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"A Faithful Anatomy of Our Times": Reassessing Shirley Jackson

History has not been kind to Shirley Jackson. Today she is remembered almost entirely for her much-anthologized short story “The Lottery” (1948) and her 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House, a fact that does not do justice to the number and complexity of the novels and short stories she produced.1 In his preface to a posthumously published collection of her work, The Magic of Shirley Jackson (1965), her husband, critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, wrote that “for all her popularity, Shirley Jackson won surprisingly little recognition. She received no awards or prizes, grants or fellowships; her name was often omitted from lists on which it clearly belonged, or which it should have led. She saw these honors go to inferior writers.” More optimistically, Hyman predicted that his wife’s “powerful visions of suffering and inhumanity” would be found “increasingly significant and meaningful,” that her work was among “that small body of literature produced in our time that seems apt to survive.” 2 But in fact Jackson’s fiction, with the exception of the two works mentioned above, is rarely read or written about today; in Lynette Carpenter’s phrase, she has been “written out of literary history.” 3 Carpenter suggests that Jackson’s many publications in women’s magazines and two books that humorously fictionalized her domestic life with her husband and children, Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957), caused her devaluation by traditional male critics who had difficulty reconciling Jackson’s housewife status with her production of Gothic narratives.4 Jackson, Carpenter wrote in 1988, needed a reevaluation by feminist critics, a reevaluation that has to some degree already occurred. It has not, however, led to any sustained critical attention to Jackson’s work, in spite of Darryl Hattenhauer’s contention that criticism of Jackson has recently “flourished.” Hattenhauer, who uses John Barth’s term “proto-postmodernist” to describe Jackson’s work, characterizes her as an “inchoate postmodernist” whose writing has been neglected because its complexity and variety of forms have made it difficult to categorize.5