the same chaos she wants to tame. Many of the mothers in these texts are this way; Jackson’s attempt to give women in her own situation a voice, yet we occasionally see a ‘careless’ mother, like Alice’s in Arabian Nights, who, along with her husband and friends, manipulates the little girl in various ways.

            However, the rawest account of motherhood and home life comes from her personal essays, published in various women’s magazines across the years, where she temporarily walks away from the darker side of womanhood to think about how difficult it is to go to restaurants along with four children, though the night almost always ends up in laughter, and admits that she and her husband tried multiple times to set strict rules in the house, just how they saw other couples their age do, yet it seemed that they never lasted long, which was alright with them, The idea of the perfect family, the nuclear family, and an overall perfect life was unattainable and dull.

            What Shirley Jackson did during her career is far deeper than writing scary novels that would inspire horror writers for years to come, as she was one of the first women to speak up on what truly happened in American homes during its modern ‘Golden Age’, almost twenty years before the first Women’s Rights Movements during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. She didn’t want to demonize motherhood, as some thought, instead meditating on how they wouldn’t be such horrifying experiences, for most, if the recurring hardships they included weren’t normalized, criticizing not women or children, but people who took pleasure from town gossip and mocking others’ weaknesses, their suffering, and identity. Shirley Jackson gives voice to those women who can’t make themselves heard over the everyday life’s noise.