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Ann Arbor, MI 48106 "TEîE LOTTERY'S" HOSTAGE: THE LIFE AND FEMINIST FICTION OF SHIRLEY JACKSON DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University By Sue Veregge Lape, B.A., M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 1992 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Barbara Rigney Debra Moddelmog Frank O'Hare Advisor Department of English For Dennis James Quon Nothing gold can stay ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank Professor Barbara Rigney for her unflagging interest in my academic career and for her belief in and support of this study. I am indebted to Professor Debra Moddelmog for her painstaking attention to detail and for her high academic standards, and to Professor Frank O'Hare, teacher and friend, for his wisdom and guidance over the years. I am also deeply grateful for the friends who have been with me during my years as a graduate student and during the writing of this dissertation: Joyce Fee, Lisa Navarro, Jan Schmittauer, Catherine Hardy, Dennis Quon, and Viola Newton. I especially want to acknowledge Dan Chemek, who stood by me during the times when I doubted myself and my ability to finish. My sons, Chad and Rodd, have always been my strong supporters, and their father, Larry, made it possible for me to have the time needed to complete this project My heartfelt thanks to them as well as to my brother, Tom. I also wish to pay my respects to the students over the years who have reminded me that the value of any work lies primarily in its ability to teach the reader. I thought of them often as I worked to recover the reputation of a writer who deserves to be read by everyone. It is my hope that this study will encourage teachers to bring Shirley Jackson's work back into the classroom. She, above all others, has been my greatest teacher and inspiration during the writing of this dissertation. m VITA August 11,1944, Bom - Richmond, hidiana 1963. BA., Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio 1985. M.A, Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio 1981-1989. Graduate Teaching Assistant Ohio State University 1989 - Present.. Assistant Professor Columbus State Community College, Columbus, Ohio PUBLICATIONS Rhetorical Index, Rereading America. 1992-93. "Schweitzer's Bride, "Naming the Sorrow," The Incliner. 1992 "Practice," "Weathering," Spring Street. 1991 "Computer Passion," Poet & Critic." 1991 "Response to Janice Gohm Webster," APE Bulletin. Winter 1990 w "Response to Student Writing," The St. Martin's Handbook. 1989 "Venus' Basket," "Feeding From the Earth," "Weathering, "Georgia O'Keeffe," Gambit Spring, 1988. "Getting Wet" "Pictures From El Salvador: The Book of the Missing Dead," And Review. 1988 ""Surviving," Sojourner. 1987 "Tigress," "Land Magic," WIND Literary Journal. 1979 "History," "Flying Through Inner Space," "Origins," "Taurobolium," "The Bombadier," The Ohio Journal. 1978 FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English Studies in Rhetoric and Composition: Professor Frank O'Hare Studies in Feminist Criticism: Professor Marlene Longenecker Studies in Creative Writing: Professor Gordon Grigsby and Professor David Citino TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION.................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS................................................................................................. iü VITA................................................................................................................................... iv CHAPTER PAGE I. SHIRLEY JACKSON: “THE LOTTERY’S HOSTAGE”.......................... 1 n. HANGSAMAN: AN AMERICAN GIRL’S BILDUNGSROMAN...........28 m . THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE: DOUBLING AND THE RHETORIC OF THE DEVOURING HOUSE..........................................100 IV. WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE: THE HEROINE'S DILEMMA: MADNESS, SUICIDE, OR MURDER?...............................140 V. WOMAN ALONE, WOMAN FULFILLED? SHIRLEY JACKSON'S FINAL ESCAPE...................................................................182 VL NOTES...................................................................................................... 207 Vn. WORKS CITED........................................................................................221 vn CHAFFER I SHIRLEY JACKSON: “THE LOTTERY’S HOSTAGE” [T]he woman writer throughout most of history has had to state her self definitions in code, disguising passion as piety, rebellion as obedience. Alicia Ostriker Shirley Jackson was an unconventional woman, a gifted writer (more gifted than has been acknowledged) and at the same time a traditional wife and mother of four children (two boys, two girls-the perfect Fifties procreative formula). As a writer, she was also an original. Shirley Jackson belonged to no literary movement and was a member of no 'school.' She listened to her own voice, kept her own counsel, isolated herself from aU fashionable intellectual and literary currents. She was not an urban or existential, or 'new' or 'anti- novelist' She was unique. ("School of One" 83) In her lifetime, Shirley Jackson published five novels, two significant works of nonfiction, a children's book, over seventy-five short stories, and several critical essays on fiction and writing. Yet she has received very little recent critical attention, particularly from feminist scholars. As Linda Metcalf notes in her study of Jackson, the author's short stories have "never been systematically criticized, and very little has been written in the way of practical criticism" about her novels (16). During her lifetime, as Friedman acknowledges, Shirley Jackson usually received accolades from critics for her "storytelling abilities"; as a writer, 1 2 however, Friedman claims “she has been little understood" (118). "It would take a rash man," Edmund Fuller said in a review of Jackson's first novel. The Sundial, "to assert dogmatically what Shirley Jackson was up to in any of the novels generated by her unique talent" (qtd. in Friedman 118). In his response. Fuller reveals what I consider to be a central problem for critics of Shirley Jackson's fiction: their inability to categorize her as either an entertainer, a fabulist, or a satirist Male critics also seem to have trouble reconciling "gender with geme," as Lyimette Carpenter has noted ("Domestic Comedy" 143). Another less substantial annoyance that stalked Jackson throughout her literary career, noted by Elizabeth Frank, is a tendency on the part of critics to identify her as the "Sorceress of Bennington" (6), an amateur witch who conjured supernatural tales for gullible readers, rather than the practiced writer of serious fiction she was. This association, however annoying, is not surprising; Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar point out that "the threat of the hag, the monster, the witch, the madwoman, still lurks behind the compliant paragon of women's stories," and that just the mention of witches "is to be reminded once again of the traditional (patriarchal) association between creative women and monsters" (Madwoman 79). Indeed, one of the myths about Jackson's magical prowess circulated among journalists is that she had "broken the leg of Alfred Knopf [at one time her publisher] by sticking pins into a voodoo doll" (Frank 67). Metcalf quotes one anonymous New York Times critic who christened Jackson the "Virginia Werewolf of Seance-Fiction" (52). After the publication of her first short story collection, "The Lotterv" and Other Stories, several critics wrote that Jackson's work "signaled a return to the supernatural and some sort of devil worship" (qtd. in Breit 15). Jackson has often been identified with another famous teller of supernatural tales, Edgar Allan Poe (to her credit, certainly), and recently her work has been compared to that of Stephen King (not to her credit), whom Margo Jefferson

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