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The Lottery’s hostage: The life and feminist fiction of Shirley Jackson

Lape, Sue Veregge, Ph.D.

The Ohio State University, 1992

UMI 300 N. Zeeb Rd. 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 identifies as "our most flamboyant ringmaster of terror" (70). One critic. 3 cognizant of Jackson’s interest in witchcraft, wrote that "Miss Jackson writes not with a pen but with a broomstick" (qtd. in Breit 15). As a result of Jackson's unfortunate association with black magic and the horror genre, her status as a writer has diminished considerably since her death in 1965. Only four dissertations have been devoted to Shirley Jackson's works: John Gordon Parks, "The Possibility of Evil: The Fiction of Shirley Jackson" (1973); Raymond Miller, "Shirley Jackson's Fiction, An Introduction (1974); Michael Narducci, "Theme,

Character and Technique in the Novels of Shirley Jackson" (1980); and Linda Metcalfs

"Shirley Jackson in Her Fiction: A Rhetorical Search for the Implied Author" (1986). Of these, only Metcalfs study approaches Jackson's fiction even tangentially from a feminist perspective. One full-length critical study of Jackson's complete work has been published in the Twavne United States Authors Series, but that was in 1976, nearly fifteen years ago.

In 1988, Judy Oppenheimer's Private Demons was published, the first and only biography ever written about Shirley Jackson. A great deal of Jackson's critical obscurity is the result of readers' single-minded identification of Jackson with her short story, "The Lottery." As Peter S. Prescott points out in his introduction to The Bird's Nest, nothing "irritates a productive writer more than to be identified with only one of his or her works, and that one inevitably written early in life"

(xi). Prescott considers "The Lottery" to be "the most famous short story published by an American since World War II," a story that has, in his opinion, been read by "virtually everyone under forty in this country who holds a high school diploma" (xi). I would extend that to everyone under fifty and add that almost no one today can pass through Freshman Composition or an introductory literature course in any college or university in the United

States without reading that the "morning of June 27th was clear and sunny with the fresh warmth of a fuU-summer day" ("The Lotterv" and Other Stories 291). 4

"The Lottery" first appeared in the June 26,1948 issue of The New Yorker and, as Oppenheimer notes, its effect was "instant and cataclysmic" (129):

This story was incendiary; readers acted as if a bomb had blown up in their faces, as indeed in a sense it had. Shirley struck a nerve in mid-twentieth century America the way few writers have ever succeeded in doing, at any time. She had told people a painful truth about themselves (129)

Letters from readers poured in by the thousands. Some of them begged for an explanation, but most were filled with "abuse, anger, and tearful horror" (Oppenheimer 129). It was clear to readers and critics alike, whether they admitted it or not, that this composite "raw and defensive emotional reaction" demonstrated that on its deepest level, "The Lottery" was only "too well understood by those who experienced it" (Oppenheimer 129).l Almost no one with a discerning sense of talent and craftsmanship would deny that "The Lottery" is exemplary by any critical standards we might apply to it as a work of short fiction. "She's written a real masterpiece," Stanley Hyman told poet Ben BelliL Bellit agreed: "It was the pure thing. . . the real, the immortal thing. It was incandescent, the mythic thing you find in Greek literature" (qtd. in Oppenheimer 28). Nor would anyone deny that students should be assigned "The Lottery"; it is a finely crafted work, as well as an adroit demonstration of literary devices such as symbolism and foreshadowing. Rather, the problem is that the success of "The Lottery" has, in part, prevented readers (and I include teachers and scholars here) from becoming familiar with any of Jackson's other works, nor do they know much about Jackson, the woman and artist As one who is interested in reviving Jackson's reputation as a serious writer, I hoped that Judy Oppenheimer's biography. Private Demons: The Life Of Shirley Jackson, would provide a substantive basis for a new perspective on her work. Unfortunately, this study relies primarily upon interviews conducted by Oppenheimer, whose credentials as a reporter and movie critic leave something to be desired in terms of literary scholarship. She makes 5 no serious attempt to interrogate Jackson’s work critically. The book does, however, provide some useful insight into the very complicated existence of a writer blessed with multifarious curiosity (sometimes referred to as brilliance) and discipline (seriousness of purpose) in a culture which, during her lifetime, gave little respect to either if they were exhibited by a woman. Another factor contributing to Jackson's slide into critical obscurity has to do with a particular attitude demonstrated by some feminist scholars toward the work of women writers they do not consider feminists (Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Coimer are two examples), yet as Peter Rabinowitz notes, an ”[a]wareness of female tradition provides a different kind of notice" (220) which should allow us to discover in a text what has been previously overlooked by traditional male critics, or in Terry Eagleton's words, to "show a text as it cannot show itself' (Literarv Theory 43). Lyrmette Carpenter agrees that "feminist critics should be able to appreciate. . . [Jackson's] experiences as wife, mother, and Great American novelist" ("Domestic Comedy" 144), or for that matter, any woman author who articulates the experiences of wife, mother, and artisL Although Jackson did, in fact, deal with themes of the lonely career girl ("Elizabeth"), the middle-aged suburban wife in search of an identity ("The Tooth"), and the frustrations of an aging woman who refuses to give up her imaginative power ("Island"), the fact that many of these stories appeared in Good Housekeeping or Woman's Home Companion, rather than in The New Yorker, has apparently diminished the possibility that they would be viewed as serious fiction. However these works do "challenge patriarchal modes of writing" and traditional "gender arrangements" which, according to Alix Kates Shulman, qualify them for inclusion in a feminist canon (3). Perhaps Jackson's husband, Stanley Hyman, exemplifies, as well as any politically correct feminist, the general critical disdain directed toward magazines that appeal primarily to housewives and mothers: "womb's home companion," Hyman wrote to 6 a friend, "is currently threatening to buy one [short story] for eleven hundred smacks. You and I should have been plumbers!" (qtd. in Oppenheimer 130-131). Even Judy Oppenheimer, who should know better after having documented the life of a writer permeated with the wreckage of a chauvinistic marriage and lacerating concerns about identity and self-worth, asserts that Jackson was "no feminist" because "her vision was personal, not political" (160). Yet feminists understand that the personal is political when what is written by a woman depicts the situation of a believable female character who struggles against patriarchal disempowerment Very few of Jackson's female characters either blindly or kindly acquiesce to their fate. Jackson had "no patience with the idea of victimization or passivity," and though, as Oppenheimer points out, "she did not need a political movement" to define strong female characters who were "capable of exercising power" (164), neither does that fact exclude her from consideration as a feminist writer. Oppenheimer's failure to define feminism and her persistent refusal to read Jackson's fiction as the work of an emerging femiitist are unfortunate; nor does Oppenheimer recognize the impact such a careless allegation ("she was no feminist") might have upon future critics relying almost exclusively on this one biographical source for information about Jackson's life.

Krista Ratcliffe, in her rhetorical analysis of the essays of Virginia Wolf and Adrieime Rich, provides a useful distinction among the terms feminist, feminine, and female. Ratcliffe considers the feminist tradition to be that which is "grounded in ideology; feminine, in socially constructed gender differences; and female, in biological sex differences" (15). Since Shirley Jackson had no overtly articulated ideological perspective, feminist or otherwise, many of my colleagues would disavow any coimection between

Jackson and feminism. However, as I argue in this study, Jackson, in much of her fiction, does articulate a number of important concerns that continue to occupy feminist writers and critics: the struggle to recover the "lost little girl" of our pasts; a resistance to the imperative 7 of domestic enclosure; criticism of the patriarchal family; condemnation of the sexual abuse of female children by fathers and surrogate fathers; and the attempt to give voice to what

Barbara Rigney calls the "tragedy of one's own fragmentation and alienation from the self' (7). According to Gilbert and Gubar, the woman writer's "quest for her own story" is her attempt to re-attach or re-associate her body parts, which represent not only her female sexuality, but her entire history as a woman as well (Madwoman 76). In her life as well as in her work, Shirley Jackson gives us a powerful insight into one woman's struggle to integrate the disassociated lives of wife, mother, writer, and wage earner; this literary act of recovery places Jackson within the feminist tradition of the literature of disassociation/reassociation that typically describes a woman's attempt to recognize and recover her divided selves. As Jackson once told a critic, "all my books laid end to end would be one long documentary of anxiety" (qtd. in Gates 67) and, in fact, inquiry into the "causes and consequences of female victimization" permeates Jackson's work (Carpenter, "Establishment" 32).

At times, for Jackson, the personal is not only political, the personal becomes the product itself, which is not surprising since as Georges Poulet notes in "Criticism and the

Experience of Interiority," "every word of literature is impregnated with the mind of the one who wrote it" (46). This is especially true in Jackson's case for, as Metcalf points out, "Jackson's subject matter and Jackson's experience of her subject matter are one and the same" (10). Although this study focuses primarily upon Jackson's texts, it is impossible to ignore the symbiotic relationship between the writer and the writing; therefore, it is useful, at times, to connect the events of Jackson's personal life to those depicted in her fiction. To do so is not to suggest that Jackson's work cannot or should not be read as work which represents many women; on the contrary, as Metcalf notes, Jackson's rhetorical purpose in her fiction is to "awaken the reader to [her] own nature" (38) and to the "resemblance between our lives and hers" (20). 8 The four novels selected for this study ffllangsaman. The Haunting of Hill House.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and Jackson’s unfinished work "Come Along With Me") collectively recount the perilous and seemingly interminable chronicle of a woman writer's struggle, from girlhood onward, to protect her identity and her personal space and to free herself from the constraints of patriarchal dominion in order to claim (or reclaim) her identity as a self-conceived woman. Alicia Ostriker writes of the "protracted crisis" that Adrienne Rich sufiered when she felt "unable to make coherent sense of her life as a woman, wife, and mother, her life as a poet..." (Stealing the Language 57). "I was looking desperately for clues," Rich tells us, "because if there were no clues then I thought I might be insane" (Rich, "When We Dead Awaken" 41). I am looking for clues in Shirley Jackson's fiction that articulate these same concerns, and I believe they are there, waiting to be recovered and affirmed. Rich tells us that near the end of her crisis she wrote her first poem ("Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law") about "experiencing myself as a woman," although she had not yet found the courage to use the pronotmI ("When We Dead Awaken" 45). In her life and in her work, Jackson displays this same crisis of multiple identities. She and her female characters struggle with the opposing forces of madness and sanity, of good (what a woman should be) and of evil (often what a woman wants to be). In her last work, "Come Along With Me," begun only months before her death, Jackson (just as Rich finally was able to do) moved beyond the safeseconà-persona pronoun toward the wholeness of /. Tragically, this novel was unfinished, its promise as a feminist work of integrity, unfulfilled. But Jackson's stature as an artist should not go unrealized. The literary merit of the completed novels and short stories written after the publication of "The Lottery" provides convincing evidence that Shirley Jackson deserves to be rescued from the literary narcotization of an anthologized icon. Her long battle to reconceive her identity as a woman and as a writer deserves recognition. 9

From the beginning, Jackson was at odds with the world as is evidenced by her furiously ambivalent relationship with her mother. It is easy to appreciate Jackson's ambivalence. Oppenheimer writes that when Jackson was fourteen, her mother "informed her she was an unsuccessful abortion" (14). Indeed, Jackson was not the ornamental daughter her mother wanted, but rather a "brilliant, messy, torrentially creative. .. porpoise" who had been bom to a "goldfish" (Oppenheimer 14). According to Oppenheimer, it did not take long for those close to Jackson to recognize that she possessed a "terrifying gift: the ability to see straight down through the layers of appearance, of convention, of style, of hypocrisy-right to the nutty core of reality" (17). Later, when Jackson was a student at Syracuse University, this quality of discriminate seer and her extraordinary gift with words, attracted her future husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman. Leafing with a jaundiced eye through a copy of The Threshold. Syracuse University's student literary magazine, Hyman sat upright and banged on the table when he saw "Janice," Jackson's first published work. "You see this?. . . It's good. It's the only goddamn good thing in here. It's more than good. You understand? It's got something. She's got something" (qtd. in Oppenheimer 56). Jackson and Hyman were married in 1940, when she began her long-suffering life as faculty wife to an aspiring literary critic and professor. In the years to come, Hyman would "variously terrify her, amuse her, teach her, encourage her, protect her, and dominate her" (Frank 6). It is true that Hyman took Jackson's work seriously and insisted that she write every day; however, her "study" was a minuscule comer of her husband's crowded home office (not unlike Jane Austen's discreet table in the drawing room). At any moment she might be interrupted to fetch Hyman a book from the second floor of the house or to replenish the "Indian nuts" he liked to have at his fingertips while he worked (Oppenheimer

178). Their children also made demands upon Jackson, who somehow managed to write while supervising homework and preparing meals. She did all of the family shopping, usually on foot, since neither she nor Hyman drove. A neighbor once observed Jackson, 10

"hugely pregnant," pushing a grocery-laden cart up the hill toward her house, two children in tow. Stanley rushed out of the house and down the hill to meet her. "How nice," thought the neighbor, "he's going to help her" (qtd. in Oppenheimer 126). Stanley did reach for Jackson's hand, but only to grab the mail (which she collected every day from the post office) and head back into the sanctity of his study. Jackson was left to struggle the rest of the way home on her own. She finally did get a driver's license, but then she became the family chauffeur, often driving Stanley to and from his classes at Bennington College. In Stanley's domain, the house was the woman's responsibility. If the furnace went out, he'd try to do something about it, but he had no interest in the daily maintenance of a family. According to his brother, Stanley's preference was "no kids, no house, no dogs, no cats—that was someone else's responsibility" (qtd. in Oppenheimer 178), and that someone else was his wife. In spite of this time-consuming schedule, Jackson not only wrote, but published, and consequently contributed substantially to the family income. In a 1949 interview with Harvey Breit, Jackson remarked that "50 percent of my life is spent washing and dressing the children, cooking, washing dishes and clothes and mending. After I get it all to bed, I turn around to my typewriter..." (15). Li "Experience and Fiction," Jackson describes her attempt to finish a story which began as an impassioned protest against arbitrary tax audits, but became, out of necessity,

"The Night We All Had the Grip";

For one thing, I had a high fever the whole time I was writing it For another thing, I was interrupted constantly with requests to take upstairs trays of orange juice or chicken soup aspirin or ginger ale or dry sheets or boxes of crayons. For another thing, while I was writing, my husband was lying on the couch with a hot-water bottle saying that writing stories was aU very well, but suppose he died right then and there (Come Along With Me 204)

Jackson goes on to say that she, herself, was just as sick as the rest of the family; she jokes that it was "only the fact that I had to finish the story that kept me from abandoning them 11 and going someplace quiet to lie down" (204). On the surface, Jackson appears to have managed her multiple roles with ease and good humor, yet Lynnette Carpenter wonders how we can "read a catalogue of Jackson's virtues as wife, mother, and great American writer without wondering how she kept her sanity?" ("Domestic Comedy" 147). Li fact, she barely did. Jackson paid a terrible price for the demands placed upon her by her husband and family, and those she placed upon herself as a writer of serious purpose. She was ponderously overweight for most of her life, and she also drank and took barbiturates. Li 1961 she suffered a serious emotional collapse: "she couldn't leave her house, she couldn't leave her room" (Oppenheimer 247), and most frightening of all to Jackson, she couldn't write. She was treated by a psychiatrist who fed her more of the barbiturates to which she was already addicted. Perhaps her daughter SaUy understood better than anyone the true nature of her mother's illness: "I think she was made really nervous by the fact that she fought Stanley and she fought the world and she fought her parents to be true to herself' (qtd. in Oppenheimer 248). Jackson struggled all her life to achieve a balance between her unorthodox imagination and the necessary compromises expected of a woman coming to maturity in the 1940s. As Oppenheimer states:

She got the four kids and the big house and the smart husband and she went crazy anyway. And I think she felt really bad. She felt bad that the books weren't enough therapy, that writing a book every year or two didn't keep her sane. Because she put her guts into it But it wasn't enough. (248)

Shirley Jackson died on August 8,1965, four months before her forty-sixth birthday, but despite her early death and extensive family obligations, she managed to leave behind an impressive list of publications that spanned two decades. Her first published piece, "My Life with R. H. Macy," appeared in The New Republic in 1941: Jackson continued to publish in The New Yorker. Mademoiselle. and

American Mercury. Her story, "Come Dance With Me in Ireland," was included in Best 12

American Short Stories. 1944. In spite of being a new mother, Jackson published eight

stories during 1944. She "learned early that the special breed known as the housewife- mother-writer must make important choices and firm decisions" (Friedman 26). The baby must be fed, but the dirty windows could wait Somehow between the necessities and "obsessities" of life (by this time another child had been bom), Jackson found the time and energy to begin Life Among the Savages and to publish her nemesis, "The Lottery," in

1948. She also published her first novel that year. The Road Through the Wall. In 1949, Jackson began to sell family stories to women's magazines such as Good Housekeeping and Woman's Home Companion. Unfortunately, these stories, as well as her two works of domestic fiction. Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, are

considered at best "lesser works" by most critics, some of them feminists.^ I find it hard to understand why any woman writer’s works that deal with domesticity should, on that account alone, be discounted as "family stories" and not as literature. As with most writers,

male or female, Jackson's "writing had always come directly out of her life, and now that her

life included children and housekeeping, it was inevitable that she would start writing about that as well" (Oppenheimer 119). These stories were grounded in Jackson's experience as a woman, and yet that experience has been regarded as less important than that of her male

contemporaries who wrote about their lives as fighters, lovers, and soldiers of fortune.

Carpenter acknowledges that feminist scholars have begun to "challenge accusations of

insignificance directed at women writers by traditional male critics" ("Domestic Comedy"

144); however, to date, Jackson's domestic chronicles have received very little serious critical

attention. Jackson continued to publish widely throughout her lifetime. The list attests to her versatility (and vitality-another daughter had been bom in 1948) as a writer : The New

Mexico Ouarterlv Review. The Yale Review. Colliers. Readers Digest Woman's Home Companion, and Best Television Plays of 1953. In 1951, her second novel, Hangsaman. 13 the story of an adolescent gkl's struggle to maintain her identity as an aspiring writer, was recognized by critics as one of the outstanding books of the year (Friedman 26-28). In

1954, Jackson's novel about multiple personalities. The Bird’s Nest was published. The book received excellent reviews and was optioned by Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer who released it as Lizzie. Unfortunately, Lizzie was "met head on by The Three Faces of Eve, another, much more skillful movie about a multiple personality” (Oppenheimer 193) whose popularity eclipsed that of Lizzie. The Bird's Nest, however, remains a classic study of the fragmented life of a woman, written several years before the public became aware of such a clinical condition, and many years before femirtists began to acknowledge multiple lives as a condition of being female in a society that preferred women served up in pieces. In 1956, Jackson wrote The Witchcraft of Salem ViUage. a well-researched book for pre-teen readers which discusses the Puritan preoccupation with witchcraft in America and in England. She continued to write for magazine publication, and in 1959, The Haunting of

Hill House is released. As I demonstrate in Chapter 3, Hill House was much more than a simple tale of terror. Like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, it is the story of a woman's struggle for identity and her eventual engulfinent by the patriarchal structure. Jackson's last novel. We Have Alwavs Lived in the Castle, was brought out in 1963 and named by Time as one of the ten best novels of that year. She was at work on her last novel,

"Come Along With Me," when she died. Today, almost thirty years after her death, Jackson is regarded by many as a better-than-average storyteller with a gift for entertaining readers, but a writer whose style is considered by some critics to be too simplistic. Because of Jackson's straightforward prose style, Lenemaja Friedman is convinced that Jackson avoids

"endless philosophical meanderings, affectations, and fussiness "(161). Linda Metcalf disagrees, and so do I. Metcalf points out that "serious writers have searched for meaning in Jackson's workbecause the moral charge which shoots through her fiction is so strong" (11; my italics). In her study of Jackson's rhetorical style, Metcalf asserts that Jackson's 14 writing shows a "strong philosophical bent" (9) and that she has the "instincts of a moralist" (12). Friedman does agree, as do most reasonable critics, that all her life, Jackson championed "the cause of the underdog" and worked, in her stories, to expose prejudice, especially that against Negroes and Jews" (25). However, not as much attention is paid to her published efforts to convey a better understanding of the lives of women in a patriarchal culture, in spite of the fact that many of Jackson's short stories demonstrate that she was acutely aware of the price women must pay to the patriarchy. Perhaps the story that articulates Jackson’s subterranean anger toward male privilege more clearly than any other is

"EHzabeth." The protagonist of "Elizabeth" is a thirtyish "brisk young businesswoman" with a

"one-room home" and the surname of Style ("The Lotterv" and Other Stories 151). Elizabeth Style is a literary agent who, instead of making her own mark on the world of publishing, has settled for working behind the scenes in order to promote a man far less able and intelligent than she. Robert Shax, the senior partner in an agency Elizabeth actually created, is a balding, paunchy coward whose childish temper and timidity have cost the firm clients and cash over the years. He is also her ineffectual lover of eleven years. "Robbie, " as she calls him, hires an eighteen-year-old blonde with questionable secretarial skills to manage the office (her strongest attributes seem to be her compact and lipstick). When Elizabeth raises the issue of the new secretary, Robbie responds, smugly, that she is jealous. Elizabeth regards his "red face" across the table from hen "He thinks I'm awed. . . [that] he's a man, and he's cowed me" (169). Elizabeth knows that Robbie is really a pre- pubescent child who only feigns authority, yet rather than require him to grow up, she accepts the job of firing the inefficient secretary. Disappointed in Robbie as well as in herself, Elizabeth phones an old acquaintance to maneuver a dinner date. The man is obviously uninterested in any renewal of the friendship, but like Robbie is unable to speak up for himself. The story closes with Elizabeth, armed in a "dark red silk dress," preparing 15 to do battle with the drabness of her life. Unfortunately, her plan includes the new man, one more child to be flattered and managed. However competent Elizabeth Style may appear to be, she cannot forge a new life without the help of a man. Any man, however incompetent, is better than no man. In several of her short stories, Jackson also demonstrates a concern with issue of sexual abuse, a theme that is revived in Hangsaman. The Haunting of Hill House, and

Have Alwavs Lived in the Castle. "I Know Who I Love" is the story of a yotmg woman, Catherine Vincent, who spends most of her life trying to escape the tyrannical chauvinism of her father, a clergyman. Reverend Vincent is almost obsessively concerned with his daughter's virginity, suggesting that perhaps he is repressing his own incestuous feelings for her. He forbids Catherine to associate with boys or attend parties where "kissing games" might be played, and ends her friendship with another girl who introduces Catherine to the art of flirting. Catherine seems to sense her father's real motives in keeping her away from other males. When Mrs. Vincent tries to talk to Catherine about "delicate subjects," she laughs and tells her mother, "If I have any questions. 111 ask Daddy" (Come Along With Me 53V

In another story, "The Bus" (1965), the theme of abuse/incest is less evident, but still present in the symbol of the doll. "The Bus" concerns Old Miss Harper who is returning to her childhood home. On the way, she falls asleep and either dreams that she is forced to leave the bus or is actually put off by the driver at an unfamiliar crossroads in the middle of nowhere. Miss Harper is picked up by two men in a truck and driven to a house that is

"illuminated only by a sign, hanging crooked, which read BEERBar & Grill'' (186). She is amazed at the resemblance between this house and one she lived in as a child. Once inside, the old woman is taken to a room she recognizes immediately as one "that had always been hers" (189). When she opens a closet door she discovers aU her childhood toys: "It's my snake [symbolic of the phallus]. . . it's my old snake, and it's come alive" (191). Further 16 back in the cave-like closet. Miss Harper sees a toy clown, "bright and cheerful," her doll house, and a "big, beautiful doU" sitting on a small chair. "Rosabelle," she cries out

"Rosabelle, it’s me" (191). "Go away," the doll quacks, "go away, old lady, go away." Miss Harper runs from the room screaming "Mommy, Mommy" (191). The doll represents

Miss Harper as a small child who was "played with" and then abandoned. The memory of the childhood (or perhaps even infant) abuse has been shoved far back into the old woman's consciousness, into the closet of her mind, until the scene is re-awakened by the doll. "The Bus" is reminiscent of another feminist work, Doris Lessing's The Memoirs of a Survivor. in which a female protagonist walks through a wall into an abusive childhood. There are overtones (or perhaps undertones) of incest in both stories. Although Jackson never explicitly writes about sex or incest, there is also a strong suggestion, in Hangsaman. that Natalie Waite is either molested or raped by a guest at her father's party. Eleanor in The Haunting of Hill House, and Merricat and Constance in We Have Alwavs Lived in the

Castle, also exhibit behavior that may identify them as incest survivors. There are other notable examples of feminist themes and concerns in Jackson's short fiction. "The Visit" (1950), for instance, describes a house and grotmds with "carefully planned and tended gardens close upon all sides" (Come Along With Me 911 so similar to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's prison house ofThe Yellow Wallpaper, one can only wonder whether Jackson, by some fortuitous accident, gained access to a manuscript denied most readers until 1960. There is also a tower, which Margaret, the young protagonist, finds irresistible; it is the same symbol of phallic power used by Jackson in The Haunting of Hill House nine years later.

Finally, there is "The Tooth" (1950) which deals with the confused identities of Clara Spenser, a suburban housewife who journeys to New York to have a tooth extracted. Outside of her domestic enclosure, and imder the influence of pain-killing drugs, Clara has trouble defining just who she is: 17

She looked into the mirror as though into a group of strangers, all staring at her or around her; no one was familiar in the group, no one smiled at her or looked at her with recognition; you'd think my own face would know me, she thought, with a queer numbness in her throat (238)

Clara does not like the vision of the woman she sees in the mirror, which is a grotesque combination of the old, submissive Clara, and the possibility of a new Clara who can live alone in the city without the support of a husband. She touches her face, trying to find a clue, but nothing is familiar. Her hair is still fastened at the back of her neck with a "wide, tight barrette," like a schoolgirl's. "But I am older than that," she tells herself (284). Clara begins to see herself, for the first time, as an adult woman. She throws away the childish barrette and discards everything else that identifies her as a child-wife. She even removes her initial pin. When Clara looks at herself in the mirror again, after shedding her old self, she is shocked:

Her hair hung down untidily around the pale face and with sudden anger she fumbled in the pocketbook and found the lipstick; she drew an emphatic rosy mouth on the pale face. . . she opened the compact and put on pink cheeks with rouge. (286)

Even though the makeup has been applied inexpertly, Clara likes what she sees. She throws her stockings and shoes in a wastebasket and leaves the room barefoot and bare legged.

Freed from the constraints of faceless domesticity, Clara Spenser believes she is entering a new life. As with "The Tooth," Jackson, in a number of her short stories, explores with a cunning eye the superficially vacuous but deeply layered world of the conventional housewife, and, in doing so, finds meaning in what is sometimes seen only as the "empty space" (Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman 45) of female contentment. Beneath the humorous veneer of Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, as well, there runs a rich vein of 18 feminist anger that has not yet been tapped by critics, a subterranean fury which, as Carolyn G. Heilbrun points out, has been "forbidden" to women in much of their autobiographical writing (Writing a Woman's Life 131. Adrienne Rich in "When We Dead Awaken" describes her re-reading of Virginia Woolfs A Room of One's Own. "I was astonished," she tells us, "at the sense of effort, of pains taken, of dogged tentativeness," in the essay's tone. It was the tone of a woman "almost in touch with her anger, who is determined not to appear angry, who is willing herself to be detached or even charming. .( 3 7 ) . So Jackson appears to be in her tales of wife-and-motherhood. (Carolyn Heilbrun quotes May Sarton, who recounts a similar experience in describing a re-reading of her first published journal. Plant Dreaming Deep. an idealized account of her "adventure in buying a house and living alone" (qtd. in Heilbrun 12). In her attempt to present herself as an "exemplar" for other women, Sarton discovered that she had "left out all rage and pain" (qtd. in Heilbrun 12). In her domestic fiction, Jackson, I think, practices the same kind of subterfuge Sarton refers to. Carpenter quotes Judith Wilt who argues that "housewife humor," or what she calls “matriarchal comics," provides the "safest way to express the frustrations of the female role in a sexist society" ("Domestic Comedy" 145). I agree. I will not say that Jackson deliberately set out to write a feminist diatribe against marriage and motherhood in her two domestic works; however, anyone who reads Life Among the Savages or Raising Demons cannot ignore the heat fi'om her pen when she talks about her husband sitting beside her in the labor room, casually reading The New York Times and smoking a cigar, while she pounded the bed and counted contractions ('Savages 72-73). Whether readers view these two works as autobiographical or as the troubled topography of their own sublimated lives, the effect is the same. A seething vein of resentment runs explosively through the white-picket-fence episodes, and it is easy to see why her audience of housewives and mothers smiled in grim recognition of Jackson's honest depiction of the American dream of suburban domestic bliss. Clearly, in 19 her short fiction, Jackson demonstrates a concern with feminist issues. However, to appreciate the immensity of Jackson's contribution to feminist fiction, it is necessary to analyze her longer works. For this study I have selected four novels (one of them unfinished) which I believe most clearly demonstrate her exploration of the female experience. Chapter 2 of this study, "An American Girl's Bildungsroman," discusses Jackson's first psychological novel, Hangsaman. I begin with this novel for several reasons. It is considered by many critics to be her most autobiographical work, and, indeed, its plot does appear to parallel what is known about Jackson's early years and also paints a revealing, and not very flattering, picture of her married life with Stanley Hyman. Hangsaman is also an accurate portrayal of the artist as a young woman. Most critics have seen the novel as a study of schizophrenia, and indeed it does chronicle the fractured vitality of seventeen-year- old Natalie Waite, a brilliant and talented adolescent who must face the realities of a woman's life at a New England all-girls college. There are immediate, although unintentional, parallels between Natalie and another brilliant seventeen-year-old who suffered a similar fate during her first year at a prestigious woman's college, Sylvia Plath. The focus of Chapter 2 is to demonstrate that Natalie is not actually schizophrenic, but is rather the by-product of a culture that does not reward precocity and talent in young women. Using information derived from recent studies of female psychology flha Different Voice and Women's Wavs of Knowing, for instance) I shed light on Natalie's adolescent crisis and provide a saner interpretation of what some critics have called her irrational behavior, behavior which I believe to be defensive and protective. I also refer to

Emüy Hancock's, The Girl Within, in which the author traces the American girl's quest for identity. Hancock has identified a stage in the life of every woman, usually between the ages of eight and ten (just prior to the onset of adolescence) when a girl "crystallizes a distinct and vital sense of self, which she then loses in the process of growing up female" 20 (xi). Indeed, Natalie often worries about "having an original mind like mine and losing it"

(131) and fears that if she would ever tell anyone about "everything inside her head," she would be "gone, and not existing anymore" (137). She seems to know, without being told by Phyllis Chester, that to give in to madness and confusion is to "sink away into that lovely nothing-space where you don't have to worry anymore," to give up all hope of acting for yourself ever again. You "wouldn't be anymore and you couldn't really do anything" (137).

It seems apparent that much of Natalie's supposedly abnormal behavior results from her desire to preserve that vital sense of self she has carried inside her and nurtured for years. Another source of Natalie's fragmentation derives from the fact that she is sexually abused, a fact that has been alluded to by several critics but, to my knowledge, never thoroughly dealt with critically. Many of the suspect behaviors Natalie exhibits can be explained—are explained-by experts on incest and abuse treatment such as Alice Miller, Rorence Rush, and Sue Blume, whose research I use to support my position that Hangsaman is also the fictional journey to recovery of an abuse survivor. Chapter 3, "Doubling and the Rhetoric of the Devouring House," discusses The Haunting of Hill House and focuses upon Jackson's use of the female double to articulate the "angel in the house" and "the whore," both of which fight to reside inside Eleanor

Vance. Because Eleanor is a woman unable to accept the whore who represents her sexuality, Jackson projects Eleanor's sexuality onto Theo. Eleanor is the passive angel- Mary, Theo the aggressive or dominant whore-Eve. The theme of the dominant versus the submissive female is reinforced in The Haunting by Jackson's use of minor doubles, confusing at times, who mirror the relationship between Eleanor and Theo. There is also evidence that Eleanor may be an incest survivor, another fact which would account for

Jackson's use of the double in this work, since splitting is a common denial mechanism used by incest victims. In Chapter 3 1 also examine Jackson's use of the house as a device for representing phallic power and domestic enclosure; in The Haunting of Hill House, the 21 house "doubles" both as seducer and container. I also want to suggest that the term rhetoric can—and should-be applied to the way in which women writers use symbolic imagery (the devouring house, for instance) to express concerns with spatial restriction. As Terry Eagleton points out in Literary Theory: An Introduction, even traditional rhetorical smdies, often assumed to be concerned only with matters oflogos, ethos, and pathos (in that order of importance), have been devoted to the examination of how discourses are constructed to achieve certain effects:

It was not worried about whether its objects of inquiry were speaking or writing, poetry or philosophy, fiction or historiography: its horizon was nothing less than the field of discursive practices in society as a whole, and its particular interest lay in grasping such practices as forms of power and performance. (295)

It is the matter of "power and performance" that concerns me when I use the term rhetoric. I believe that women writers do have a rhetoric of their own, although not necessarily a sentence of their own. Both Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson attempted, in their fiction, to avoid what they called the "male sentence structure" which they considered "too loose, too heavy, too pompous for a woman's use" (qtd. in Cameron 9). It is assumed, then, that by a feminine sentence, Woolf and Richardson mean plain text, writing which is concrete, straightforward, without embellishment If this is the case, it will be hard to exclude

Hemingway from feminine writing, since he espoused the same philosophy of the unembellished, or as he referred to it, "true sentence." Luce Mgaray believes that women's language has not yet been uncovered, but that once unearthed, women's writing will be nothing like the "subject predicate" or "subject verb, object" we are used to in traditional (read male) grammatical tradition (qtd. in Cameron 9). Women's writing is seen by Irigaray as writing which breaks with traditional conventions. If this is true, then contemporary 22 poetry with its unpredictable punctuation and variant spelling and usage, whether written by a woman or a man, must be considered women's writing. Clearly, when we try to analyze sentence structure in terms of either masculine (traditional, rational) or feminine (unconventional, irrational) linguistic practices, we run the risk of further devaluing women's written experience. Consequently, when analyzing women's writing, we must look elsewhere for distinguishing features. As Julia Penelope writes in Speaking Freelv: Unlearning the Lies of the Father's Tongues:

Languages must serve the purposes of their speakers. There are no exceptions. If women are to change the ways we perceive ourselves as well as the context of our lives, we must first understand what our situation is and how patriarchal languages perpetuate our state of oppression. To the best of my loiowledge, there are no languages in existence based on women's perceptions of our experiences in the world. (67)

Genderlect, a distinctive dialect used exclusively by one gender, may exist, but it has not yet been conclusively identified. I agree with Sonja Foss that the best approach to discovering a female rhetoric is to expand the definition of the term itself to include both "discursive and nondiscursive symbols" (Preface xi), images, and metaphors. Women writing often use symbolic imagery in irmovative but sometimes enigmatic ways-enigmatic, that is, to readers who expect to find a conventional rhetorical pattern or strategy. When such readers are unable to recognize and identify a conventional pattern, they assume that certain rhetorical strategies have been ignored and thus do not exist in the text; in fact, this may be true. However, the absence of one pattern of communication does not necessarily signify a void. On the contrary, it may merely armotmce the presence of another less familiar (or completely unfamiliar) mode of expression, perhaps one that does not fit the traditional definition of rhetoric, yet one entirely necessary to the writer's situation and purpose. 23 Women writing, and thus women reading, have historically been constrained by established patterns of discourse; they have often had to subvert or circumvent the traditional by discovering new ways of representing their experiences as women. One of the ways they do this is to reconstruct the images or devices of representation. Where male writers have used the images of wilderness and the world as their frontier for literary exploration (and exploitation, one might add), women writing have often focused on the more restrictive language of domesticity. Unfortunately, this predilection for the language of domesticity has often undermined their literary reputations and obscured the communicative power of their prose, and they are considered, at best, second-class citizens in the country of literature, and their work not worthy of canonical consideration. As Peter

Rabinowitz notes, men "who form the canon are trained to prick up their ears at an echo of T. S. Eliot in a way they are not trained to notice dining room tables" (218). My approach in this chapter may appear to be in conflict with the views of some French feminists, who object to any unification of feminist writing and the traditional rhetoric of tropes and topics. Their position is that rhetorical strategies were first conceived by men for the exclusive dissemination of patriarchal ideas and principles; consequently, these strategies neither honor nor admit the possibility of female experience. Other feminists, such as Shirley Ardner, support this view of rhetoric, insisting that women are

"not only outside the dominant discourse community, but inside it as well, and thus paralyzed by tiieir "ambiguous and precarious position" (qtd. in Ratcliffe 32). I would argue that this position is neither necessarily precarious nor ambiguous, but potentially advantageous. Being both inside and outside the dominant discourse community permits movement in either direction: each of us may choose to remain within the patriarchal house that rhetoric built (as Eleanor Vance wishes to do and as Constance Blackwell does) or we can step outside those boundaries into the light, taking with us the "secrets" of the fathers so that we can enter or leave, at will, or even reconstruct our own artifact of female autonomy 24 upon the altered foundation of the old, which is precisely what Constance's sister Merricat does. Merricat's action, her choice of action, raises a crucial question for feminists. Is it necessary or even wise to erase entirely the memory of what we learned in the house of patriarchal rhetoric: the language and customs that both made and umnade us? Or is our intellectual energy better spent in honoring the writing lives of the women who showed us the way? What is certain is that, at the moment, none of the theories about the uses of language by men or by women "incorporates a complete definition of the term rhetoric," a definition that allows us to do "justice to [all] feminist texts," not just those composed by women who happen to fall within the constraints of current theories of Anglo-American feminist criticism or French feminist criticism (Ratcliffe 32). Whether the issue is one of patriarchal rhetoric or feminist rhetoric, l’Ecriture feminine or materialist feminism, one of the essential questions will continue to be who is in and who is out In my discussion of The Haunting of Hill House. I would like, at least to acknowledge the ways in which a particular woman writer, Jackson, uses imagery as a rhetorical strategy for telling the truth about enclosure, for seldom in fiction have I foimd a writer who captures the patriarchal malevolence of Gothic architecture better than Jackson does in The Haunting of Hill House. In her hands, the house becomes a chauvinistic structure that seduces and ultimately destroys its female victim.

Chapter 4 of this study, "The Heroine’s Dilemma: Madness, Suicide, or Murder?," focuses on Jackson’s last completed novel. We Have Alwavs Lived in the Castle. This work is concerned with two sisters, each of whom once again represents the two opposing options available to women at the time Jackson was writing. Constance (the perpetual servant) is the older, she remains inside the Blackwell mansion, another patriarchal construct Constance knows her place as a woman and is in charge of aU domestic duties—"most of

Constance's footprints were in the garden and in the house, and she never ventured beyond 25 the locked gate of the estate" (Castle 27). Constance may be viewed as one who dwells within the patriarchal definition of the feminine. Mary Katherine (Merricat), the younger sister, spends most of her time outside the house, often in the woods that suirotmd it; every Tuesday and Friday, she goes to the village for supplies. Merricat exists both inside and outside the patriarchal confines of life and language. The rest of the Blackwell family--a very traditional family where the wives "always did as they were told"—is dead, poisoned six years before the story opens (68). As a character, Merricat is easily the most complex and satisfying of Jackson's creations. In her we find Natalie Waite’s perspicacity (and some of her sociopathic personality disturbances, as well) and Eleanor's awareness of house and sense of place. Yet somehow Merricat, perhaps because she is "extremely intelligent, very honest, and capable of loving and hating with equal intensity" (Friedman 136-137), is able not only to preserve her own identity as a female, but also to protect her sister's less secure sense of self. Merricat is a survivor on her own terms. In fact, as we leam later in the novel, it was she who engineered the deaths of her oppressive parents who disliked her omnivorous intelligence and considered her a black sheep because she refused to submit to their vision of a daughter (just as Jackson refused to do as a child). Merricat literally reconstructs a life for herself and her sister, a woman-centered Hfe, after a fire destroys the upper floors of the Blackwood homestead. She is able to rebuild on the foundation her father left her, but the house she builds is decidedly her own.

In Chapter 5 of the study, I conclude my examination of feminist themes in selected works of Jackson's fiction. In Chapter 5,1 also discuss Shirley Jackson's unfinished novel, "Come Along With Me."^ Angela Motorman, Jackson's final protagonist, is a woman in the act of completely recreating herself, this time without the split personality and without paying homage to patriarchal dualism. "Come Along With Me" demonstrates that even at the time of her death, Jackson was still seeking an uncompromised existence for her female 26 characters. In this unfinished piece and in the three novels discussed prior to Chapter 5, there is a discernible thematic düemma: how can an intelligent, perhaps even artistically gifted woman reconcile her desire for female independence-the autonomy of self, the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness promised by the patriarchy to aH of its citizens—with the obstructive and interruptive condition of being female in a culture that denies her these rights? In the works discussed in this study, each of Jackson's protagonists, in her own way, rebels against this predicament, and each, in predictable ways, met failure or achieved victory. This is not to say that Jackson is following tradition, for she seldom does, but simply that she is writing without prevarication fiom her own experience as an exceptional and extraordinarily determined female in a world that prefers (and rewards) capitulative femininity. I am reminded of a criticism made by a feminist against Henry James: that his female protagonists never achieved the independence their characters promised, but inevitably submitted to the authority of cultural prescriptives. In James' defense, I submit that he was simply reflecting, realistically, the restrictive realities of the world his characters inhabited. I believe the same is true for Shirley Jackson. Jackson writes with verisimilitude when she describes each of her female characters' longing for a life both fulfilling and fulfilled; she also writes with excruciating truthfulness when she recognizes that the life her characters seek is a life, as yet, just outside their conscious ability to realize. Yet, to their credit and to Jackson's, they still try. Was Shirley Jackson a feminist? Not if we measure her life by the definitions of that word we honor today. The more important question is whether Jackson was a feminist writer? The answer to that question is, I believe, affirmative. In a recent Ms. article. Alix Kates Shulman asked women writing today to define feminist fiction. They defined it as writing which: 27

demonstrates the authenticity of women's experience; centers on what it is to be a woman in this culture; dramatizes the constraints on women under patriarchy; examines patriarchal institutions; is self-conscious about gender and traditional gender arrangements; challenges patriarchal modes of writing; portrays strong, independent women; explores feminist themes---- (72)

By any of these definitions, Jackson must be considered a feminist writer. Does it matter that she might decline that label? Not at all, according to Shulman, who points out that neither Christa Wolf nor Doris Lessing wants to be called a feminist, yet their work certainly meets all the requirements of feminist fiction, as do the works of Jackson discussed in the following chapters. CHAPTER n HANGSAMAN: AN AMERCAN GHIL'S

BBLDUNGSROMAN

Do you see? You must read my work carefiilly—not missing my peculiar words. Virginia Woolf

When the neurotic woman gets cured, she becomes a woman. When the neurotic man

becomes cured, he becomes an artist ___ Otto Rank

In her landmark work on child abuse. Thou Shalt Not Be Aware. Alice Miller laments the fact that civilized society acknowledges the suffering of its citizens from a detached and inteUectualized distance, particularly its children and especially its female children. We, as members of a civilized society, refuse to become "emotionally aware of cruelty," because this anesthetized perspective allows us a comfort zone of denial when faced with the fact that growing up female in any culture, but particularly American culture, is a grievous and often disastrous undertaking. "Violence" (physical and emotional), as a reality, "doesn't exist"; most of what we have learned about violent acts "has only an abstract and not a living significance" for us (Miller 229). This is not the case for creative writers who, according to Miller,

28 29

suffer from cruelty inflicted on others as well as on themselves, and they suffer doubly because usually they are isolated in their suffering, for no one wants to believe them. Often people try to talk them out of their awareness in order not to become aware fiiemselves. If these writers are not renowned they will be dismissed as fools, or, if famous will be admired and celebrated as great prophets, but always with the proviso that the source of their awareness remain hidden from society. (Thou Shalt Not Be Aware 229-230)

Miller admonishes writers to "begin to describe their childhood," but warns that as they do, they will soon be "confronted with the hostility of society, which sees the customs and rights it has enjoyed for thousands of years threatened" (230). With the exception of "The Lottery," Shirley Jackson's work has seldom been received by readers or critics with hostility, a reaction that usually suggests the work has, indeed, penetrated the anesthetized surface of the detached and inteUectualized reader MUler writes about Instead, much of Jackson's work has been dismissed as less than literature-artful but not quite art This has been and continues to be the case with Jackson’s second novel, Hangsaman. a compelling and revealing portrayal of female adolescence. In fact, most readers and critics today are unaware of the novel's existence. Does the obscurity of this work result only from

Jackson's diminished reputation as a writer of serious fiction, or does it result, as well, from the fact that Hangsaman depicts the coming-of-age struggles of a young woman, rather than the adolescent angst of a young man? Evidence suggests the latter may have strongly influenced Hangasman's decline. In 1951, two novels of adolescence were published: one by a novelist of some critical acclaim; the other by a writer of short fiction who had not yet been recognized as a novelist. The first work, Hangsaman. was initially given an enthusiastic reception by critics, one of whom caUed it an "extraordinary, perceptive picture of adolescence." The book's sales, however, were "relatively unimpressive," and plans for a second printing were "scrapped" (Oppenheimer 155). Within five years of its publication, Hangsaman had 30 slipped into obscurity (Pickrel 767). The second novel became an American classic, and within five years of its publication, there were fifteen foreign language editions available

(French 125-126). Today the novel is still "clocking up an aimual sales worldwide of some quarter of a million copies" (Hamilton 122). I am, of course, referring to J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rve. Why has Salinger's novel of adolescence been elevated to cult status (Frederick Gwyim and Joseph Blotner once compared Holden to Jesus [Salinger

255]), while Jackson's work can barely boast a shelf-life in most libraries across the country? Both works are concerned with protagonists on the verge of adulthood: Hangsaman’s Natalie Waite is seventeen, Holden Caulfield of Catcher is sixteen. Both youths are faced with the rigors of private school: Natalie is an ambivalent fieshman at an all girls' institution; Holden the reluctant inhabitant of a boys' prep school Both Natalie and Holden experience a crisis of identity, become lost and confused, break down, and recover. Yet Natalie is assumed to be "mad" by critics, a schizophrenic who is, as one critic wrote, "strange and obscure as the nightmares of a mad psychoanalyst" (qtd. in Friedman 89), while Holden is variously and universally embraced as "defiant" and "sensitive" (Aldridge 131), a “rebellious, nonconforming adolescent" (Hamilton 28), and an "artist in embryo"

(French 119).l Although differences in style and presentation may account for Hangsaman’s obscurity and Catcher's success, another likely explanation may be that universal means male. Critic Martin Green lauds Salinger as a "cultural image-maker" (qtd. in Grunwald 253) and Holden Caulfield as the "kind of heroic figure whom we can all look up to" (qtd. in French 103). Christopher Parker echoes Green, assuring readers that "we can all identify with Holden's plight" (qtd. in Grunwald 254). Finally, in Nation, reviewer Ernest Jones insists that The Catcher in the Rve is a "case history of us all" (qtd. in Grunwald 255).

Reviewers of the book who were male, as most reviewers were in 1951, identified Holden

Caulfield's masculine rituals as universal, but were at a loss to explain Natalie's foreign (to 31 their experience) rite of passage from girlhood to womanhood. It is not that male critics resist books that raise psychological problems. In fact, as Peter Rabinowitz notes, male critics are w illing to "canonize books that raise problems"; however, they seem to "prefer it if those problems are the problems of a certain dominant group" (229), their own. The few (very few) women who reviewed Hangsaman concurred with their male colleagues' reading of the novel. Most critics were willing to recognize Hangsaman as a psychological novel; however, in their view, its heroine was not just a disturbed adolescent, she was insane. According to their view, Natalie is a schizophrenic, a character who might invoke our curiosity and sympathy, but not one to be taken seriously. She is an unreliable narrator, as women often are in a world where the commandments for credibility are determined by males; therefore, we need not acknowledge Natalie's confusion, her loss of self-esteem, or any the disturbing suggestions of coercion and abuse she relates as her story unfolds. We need not become, in Miller's words, "emotionally aware" of the pain Natalie experiences as a result of being female in a world where male privilege dominates, subdues, uses, and often destroys a girl's will to survive. Natalie's experience, furthermore, did not then (nor does it today) reflect the universal reality of adolescence for male critics; such a response, according to Phyllis Chesler, "allows men not to experience female suffering as representative of human-and therefore male-suffering" (About Men 211-212).^ Nor could Natalie's behavior be explained by any theory of adolescent psychology that existed in the Fifties. Consequently, Hangsaman failed to meet the critical standards expected of a successfulBildungsroman and, therefore, failed to attain either cult or classic status among readers and critics, and failed to be considered by some as worthy of reading.^ The Catcher in the Rve. on the other hand, "became canonized" because the novel fit a "popular

[male defined] pattern" and worked with a "normalized [reading] strategy or set of strategies" (Rabinowtiz 212) that reflected male experience. 32

It is only recently (in the long history of literature, that is) that critics, most of them women, have begun to re-examine the works of writers from a female perspective. "Re­ vision," Adrienne Rich calls it, "the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical perspective. . (Lies 35). In "Turning the Lens on The Panther Captivity,'" Aimette Kolodny suggests that the feminist critic brings not one but two perspectives to the text: the traditional, patriarchal approach, because that is the method she has been trained to use, and a feminist vision. In other words, for Kolodny and for the feminist critic, reading is not just a matter of re-vision, but "double-vision" (343). For both Rich and Kolodny, and for many other feminist critics, the re-visioning of male texts is "an act of survival," a "refusal" to participate in the "self-destructiveness of male- dominated society" (Rich, Lies 35). Today, thanks to two decades of reappraising both male and female texts, we have fresh ground in which to sow new theories about how women write their lives and how they develop (or fail to develop) psychologically as a result of cultural conditioning, theories that acknowledge the ways in which women experience exclusionary status because they do not fit the male-based (and biased) theories of psychology which have prevailed for a century. My examination of Hangsaman is motivated by the necessity to re-enter Jackson's text from a feminist perspective in order to substantiate her credibility as a feminist writer and to rescue her protagonist from the schizophrenic oblivion to which she has been banished by critics who could find no clue in the text which would explain Natalie's psychological behavior. Such a critique of Hangsaman wiU follow Rich's admonition to

"take the work first of aU as clue to how [women] live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves..." (Lies 35). My examination of Hangsaman is thus informed both by my academic training in feminist criticism and by my own personal experience of growing up female in America. My reading of the text is also illuminated by recent and much-needed research into the particular developmental processes of women and 33 by the new psychological theories of female development which have emerged from this research. As Carol Gilligan points out, the "disparity between women's experience and the representation of human development, noted throughout the psychological literature, has generally been seen to signify a problem in women's development" (2). On the contrary, GiUigan's research as well as that of Mary F. Belinky, Nancy Chodorow, Matina Homer, and Jean Baker Miller, among others, confirms that much of the "failure of women to fit existing models of human growth" is due to the models themselves which are based primarily on research conducted on male subjects (Gilligan 3). Consequently, when women

"do not conform to the standards of psychological expectation, the conclusion has generally been that something is wrong with the women" (Gilligan 14). In addition to new theories of female development which admit to an entirely different, although not necessarily more accurate, perception of values and rationality, I also base my interpretation of Hangsaman’s elusive and perplexing passages, which have heretofore mystified critics and caused them to dismiss the material of Natalie's experience as the product of a deranged mind, on recent (and again much-needed) information about the abuse (sexual and psychological) of young girls and women, its identifying symptoms, and its devastating, long-term effects on the women abused.

In light of the overwhelming volume of recent media revelations by women alleging their abuse as children, it is a temptation to equate and justify every kind of vmexplained or unacceptable behavior in a female literary character to a history of child abuse. It is a temptation that must be resisted by feminist critics, or else we wiU find ourselves guilty of the kind of dismissive stereotyping and labeling we accuse patriarchal critics of practicing. On the other hand, no responsible critic can deny the implications of statistics published in Florence Rush's The Best-Kept Secret: Sexual Abuse of Children in which she quotes from research studies that indicate approximately "twenty-five million women in the United States will experience sex with a male adult before the age of thirteen" (4-5). These statistics are 34 based on studies conducted by the Kinsey team, who established in a random study of 4,000 American women, that "25 percent were found to have experienced a sexual encounter with an adult before the age of thirteen" (qtd. in Rush 4). David Finkelhor also fbtmd in his study of 530 female subjects that "19.2 percent had been victimized in childhood..." (qtd. in Rush 4). This is alarming evidence of the abuse and misuse of young females in our culture; even more disquieting, however, is the fact that these findings and others presented by Vincent De Francis, and quoted by Rush, suggest the strong probability of an "enormous national incidence many times larger than reported incidents of abuse of children" (4). These statistics and their implications for women cannot be overlooked when examirting the text of any work written by a woman, particularly a woman who grew up during the repressive decades of the Thirties, Forties, and. Fifties, years during which Sigmund Freud's "drive theory" ruled the hearts and minds of psychiatrists, psychologists, and their coterie of pseudo-interpreters of Freudian theory.^

What has previously been dismissed by Freudian therapists (and literary critics who base psychological interpretations of a text on Freudian theory) is the possibility that what appears to be a manifestation of a character's neurosis or madness (in this case a female character's) may have actually occurred. The author may be telling a concrete truth about her protagonist's experience (as well as her own), but telling it "slant" This, I believe, is the case with Hangsaman. Natalie Waite is a not a hopeless schizophrenic or a character to be dismissed as an unreliable narrator. On the contrary, I am confident that an examination of

Natalie's behavior from a feminist critical perspective will reveal that she is an eminently sane and very courageous heroine.

While Shirley Jackson's second novel, Hangsaman. may not represent her best work in terms of the stylistic maturity she attained in her later full-length works, it is certainly the most "revealing, complex, and difficult book she would ever write" (Oppenheimer 145) because it is her "most autobiographical" (Oppenheimer 27). But Natalie Waite's story did 35 not begin in 1949 with the first chapter of the novel; she had come to life some years earlier in several unpublished pieces written sometime between 1937 and 1940 while Jackson was a student at Syracuse University. The Natalie pieces reflect Jackson's unhappiness after her family moved from the California Bay Area, in 1933, to Brighton, an affluent suburb of Rochester, New York. This move took place just before Jackson's senior year in high school, and it was a wrenching one: Jackson left behind her childhood friends, those who knew and accepted her idiosyncrasies. Rochester was a different story. Oppenheimer writes that the city was, at that time, "small and drab," the "social strata were rigid," and the rules for correct behavior were "plentiful and rigorously enforced" (33). Much of Jackson's unhappiness during this period of her life was the result of being snubbed by the popular crowd at Brighton High School. Jackson asserted her right to be different, yet wanted more than anything to belong. When she was rejected by the school's most prestigious sorority, her diary records only one sentence: "I didn't make the sorority.

Damn Gene Robbins" (qtd. in Oppenheimer 34). What Jackson did not record, perhaps could not record because she had not yet found a device for acknowledging the trauma of rejection, was a growing realization that a girl who has brains and imagination, and who displays them, will not win the world's affection. The "device" Jackson sought was something-or someone-upon which to project her pain, her anger, her deepest feelings of rejection and loss, secrets about her family life she could never reveal even to herself. That someone was Natalie Waite, Shirley Jackson's adolescent double, for all intents and purposes.

In one unpublished firagment, the Natalie/Shirley character depicts her association with the wrong kind of girls:

Doris was fat and badly dressed and stupid, and the center of a little group of girls who did things by themselves, went to movies and had parties and went swimming in the summer, in a gay chattering body whose animation never quite concealed the fact that they were ugly and awkward and 36 unpopular. Ginny was pale. . . and given to much giggling flirtation with her teachers. When Natalie sat with them she knew that she was marked, just as irretrievably as though they had all worn distinctive uniforms, as one of the little group around Doris, the terrible social outsiders, (qtd. in Oppenheimer 34)

Oppenheimer, in her interpretation of this passage, concentrates only on Natalie, insisting that it is she alone who suffers because it is she alone who is "horribly aware" of her friends' shortcomings and thus of her own (34). Certainly there is some truth to this if we identify Natalie/Shirley as the omniscient narrator. However, I believe that the other two girls mentioned, Doris and Ginny, are also Shirley, one "body," Shirley's body, "fat, badly dressed and stupid. . . pale... ugly and unpopular." At the time of the Rochester move, Jackson was indeed a "somewhat unsure, slightly overweight sixteen-year old" (Oppenheimer 33). Jackson's mother dressed her weU, or attempted to; the result was sometimes off the mark of fashion. As Oppenheimer notes:

Shirley was sloppy about her appearance—hemlines never hung right, the newest clotiies somehow ended looking sightly askew the minute she put them on. Part of it was due to her figure. It was not that she was terribly fat, but according to her friend Dorothy Ayling, Jackson did have a fat stomach that just popped ouL (26)

When faced with the evidence, it is difficult to deny the cormection between the overweight and self-conscious Shirley at sixteen and her alter-ego, unpopular, miserable Natalie. Fat

Doris and pale Ginny also seem to be fragments of the adolescent Shirley's personality. At some deep level of her subconscious, Jackson always knew something about herself and about her childhood that was too painful to face, and I believe that the Natalie pieces are the first written evidence of Jackson's use of the fragmented character as a way of approaching the truth. It was Shirley Jackson's lifetime task as a writer to confront and mend all the fragmented little girls, fifteen year olds, sixteen year olds, thirty year olds, until finally, just 37 before she died, she created in Angela Motorman a united front against the past But the search for truth and wholeness began with the Natalie of Hangsaman.

Although not a great deal has been written about the protagonist who most closely resembles the adolescent Jackson, what has been recorded almost invariably places Natalie Waite among the disturbed youth who cross the line from adolescent morbidity into full­ blown neurosis; in Natalie's particular case, the journey inevitably leads to madness, at least according to the critics. Among them is Lenemaja Friedman who, in spite of an otherwise judicious reading of Hangsaman. still calls the novel a "sustained study of mental aberration, in this case schizophrenia" (86), as though craziness is the novel's only component Most critics who refuse to see Natalie as other than mad point to the first section of the novel to support their diagnosis. It is in this first section, they feel, that Jackson identifies the schizoid behavior of her protagonist the internal "secret" conversations with the make- believe detective, the out-of-body excursions to an archaeological expedition. There is no denying that Natalie's mind wanders along unconventional pathways, but so do the minds of many brilliant and imaginative adolescents. Certainly Natalie is brilliant and imaginative, but she is something more. Natalie is a writer in embryo. Hangsaman is also a study ofthe female artist as a young woman, an exploration of growing up female, a female Bildungsroman, or more accurately, kunstlerroman.a Much of Natalie's perplexing behavior can be explained by Jackson's intent to present her as bright, sensitive, naive, anxious, confused, and sometimes guht-ridden adolescent However, there are other less obvious but much more disturbing reasons for Natalie's dissembling nature. John Parks notes that "seduction and sex figure in Natalie's initiation" ("Chambers" 18), but he treats

Natalie's abuse by an older man as if it were a necessary coming-of-age ritual. Parks fails to realize the impact this event has upon Natalie as an adolescent female. Her seemingly mad behavior is the result of a sexualtrauma, not an initiation, which occurs in the first section of the novel; contrary to Friedman's pronouncement that "we carmot gauge the 38 impact of the trauma or its long-lasting effects" (91), I submit that the remainder of the novel does "gauge" the impact of that trauma in recognizable and wholly explainable ways. Certainly Natalie is the product of an overwheening and dominant father. The first character we meet, indeed the first name we see on the first page of Hangsaman. is "Mr. Arnold Waite-husband, parent, man of his word" (3). Arnold Waite is the undisputed head of his household, its reigning deity. "God," Mr. Waite intones,"I am God" (4). His chair at the breakfast table is situated so that "when he put his head back the sunlight, winter or summer, touched his unfaded hair with an air at once angelic. .. " (3).

Like the Sun King, Louis XIV, Mr. Waite accepts his divine right to rule the women of his household, just as Jackson's father, Leslie, ruled his wife and daughter with the "iron backing" (Oppenheimer 15) of his forcefirl personality. The "pompous" and "condescending" (Hangsaman 7) Arnold Waite also strongly resembles Stanley Hyman, who considered himself the "great man, the distinguished member" of his household (Oppenheimer 176). Stanley, like Arnold Waite, was most of the time cheerful and affable, but also like his fictional counterpart, Hyman had a "mighty temper that could make the rafters ring" (Oppenheimer 198). Natalie's mother, Mrs. Waite, is the most fijequent recipient of Mr. Waite's ire and impatience. When the doorbell rings, announcing his Sunday guests (the emphasis is on his ), Arnold Waite insists that he will "get it" in a tone which implies "very strongly that he did not believe that Mrs. Waite could find the door" ( Hangsaman 34). Although husband and wife have agreed, over the years, to "substitute half-hearted disagreement for a more taxing marital relationship," there is an unmistakable tension between them. It is Mrs.

Waite, more often than not, who substitutes a "half-hearted agreement" to whatever her husband requires of her, rather than rebelling outright, although the anger and resentment are there. During one conversation with her daughter, Mrs. Waite calls her husband an "old fool" and tells Natalie her father "must be an awful fool to believe that people are taken in 39 by his pretensions" (21). Most of the time, however, Natalie's mother functions as the long- suffering wife of a difficult man. Throughout the novel, Natalie's mother is addressed as Mrs. Waite; she has no identity of her own outside the marital relationship. Her first name is mentioned only once; however, the mention is significanL "Sometimes, " she tells Natalie, "I think [your father] married me because my name is Charity" (22). Natalie often finds herself caught between her father's exalted expectations for his daughter's intellectual and literary success (she is soon to leave for college), and the reality of her mother's submissive existence as wife and mother, another inevitability for Natalie as a female child. Each morning, promptly at ten (Arnold Waite is a man of meticulous schedules), her father tutors Natalie in his study. His desk faces the door:

The books which stood expectantly on the shelves aroimd the room had the ftdfiUed look of books which have been read, although not necessarily by Mr. Waite; the leather chair still held the marks of &&. Waite's ample bottom, the ashtray beside it already this morning touched with ashes. (13)

We need only add the touch of Indian nuts or sunflower seeds to complete the picture of Stanley Hyman's study as well. In New York, before the Hyman's first move to Vermont,

Stanley's study dominated their small apartment. He placed his large desk in the "exact center" of the front room, then sat behind it, facing the door. "No one was allowed to bother him, not Shirley, not visitors, while he sat there. He, on the other hand, was allowed to bother everybody" (Oppenheimer 97). Later, after the move to Bennington:

Stanley's study-it was always called Stanley's study-was off to the side of die living room... Stanley's desk was always meticulously ordered, every paper clip and pencil in its place. .. bowls of sunflower seeds sat in the study-away from the subway, sunflower seeds had replaced Indian nuts as Stanley's work snack. (Oppenheimer 116) 40

When the couple finally bought a house and settled permanently in Vermont, Stanley's study-still called Stanley's study in spite of the fact that Jackson's work had helped make possible the purchase of "Stanley's study"—was off to the side of the living room (Oppenheimer 170). Furthermore, the rather corpulent Stanley (no doubt his ample bottom also left an impression in the chair), a “bom teacher" and a "disciplinarian," also tutored

Jackson at one time in their marriage, "assigning her specific courses in literature" (97), just as Natalie's father oversees her reading and monitors her writing. Each morning she must, with some trepidation, surrender her writer's notebook for advice and criticism:

Silently Natalie passed [the notebook] across the desk to him. There was always a moment of dismay, when the words she had written crossed her mind remorselessly and the thought of her father reading them made her hesitate with an urgent desire to be off, out of the study, anywhere. (12)

A great deal of Jackson's own writing philosophy is intoned by Arnold Waite during the tutorial. Lighting one of the many cigarettes he smokes during the encounter, her father tells Natalie: "I'm going to quarrel with your whole attack in regard to the problem of description. No description can be said to describe anything—I’ve told you this before—if it's in mid-air, so to speak, unattached. It's got to be tied on to something, to be useful" (15).

We can only speculate, of course, but there is some evidence that Stanley, like Arnold Waite, attempted to direct, and in some cases, control Jackson's writing. According to Walter

Bernstein, Stanley made "damn sure she continued to do what he considered her real work: writing" (qtd. in Oppenheimer 96). Bernstein suggests that Stanley believed that Jackson,

"left to her own devices... might fritter away hours baking cakes or playing with the baby; it was up to him to keep her on the right road" (qtd. in Oppenheimer 96). Jackson includes these scenes between Natalie, the fledgling writer, and her father, the omniscient mentor, to make the point that women's writing is always, to a certain degree, controlled and shaped by the patriarchy. Jackson, according to Bernstein, was "very much in certain ways Stanley's 41 creation" (qtd. in Oppenheimer 120). Bernstein goes on to say that he remembers Stanley saying to him that "a lot of things Shirley wrote she had no real idea what the hell they meant. It was the closest thing to automatic writing. She would go to him for explanations- -what does this really mean?" (qtd. in Oppenheimer 121). I hesitate to accuse Stanley Hyman of controlling Shirley Jackson's talent and her texts. He was, according to many of their fiiends, very supportive of his wife's writing, and in those days a man who actually encouraged his wife to write was a saint, especially when that man was himself a writer. However, since that time we have had other instructive accounts of literary husbands who supported their wives' writing, and we know that the double-tongue of jealousy and envy can strike with venom from the cover of connubial altruism. Ted Hughes is one example, and I wonder if Leonard Woolf is not another. Perhaps what is most disturbing about Bernstein's statement is the implication that Jackson was not a deliberate (and therefore serious) composer of fiction, but rather a psychic conduit who merely took dictation from a source she neither understood nor controlled. It is aU well and good to give the subconscious credit for its share of a writer's material; however, to suggest that this weird, wild, and indecipherable country is female is to suggest that the woman who writes is an unsophisticated "natural child" of literature. In other words, as JoaimaRuss points out, "artists-of-the-wrong group create intuitively, not intellectually"

(90). Very little has been recorded concerning Shirley Jackson's own opinion of her motives for writing, although Arnold Waite tells Natalie that "youmust, if you are ever to be a good writer, understand your own motives" (16). Perhaps Jackson's metacommentary is not nearly as important as the work itself, for it is there that Alicia Ostriker tells us we will discover "what was present but unseen by others" (Writing Like a Woman 135). One of the palpable tensions in Hangsaman is generated by Natalie's confusion about who she should please, her father or her mother. While Natalie may resent her father's interference 42 in her life, she admires him, looks up to him. Natalie's attitude toward her mother, on the other hand, is one of pity and, sometimes, disgust The portrait Jackson paints of Mrs. Waite is acute and devastating. As a consequence of being married to a self-aggrandizing and domineering husband, Mrs. Waite finds that the kitchen is "the only place in the house she "possessed entirely" and the "only place where [she] talked at all" (20). Every Saturday Natalie's father invites "whom he pleases" from his literati colleagues while his wife "deals with the pot," making "small sandwiches and canapés for any number of people. . . and buffet supper for afterwards" (20-21). Unlike her husband's book-lined retreat from the secularity of everyday living, Mrs. Waite's "study" is the kitchen; this is also the room where Natalie "studies" to be a woman, not a writer. Every Sunday, directly after her writing tutorial, Natalie must help her mother prepare for Arnold Waite's guests, since Mrs. Waite "was not allowed the services of her maid on Sundays." Presumably Natalie fulfills the function of maid at these times, and "Mrs. Waite thought of this as good training for her daughter" (20). Indeed Mrs. Waite looks forward to these weekly sessions in the kitchen as her only opportunity to repossess her daughter from the rigors of fatherly instruction. Natalie's mother is

"allowed" the company of her daughter "one day a week" in the kitchen which is, after all, the "only place in the house" that she "possessed utterly; even her bedroom was not her own since her husband magnanimously insisted upon sharing it" (20). Jackson clearly defines the kitchen as women's space, a "female world" where

"womanly knowledge" is exchanged between Mrs. Waite and her domestic understudy:

In these hours they shared in the kitchen, she and Natalie were associated in some sort of mother-daughter relationship that might communicate womanly knowledge from one to ±e other, that might, by means of small female catchwords and feminine innuendoes separate, at least for a time, the family into women against men. (20) 43 Interestingly, Mr. Waite has offered Natalie those same sentiments, although perhaps not drawing the battle lines quite so decisively. Earlier, during their tutorial, he cautions her about "basic sex antagonism" between fathers and daughters, then tells her that "at this time in your life you are growing to hate me" (18) and that "it is natural" (17). This is certainly one of the few times in the novel that the Waites agree on anything. Arnold is prepared to receive his daughter's animosity; Mrs. Waite is prepared to fuel it. Mrs. Waite begins by talking about how "lazy" her husband is and cautions Natalie to "see that your marriage is happy," although she is not prepared to offer suggestions as to how this might be achieved. "I always used to wonder," she tells her daughter, "how people made happy marriages and made them last all day long every day" (22). She wanders on, reminiscing about how she was both tricked into marriage and forced into it Like so many other young women unhappy at home with snoring fathers and uncles whose single contribution to the dinner hour is the rapid ingestion of food, Natalie's mother saw marriage as escape. Clearly there were no other options for Mrs. Waite, nor for Natalie. Young women, according to Mrs. Waite, who has now become Natalie's marital tutor, "think" that a husband will be better. What happens, she cautions, is that a "husband is usually the same":

When I met your father he had a lot of books that he said he read, and he gave me a Mexican bracelet instead of an engagement ring, and I looked around at my uncles sitting in their old goddam. . . goddam chairs and I thought being married was everything I wanted. Only of course it's the same ....(24)

Natalie is understandably upset, caught as she is between the study and Mtchen-between her father's intellectual ardor and her mother's domestic depression-between the possibility of a career as a writer and the inevitability of an unhappy marriage with no legitimate route of escape. Significantly, it is during these periods of psychological stress that Natalie resorts to what some critics have identified as schizophrenic breaks. 44

During one argument between her parents, Natalie transplants herself to an "archaeological expedition some thousand years from now, coming unexpectedly upon this kitchen and removing layers of earth carefully from around the teakettle" (27). She imagines members of the expedition arguing over whether one discovery is a cookpot or a chamber poL What does it matter, she seems to be saying, whether the object is a cookpot or a chamber pot, whether my father is brilliant or foolish, my mother a good wife or a bad one, we'll aU be dead, buried under layers of clay that wiU yield the truth no better than the two who are fighting over it now. The dig might prove entirely infertile, or it might yield the skull of Natalie herself. The thought fills her with contentment; finally there would be "no further fears for Natalie, no possibility of walking wrong [making the wrong choice] when you were no more than a skull in a strange man's hands" (27). I suppose a case could be made that Natalie's preoccupation with her own skuU indicates a growing dissatisfaction with her fife and possibly even foreshadows a suicidal crisis. Certainly Natalie is not happy to witness one more altercation between her parents, one that will surely force her to endure another emotional tirade from her mother, and perhaps a few condescending and sarcastic remarks about his wife from Mr. Waite. I do not, however, see Natalie’s expedition into the future as the behavior of a psychotic. Not only is Natalie's projection a fairly typical method of dealing with a no-win situation, it is also the product of a fairly typical but very bright adolescent's creative imagination. Less easy to explain are Natalie's conversations with the imaginary detective. But again, these breaks with reality are a means of coping with it, and not a means of denying it, surely an indicator of mental health and not disintegration.

These encounters seem to occur at random, giving the impression that Natalie has no control over the detective's intrusions; however, a closer reading reveals that the conversations between the two occur almost always at points of stress and discomfort, or even boredom, in

Natalie's fife. 45 Natalie's first encounter with the detective occurs just after Mr. and Mrs. Waite have been discussing the upcoming Sunday party. The conversation is reminiscent of other

Sunday conversations. Mrs. Waite looks deeply into her coffee cup and says, "with the soft, faintly wistful intonation she kept for her husband, 'Cocktail olives'" (5). He predictably flares up: "You mean I have to make cocktails for that crew? Cocktails for twenty people? Cocktails?" Mrs. Waite, satisfied that she has "set him off," replies that he could hardly "ask them to drink tea... Notthem" (5). Clearly the "them" are not people she likes to serve any more than she does her husband. Natalie, feeling herself drawn into another argument between her parents, allows her mother's plaintive, biting voice to be interrupted by the detective: "How, Miss Waite, " he asks, "how do you account for the gap in time between your visit to the rose garden and the discovery of the body?" (5). As we wül see later, the body in question almost always refers to the parent Natalie would like to "murder" at the time. "I refuse to say," Natalie replies, clearly disturbed by the question; her fear is the result of the dissension between her parents, but it also arises from her own subterranean anger at having to witness their bickering over and over again. As their daughter and dependent, Natalie is forced to be a witness and inevitably a participant in the conflicts, when each parent takes her aside to tell his or her own story of the incident Natalie's brother. Bud, in contrast, is never involved in the parental disputes; he is expected to ignore them and pursue his own masculine interests. He is never required to attend the cocktail parties, or act as junior host nor is he expected to have any interest in literature:

"Listen," Bud said abruptly, "7 don't have to come to this thing, do I?" His father frowned, and then laughed mdely. "What were you planning to do instead?" "Something," Bud said insolently. "Anything." (7) 46 Mr. Waite acknowledges that "this son of mine has such a distaste for the literary life," yet he laughingly dismisses him. Natalie, on the other hand, is required to help her mother prepare the meal and to function as her father's "daughter and assistant hostess" (34). Is it any wonder that she rages at being expected to fulfill her father's literary dreams and required to meet her mother's (and his) ideal as the perfect cook and hostess? Natalie, unlike her brother, has no choices; consequently, her only means of escape is to retreat inside herself where she deals with the situation through her alter ego, the detective. A second encounter with the voice, during her tutorial with her father, reinforces this notion.

As her father thumbs his way through her assignment, Natalie looks around the study and begins to contemplate her father's demise:

[T]he corpse would be over there, of course, between the bookcase with the books on demonology and the window, which had heavy drapes that could be pulled to hide any nefarious work. She could be found at the desk, not five feet away from the corpse, leaning one hand on the comer to support herself, her face white and distorted with screaming. She would be unable to account for the blood on her hands, on the front of her dress, on her shoes, the blood soaking though the carpet at her feet, the blood under her hand on the desk, leaving a smeared mark on the papers there. (15)

Bmtal, perhaps, but actually more dramatic than violent The scenario reads like a cheap detective story. Natalie is acting out subliminally; she is "posed" at the desk as the story's tragic heroine while her father dismantles her writing assignment in front of her (the blood- smeared papers refer to the sheets she has just submitted to him). It is Natalie, in her fantasy, who chastises, who metes out just punishment, not her father. Jackson is brilliant and very deliberate when it comes to the dialogue between Natalie and her father and Natalie and the detective. There can be no doubt that the murder played out in her writer's mind is prompted by the scene between her father and herself. The corpse is Arnold. Just after her father instructs her in the Freudian reversal of hating the father rather than loving him, what 47

Arnold calls "basic sex antagonism," the detective voice asks: "Are you prepared to confess that you killed him?" (18).

In terms of the scene's brutality, Natalie cannot really be blamed for her subverted feelings of rage and resentment toward her father. Indeed the question is more one of health: isn't it more wholesome for Natalie to take out her feelings of rage in fantasy rather than to actually murder her father? I certainly do not want to dismiss the vehemence of

Natalie's fantasy as merely an amusing mind game: the scenario of the blood-soaked study is a savage one and has decided sexual connotations. Natalie hates her father, at this moment, but she also hates her mother. She despises and fears them both because, in spite of their differences, the two are joined in a campaign to undermine her survival as an artist and as a woman. Furthermore, they are joined in a way Natalie does not want to acknowledge because she does not want to acknowledge the sexual dynamic at work in the relationship between the three of them. As Alice Miller notes, "one of the inescapable laws governing a child's existence is determined by what parents need from her" (119). Earlier, at the end of a family breakfast, Natalie is both fascinated and repelled when her father "slid his napkin into the ring which was composed of two snakes curiously and obscenely entwined" (8). This indicates Natalie's interest in and distrust of sexual matters; however, as Miller points out about young children in general, Natalie's "anxiety, bewilderment, uncertainty" is probably "not a defense against [her own] sexual desires," but a "reaction to adults' [her parents'] sexual desires" (119). Natalie's sense of the obscene implications of the two snakes also foreshadows a sexual encounter which challenges her sanity and changes her life forever; she survives in large part because she has created an inner life of balance and reflection, a life that is grounded in her conversations with the imaginary detective.

Jackson deliberately chose a detective for Natalie's iimer voice because Natalie needs the power of an authoritative voice to rescue her from situations she does not feel powerful 48 enough to control It is useful, at this point, to recall the definition of the word "detective": "a person. .. whose work is investigating crimes" and "obtaining evidence" f American

Heritage 359). Natalie’s detective voice, then, functions psychologically and intellectually as a protective device as well as a means for investigating and assessing situations based on the evidence presented; particularly, the voice helps Natalie sort out the mixed messages she encounters at home. The detective voice does not destroy or inhibit Natalie's mental equilibrium, but rather helps her survive. "I am strong within myself," she teUs the voice after one interrogation (9). Natalie often retreats to the garden to contemplate her future. She feels the garden belongs exclusively to her, a "functioning part of her personality..." (28). She feels refreshed even by "ten minutes" in the garden, time stolen for herself away from the "windows of the house" and the "arbitrary pleasures assigned her by other people" (28). The garden not only signifies peace for Natalie, it is a measure of her maturation as a woman. As a little girl she played "pirate and cowboy and knight in armor among the trees," all male personages. For Natalie, the young woman, the garden now becomes a female retreat from the male world of her father's house. She presses her body against the grass, trying to absorb its "soft" power, ignoring the "dark and silent" trees (28). Natalie is particularly fond of her view of the distant mountains which represent "a carrier of something simultaneously real and unreal to set up against the defiantly real and unreal batterings of her family" (29). She is dimly aware that the power she needs to defend herself against the encroachments of others resides within herself, a "point where obedience ended and control began." She senses that once this point is reached and passed, she becomes a "solitary functioning individual, capable of ascertaining her own believable possibilities" (29). As she absorbs the earth's lush warmth, Natalie is thrilled and "shocked by her own capacity for creation"; she holds herself "tight and unyielding, crying out silently something that might only be phrased as, 'Let me create, let me create'" (29). Surely, 49 this is evidence enough to convince readers that Natalie is a portrait of the artist as a young woman, although the "gap between the poetry she wrote and the poetry she contained" was, for now, not yet "solvable" (29), nor is the gap between what Natalie wants to write and what

her father expects her to write resolvable. The moimtains somehow relieve the pressure of her father's obtrusiveness. "[FjuU-bosomed and rich," they

extended themselves to her in a surge of emotion, turning silently as she came, receiving her, and Natalie, her mouth against the grass and her eyes tearfiil from looking into the sun, took the mountains to herself and whispered, "Sister, Sister." "Sister, sister," she said, and the mountains stirred, and answered. (30)

This primordial and very female scene has been played out in myth and literature for centuries. The earth is female, and Natalie, hungry for mother love and support, for strength in the female, goes to the grass and mountains for the sustenance she carmot find in her own mother, who is unable to provide it because her (Mrs. Waite's) own longing for female nurturance was never satisfied by her mother. According to Mrs. Waite, her mother was an

unhappy and unsatisfied woman. She married, served a demanding husband (and was

herself something of a shrew as a result of her enslavement), and was left a widow who no longer cared whether she lived or died; it was "too late"— there was nothing left of the

original girl to redefine fHangsaman 22). "I used to lie awake wanting my mother, "Mrs.

Waite tells Natalie, "but she wouldn't have me because I was different then" (46). For

Natalie, there is very little encouragement to be found for career or for love and marriage among the women she knows. However, Natalie does find a fleeting role model in one of her father's guests, Verna Hansen. Vema Bbnsen, who is "enormously fat" and quite comfortable with it, has never married. She insists on being herself and tells Natalie that she once changed her name 50 when the life she was living as Edith dissatisfied her. Vema observes Natalie closely and listens carefully to her plans to be a writer, then tells her.

Little Natalie, never rest until you have uncovered your essential self. Remember diaL Somewhere, deep inside you, hidden by all sorts of fears and worries and petty little thoughts, is a clean pure being made of radiant colors. (37)

This is the first encouragement from a woman that Natalie has received; it is the first encouragement from anyone, man or woman, that she listen to her own voice and become essentially her own woman. The choices for Natalie are stül not wholesome ones: it appears that if she becomes herself, Natalie the writer, she will have to forgo love and marriage (it is no coincidence that Vema is unattractive and single). On the other hand, if she pursues love and marriage, she will surely end up as colorless as her mother, with not one thread left of the radiant colors Vema describes. What Jackson describes here are the self-defeating choices faced for centuries by women who have wanted "it all"— a life that includes writing and love, perhaps marriage and even motherhood. Tillie Olsen, in Silences. has documented the losses to literature as well as to the emotional well-being of individual writers that choice has forced upon generations of lively, intelligent, and talented young women, including Shirley Jackson herself. Jackson's recreation of herself in Natalie places both author and character among their female predecessors, those "scribbling women." But that does not make either of them crazy.

Every element of Natalie's behavior that many critics have labeled paranoid or schizophrenic (or both) can be explained on the basis of our record as a chauvinistic culture which has denied (and continues to deny) women the right to be fully human. Furthermore, what happens in Natalie's inner world later in the novel is predicated upon an incident that has previously been overlooked or underrated by critics and yet has a permanent effect upon 51 her development as a fully integrated human being. That "incident "is the seduction and betrayal of Natalie by one of her father's friends. The man is introduced to Natalie by her father after she has tripped over his feet (one may speculate that the man deliberately put his feet in the girl's path). "Daughter of mine," asks her father, who has come to help her, "has anyone yet corrupted you?" (40). Arnold Waite's question is directed at Natalie, but implicates the "man in the big chair," who relishes her innocence and calls her "a fine figure of a girl" when introduced to her (41). Just before this scene, Mrs. Waite has been telling Natalie about her Uncle Charles who also satina "red chair. . . I always remember that uncle sitting in that chair. I guess all young girls--" (24). She doesn't finish the sentence, so the reader is left to speculate about young girls with uncles who sit in red chairs. There is very little need to speculate about Natalie's relationship with the man in the chair or to deny the evidence in Hangsaman that she was molested by him. Natalie has a premonition just before the event, "the preliminary stirrings of something about to happen":

The idea once bom, she knew it was true; something incredible was going to happen, now, right now, this afternoon, today; this was going to be a day she would remember and look back upon, thinking. That wonderful day. . . the day when that happened. (47)

Unfortunately, Natalie is terribly wrong about the nature of the happening, nor does she recognize a warning in the detective's interrogation of the situation. "Let's go over the sequence of events once more," he tells her. He had "leaned back and unbuttoned his jacket, and Natalie. . . thought that no matter how tired he was, he would not stop until he had from her what he wanted" (47). Jackson, significantly, does not write "until he got a confession from her" or even "until she gave him what he wanted," but until he had from her what he wanted. There is no surrender on Natalie's part, but there is the strong suggestion that the 52 man will get (take) from Natalie what he wants. The scene shifts immediately to Natalie’s father, whom she sees "across the lawn, leaning forward and smiling as he talked, his arm placed carelessly around the waist of the pretty dark girl" She hears the refrain—"One is one and all alone and evermore will be so. Then, "I'll sing you two-0 a single voice sings clearly through the noise (47). To whom does the single voice belong? Her father or the man in the chair? Or does it belong to them both? Natalie finds herself nearly stepping on the man who nipped her earlier. He is alone, and Natalie marvels at the fact that his voice "came clearly to her through the noise"

(48). Surely the "clearly" refers to the "single voice" that "sang clearly" earlier. Natalie can hear "exactly" what the man is saying, "as though they had been alone, or perhaps, as though his voice were in her mind like the detective’s" (48). This is the man who will have what he wants from Natalie. Again, the voice of the detective tries to warn Natalie: "Think. Think? Suppose you think about the fact that you are very close to being in serious trouble" (48-49). "One is one and all alone” the refrain continues, and here is "this man, in her father’s house-in her own house—and he was staring at her..." (49). The man is old: "she could see now, much older than she had thought before. There were fine disagreeable little lines around his eyes and mouth, and his hands were thin and bony, and even shook a little"

(49). Natalie looks for her father, finds him, but cannot see his hands—"one was in his pocket reaching for a pencil, the other lost around the waist of the pretty girl" (49). The reference to the pencil does not need explaining. The man asks Natalie about her writing, feigning an interest Natalie tries to pride herself on the fact that she is "enough of a woman of the world to keep her head" and to "perceive the iiuiuendoes of a man who had probably talked to many people, most of them women. . . ’’ (50). AU the whUe the voice of the detective tries to warn her: "Have you given any thought to the extreme danger of your position?" (51). Before NataUe can act for herself, the man rises and takes her arm. A 53 "little chill went down Natalie’s back at his holding her aim"; he moves her toward a tray of drinks, takes one for himself and gives one to Natalie. "Come along," he tells her. The detective's voice is agitated now: "And the blood?" it whispers fiercely. "How do you account for the blood?" One more time comes the refrain,"One is one and all alone and evermore will be so." Then the strange man leads Natalie away from the crowd toward the trees. "This you will not escape... This you will not escape," the detective warns. But it is too late. In those "few quick minutes the man walking next to her had changed so rapidly from one shadow, on the lighted lawn, to another shadow, in the dark garden..." (52). Natalie wonders "how far wrong... can one person be about another?" But again, it is too late. She "felt the grass under her feet, the soft rush of bushes against her hair, and his fingers on her arm" (53). It is much, much too late for Natalie. "Youcan't refuse an explanation," the man tells Natalie, moving her closer to the trees. "Where are we?" is all she can reply. "Near some trees," the man answers (53). Remembering Natalie's prior identification with the trees as masculine, it should not be difficult to see where this sequence is leading (although many critics seem to have missed it). They continue to move into the trees:

They had come, then, to the trees where Natalie had once encotmtered knights in armor; she could see tiiem ahead, growing together silently. There were almost enough of them to be called a forest Natalie could still, before reaching the trees, see the path under her feet; the darkness was then not yet absolute (53) "The danger is here," she thinks, but by then they are "lost in darkness" (54):

What have I done? she wondered, walking silently among the trees, aware of their great terrifying silence, so much more expectant by night, and their great unbent heads, and the darkness they pulled about her with silent, patient hands, the darkness they pulled about her with silent patient hands. (54) 54 Natalie and the man sit on a fallen tree trunk. "TeU me what you thought was so wonderful about yourself?" The man's voice is barely audible. "Oh my dear God sweet Christ," Natalie thinks, "is he going to touch me?" (55). Judy Oppenheimer insists that Jackson "rarely dealt with sex" in her writing (27). Unfortunately, Oppenheimer is not a very knowledgeable reader of symbols and sexual imagery, but I suppose, according to the contemporary standards of rating sexual explicitness in books and films, the above passage would scarcely rate a two on a scale of ten Modem readers are accustomed to graphics; they have no patience with glyphics. For the reader with an eye for clues, the evidence for sexual assault is there: Natalie's focus on the man's hands, the darkness, the trees, his "muted" voice, the touching. A description of sexual abuse does not have to be explicit; in fact, it seldom is. Selective memory and denial, "minimizing" ("it doesn't really matter" or "it didn't really happen") are common reactions to abuse (Blume xxix). If additional evidence of Natalie's molestation by the older man is needed, we need look no further than the victim's reaction. When Natalie awakens the next morning, she remembers nothing about the night before. The sun is bright, the curtains are dancing at the window. One cannot help remembering Jackson's opening to "The Lottery" which gives the reader such a feeling of peace and goodwill; but it is a peace that is soon broken, and the same is tme for Natalie's temporary morning euphoria. A common literary device for symbolizing loss of innocence is to spoil a perfect morning, and indeed, before Natalie is fully awake, a "sudden coldness" enters the room. Natalie, without yet understanding why, buries her face in the pillow.

Then she remembers- "No, please, no" (54-55). Natalie tries hard not to think about what happened; she displays the classic denial behavior mentioned above:

I will not think about it doesn't matter, she told herself, and her mind repeated idiotically. It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, it 55 doesn’t matter, until desperately she said aloud, "I don't remember, nothing happened, nothing that I remember happened." (55)

Natalie continues to repeat her litany, "Nothing happened. .. I don't remember. .. I will not think about it" (55). But she knows. She remembers. There are her clothes, now lying in a crumpled heap on the floor near the bed; she recalls how "she had tom them off wildly when she went to bed," how she watched a loose button faU off her dress and roll under the bed. She also remembers telling herself that in the morning "it wiU be gone":

Someday, she thought, it wiU be gone. Someday IH be sixty years old, sixty- seven, eighty, and, remembering, will perhaps recall that something of this sort happened once (where? when? who?) and will perhaps smile nostalgically thinking. What a sad silly girl I was, to be sure. (55)

The sad, pathetic girl is suffering from more than psychological trauma. The most "horrible moment" of the morning, worse than the darkened sunshine, worse than the fear of being discovered (the "suspicious? knowing? perceiving?" looks she might receive from her parents), worse than the "disgusting" memory, is the "bruised face and pitiful erring body" she sees in the mirror (56). Natalie may spend the rest of her life denying the evidence of her assault in order to survive it. That, too, is a common coping mechanism of abuse victims. The fact that she survives at all is to her credit, for at the end of this first section,

Natalie can only echo the feeling of utter darkness and defeat that has taken over her body and soul: '"I wish I were dead,' Natalie thought concretely" (58). In answer to the question that is bound to arise concerning Shirley Jackson's abuse experience, for myself, there can be little doubt that she was molested by someone at some time during her childhood or adolescence (perhaps repeatedly). AU her life she displayed symptoms of sexual abuse, namely "alienation from the body (failure to take care of one's body); manipulating the body to avoid sexual attention" [obesity in Jackson's case]; eating 56 disorders; drug or alcohol abuse; phobias [Jackson suffered from agoraphobia]; depression, blocking, feeling crazy, and feeling different" (Blume xxvii-xxx). Jackson also evidenced an unprecedented (for the time) interest in the split and multiple personality, as her fiction demonstrates. As Oppenheimer notes, this was a process that "fascinated her, this splitting" (161). Jackson did considerable research on personality dissociation which "convinced her that a multiple personality needed to have an act of sexual abuse as its cornerstone" (Oppenheimer 164). Certainly in the chapters that follow this one in Hangsaman. Natalie

Waite demonstrates evidence enough to convince readers that she was a child whose trust had been violated by adults who should have been nurturing her development, her intellect, her psyche, and not their own. Both her father and her mother use Natalie often unscrupulously to feed their own ego needs, and when she most needs their protective love, during the seduction and molestation, they are absent During this entire scene, Natalie's mother is lying drunk in bed, her way of denying the truth of her husband's flirtations and probable affairs.^ The most she is w illingto do is to warn Natalie to "stay away from men like your father," a warning that goes unheeded because, in spite of her awareness of his shortcomings, Natalie still expects her father to protect her, to validate her trust in him.

This he does not do because he cannot do it, involved as he is in the drunken pursuit of a "pretty girl." The fact that Arnold Waite and the pretty girl also function as doubles for the older man and Natalie, further implicates Natalie's father in her seduction and abuse.

Natalie is left to deal with the abuse incident as best she can. She makes a heroic attempt to put it behind her by continuing to tell herself "it never happened," and by distancing herself from the event Natalie's move from home to college helps her accomplish the latter. Jackson opens the second section of her novel with a commentary on education, and the book is worth reading for this alone, that is, for her perceptive evaluation of the modified liberal attitudes toward education that still prevailed in some parts of the country (most notably the east) during the early Fifties. This peculiar combination of laissez faire 57 pedagogy and classicism has some bearing on Natalie's early confusion and floundering and is worth examining before moving on to her own struggles to integrate (not choose between) order and chaos:

Obviously, in any college which begins with the notion of education as experience, a certain amount of confusion must be allowed for before anyüiing can be done about what is going to be taught Should the student be free, for instance? Should the teacher be free? (k should the concept of freedom be abandoned as an educational ideal and the concept of utility be substituted? Ought the students be allowed sentimental sciences like Greek? Or geometry? Should there be a marriage course? What, precisely, should be Ae attitude taken by the college with regard to a resident psychoanalyst? fHangsaman 601

Natalie's college, never named in the book, was "decided" for her by her father and closely resembles Bennington College, where Stanley Hyman taught during the Fifties. Men have been "eliminated from the student body and women from the faculty," thus providing a conducive atmosphere for professorial conquest among the female nubiles, an opportunity that was not lost on Stanley at Bermington. The "youthfril founders" of

Natalie's college believed that education was "more a matter of attitude of than of learning"; the goal was to accustom students, in this case women, to "live maturely in a world of adults." Words like "sustained" and "life" and "vision" were used "lavishly" by faculty and members of the board of trustees (59-60). In order to prepare women to live maturely in the world, Natalie's school believed that "anyone who wanted to study anything should be accommodated," although subjects like gym and microbiology, both of which would "surely have benefited women more than an entire semester spent discussing 'Frankie and Johrmy,"' were not encouraged (61). The school's faculty were "drawn almost entirely from a group which would find the inadequate salary larger than anything they had ever earned"; this, of course, resulted in a faculty necessarily inadequate to meet the needs of any students except 58 those of the female sex. Some compromise in the college's liberal philosophy had been reached over the years: some courses were actually required of students.

In addition to these rigors, students at Natalie's college were permitted to "gamble and drink fieely" only in the presence of a "condoning faculty member or [his] wife," and they might stay out aU night "only if an accurate address" was left with a "sort of house resident" who was expected to exert a "semi-ofBcial influence over the girls" (62). In other words, as Jackson so cleverly observes, students instead of being "allowed to dance as they please. . . were now required to dance in patterns" (62), patterns which gave no assurance that the young women who managed to graduate at all would ever be prepared to make a genuine contribution to the world other than as a competent wife and mother, or if they attempted to do more, would find their expectations for domestic happiness seriously compromised. This is the college to which Arnold Waite sends his daughter with no plans for a “broad education," but rather an "extremely narrow one"; this is also the college which produced from its first graduating class a "set of alumnae ranging ftom the bold-eyed members who were almost without exception divorced and haggard women of the world, to the well-trained members of the most recent graduating classes, who came back comfortably to reunions with their small children" (63). Once more, Natalie is faced with a choice between the apparent ravaging effect of a career on a woman or domestic complacency. Natalie's initial reaction to her new surroundings is noteworthy for at least two reasons. Having for the first time in her life a "room of one's own" is clearly something she desires and needs if she is ever to break free from the events of the past The use of rooms and houses as a device for depicting character and plot development also signals Jackson's growing interest in the function of architectural boundaries in either assisting or inhibiting women's psychological development For the moment the four walls of Natalie's new home mean a "new start" for her, and she looks upon the "blank and empty" walls," the window which "fiUed almost the entire far wall," with "joy" (63). These were walls to be "adorned 59 with her pictures, or whatever else she chose to put on them. . . the floor was readied for the movement of her feet" (64). Natalie’s room, in many respects, resembles that of Virginia Woolfs Clarissa Dalloway, who is also trying to assess and subdue memories of the flesh. Woolf, like Jackson, was another female writer concerned with doubles and, like Jackson, a precocious girl who had been sexually abused.^ Jackson describes the room as "bare" and "cell-like"; the bed is "narrow and its mattress thin enough for the sleep of exhaustion," the sheets "neat" (64). Clarissa, when she enters her room at the top of the house, feels like "a nun withdrawing, or a child exploring a tower." The sheets on her bed are "clean, tight, stretched in a broad white band from side to side. Narrower and narrower would her bed be" (Mrs. Dallowav 45-46).

When I use the word precocious to describe Jackson and Woolf as young women writers, I mean it to apply to Natalie as well, and I define it here to mean an acute sensitivity to surroundings which often results in a heightened physical, mental, and emotional reaction to them. Natalie Waite as a child and as a young woman watches, listens, senses, and continually assesses the information she takes in. She sometimes projected herself into the lives of the other girls in order to gain a different perspective on the reality of a situation

(Woolf often did the same thing). In fact, perspective is a recurring theme throughout the novel, and I find Natalie's level of introspection and perception surprising in a girl of seventeen; she is sagacious enough to look at the past from both a child's perspective and that of the adult she is struggling to become. One illustration of this double vision is

Natalie's recollection of the "small, vague Natalie" bringing her mother a "wishing stone."

Natalie, the child, was certain the stone was magical simply because it "looked like a wishing stone"; so strong was this belief, she "held it tight in my hand and closed my eyes and wished for a bicycle..." (139). Mr. Waite had laughed at her childish faith in magic, but her mother had begged for the bicycle. Looking back, at seventeen, Natalie realizes it was "less important. .. to allow her father's humor to be transmitted to his children than to 60 keep alive her mother's faith in magic" (139). Natalie also sees the real logic of the situation: if she had held on to the wishing stone until "the right time came," she could have used it to wish for "a bicycle on that Christmas Eve when a bicycle was so obviously awaiting her under the Christmas tree." For the young Natalie as well as for the adolescent Natalie, the "magic would have been sustained, and cause and effect not violated for that first, irrecoverable time" (139). Natalie fiequently practices a similar kind of scrupulous inner rumination at school m an attempt to understand the other girls: "who it was just and right to be afraid o f. .. who would tell tales or steal or have nervous breakdowns who would fail all their courses and go home ingloriously crying. .. who would fail all their courses and join the best cliques...?" (65). As she passes their rooms at night, Natalie projects herself into their dreams in order to know what they have brought with them from their past lives to the school. Because of this intense watching and her long silences, Natalie's peers at school think her strange; "they say you're crazy. .. spooky," one of the girls tells her, but again Natalie's unconventional behavior has nothing to do with psychotic episodes or witchcraft Natalie's "peculiar behavior" is a result of what she knows that the other girls do not Alice Miller tells us that it is not unusual for children (and adults) who have been sexually molested to be acutely aware of the evil inherent in a situation that only has the appearance of being safe and normal; child abuse of any kind is "evil in its tmdisguised form" (232). Children and young adults who have experienced betrayal at the hands of an adult caretaker, that is, someone, anyone, who is supposed to be responsible for the child's safety learn very quickly that "the world is not a just place" (Miller 232). One of most common behaviors seen in abuse victims is either difficulty setting boundaries or extreme sensitivity to them; in Blume's words, to be "very aware of turf' (49). Natalie claims her room as her "turf' and guards its sanctity by carrying her key everywhere instead of leaving it in her mailbox as she is instructed to do (115). Another distinguishing feature of abused 61 children and adults is the inability to differentiate and to understand that one is not simply an "extension of one's parents or loved ones, but a person who owns—who is entitled to—her own characteristics" (Blume 42). Natalie’s experiences at school are primarily concerned with her struggle to make that break and to preserve her center, in spite of her parents' attempts to use her as an ego extension of their own inadequacies.^ Natalie does finally come to realize that her mother has been trying to heal in Natalie aH the "sorrows" she could not heal in herself, and that her father was also "trying to cure his failures in Natalie" (210). She comes to understand that she need not "do over" in her own life those choices "now believed by her mother to have been mistaken" (210), nor is she responsible for her father's "adolescent hangovers" (204). But the journey to this place of self-delineation and wholeness is a long and difficult one which begins shortly after her arrival at school;

Natalie's first experience is aptly called the "initiation." In the early hours of the morning after her arrival, Natalie is awakened by several girls with handkerchiefs over their faces; she is herded, with the other new girls, down a dark hall to the third-floor bathroom. Every time she asks a question (she is the only girl who does), Natalie is told to "Shut up." How "bold," she thinks, the "lack of a face makes one" (73). She wonders if the mothers of such girls "encouraged their superiority" and

"egged them on to masked acts" (74). After more questions and shoves, Natalie decides to keep quiet, perceiving that it is never too soon to leam "the resignation of a perceptive mind before gleeful freed brutality" (74). The anonymous leaders, tired of shoving and pushing their captives, begin, without much enthusiasm, to call the girls, one by one, to the center of the room for interrogation. It occurs to Natalie that if she had simply stayed in her room and refused to open the door, no one would have pursued her further. Another lesson learned of "ritual gone to seed; the persecution of new students, once passionate, now perfunctory" is very like the outdated tradition depicted in "The Lottery" (76). 62

The first question aslæd of the new girls is, "Are you a virgin?" Natalie is understandably disturbed: "I hope they don't ask me." This is further confirmation that she has been sexually molested. Natalie's turn finally comes. "You," comes the command. "No," replies Natalie (76). But she complies, not so much because she is afiaid of being ostracized, but because she knows that to refuse out of petulance is as bad as allowing herself to be led blindly. Sitting in the center of the room, everyone's eyes on her, Natalie

"knew at once and for aU time the hard core of defiance with which she might always face the tmknown. .. she knew it would be easy, or even easier, to resist than to expose herself'

(76). This is hardly the confusion, the anxious indecision we expect firom someone with an unbalanced mind. The ritual proceeds. Natalie refuses to answer yes or no to the question about her virginity. She also refuses to tell a dirty joke (the other "horrifying" requirement of the initiation). "Bad sport, rotten sport, not fair" is all she hears firom her interrogators. "What a silly routine," Natalie thinks. Of course, by defying the norm, she is jeopardizing her place among these "placid, masked girls, with their calm futures ahead and their regular pasts proven beyond a doubt" (79). Natalie's past is hardly regular, as we have seen; still she does not yet fully understand how

one person, stepping however aside from their meaningless, echoing standards, set perhaps by a violent movement before their recollection, and handed down by the other placid creatures, might lose a seat among them by question, by anything except a cheerful smile and the resolution to hurt other people. (79)

According to Emily Hancock, "conformity marks the era of the older girl" (18), but this hardly describes Natalie, although perhaps it is true that she has not registered the consequences of defying the bovine norm, the herd instinct; however, Natalie is guided by an instinct finer than intellectual recognition (which all too quickly becomes intellectual rationalization for those whose morality is determined by mob mentality ): it is tlie radiant 63 essence Vema Hansen assured Natalie was present inside her, Hancock's "root identity" preserved, instead of "cut off' (3). Who or what is Natalie’s core self? This integrated persona is not always clear to the reader in this section of the novel, because it is not yet clear to Natalie who she is or wants to become. However, there is one constant in her life that cannot be altered, and that is her identity as a writer. It is from Natalie's letters home to her father and from the contents of her secret diary that we are able to keep track of Natalie's growing estrangement from the past (what she calls "there"), her efforts to deal with the "here" of the present, and her progress toward an integration of the two. Natalie's letters to her father seem, on the surface, the communications of a well- adjusted student "I feel so much at home here," she writes, "that I don't really remember what it was like to live anywhere else" (80. She assures her father that "right after you left.

.. I started feeling like a college girl..." (81). Her secret journal tells another story. In it she takes pains to reassure the lonely Natalie, the girl who has chosen not to live within the rule-bound boredom so prized by the other girls in her classes, that she is the "the best, and they will know it someday..." (91):

Somewhere there is something waiting for you, and you can smile a little perhaps now when you are so unhappy, because how weU we both know that you be happy very very very very soon. Somewhere someone is waiting for you and loves you and thinks you are beautiful, and it will be so wonderful and so fine, and if you can be patient and wait and never never never despair, because despair might spoil it, you will come there someday, and the gates will open and you pass through and no one wiU be able to come in unless you let them (92)

Friedman, among others, sees Natalie writing ("talking") to herself as evidence of her "schizoid tendencies"^ (92), but after all, a writer's diary or journal is necessarily a conversation with the self. For example, Virginia Woolf used her diary to "commune with herself' (A Writer's Diarv viii); one of her entries sounds so like Natalie that it is difficult not to the draw the conclusion that both women wrote from a similar and understandable 64

need to reafGrm their self-worth. What I find so affirming about Natalie's conversation with herself is her candor and courage in admitting that she is not happy, that prolonged despair

is a possibility, and that it can be dangerous. Sylvia Plath knew and faced the same despair, the same perplexities of identity, the same lack of "sun" in her life, but somehow she lacked Natalie's confidence that the sun would rise again. At the risk of assisting those who believe Natalie's journal entry supports their claim for schizophrenia, I offer this entry from Plath's

journal written when she, too, was seventeen and a fieshman at Smith college, because I believe it indicates real evidence of mental disturbance. Here is the entry of a young woman who displays real evidence of a breakdown in self-esteem resulting from a lack of personal

identity:

God who ami? I sit in the library tonight, the lights glaring overhead, the fan whirring loudly. .. I sit here without identity: faceless. . . There is my date this weekend: someone believes I am a human being, not a name merely. And these are the only indications that I am a whole person, not merely a knot of nerves without identity. I'm lost. .. It is nightmare. There is no stm (Journals 171

Natalie, tmlike Plath, knows that in spite of life's present gloom and confusion, there

is "something waiting," something so good it can make her "smile a little" even now (91).

In spite of the past, in spite of the shadow of sexual trauma that hangs over her, Natalie is

able to reaffirm a belief in her inherent goodness and her right to happiness. Surely this is a sign of mental health, not distress. Unlike many victims of sexual abuse, Natalie refuses to believe she is "bad" or "dirty," or that she deserves to be punished. In fact, she seems to have an uncanny sense that recovery lies in controlling who will have access to her body, her

space, her identity as Natalie Waite. When she is able to say no to those who want to invade her privacy, her body, she will have come through. That time is not yet here for

Natalie, but her journal demonstrates that she knows where her salvation lies. For Natalie,

writing in her journal is self-administered, health-giving therapy. And she needs it. In spite 65

of her admirable efforts otherwise, Natalie has been unable to forget, completely, the incident of her sexual abuse. One evening she is visited by Rosalind, another outcast, who tells Natalie some "gossip" she has overheard. "Listen," Rosalind hisses in Natalie's ear, "you know that girl, the skinny one who's such a good friend of Peggy Burton's?... Well the reason she went away last weekend was because she had an abortion" (89). She cautions Natalie not to have

anything to do with the girls, or the "first thing you know they think the same about yow" (89). From some place "far off, in the untouched, lonely places of Natalie's mind, an echo came: It isn't true, it didn't happen..." (90). In ajournai entry some time after this incident, Natalie writes: "Perhaps, you thought, Natalie is frightened and perhaps she even thinks

sometimes about certain long ago bad thing that she promised me never to think about again" (135). She reassures her journal (and herself) that she does not think about that "terrible thing. .. because both of us know that it never happened, did it? And it was some horrible dream that caught up with us both" (136). It appears as though Natalie is avoiding

the truth, a truth she only pretends to hide from herself. In this entry, she displays commendable courage and self-possession as she begins to dismantle the ogre:

let me say it like this: when I came here to college I was all alone and that bad thing had just happened and I had no friends and no one to think about and I was always frightened. Now all of a sudden I find that I am walking around in a world very full of other people, and because they are aU frightened too I can afford to be fastened, and then once I know I am frightened then I can go ahead and forget about it and start looking around for other things. (136)

Here, in a single entry, Natalie denies and at the same time acknowledges the abuse incident. Entirely unaided by modem psychiatry, she has managed to push herself another step along the way to recovery, not the act of an unbalanced personality. In fact, in the same entry she explores her misgivings about teUing a psychoanalyst "all about myself: 66

I wonder what I would say to a psychoanalyst I wonder where people find words for all the funny things inside their heads. I keep turning around in circles and finding how well things fit together, but nothing is ever complete. I think if I could tell someone everything, every single thing, inside my head, then I would be gone, and not existing any more, and I would sink away into that lovely nothing-space where you don’t have to worry any more and no one ever hears you or cares and you can say anything but of course you wouldn'tbe any more and you couldn't reallydo anything so it wouldn't matter what you did. (137)

As young and inexperienced as Natalie is, she understands that it can be just as dangerous to give up her story (the power of her own words) to a doctor as it is to work through her problems alone. She is not yet out of the woods, but she is not out of control, either. She deliberately conceals the truth of her circumstances from her parents not so much to spare them, but to separate herself from the past The letters she sends home are firom the old Natalie; the journal entries represent the new Natalie. They also represent an attempt to separate herself from the overbearing ego needs of her father, who writes in one of his letters to hen

As the person who knows you most dearly, and who loves you always the best, I am equally the one most capable of telling you these things. It has been my plan, Natalie, all of it, and when you approach despair remember diat even your despair is part of my plan. Remember, too, tiiat without you I could not exist. .. You have thus a double responsibility, for my existence and your own. If you abandon me, you lose yourself. (152)

This is a rather large responsibility for a girl of seventeen who is trying to work through the trauma of sexual abuse; one can hardly blame Natalie for ignoring her parents' request to come home for a visit She does, however, manage to come to a better understanding of her relationship with them through her interaction with Arthur and Elizabeth Langdon, who function for a while as Natalie's surrogate parents. 67

Natalie's relationship with Arthur Langdon has been correctly seen by critics as an extension of her relationship with her father. Arthur teaches English, writes reviews, and encourages the crushes his students inevitably develop on him. Arthur Langdon is Arnold Waite. What sets Arthur apart from the other two is the fact that he actually married one of his conquests. Elizabeth Langdon is twenty-one, a college dropout with no identity of her own. When she and Natalie meet for the first time, all she can say is: "My husband teaches

English. I used to be a student" How sad, Natalie thinks, "that's all she knows to tell me about herself' (97). What Elizabeth chooses not to tell Natalie, but soon makes apparent to her, is that she is an alcoholic. On one of Natalie's afternoon visits to the Langdon house, she notices that "Elizabeth Langdon, her own door closed behind her, had changed, as a bird stepping again inside its cage is no longer a creature of circle and parabola, is a hopping thing" (99). Natalie wonders what Elizabeth finds so "alarming" about the house; she soon finds the answer. After several martinis, Elizabeth begins to reveal to Natalie the unhappiness of her married state in much the same way Natalie's mother has done, in the past, under the influence of too many cocktails. "I guess I'm bitter because I used to be a student and now I'm a faculty wife" (102). On subsequent visits, Natalie discovers that

Elizabeth has no real friends because it is very hard to talk to "girls I used to know as students," and the faculty wives are "too old for me" (103). Here is an attractive and intelligent woman who relinquished her education for status, that is, status gained through her husband and not through any achievement of her own. "I thought it was all going to be so wonderful," she sighs, another sad echo of Natalie's mother (145). Here is yet another inadequate role model for Natalie, a younger version of her mother. Mrs. Waite and Elizabeth have another thing in common: husbands with wandering eyes and hands. Arthur Langdon is fond of asking his favorite students home to "tea," except, in this case, tea means martinis. Elizabeth, understandably, is suspicious and jealous. "What's the big fuss overthemT she fumes, in much the same way Mrs. Waite 68 fumed over Arnold's guests. But, of course, she is only too aware of the nature of the fuss. The girls-Ann and Vicki—are predictably pretty with the "rounded, colorful, rich beauty of girls who have been pretty babies and pretty little girls and pretty boarding school girls" (110). Even though the "giant and ungraceful" Natalie is surrounded by three pretty girls (Elizabeth is, after aH, only a few years older than her husband's guests),

something vague solidified within Natalie... so that she became less of a meek and submissive personality and was without as good a soul as the rest of them; from within tiie strongholds of her own possessive pride in herself it became now apparent to her that there were w e^esses of defense in other fortresses. (112)

The lesson Natalie is learning is that she is not so different from the people who surround her, a lesson women who have been molested must learn if they are to recover. Other people, even beautiful people, have fears, are vulnerable, and Natalie soon has another opportunity to prove to herself that she is much more sane and stronger than those around her who appear to be "normal."

On one occasion, Elizabeth and Arthur are invited by Natalie, Vicki, and Anne to the dorm (once more Natalie is an assistant hostess) for cocktails mixed in a flower vase and served in toothbrush glasses (152-53). The conversation centers around Natalie's writing, which Arthur praises. Elizabeth regards Natalie for a "long minute," then says, "I suppose that sort of thing is all right to do until you're married," suggesting again that no "real woman" would entertain ideas of a career once she has attached Mrs. to her name.

Certainly "after you're married," Anne chimes in, "you're too busy doing housework"

(161). Elizabeth makes a serious attempt at staying sober, but her husband, with the particular assistance of Vicki and Anne, aids and abets her drunketmess to the point that she must be assisted home by Natalie while Arthur continues on to a faculty diimer party. Natalie, with the "infinite superiority and confidence that comes to a moderately sober 69 person addressing a very drunken person," hauls Elizabeth out of her chair and begins to help her down the stairs and out of the dorm (167). She makes an interesting comment which, again, demonstrates her acute awareness of her own situation as well as her ability to make choices about whether she will cross the line between rationality and madness:

It is really an instinct, the knack of dealing with irrational people, Natalie was thinking; I suppose that any mind like mine, which is so close, actually, to the irrational and so tempted by it, is able easily to pass the dividing line between rational and irrational and communicate with someone dnmk or insane, or asleep. (167)

If self-awareness-knowing where one is, physically and psychically, at any given moment in time-is a sign of mental stability, then Natalie at this moment is certainly very stable. Not just mental strength is required, however; somehow Natalie, "shivering tmder the pressure of Elizabeth's legs against her," must half-pull, half-carry the woman who is supposed to be her chaperone across campus to the home which is not really hers but her husband's house (168). It seems that Natalie, once again, is required to demonstrate a wisdom and maturity beyond her years in order to shore up the shaky ego of yet another incomplete and unreliable adult (granted Elizabeth is only twenty-one; however, by virtue of her marriage, in this culture, she has been elevated to adult status). It would appear as if

Natalie's Bildungsroman, her coming of age, follows fairly closely the female system of relationship values identified by Carol GiUigan which incorporate a "very strong sense of being responsible to the world" (21). Certainly Natalie demonstrates a genuine compassion for her companion's situation by speaking to her gently, by putting her arms aroimd her, and by allowing Elizabeth's head to rest on her shoulder (171). "I want to die," Elizabeth mumbles: "I know you do," is Natalie's reply. "I want to die," Elizabeth repeats. 70 "Don't be silly," Natalie tells her. "We all want to die, I suppose, from the minute that we're bom." (171) In fact, it is Elizabeth who attempts suicide in the novel, not Natalie, although Natalie does sometimes think about death. In a conversation with Arthur Langdon, she tells him that she has been "thinking about when I would be dead" (130). When he shows some concern, she assures him she is not looking for an escape from life, but just the opposite. She worries about when she will no longer "be with myself' (130). The loss of "a mind like mine" disturbs Natalie much more than living with the challenges of a "very original mind" (131). Elizabeth, on the other hand, has no originality and no life, either. Envious of Natalie's ability to write, but unable to complete any of the classes she begins each semester in an attempt to finish her degree, she eventually creates a baby neither she nor her husband wants. Natalie, on the other hand, creates herself as she continues on her way toward the

"something good" she is sure will happen to her soon. Throughout the second section of Hangsaman. Jackson has taken great pains to show that in spite of Natalie's recent trauma, in spite of the fact that she feels she is an outsider, in spite of the fact that she is thmst into situations that would try the wisdom of most adults, there is still inside her an immutable treasure, forged from intelligence and the keen and observant eye of the writer's mind. In presenting Natalie as balanced somewhere between the orderly (but inherently chaotic) existence at home, and the chaotic (but inherently stable) envirorunent at school,^ Jackson is preparing us for Natalie's encounter with Tony, who has been variously labeled "an actual girl" (Morris 5), a "Lesbian" (Lyins 64), a "product of Natalie's imagination" (Friedman 87), and "an aspect of [her] madness" (Bullock 7).

The first mention of Tony interestingly appears in a letter written by Natalie to her father, interesting because the workings of Natalie's mind are not usually revealed in letters to her father. "There is a very strange character around here," she writes, a girl who is 71 "always going off by herself somewhere." Natalie "would like to meet her" (177). Natalie goes on to discuss a dress her mother sent her. Then, suddenly, Natalie returns to the subject of Tony:

Speaking of magic, I figure that now I have once mentioned that I would like to meet üiat girl Tony, I will certainly meet her soon. I have discovered that all you have to do is notice a thing like that concretely enough to say it, as in a letter like this, for it to happen. (178)

There is no real evidence, at this point, to indicate that Tony is imaginary. She does, however, sound very much like the loner Natalie so obviously is. There is also the mention of magic. Whether magic implies conjuring up an imaginary playmate or whether it refers to Natalie's very real (concrete) desire to meet Tony is not made clear in the letter. Tony's ethereal introduction compels the reader to begin looking for evidence either for or against fantasy. It is true that identifying Tony as a real character might dismantle arguments that Natalie is schizophrenic; however, the focus of this section of the novel should be Natalie, not Tony, and I fear that too many readers and critics are distracted from this issue by the quest for Tony's "identity" when our attention should be directed at Natalie's.

Tony's next appearance, following her epistolary debut, occurs after a very peculiar and confusing sequence which critics seem to have overlooked (or perhaps have chosen to ignore). Natalie is once more awakened in the middle of the night by an "urgent soft voice in her ear" (178). The voice is "without personality" and therefore different from the voice of the detective, which has disappeared from Natalie's inner world. "Please, please, wake up," it whispers. Natalie hears her own "loud voice" respond (179). There are, apparently, two voices in the room. There is also a "figure beside her bed" that is "undefinable" (179). Is the voice and is the figure real, or is it a configuration of Natalie's bewildered imagination? She responds sanely enough--"what is it, fire?" The formless figure urges Natalie to follow her: "You don't need yourbathtohe . .. I'm naked" (179). If we take 72

Jackson at her word, this "person" is without any clothes at all, but perhaps she only means she has no robe? Natalie is dressed for she is acutely aware of and embarrassed by the "pattern of red-and-black scotty dogs on her pajamas" (180). Far more disturbing than the nudity is the "soft giggle" that accompanies the "vague figure," and seems disconnected from any source. With that sound, Natalie feels the "first cold actual fear" of invasion. The giggle was "here in her own room" (179). Natalie fumbles for the light cord, but "her hand was taken in another hand and she was pulled firmly" toward the door (179). The figure, giggling, continues: "You needn't think you're the only one. Wait tiUI show you what ZVe got" (180). Natalie wonders, "why don't I scream?," but continues to follow the "barefoot naked figure ahead" (179). They descend to the first floor and turn toward a door at the end of the hah. The voice tells Natalie: "[Y]ou can lie very still and not move and not say anything and you can hear everything and even though they think you're there they don't know who you are and they go right ahead" (180). Immediately one thinks of some kind of sexual orgy, and perhaps to the ears of a young child, the sound of her parents making love in the next room sounds terrifying and confusing. "There's this little girl," the voice continues, "and she came to my room and said, 'May I please sleep with you tonight?' and I said, 'Of course you may only I have to get up so you go right to sleep'" (182). I submit, at the risk of being accused of overreading, that if this is a fiction of Natalie's imagination, it may be based on the reality of an early experience of hers. Perhaps

Natalie overheard her parents engaging in intercourse, or just talking intimately. Hearing or sensing parental intimacy, a child will feel left out, even abandoned. Most parents, hearing the small child, would at least attempt to reassure her; indeed, "[wjhen they come right into my room I just look at them and say, 'Go ahead with what you were saying because I certainly don't care'" (180). But the little girl does care, for she asks: "May I sleep with you tonight?," and the adult, the parent (the father? vmcle?) replies, "Of course you may only I have to get up early but it's four hours before I have to get up so ..." (181) 73 It would appear that Natalie, at some time as an infant or small child, shared her parents' bed. The voice in the dorm room is at first beguiling: "Little girl? Little girl?," it calls outlovingly. Then the voice is annoyed, disgusted: "She's fallen asleep again, they're always like that Leave them for a minute and they're gone asleep. Little girl? Come on, we've got to hurry” (182). Hurry where, to do what? Natalie's awareness of the "rumpled bed" (182) and the seductive voice calling out to her suggests that a sexual encounter between a very young Natalie and someone, perhaps her father, took place before the actual molestation incident in the trees. Certainly, there is no mistaking the fiightened "lost little girl" quality of the episode, the giggling child's voice, the hand that touches and beckons. This same sequence of "little gurgling laughs" surfaces again in The Haunting of Hill House (162); it is a recurring pattern that cannot be disregarded. If, indeed, Natalie is trying to recover the little girl who was violated by someone, or if the little girl is trying help Natahe recover the young woman who was violated, betrayed, her value thrown away by the man in the trees, then the episode, however strange and disturbing, makes sense.

Metcalf acknowledges that the "difficulty in reading Jackson is precisely the difficulty involved in playing the painful game she asks us to play" (40). That is precisely the difficulty here in determining what is real. Jackson is depicting the experience exactly as it occurs to someone who is trapped between a reality so terrible it carmot be faced and a fantasy that cannot obscure the pain. Sooner or later, Natalie must turn and face her past Just now she is unable to, but she is prepared to protect herself from further harm. Quietly and "in acute fear," she backs toward the door:

When she felt the panels behind her back, she opened it without a perceptible sound, her hand behind her, and opening it stül behind her, backed further into the hall and closed the door in front of her face, shutting out aU the light in the haU but feeling more at ease in the darkness; she was on the first fioor of the house, she knew, and up two flights of stairs-oh, interminable !—was in her own room again, and a safe light she might turn on. (183) 74

Natalie hurries toward the door, pursued by "sly brushing footsteps." In the darkness, she "heard the "soft giggle and felt almost the seeking hand brush her face and heard very close, and softly, "Little girl'" (184). Natalie manages to escape; she runs "fteely" and then "primitively" over the "wet grass" (184). As she runs she sees another figure emerging from the trees. "Who?" Natalie asks, helplessly. "Is there something wrong?," Tony responds (184). Natalie’s journey through the dark and narrow halls of the dorm followed by her encounter with Tony signals the beginning of a longer journey which will take her into the woods once more, only this time her companion is Tony, and not the old man with the wandering hands. Nevertheless, the imagery of the narrow, dark passage, the innuendoes of voices, soft laughter, the rumpled bed, bare feet, and wet grass are all decidedly sexual.

Many critics have suggested that there is, indeed, a lesbian component to Natalie's relationship with Tony. I have no problem with such a reading; however, as with any of the labels that have been applied to Natalie ("crazy," "mad"), caution must be exercised, particularly if the two labels, lesbianism and madness, are treated as one "affliction." John

Parks recognizes that Natalie, having been betrayed by the "men in her life," and "without much help or guidance from her mother," is "ripe for a fall into madness" ("Chambers” 19). I wonder, though, if he is begging the question. I suspect that what Parks really means to say is that Natalie, having been sexually molested by a friend of her father's, and abandoned by her mother, is ripe for a fall into an intimate relationship with a woman, and he is correct 'Who else but a woman would understand the terror and agony of such an experience? Who else but a woman could offer Natalie the support and warmth, sexual or not, she needs to recover? Jackson, I believe, understood this, but for the record wrote that any ambivalence in Hangsaman was "of the spirit, or the mind, not the sex." The women, she went on to say, are "not bitches, they are not witches, they are most emphatically not 75 switches" (qtd. in Oppenheimer 233). Jackson's denials to the contrary, I do not rule out

the plausibility of a lesbian connection between Natalie and Tony; however, it is not the nature or labeling of the relationship between Natalie and Tony or Natalie that matters here.l® The question, for me, is rather one of whether Tony's presence in Natalie's life, real or imagined, lesbian or otherwise, helps her grow beyond the sexual abuse incident? The

answer is, yes. After her first encounter with Tony, Natalie attends a pretentious faculty party at Arthur Langdon's home almost identical to those hosted by Arnold Waite. During the event

she feels the same "preliminary faint stirrings" she experienced before meeting the man who molested her. Natalie is bored; the territory is all too familiar to her as she empties ashtrays and plays "assistant hostess" for the Langdons. Finally she manages to extricate herself from the pretentious and empty dialogue that surrounds her. On one side of the room she

hears, "Take Kafka for example," and on the other side, "When, for example, we consider the question as one purely o f...," echoes of her father's gatherings (190). Once again Natalie closes a door behind her and sees trees, the same trees that were

living in the ground without curiosity about the insides of houses, and growing toward death as surely as Natalie. When one of the trees demonstrated that it was not rooted and perhaps not completely indifferent by disengaging itself from the others and coming toward NatAe where she sat on the porch step, she was not surprised (190)

This is the second time Tony has emerged from the trees; in fact, the image of trees is significant throughout Hangsaman. and with the exception of Natalie's childhood experience of playing knight and lady in the trees, they always pose a threat to her. As a child, Natalie preferred the open ground covered with grass; later, she is molested in the trees. Trees usually symbolize male sexual aggression in Hangsaman: however, Tony's emergence from 76

the trees suggests that the threat of sexual aggression is female as well. In fact all trees are a threat to Natalie, and this threat is not necessarily connected with either a male or a female.

What Natalie really fears is that she will be sexually molested or violated by someone stronger than she is (precisely what happened to her in the trees); Natalie feels she is at the

mercy of aU adults, male or female, or anyone she considers to have more power than she, anyone, male or female, who makes sexual demands of her that she feels unable to resist, as the following sequence of events demonstrates. Just after meeting Tony under the trees, Natalie has a daydream that could be considered a nightmare. First, she recalls "running through the grass calling "Daddy? Daddy?'" (193). Suppose, she muses,

it had been no more than a split second of time, as in a dream, perhaps under an anesthetic; suppose after this split second when her wandering mind fancied she was someone named Natalie Waite, that then she should wake u p ... a nurse bending over her and the voices saying. There now, it wasn't so bad, was it? (193)

Then Natalie imagines waking up in a hospital, presumably after surgery, telling the nurse,

"I dreamed I was Watalie Nat" and not Natalie Waite. Or even suppose that she was confined, locked away, pounding wildly against the bars on the window, attacking keepers, biting at the doctors, screaming down the corridors that she was someone named Watalie Naite (194)

In this sequence, Natalie displays several of the characteristics of an abuse survivor who attempts to gain control over the situation by pretending to be someone else or by changing her name (Blume 57). Many survivors of sexual abuse also cope with the trauma by using

the rationale that the experience was only a bad dream. They try to minimize the situation ("He was only tickling me" or "It couldn't have been that bad" [Blume 88]), wonder if they are "unreal and everyone else is real" (81), and question their sanity ("I must be crazy to feel 77 the way I do" [76]). Yet in spite of Natalie's obvious pain and confusion, in spite of her attempts to imagine a world other than the one she is in, she is "forced" to deal with the "ftightful conviction of perhaps being in reality no more than Natalie Waite, college girl, daughter to Arnold, and unable to brush away the solidity of this world but forced to deal with i t " (195). Perhaps, then, "she was not dreaming, not mad, but alive and sound..."

(194). Natalie must deal with the reality of her situation. She must return home.

From the moment Natalie arrives home, she is anxious to return to school, since that is where she feels her new life is beginning. Still the transition from the "there" of school and the "here" of home seems to Natalie "no more than a fading in of one place upon another," a good sign since it indicates that Natalie has begun to integrate her two lives: the life of the "little girl" who obeys her father’s every command and who sets no boundaries for herself, and the evolving Natalie who makes her own decisions and who is beginning to draw the line between being controlled by others and controlling her own destiny (197). She has learned that there can be a life for her outside of the "former narrow boundaries of her world" (198). The ride from the bus station with her father is awkward and formal; once inside the house, she feels like a guest instead of a resident:

Seventy-five days before, not one of [her family] would have thought it necessary to address her unless they wanted to, but now it was almost obligatory to assure her warmly of the fact that she was always welcome in her own home-always welcome, with the clear implication that she was thus always a visitor there. (199)

This experience is not an uncommon one. It is necessary for every child who leaves home to put at least some distance between herself and her family in order to develop an autonomous relationship with them. For Natalie, this is especially important since her physical and psychic space has not always been respected by her family. 78 On Thanksgiving Day things are the same and not the same for Natalie. For once the dinner is prepared "solely and lovingly" by Mrs. Waite, with no help from her daughter, but is, as usual, "eaten by her family in iU humor and weariness" (201). Mrs. Waite tries to beam and speak brightly to her family, gathered silently around the table. "Where will we all be next year," she wonders. "Dead, perhaps," her husband replies. On Friday, as usual, Natalie's father expects her in his study promptly at ten for their tutorial, but she has forgotten and is "reminded of it only by her mother's fearful grimaces and gestures."

Natalie's father is anxious to have his daughter to himself. "This," he tells her, "is what I've been waiting for" (202). Natalie, gazing around the room at the books, hears "faintly an echo which made her almost smile CWhat if I told you that you were seen?')" (203). The voice of the detective, so insistent only seventy-five days earlier, is now only an amusing memory, an indication that Natalie has grown stronger during her absence from the family.

The conversation between father and daughter is, at first, perfunctory: "Is everything going well?" "No. .. Not at all well, I guess. I'm doing very badly." "How?" "In everything."

"Anything you need from me?"

"No, not right now. Later, perhaps."

"Can you tell me about it?"

"I'll tell you when I can." (203)

Natalie demonstrates to her father and to the reader that while she is not "doing well," neither is she doing badly in terms of making decisions for herself (203). She is honest but not forthcoming with information she does not want to share with her father. To his credit, Arnold Waite does not press his daughter, but he does give her a valuable piece of advice. Suspecting that Natalie may be taking herself too seriously or that 79 she may even be contemplating a dramatic adolescent demise, her father suggests that attaining a better frame of mind is only a matter of a slight shift in perspective, what we call today an "attitude adjustment";

You have only to shift perhaps a quarter turn to the northeast, and your problems are gone. Perhaps nothmg more is required than one clear view of your situation and your present actions; it is very possible, you know, to be doing the right things and thinking the perfect thoughts for one's position, and yet seem entirely wrong because that one faint shading of vmderstanding is missing; perhaps you are doing badly these days because you do not perceive tiiat you are, in fact, doing very well indeed, and only lack the perception of your own worth to hiow exactly how well. (205)

Without realizing it, Arnold Waite has given his daughter the kind of help she needs at this time. He has encouraged her to face her situation squarely, to see the world the way it is and not as she imagines it is, and to value and trust herself. From this moment on, Natalie wants nothing more than to return to school. Symbolically, the raincoat she wore home just twenty-four hours earlier is still damp from the rain that fell on her as she walked to the college bus station. The "wet raincoat smell" excites Natalie; it is a "symbol of going and coming, of wishing and fearing, or, precisely, of going out of a warm, firelit house into the breathtaking cold" (211). On the ride to the bus station, she

looked with interest on the street light at the comer, ornate and suburban, belonging undeniably to the home where her mother and father lived, and she saw with satisfaction the rain slanting brightly against the light; it was already dark on the rainy afternoon and this was the last outpost of her father. Beyond here the people she might see were less familiar, less the exclusive property of her father, more die potential shining world of her own. (213)

On the bus ride back to the college, Natalie is "cradled in the deep heavy seat" like a newborn. She sees herself as an infant slowly developing into individual who is and should be separate from the parent (213): 80

[W]hat was important at this moment was the quick control of muscles all up and down her leg, bent now, but potentially straight, the narrow solidity of her fingers, bare and still wet with the rain, the unity that began with her eyes and forehead and tied to her back and into her legs again, all of it bound together into a provocative whole that could be only barely contained within the skin and sense of Natalie Waite, individual (214)

Natalie sings to herself, perhaps a lullaby, and continues to wonder and delight in the "most incredible personality of our time, the unbelievably talented, vivid" Natalie Waite (214).

This time the self-accolades are not buried in her secret journal; Natalie now looks ahead with some confidence to the worlds that are waiting for her. She falls asleep, and relying upon her "unerring accuracy and supernatural sense of time," wakes just in time for her stop, recognizing instantly "where she was" and, I would add, who she was. She will need her sense of place and destiny, for she is about to embark on her journey into the wilderness (215). Recalling her first encounter with her room, its careful boundaries and its compacmess, Natalie now demonstrates a desire to move away from the safety of her womb-room, which seems "hot and airless" (218). Until this moment, Natalie's room has been her refuge, her protective skin against intrusions from the outside world. Now, without stopping to turn on the light, she goes immediately to the window. Shortly after, Natalie flees the confining corridors and rooms of the dormitory. Moving lightly "and without a sound, she ran swiftly down the stairs and out onto the campus, stepping with gratitude onto the grass," which is damp; the trees "slid" water over Natalie "like a baptism" (221). Behind her the "taut lighted square of her room was disgusting"; out here, on the grass, she could take long steps and "move as far as she wanted" (221). Natalie is now the "owner of this land . .. I am walking around my own country, I am telling its boundaries, describing its edges, enclosing it" (222). Again there is the extreme concern with boundaries, a common 81 characteristic, as Blume notes, of someone who has been sexually molested and of one who, if she is to recover, must learn to determine her own boundaries and to insist that they not be violated (47). Natalie's statement is that of someone in the process of reclaiming her right to decide what is hers, what shall be hers, and what shall not be taken from her again. Natalie inflates her power over her own destiny, but also over the life and death of others; she becomes in her own eyes "infinitely tail" As a child and as a young adult, she was made to look up to others, to do their bidding, to acquiesce to their wiU. Now she is the giant queen of "her country" (222). As Natalie strides across campus to her destination (destiny), her suppressed anger explodes in a frenzy of omnipotence; she becomes the great creator, the omniscient narrator who decides the fate of others. "Perhaps," she thinks, "I shall move the Langdon dolls to the steeple of the Commons building, and leave them there for a week, while they sob and beg to be released, and I look down, so large they cannot see me, and laugh at them" (223). What Natalie is doing in this scene is reversing the power structure so that the formerly defenseless child now has dominion over adults. Am I suggesting that Arthur Langdon and his wife molested Natalie? Not necessarily, although I do think she feels used by them. In this instance, the full force of Natalie's rage toward the real perpetrator, or perpetrators (her father, his friend, who may function as a father-surrogate, and her mother, who fails to protect Natalie against the advances of both men) is displaced onto the Langdons, as is the case with many abuse survivors who "cannot face the original objects of their anger"

(Blume 134). Natalie's fury is very evident;

Perhaps tomorrow I shall pick up one of the houses, any one, and holding it gently in one hand, pull it carefully apart with my other hand, with great delicacy taking the pieces of it one after another. . . all this while the mannikins inside run screaming from each section of the house to a higher and more concealed room. . . finally they will be all together like seeds in a pomegranate, in one tiny room, hardly breathing, some of them fainting, some crying. . . and then when I take the door off with careful fingers, there they will aU be, packed inside and crushed back against the waU, and I shall 82

eat the room in one mouthful, chewing ruthlessly on the boards and the small sweet bones. (223)

Natalie continues across campus toward another dorm and goes immediately to a room at the end of the second floor corridor. On the way she encounters the stares and giggles of several younger girls; it is obvious that Natalie has been there before. Without knocking, she opens the door and slips inside. Someone is sitting cross-legged on the bed, playing solitaire with "the ancient fortune-telling cards called the Tarot; cards old and large and lovely and richly gilt and red"; the person is Tony. This is the only description Jackson provides of Tony, who (one must assume) is female, because she lives in a women's dormitory (227-228). The name itself is androgynous and appears to be symbolic only in that sense, since it derives from Anthony (or the feminine form, Antonia), which means

"priceless"; perhaps for Natalie, at this time, any friend is priceless. More instructive is the connection between Tony and the Tarot cards, particularly since they are used to predict the future. Tony, then, may be assumed to hold the key to Natalie's future or to have some power in influencing it, because once inside the room, Natalie's first words are: "I'm sorry, I really am. I came to say I was really terribly sorry. I shouldn't have gone and I'm sorry" (227). Apparently Tony has either suggested or demanded that Natalie not make the trip home. Tony's displeasure is something Natalie fears; if Tony is real, she clearly influences Natalie and perhaps even exerts power over her in the way some adults have done in the past. If Tony is only a product of Natalie's disturbed mind, then the girl fears her own anger, also understandable. However, there is no reason to assume that Tony is not who

Jackson says she is: a girl who lives in a "rococo" dorm diagonally across campus from

Natalie, who has a room on the second floor visited by Natalie on a regular basis, who tells fortunes and plays solitaire with the Tarot cards, and who is probably older and stronger than Natalie. Tony and Natalie are both involved with the Tarot and believe 83

that they are the only two people in the world who now loved the Tarot cards, and used them... for games of their own, invented card games, and walking games, and a kind of affectionate fortune-telling which was always faithful to die meanings of the cards as recorded in the Tarot book, but which somehow always came out as meaning that Tony and Natalie were the finest and luckiest persons imaginable. (228)

Tony favors swords, and "the Page of Swords was always her particular card" (228). The

Page of Swords signifies hopes and fears; the figure is also usually regarded as a guide. . . someone who accompanies and leads others (Knight 150). The fact that Tony favors swords could be interpreted as evidence that she is masculine; however, the Page of Swords may be either masculine or feminine, and some illustrations portray an androgynous figure.

Tony, initially, is actually kind to Natalie; she shows her compassion and consideration, offering to sleep on the floor so that Natalie can have the bed. Of course, this, too, could imply a physical relationship between Tony and Natalie; there is evidence to suggest that at least the two young women share an interest in sexual matters. For instance, Natalie pays particular attention to the positions of the Tarot cards on Tony's bed and notices that "the page of swords lay upon the queen of cups" (228). Later, while Natalie falls asleep, Tony reads to her from Fanny Hill. Some readers and critics may read all this as evidence that

Tony and Natalie are lovers, because this makes it much easier to explain Natalie's crisis of identity, as well as the morbid interest in and hostility toward her on the part of the other girls. Again, I must advise caution. In the first place, such a reading implies that lesbian relationships are "sick" if they cause such a psychotic reaction in someone like Natalie, and that Tony, if she is lesbian, must be "sick" as well, or worse, evil, because she is trying to "corrupt" Natalie. A second reason for avoiding such a reductive reading is that since, for a heterosexist society, a sexual relationship between two women is considered urmatural, it can be dismissed either as

"aberrant" (the sickness argument again) or as unimportant (it's only two women). In either 84 case, Natalie's diffîculties, which arise from several real and complex events in her life, are either reduced to labels or dismissed as irrelevant to the larger concerns of the heterosexual male adolescent experience. I acknowledged earlier that the possibility exists for a lesbian relationship between the two women; however, I do not believe that lesbianism alone is responsible for Natalie's crisis, although, given the post-Freudian attitude toward female friendships (see Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Menl and the repressive climate of the Fifties which reinforced and rewarded the narrow boundaries of what Rich calls "compulsive heterosexuality," any intimate relationship between Natalie and Tony, sexual or not, could produce feelings of guilt and confusion, perhaps even repulsion, on Natalie's part. Whatever the nature of the relationship between Natalie and Tony, Natalie feels comfortable enough to fall asleep in Tony's presence, something she probably would not do if there was even a hint of sexual aggressiveness in Tony's behavior toward Natalie. Eventually, Tony does get back into bed, and the two women sleep "side by side like two big cats" (232). The surest indicator that Tony and Natalie did not engage in any threatening

(forced or coerced) sexual activity is that, upon waking, Natalie is refreshed and relaxed; there is no disgust, no denial, no need to tell herself, "Nothing happened. . . I don't remember... I will not think about it," as she does following the earlier abuse experience

(233,55). Instead, the two women

got out of bed together, enjoying the quietness of the morning. .. first, Tony, rolling out of bed, turned a somersault on the floor and rose laughing silently, then Natalie, stretching and turning to the window to see the rising sun, bent and touched her toes without bending her knees. Together, warning one another not to laugh, they went down the hall fuU of the showers, where they bathed together, washing one another's backs and trying not to make a sound. Then, dry and shivering. .. they went back to Tony's room and dressed. (232)

Natalie and Tony dress swiftly and leave the house, Natalie running down the path "not from fear, but because it was early morning and they were together and they had fifteen 85 dollars and a world ahead of them and no one to know at any time where they were" (233).

The significance of the Tarot becomes apparent here. Whenever the girls see a sign or an object that reminds them of the Tarot, they identify the card and its symbolic meaning. Each card represents a choice for Natalie, one she must make if she is to control her own destiny. Natalie spots a candelabra in a window: "Three of wands," she tells Tony, who responds with "Established strength. Trade, commerce, discovery. Ships crossing the sea. Reversed, the end of troubles," an auspicious beginning for Natalie, if we assume that

Jackson intends us to make a connection between this particular selection and Natalie's future (237). The three of pentacles is next, signifying "Nobility, aristocracy" and, reversed, "pettiness" (237). The Ace of cups is traditionally known as the "Root of the Powers of Water, by which is meant the emotions and particularly the emotions of love and affection" (Knight 116-17). The House of the true heart is Joy, fertility, and, reversed, revolution; the

Ace of wands stands for the origin of all things, and, reversed, ruin; significantly, the Hanged Man symbolizes Life in Death and, reversed, the opposite (Knight 117). Jackson uses the device of the Tarot not to predict Natalie's future to the reader, but to demonstrate that life does offer possibilities for those who are willing to take risks and make choices, and soon Natalie does make a decision that determines whether the hanged man card signifies death or revival for her.

Natalie and Tony arrive at the train station, with its tangled web of arrivals and departures, a traditional setting for foreshadowing a major change in a character's life. Once inside the terminal, they imagine lives in other cities-New York, Tony suggests. Or even the railroad station itself:

You could live quite comfortably in a railroad station; there was the great arching roof for shelter, and food in the restaurant; there was the ladies' room and an enchanted spot where you could find books and magazines and little odd colored toys to amuse the children in Paris, in Lisbon, in Rome. It was better, even, than living in a department store, not quite so good, perhaps, as living in a garret in medieval Spain. (244) 86

Possibilities. Choices. Next, Natalie and Tony visit a cafeteria, where trays, like trains, glide along a track toward their individual destinations. They encounter a one-armed man

(another representation of the gallows), who makes suggestive moves toward Natalie. As he puts his tray beside hers, he leans toward her until his "head touched against Natalie's shoulder and she moved back abruptly." She notices his "thick dirty hand maneuvering the coffee cup" closer to her ciimamon bun which had "suddenly turned stale and sticky" (251). When he holds out a knife to her, inveigling her to cut his meat, instead of recoiling, Natalie reacts the way she reacted to the man who molested her in the trees; she tries to be helpful and to please, denying the not-very-subtie sexual implications of the one-armed man's behavior. This time Tony steps in, coming forcefully between Natalie and the man, demonstrating the correct and necessary response to the dirty man's suggestive behavior a refusal to be the victim of a male's sexual advances. "Five of pentacles," Tony says suddenly. "What?," Natalie replies, at first confused; then she remembers: "Material trouble, no charity; reversed, earthly love" (251). For Natalie, then, love offers the possibilities of warmth and kind protectiveness, or, reversed, danger—no charity and no protection. Once outside, Tony remarks that the "question is, whether we can still escape, or whether they will have us after all... I know a place where we can go and no one can trouble us": "I want to go, there, then."

"You won't be afraid?"

"No." (254) They cross to the bus station (aU of Natalie's journeys toward stability and maturity begin with a bus ride). They board the crowded bus where passengers push against Natalie and lean on her. The man in the seat next to her "seemed to overflow onto Natalie"; she feels "hardly able to breathe" and for a minute thinks "wildly of pushing against [him]" 87 (257). However much she has tried to forget or deny the past, the sexual abuse, the memory of it is always with her, buried at times, yet so close to the surface of her daily existence that it takes only the proximity of an over-libidinous male to expose it:

It then became perfectly clear to her that this was thereasonable consequence of all her life, from the beginning until now. She had done so much to preserve herself from this kind of captivity and had taken inevitably one of the many roads which would lead her to the same torment; she was helpless among people who hated her and showed it by holding her motionless until they should choose to release her. All her efforts to become separate, all Tony's efforts, had brought Natalie to this bus. (257)

The bus empties, but the girls continue to ride, aU the while discussing the departed passengers as disillusioned players in a drama they do not understand. Tony wonders what it must be like to be "always pretending to run a world, always imitating the sort of people they think they might be if the world were the sort of world it isn't" (260). Natalie, for the first time, asserts herself against those who hate her and attempt to hold her against her wilL "I don't think they've estimated us correctly," she teUs Tony. "They seem to think we're weaker than we really are. I personally feel that I have talents for resistance they don't even suspect" (260-61):

If I were inventing the world-and I may well have-I would gauge my opponents more accurately. That is, suppose I wanted to destroy the people who saw it clearly, and refiised to join up with all my duU ordinary folk, die ones who plod bUndly along. What I would not do is set them against numbers of dull people, but I would invent for each one a single antagonist, who was calculated to be strong in exactly the right points. (261)

The person who sees the world clearly, who refuses to play the dull game, is Natalie; perhaps the antagonist (or worthy opponent) is Tony? Whatever her role, Tony has helped Natalie work through some of the situations which disturb her (261). The bus approaches the end of the line: 88

"We're going much farther today," Tony tells Natalie. .. "Hiis must be the very edge of town. . Natalie said. "Beyond this. . . everything is wilderness" is Tony's reply. (262) A sign armouncing an amusement park—"Paradise Park"—appears so suddenly and so close to Natalie's window, it startles her. Eden is a lost paradise. "Do you want to go back?" Tony asks. Natalie is silent "Do you want to go back?" Tony repeats. Again, no response from Natalie. "Do you want to go back?" Tony asks again. "No." The past must be faced. Ahead of Natalie lie the

remnants of last summer's pleasure sprawled darkly, the damp air from the lake carrying along with it the faint almost detectable odors of wet bathing suits, and stde mustard, the rancid popcorn; it was impossible to remember with any clarity the heat of the summer or the taste of sweat or die feeling of clothes confining in the heat (264)

Natalie's past is filled with dark memories, wet memories, memories of the taste of sweat and suffocating heat. The "clinging wetness of her raincoat against her legs" disturbs her (264). Even Tony, sitting next to her, seems "disagreeably close," reminding her of the man in the bus earlier who had made her feel trapped and paniclqr. Natalie shivers at the thought of Tony so close. This is another common response of abuse victims, according to Blume.

Having been betrayed by someone she needed or trusted, the survivor of sexual abuse "often spends adulthood afraid of people, and, especially closeness" (Blume 124). Many display panic symptoms and "phobias of confinement" when closed in with other people, especially when doors are blocked or, as in Natalie's case, the exits are controlled by the driver (127). "Aren't we ever going to get out ?" she asks, "overloudly" (264). Finally they reach the end of the line; the driver turns to the girls, "Going back?"

The answer is no, but before he leaves, the driver specifically gives Natalie another chance to return with him. "Last chance," he tells her (265). When she does not answer, he drives 89 away. Natalie watches the tail lights disappear, thinking, "He is going back right now to the lights of the town, to the sounds and the lights and the people" (265). Natalie and Tony remain behind in the deserted amusement park. It is nearly dark, the "only light apart from the faintly luminous sky, was its reflection of the water . . . the only sound was the noise of the waves on the shore" (265). Natalie finds herself irresistibly drawn toward the sound, as though it signals a "human impulse to get to the edge of the world and stop"; Tony, however, has another idea, and here begin the undeniable similarities between Natalie's first seduction/molestation and the present situation. "This way," Tony beckons, taking Natalie’s arm. Natalie shivers. This is the second time she has reacted this way to Tony's touch; furthermore, this is precisely the same response Natalie had when the man who seduced her took her arm, saying, "Come along." That time a "little chill went down Natalie's back" (51). Natalie and Tony move through the deserted playground, a symbol of childhood. In the earlier incident, Natalie and the man walked through the woods where Natalie had played as a child. Soon, very soon, Natalie and Tony are in the woods; once more it is dark and Natalie is confronted by whispering, leaning trees; "underfoot it was wet..." (267). Natalie begins to wonder why they are there. Once again, she has complied with the desires of a stronger personality, without (until now) questioiting her purposes. Soon it becomes apparent that Tony has been to this place before, and perhaps she has. If Tony is real, she may have visited the woods; if she is someone living inside Natalie, then she represents the experience Natalie is trying to forget "Why are we here again," Natalie wonders. The forest of trees thickens around them. "Are we going inhere"! Into the trees?" Natalie worries:

The trees were waiting in the darkness ahead, quietly expectant... Beneath the trees it was not dark as a room is dark when the lights are put out the artificial darkness which comes when an artificial light is gone; it was the deep natural darkness which comes with forsaking a natural li^ t; Natalie's 90

feet went without sound on the path—made by whom? for what purpose? for whose feet?-and she could not lift her head from contemplation of her own feet on the path and she knew that there was moss there, or something frightful that made no sound. (269)

This passage is coimected to the earlier sexual abuse experience. First, on the morning after being molested by the man in the trees, Natalie's room was sunfilled; then suddenly, as she remembered what happened, everything turned cold and dark. The sudden shift from light to dark is significant because in that split second of transition, Natalie repressed the truth; from that moment on, she exists in a state of denial, in a gray, twilight area where the shifts

from light to dark are not so well defined. Now Natalie re-experiences the molestation, faces it:

You can remember it aU if you try. .. and all you have to do is lie back against a comforting hand and close your heavy eyes and say, "I am here, I am where I belong, I have come home." Just as we've always been doing it, just as it's the natural and quiet and exciting way of doing things. . . as we remember, as through all our wanderings, we remember, we remember---- (269)

"We remember, we remember." This is the antidote to the earlier, "I don't remember,

nothing happened, I don't remember" (55). Natalie continues to walk forward into the trees, into the experience, "one foot going before the other... the only way to go among the trees" (269). Tony's voice is faint and

comes "only by permission of the trees." "Tony?" Natalie calls, "realizing suddenly, concretely and acutely, that it was indeed dark and that ahead of her the figure she had mistaken for Tony was only a tree" (270). "Don't be afraid," a voice answers, "dying away,

now gone out of hearing; was it that way?" (270). This is the voice of the man in the trees. Natalie touches her raincoat; yes, it is still "slippery and firm" in her hand (270).

This is her way of reassuring herself that she exists in reality and not in a dream; the words 91

"slippery and firm" are also sexually suggestive. Natalie is frightened because she is lost. However, instead of denying the reality of the situation, she faces it "Then look,” she tells herself. (270). Natalie turns "boldly"; there in front of her is the path, the path out of confusion, loneliness, pain, and terror-the path leading out of the leaning trees and the dense, wet grass of the past

The trees so close to the path that it was hardly possible to pass between them without brushing against bark were of course no more than trees and only the fact that it was drfficult to see them clearly in the darkness and the rain made them in any way terrible. (271)

Natalie's task is now one of straightening out the tangled paths she herself has constructed around the experience she wants to avoid. She blunders on alone, "almost crying (thinking. What is it I know that means steadiness and warmth and a home?)" (272). At last she comes to a clearing (the word is significant because it refers to a clearing-up of past confusions) in the trees, and at last it occurs to her that "this small clearing in the trees had been set up because she could not remain in the trees any longer..." (272). Natalie carmot remain in the place where the seduction occurred; she must take herself away from darkness and into the light:

Nothing happens unless it needs to, she told herself, and saw with complacent pleasure a fallen tree across the clearing [Natalie and the man sat on a fallen tree trunk during the molestation episode] and she knew she was expected to sit down upon it If I take a minute to calm down. . . if I try to relax and not be so nervous about nothing, if I get a perspective on things.. .. (272)

Natalie is reliving the seduction scene, but this time on her terms. She is also taking her father's advice to "get a perspective" on the situation, to act on her own behalf based upon her vision, her reading of the situation. But can she act? Does she "have talents for resistance" others "don't even suspect?" The test comes in the form of Tony, who at the 92 moment of Natalie's recognition of the problem, comes "walking easily through the trees," this time a "dark, unfamiliar figure," and not someone Nataliethought she knew (272). Natalie experienced the same recognition of strangeness when she accompanied the man she thought was a friend into the trees. "How far wrong. . . can one person be about another?" (53). It was too late then, for Natalie, but it is not too late now, if only she can act for herself: "Only one antagonist. . . only one enemy, " Natalie said. "That's very true," Tony said. (273) Whether Tony is real or imagined, it is really Natalie who has been "her own worst enemy," although the fault is not her own. Three months earlier, through no fault of her own, she was led into a dangerous situation by someone she should have been able to trust, someone she feels she should have been able to resist However, because her father was the undisputed authority in her home and because she had been raised to comply with and please her father, she acquiesced to the man's requests. How could she have done otherwise? In Natalie's experience, daughters do not resist their father's commands; the man is her father's friend; thus he is an extension of Arnold Waite, a father-surrogate. Natalie has no other model for her response to men except, perhaps, her mother who only reinforces the rule that women do not resist, do not refuse, but submit to the demands of males. Natalie must now act on her own behalf, must now resist and refuse to play a role that will eventually destroy her.

"Once, try it once," she tells herself, and then to Tony, "I'm afraid of this place. Please, let's go back" (273). Tony, the "unrepentitent traitor, the traitor to traitors," refuses. "Later. Later I might let you go back" (273; my italics). Tony now represents for Natalie the people who "won't release her," who take advantage of her inexperience. There is no mistaking the sexual implication of the situation. "Have there been others," she asks Tony. "Are you experienced? Am I the first? What did they say? Do? Were they afraid? Did it 93 happen here? Why does it happen at all?" (274). Natalie tries to rise from the fallen tree trunk, tries to back away, but "Tony put her hand on Natalie, almost casually, and held her," just as the man in the trees did, just as the man in the cafeteria tried to do. Tony smiles at Natalie, "Page of pentacles." When Natalie does not reply, Tony gives her the meaning, the translation, the message she must acknowledge if she is ever to save herself. "A soldier, a child. Reversed, degradation or pillage" (274). Natalie was a child when she was molested by the man. Soldiers pillage, soldiers rape, and the result is degradation for the woman. "With Tony's hands on her face, on her back, holding her," Natalie once again hears the refrain: "One is one and all are one and evermore will be so." Then, "I wül not." Natalie "rips herself away from Tony. "I wülnot " (275). The speU is broken. "I am not afraid of you," Natalie assures Tony. "Certainly," Tony replies. "If you want to run home, nobody is going to keep you here" (275). Natalie is free, but she must suffer the remorse of rejection, the fear that she has "been found wanting" (275). In spite of her feelings of "unworthiness," in spite of the feeling that she has displeased her seducer and, somehow in that refusal, has displeased her father, Natalie knows, finally, that it is she who must make the decision about what she will do and what she wül not do. Her responsibility is to herself; the others, the adults in her life, must pursue their own lives without her. "I am innocent, my father has work to do, Elizabeth is going to bed, Tony wants me away. Everyone is waiting for me to go off by myself, everything is waiting for me to act without someone else" (275). And she does:

Natalie was now at the point where the path entered the trees again. She knew that Tony would not answer her; she knew that she would find her back by the path without difficulty, the trees drawing back from her as she moved, her feet rustling on the dead leaves and dirt, and, crying now, she went out of the light and into the dark woods, through which she could see the lights, now, of the road back to town. (276) 94

Leaving Tony behind is, perhaps, the most difficult task for Natalie, for in her own way,

Tony, real or imagined, has helped Natalie grow, helped her face the sordid details of the seduction; Tony, real or imagined, has helped Natalie along the path to recovery from sexual abuse. But Tony is gone, refuted by Natalie. "Her feet were again upon the road. .. I wiU never see Tony any more; she is gone." Natalie has defeated her own enemy, and "would never be required to fight again" (276). Does Natalie have regrets? Of course. It is no easy task to let go of the buffer that has stood between her and a truth too painful to face until now. "What did I do wrong?" she wonders (276). I think, too, that Natalie still feels responsible for what happened between herself and the man earlier. That, too, is a common reaction of sexual abuse victims, the "baggage" they must carry. Nevertheless, Natalie, by herself, has rescued herself. The road ahead may be lonely, but at least it is she, Natalie, who will decide whether or not she will follow it On the way back to the college, Natalie is given a ride by a man and his wife. "I'm lost" Natalie teUs them as she gets into the car. "Well," the woman responds, "you were certainly far away from everywhere," to which Natalie replies, "I was lost" (277; my italics). The couple does not take Natalie aU the way back to the college; that is something she must do for herself. They leave her exactly in the center of the bridge that connects the forest to the town. Natalie is still confused and puzzled by "her quick transition from a lonely wet road to the middle of a lighted bridge" (279). She crosses to the parapet and stands looking down at the water. "Why shouldn't I?" she wonders. "Going swimming?" a voice behind her asks. Natalie "came down quickly from the wall, feeling to make sure that her skirt was down properly," but the figure, turning a "wet grinning face back at her over its shoulder," is already disappearing into the rain (279). The figure surely represents Natalie's father, for this is precisely the kind of comment he would have made when faced with his daughter's

"suicidal theatricality." Natalie now becomes aware of the other people on the bridge who 95 aie "laughing or talking or walking quietly along without interest in her" (280). Suddenly she no longer feels different, no longer feels alienated from the crowd. Natalie then begins the final leg of her journey, back to normalcy, back to health and recovery, back to herself:

The reassuring bulk of the college buildings showed ahead of her, and she looked fondly up at them and sr^ed. As she had never been before, she was now alone, and grown-up, and powerfijl, and not at all afiraid. (280)

Hangsaman. admittedly, has its flaws; in many places, the writing is vague, at times, the logic not always evident But I wonder if these inconsistencies are not deliberate on the part of Jackson. As I mentioned in the first chapter, Jackson had very little regard for or patience with erudite critical assessments of her work, and why should she? Critics seldom understood or appreciated her. Jackson also had very little regard for or patience with predictable literary devices that make writers popular among critics. Jackson wrote Hangsaman as her own story, out of her own experience, and in her own way. What is remarkable about the novel is that she was able to reconstruct with such amazing verisimilitude, the schizophrenic existence (ngi psychiatric condition) of a young woman growing up in the Fifties in America, a yovmg woman who is also an abuse survivor. Every message Natalie receives from those who are her caretakers and supposed nurturers is either mixed or designed to tmdermine her self-esteem. This constant barrage of conflicting edicts (be a brilliant writer, be a housewife, be daddy's girl, be mommy's solace) prevents her from developing an inner core of worthiness and self-confidence which might have helped her protect herself from that most demoralizing and devastating act of seduction and betrayal by a man who assumed it was his right to use Natalie to gratify his sexual desire; he is also, as I mentioned earlier, a man whose connection with both her father and her mother implicates them in the act as well. It should come as no surprise, given her split existence at home and the trauma of the abuse, that Natalie's character is doubled and 96 fragmented throughout most of the novel Furthermore, the presence of a double or alter ego, if that is what Tony is, is not an unusual occurrence in literature, especially literature written by women (Gilbert and Gubar call it the "schizophrenia of authorship" (Madwoman 69]). How else to represent the divided lives most women lead. One of Carol Güligan's subjects in her study of women's development tries to describe her two selves: "I’m trying to be myself alone, apart from others, apart from their definitions of me, and yet at the same time. I'm doing just the opposite, try to be with or relate to [people]..." (53). Other women writers articulate this same split For instance. May Sarton, in her poem, "Birthday in Acropolis," writes about being "broken in two / By sheer definition" (Selected Poems 164), and in her journals talks constantly of being tom between her need for solitude (in order to write) and for connection (the need for a love relationship) (Journal of a Solitude 12-13). In Writing a Woman's Life. Heilbran discusses her own "secret life" as a vyriter of detective fiction under the pseudonym of Amanda Cross:

I believe now that I must have wanted, with extraordinpy fervor, to create a space for myself which was physically almost impossible in the New York apartment I shared with my husband and children. . . If there was no space for a woman in the suburban dream, how unlikely that there would be space in a small city apartment So I s o u ^ t. . . psychic space. .. I created a fantasy. (113-115)

Heilbrun goes on to say that there are "layers within layers of significance to explain why a woman chooses to write under a pseudonym" (110), in effect why she chooses to create another self. The most important reason for doing so is that the woman author is,

"consciously or not creating an alter ego as she writes, another possibility of a female destiny" (110). In these works of identity and exploration, there is always an undefined line between reality and fiction because women inhabit two worlds, the one they dream of and the one they wake up to. Although Jackson did not use a pseudonym, I believe she recreates herself as a writer in Natalie, who does resort to a double or alter ego in order to 97 deal with the reality of the life she is forced to live and the one she hopes to create for herself. Is Natalie's double (or alter-ego), Tony, real or imagined? The question, rather, is does it matter? If Tony is a real person, as she appears to be throughout most of the novel, then as a bona fide character, Tony serves her purpose well; she provides Natalie with an opportunity to confront her sexual abuse. If Tony is not a real person in the novel, but only an imaginary companion created by Natalie, she still fulfills her purpose as a catalyst for Natalie's growth. Natalie, relying on resourcefulness of her own imagination, faces the trauma of her abuse, copes with it, and cures herself. Finally, there is the matter of Tony's lesbianism which intrigues critics. Does Natalie's crisis and recovery depend upon Tony's sexual orientation? Perhaps. If Tony, as a lesbian, offers Natalie sanctuary from the threat of male sexual violence—the possibility of a woman-centered existence similar to the all-female world created by Jackson in We Have Always Lived in the Castle—then Tony's sexual orientation does matter. Jackson, herself, seems intrigued by the possibility of such an existence. In The Haunting of Hill House. Eleanor Vance imagines living with Theodora, a woman many readers believe is a lesbian, and in "Come Along With Me," Jackson's protagonist, Angela Motorman, does share a house with another woman. Tony's character in Hangsaman. however, seems to function primarily as Natalie's androgynous guide. Tony, when she leads Natalie into the trees, is leading her back into the experience Natalie wants most to avoid, and yet must face if she is to recover herself. The fact that Natalie believes she is betrayed by Tony is not a shortcoming of the novel. Jackson's point in Hangsaman is that seduction and betrayal can come from any source in a woman's life, including the woman herself. The message of Hangsaman is much more fundamental to a woman's survival than any complex discussion of psychopathological types or sexual proclivity. It is the message of Margaret Atwood's

Surfacing: refuse to be a victim. Oppenheimer verifies that Shirley Jackson had "no 98 patience with victimization or passivity," but for some reason Oppenheimer views this as evidence that Jackson was not a feminist; I see it as evidence that she was. As GUligan points out:

The essence of moral decision is the exercise of choice and the willingness to accept responsibility for that choice. To the extent that women perceive themselves as having no choice, they correspondingly excuse themselves from the responsibility that decision entails. (67)

Hangsaman demonstrates, without equivocating, that women do have a choice if they are willing to face the responsibility and consequences of the choice and make it. hi fact, I see the ethical message of Hangsaman as extending beyond the topic of the sexual molestation of children and adolescent women, as repugnant and terrible as that act is. Natalie's experience with sexual abuse, her fear of others finding out, her own denial of the experience, and her ultimate victory of "I wül not" are directly connected to the problem of violence against women, a true epidemic in our society. In a recent Tune article, JiU Smolowe reports that "horrors on the homefiront" (the abuse of women by spouses or live- in boyfriends) are the "leading cause of injury today for women between the ages of 15 and

44," yet even when emergency room doctors know a woman has been battered, they are "reluctant to report it to authorities" (57). Of course, they have reason to fear the legal ramifications of such an action, since most states do not require medical personnel to report such incidents. The same is not the case for chüd abuse, since recently the legal system has realized that such occurrences are seldom "imagined" by children. Authorities seem reluctant to interfere in domestic disputes between husband and wife (or a man and "his" woman) because that area is considered to be the private domain of the couple; more specifically, "a man's house is his castle." Furthermore, authorities (doctors in this case) reason that the woman is "an adult"; therefore, doctors are not responsible for protecting adult women, even if they are being beaten (Smolowe 57). These two justifications for a 99

"don't get involved" attitude on the part of authorities are only a slight variation on the rationale for not interfering in cases of incest or the sexual abuse of little girls by male adults After all, the daughter is her father’s property; he may exercise whatever rights over her he deems in her (read his) best interests. Finally, the public holds the same distanced perspective on matters of domestic violence that it does on the abuse of young children. If I don't actually see it or experience it, I don't have to deal with i t One certain way to force people to deal with "it"—the sexual abuse of female children and the battering of women-is to write about it, because that provides us with a record of the experience, and by record I mean a descriptive narrative of what it feels like to live inside the mind and skin of a sexually abused child, and not just a compilation of statistics and figures. The real tragedy of Hangsaman is not so much Natalie's as ours: it is never taught and seldom read. Fortunately, the next two novels by Jackson dealt with in this study. The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Alwavs Lived in the Castle, are available in popular editions. However, as we shall see, even these works, both of which have had considerable critical exposure, have not always been recognized as records of female experience. CHAPTER m THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE: DOUBLING AND

THE RHETORIC OF THE DEVOURING HOUSE

I dwell in possibility— A fairer house than Prose —

Emily Dickinson

We are all trapped in the prison house o f language. Wayne C. Booth

Stephen King has called The Haunting of Hill House one of the greatest horror novels of all time; that in itself is enough to discourage most literary critics from undertaking a serious reconsideration of the novel's virtues. At the time of its publication, the work was "hailed by critics as one of the best spine-chillers in years"; it went through several printings and many foreign editions, and in 1963, a film based on the novel was released. The book made money for Jackson and it made her popular with readers, but The

Haunting of HSU House did nothing to enhance her reputation as a gifted writer of serious fiction. I make no claims here for Haunting as a literary masterpiece; in my opinion, it is not one of Jackson's best novels, although in many respects it is nearly technically perfect For the purposes of this study, the value of Haunting does not lie in its literary merit alone. My concern with Haunting is to place the novel within the feminist literary tradition

100 101

describing the effects on women of space and enclosure. Jackson uses Hill House as a

rhetorical device for commenting on the degeneracy of the patriarchal family, and in doing so, once more voices her concern for the female incest victim. Jackson also uses the literary convention of the double to articulate the angel in the house/whore dichotomy and to express the dominant/submissive conflict many women experience within themselves. For a woman's to act dominantly (selfishly) for her own purposes requires the immediate penance

of submission (selflessness). The Haunting of Hill House may also be read as a cautionary tale against what

Shulamith Firestone calls the "Culture of Romance" (146), the myth of romantic love. Eleanor, as a result of her conditioning as a female, and possibly as the result of her abuse by her father, is reduced to a state of "emotional invalidism" (Firestone 135) because she is unable to validate her identity except through identification with a father/lover who will

confirm what she already knows about the female condition: that her value as a woman is measured in proportion to her ability to submit to the authority of the fathers. Eleanor has three paternal authorities to obey: the ghost-memory of her own father; Dr. Montague; and Hugh Crain, another ghost-father. As Firestone notes, the myth of romantic love requires that, for women, the lover/husband must replace the father as "grantor of the necessary surrogate identity" (131-32), and this is surely what Eleanor seeks from the moment she begins her journey to Hill House. Eleanor does not act for herself until she is summoned by one of her father surrogates. Dr. Montague; she has been summoned by Montague on the basis of a poltergeist experience which I believe is connected to an incestuous relationship with another father, her own; finally, once at Hill House, Eleanor succumbs too easily and, at times, almost eagerly to Hugh Crain's patriarchal demands that she surrender to his omnivorous desire. Jackson seems to be telling us, in The Haunting of HiU House, that the very existence of women is haunted by the ghosts of all our fathers, by the patriarchy itself. 102

Every time we, as women, fall under the romantic spell of "Some day my Prince wül come," we deny rather than confirm our own ability to rescue ourselves, as Natalie Waite does in Hangsaman. a much mote optimistic work than Haunting. Apparently, by the time she wrote HÜ1 House, Jackson, too, had begim to see through the rose-colored veü of romantic love and the myth of the ideal famüy. In Haunting. Jackson, writing out of her own experience as a woman, warns readers to beware of the fairy tale of romantic love and the myth of the perfect famüy. Jhg Haunting of HiU House is more than a spoof on the ghost story; it is the story of a woman who waited too long to claim herself, who had already given up so much of herself that there was no longer a self to claim. Furthermore, The Haunting of HÜ1 House is an indictment of the patriarchy for refusing women like Eleanor, whom Metcalf sees as a "feminized everyman" (215), opportunities and encouragement to develop an identity of their own outside the prescribed roles of dutiful daughter and submissive wife. It does not disturb me that Jackson disguised her message as a psychic thrüler; in fact, I admire her for doing so. Given the restrictions Jackson labored trader as a woman writer, the fact that Haunting can be read today as a feminist statement attests to Jackson's cleverness in disguising it as merely a ghost story. I sometimes have the feeling that because women writing today have broken through so many of the barriers that restricted our female predecessors, we lose sight of the battle that writers like Jackson fought to free themselves, and through their efforts, to make possible the freedom many of us writing today are able to enjoy. In a recent Columbus Dispatch article, Nancy ShuUins writes that a "new generation of women authors is inventing a bold new creation." This new literary landscape, according to ShuUins, is "crowded with abusive husbands and deranged fathers. . . " (8D). On the horizon, no longer hidden by the taU shadows of patriarchal heroes nor fenced in by diminished expectations, this "new breed of Uterary heroine has emerged, one who is cutting her oppressors down to size with ingenuity, courage, and the occasional weU-placed buUet" 103 (ShuUins 8D). Writer CaUie Khouri’s characters, Thelma and Louise, break aU the rules for fictional heroines. In Ridley Scott’s film based on Kouri's script, these two women-one a waitress who does more waiting on her noncommittal boyfriend than she does customers, the other a dutiful but dissatisfied wife—are transformed into justice-meting gunslingers who kiU a would-be rapist In another work of female revenge. The Rise of Life On Earth. Joyce Carol Oates documents the medicinal retaliation of Katherine Hermessey, a nurse's aide, as she stalks the halls of Detroit hospitals, coUecting dues for years of beatings by her father and exploitation by male doctors. Though retaliatory violence provides no enduring solution to the problem of male dominance and cruelty, in literature or in life, one thing is unmistakable. These new female protagonists refuse to be corraUed either by their anatomy or by the circumstances of their birth. Certainly this is welcome news for women writers (and readers) who have struggled for years to write the truth about their restricted lives. Exalted by this new fictive fieedom, it is easy to forget that while the territory opened up by writers like Khouri and Oates is new, female rage and resentment in literature (and in life) are not. The anger has always been there; it has simply been shut up (and stored up) in appropriate containers, usually the rooms and houses of domestic existence. Not surprisingly, women have been writing for years about the restrictions of domestic space, for as Gaston Bachelard notes, the image of the house provides "one of the greatest powers of integration for thoughts, memories, and dreams" (8).^ The house, for Bachelard, contains the "topography of our inmost being," our "first universe and final resting place"

(8). This was certainly the case for Virginia Woolfs heroine in The Vovage Out, in which

Woolf represented the "sexual experiences of the female body spatially through the elaborate and rhythmically recurring images of rooms and houses" (Lape 113). Woolf speculated that a room and its furnishings "knew more about a woman" than those who sat upon its furnishings and trod upon its floors "were allowed to know" (A Haunted House and Other Stories 89). Women have "sat indoors for years" until the very walls of rooms 104 are "permeated by their creative force," a force so "overcharged" by the confines of "brick and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pen. . (A Room of Ones Own 91). Woolf wonders, however, if it is ever possible to find the words to describe a life circumscribed by walls, yet many women have tried to do just that. There is plentiful evidence of the fascination that rooms and houses held for women writers as early as the eighteenth century. Female characters in eighteenth-century fiction often "imagine themselves destroyed by their passions" (Spacks 63).2 These women also discover, rather quickly, that "restriction" is the guiding force of their lives, forced as they are to "confirie themselves" to parlors and needlework, because "reading and poring over books would never get them a husband," nor would seeking a life or career outside the confines of domestic servitude (Spacks 59). Of course, the "dominant male novel form during the eighteenth century was the picaresque," a form "unsuitable for women writers," since it was "unthinkable for young ladies, and therefore young heroines, to wander about the countryside having bawdy adventures, or indeed adventures of any kind" (Figes 11). The eighteenth-century concern with "stability of identity" and the "consequent reluctance to emphasize fundamental change" also ensured that women, in life and in fiction, would remain cloistered behind the walls of either their father's or their husband's houses (Spacks 25). Even the Gothic novels, which "unleashed" some of the eighteenth-century restrictions on the female imagination, are primarily concerned with heroines who, as Charlotte Smith's Emmaline does, spend a great deal of time "running through the gloomy passages" of castles (Figes 64).3 In Ann

Radcliffe's The Mvsteries of Udolpho. the heroine, Emily, is abducted by her wicked uncle to a remote castle in Italy where she remains "trapped in an architectural maze of stairways and corridors, underground passages and hidden doorways" (Figes 73), until she is rescued by her future husband. Udolpho emphasizes the perils of being female in a world constructed by men and illustrates women's dependence upon the very people who confine 105

them. Mary Wollstonecraft, in Maria, used the Gothic format to express the bitter

frustration of women's lives. Her heroine is locked up, on the orders of her husband, in a "dark and gloomy house" under the supervision of a wardress, Jemima (Figes 74). Women are the victims of men, but they also become the "prisoners of their own minds" when madness precedes or follows imprisonment (Figes 74). In the eighteenth- century Gothic

novel, the house, once a symbol of security and status for the woman, a place of "male privilege and protection conferred on the fortunate female of his choice," gradually becomes an "image of male power in its sinister aspect, threatening and oppressive" (Figes 74).

Where once there were "charming vistas" and gardens, comfortable drawing rooms and a cheerful library, there are now "heavy doors which clang shut, iron bars, chains, battlements and dungeons." The marital home, according to Figes, becomes a "prison" which threatens to "drive [women] insane" (74). Given this tradition in women's literature, it is not surprising that "anxieties about space sometimes seem to dominate the literature of both nineteenth-century women authors and their twentieth-century descendents" (Gilbert and

Gubar 83). Shirley Jackson is one of those descendants. Perhaps Charlotte Bronte, in Jane Evre. articulated as well as any woman writing in the nineteenth century, the female dread of being smothered by the omnivorous presence of a house. Jane is first the prisoner of her imcle's house; she eventually makes her escape from Gateshead Hall, but every episode of freedom is followed by more austere confinements: first Lowood School and then Thomfield Hall, the ultimate example of a devouring house. The real prisoner of Thomfield Hall is, of course, Bertha, Rochester's mad wife, who is confined in a "room without a window" at the top of the house (342),

Gilbert and Gubar's "madwoman in the attic." Bertha is surely a precursor to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's protagonist of The YeUow Wallpaper who, like Bertha, is confined by her husband to a room with barred windows and a "great heavy bed" (Gilman 17). The similarities between The Yellow Wallpaper and Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill 106 House are remarkable, for, as Friedman observes, Jackson, too, was fascinated by "well-built old houses with character and personality" (104). For Jackson, "houses-at least her fictional houses-were like the people who built and inhabited them" (Friedman 104). According to Friedman, Jackson believed houses not only "reflected the egos and foibles of their original owners, who often had unusual tastes, but they also exerted a mysterious force of their own" (104).^ Friedman believes Jackson's fondness for houses derived from her

"architect ancestors" (104); Jackson's great-grandfather, Samuel Bugbee, designed some of San Francisco's grandest buildings, including the "Stanford, Crocker, and Colton mansions on Nob Hill and the Grand Opera House" (Oppenheimer 12). However, Jackson's attraction to the house as a literary device came firom her love of eighteenth-century novels; Jackson admired their "preservation of and insistence on a pattern superimposed precariously on the chaos of human development" (Oppenheimer 125). She loved the works of Samuel Richardson, and Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto was also one of her favorites. Jackson is clearly a descendent of the female Gothic novelists, for she could never resist the possibilities of the "dark and mysterious castle or country home" as a setting for the unusual events her heroines must encounter (Friedman 105). In her short fiction Jackson often uses the device of the house and its rooms to depict character and mood. One of her early stories, "Trial By Combat," uses descriptions of two furnished apartments to explain differences in the lives of two women. In this brief story, Jackson advances her theory that hidden implications about the lives of women can be sensed beneath the surface of a room's appearance if one is willing to observe small details and absorb atmosphere. In another story, "Flower Garden," a mother and her daughter-in-law compete for power and space in a Vermont manor house. Using the device of the house, Jackson comments upon the importance of a woman not only having a "room of one's own," but a home of her own. In "Men With Their Big Shoes," Jackson portrays another 107 young woman dominated by one older than herself. Once again, Jackson uses the house as a battleground for the female identity crises of dominance and submission. What she is saying, I believe, is that until a woman furnishes her life with "objects" and people chosen by her and not someone else, she has neither a life of her own nor a room of her own. The female protagonists in each of the stories discussed here are searching for love and a home of their own, precisely Eleanor Vance's quest in Hill House: but these women, like Eleanor, often confuse the security of a house with love and protection, usually with disastrous results. In Jackson's fiction houses onlyappear to offer the possibility of a new and fulfilling life for her female protagonists, with one exception. In Jackson's second novel, The Sundial, the device of the house assumes a positive personality reflecting Jackson's knowledge of and interest in the eighteenth-century novel. The Halloran mansion, although mysterious, is not dark and gloomy; both the house, with its walls "painted soft colors with scenes of nymphs and satyrs sporting among flowers and trees," and the gardens with their "ornamental lake, grotto, and pagoda, display many of the characteristics reminiscent of eighteenth-century estates" (Friedman 105). The house was to "contain everything: objects of beauty, rooms 'endlessly decorated and adorned,'" and since Mr. Halloran was a methodical man:

[T]he right wing of the house has twenty windows, as does the left wing, with a great door in the middle; on the second floor, there are forty-two windows across and, on the third floor, the same. One hundred and six thin pillars hold up the balustrade on the left; the same on the right All items are balanced perfectly except for the sundial, which is set badly off-center on the lawn. (105)

These perfectly balanced dimensions are worth noting here, because in The Haunting of Hill

House, the intentions of the owner are quite different Hill House is constructed so that

"every angle is slightly wrong" (Hill House 105). In The Sundial, the house still functions as a bastion against danger, since it must protect the Halloran family against a great storm 108 which signals the end of civilization. Hill House attempts to devour its inhabitants whereas movement in The Sundial is away from the house towards autonomy and health. Fancy, who has heretofore relied on predictability, decides she would rather "live in a world full of people, even dangerous people. I've been safe all my life" (184-185). This is very much Eleanor Vance's attitude, initially, as she begins her venture into the world; however, instead of moving outward, Eleanor travels inward; the house becomes the mind of a male demagogue determined to seduce and destroy her.6 Jackson is attracted by the device of the house, as were many nineteenth and twentieth-century women writers, because it helps objectify the restrictive and prescriptive patriarchal structures which include the very words we use to express ourselves as women. And although the focus of this study is not on rhetoric per se, it is important to understand that in using the house, particularly a house like the one described in The Haunting of Hill House. Jackson is commenting, however indirectly, on the use of language by women writing about women. Robin Lakoff, in Language and Woman's Place, identifies an important linguistic construct in her examination of the role language plays in defining female experience in our culture. Lakoff notes that a "girl must learn two dialects" if she is to survive at all, in our culture, as a thinking, speaking being. She becomes, in LakofFs words, "bilingual" in her attempt to represent herself as female in a culture that devalues femininity (Lakoff 6). Such tactics justify the repeated use of doubling in women's literature, but it may also explain why women writing often appear to view domestic enclosure ambivalently; the house personified in women's literature sometimes appears to have a split personality. On the one hand, the house represents an edifice of masculine power, a tool for female entrapment; at the same time, the house also provides (or appears to provide) security and a power base for women: his kingdom may be "out there," but here in the house, I am queen. The house, as woman's place, is essentially female, her seat of power, and yet the home space never really belongs to 109

her, nor does it represent, for her, any real freedom of action beyond the dimensions designed and maintained by the real owner of the space, her husband or father. Tricia Lootens, who examined Jackson's drafts for The Haunting of Hill House. notes that the house in Haunting begins as a feminine structure and grows increasingly "more phallic with each rewriting" (177), yet the irmer life of Hill House is represented by concentric rooms that radiate outward from its center. Jackson has taken pains to describe Hill House as a male structure that conceals within its boundaries a nature that is essentially

female. How could she have done otherwise? A woman must learn to speak and write the

language of the patriarchy, all the while concealing what she really thinks and feels. "I have the feelings of a woman," Woolf wrote nearly sixty years ago, "but only the language of a man" (Books and Portraits 50). This is not to say, however, that women writing do not express their frustration and displeasure at being trapped in Booth's prisonhouse of

language. Rather, Lakoff notes that "as psychoanalysis has shown," women often use words or phrases (and I would add images and metaphors) "without knowing their significance" (1) or, more likely, without acknowledging their significance. Lakoff goes on to say that this approach to the use of language "submerges a woman's personal identity by

denying her the means of expressing herself strongly, on the one hand, and encouraging

expressions that suggest triviality" (7). At times, there simply appears to be no language, no way of speaking or writing which permits women to directly express their anger and anxiety concerning their gendered disenfranchisement In order for a woman writing to say what

cannot be said directly, she must resort to subterfuge—she must disguise her experience in a way that will not be subject either to ridicule or recrimination, especially if she is writing about incest or chüd abuse, as Jackson apparently does in Hill House and the other novels

discussed in this study. One of the ways Jackson is able to do this is through the use of metaphorical language. 110

Metaphorical language represents but does not define; it is, in Roland Bartel's words, "any comparison that carmot be taken literally" (3). Yet, metaphors must be taken literally, or at least seriously, as components of the language we use, and not just as poetic contrivances, pretty but not profound. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson report in Metaphors We Live By that "most philosophical [and linguistic] views permit metaphor little, if any, role in understanding our world and ourselves" (Lakoff and Johnson 1). Both authors believe (and their research supports this opinion) that, in fact, our "entire conceptual system is largely metaphorical" (3) and that "one of the most common means of organizing a conceptual system is through the use of "structural metaphors": metaphors that are "containers for meanings" (13-14). Of these structural metaphors, by far the most fundamental is the spatialization or orientational (up-down, front-back, in-out, central- peripheral) metaphor. Furthermore, spatialization or orientational metaphors are deeply

"rooted in physical and cultural experience; they are not randomly assigned" (Lakoff and Johnson 18). Jackson's use of the house in The Haunting of Hill House is thus more than a literary device; it is a linguistic device for writing, and not merely representing, her female protagonist's attempt to define an identity outside of patriarchal constructs (constructions, structures); that Eleanor is unable to do so speaks convincingly about the power of male­ generated language, its terms and terminology, to define and/or deny women's experience.

Eleanor Vance hardly fits anyone's vision of a Gothic ghost-story heroine. She is a colorless, dutiful, thirty-two-year-old spinster who has spent her entire adult womanhood

(she began her service at twenty-one) serving an invalid mother, who at times bears a striking resemblance to Mr. Waite's demanding "I am inadequate at all things domestic" attitude. Eleanor admits hating her mother, whose constant demands on her time and energy made her a prisoner of the house. Eleanor cannot ever remember being "truly happy in her adult life"; her years with her mother add up to a sorry total of "constant weariness and despair" (6). As a result, Eleanor does not adapt well to sunlight, has no friends, and is I l l extremely awkward around others. After her mother's death, she is forced to take up a maidenly aimt-in-residence existence with her married sister, Carrie. Eleanor sleeps on a cot in the nursery which only reinforces her inexperience and immaturity. This is not to say that Eleanor does not long for mature love and a home of her own, but when she answers an ad to stay for a week in a New England haunted house, her sister, acting as a surrogate mother, refuses to give Eleanor "permission" to use their jointly owned car for travel: "I am doing what Mother would certainly have thought best," she tells Eleanor. "Mother had confidence in me and would certainly never have approved my letting you run wild..." (12), as though Eleanor could even contemplate a wild existence. In an unaccustomed act of assertiveness, Eleanor defies her sister/mother and sneaks the car out of the city. It is her first act of independence. "Time is beginning this morning in June," she tells herself. No other road except the one she is on "could lead her from where she was to where she wanted to be" (17-18). Eleanor is choosing her own destiny for the first time in her life; as soon as she leaves the city limits, she feels like a "new person very far from home" (27). Eleanor

Vance is trying to recreate herself just as Angela Motorman will do later in "Come Along With Me," but unlike Jackson's more mature and experienced protagonist, Eleanor is wahdng into domestic confinement rather than away from it. From the moment she reaches Hni House, Eleanor is doomed, trapped by the romance of the patriarchal family, the dream of perfect domestic bliss. Eleanor's lonely wanderings through the perverted maze of Hill House's rooms, her meanderings in and out of windows, and most of all, her misguided attempts to play the sweet and obedient daughter/wife to Hugh Crain, only lead her more deeply into the destructive embrace of the patriarchy. Eleanor's journey to HiU House is reminiscent of Natalie's wilderness journey of self-discovery. The countryside surrounding Eleanor is imtamed, almost primordial. The only signs of civilization are the empty houses she passes as she moves deeper into the woods (reminiscent of Natalie's inner journey) toward her destination. At one point. 112

Eleanor drives past "dirty, closed lunch stands and tom signs" (19) suggesting the place

was once the sight of a carnival, again very similar to Natalie and Tony's bus ride to the deserted amusement park. Several of the faded signs advertise a motorcycle race; Eleanor makes out the words "DARE" and "EVIL" (19). Originally the sign must have said DAREDEVIL. Eleanor, striking out on her own for the first time in her life, may feel the

term describes her. Or perhaps in defying her sister-mother, by asserting herself, Eleanor is tempting fate, daring evil. The sign serves both as a command and as a warning for Eleanor, who continues on her way cautiously, hopefully. Just beyond the ghostly remains of the

carnival scene, a ruined gateway emerges from a tangled mass of oleanders (a poisonous shrub). An overgrown drive leads away from the gate toward what appears to be a home site, but there is no building. Perhaps the building has burned, another ill-omened foreshadowing. Further along the highway, Eleanor sees a run-down house; she projects

herself as mistress of "her own" stone lions that guard the entrance to the "pillared and vast" (read patriarchal) edifice (18).^ She imagines that she has lived a "lifetime in a house with two lions" where "I took my dinner alone in the long, quiet dining room at the gleaming

table..." (18). Both decaying homesites echo the corrupting influence of the patriarchal

order that possesses property, then ruins or and abandons it. Later, just before arriving at Hill House, Eleanor sees a "tiny cottage buried in a garden" (Mrs. MacLane's cottage); again, she pretends to be the owner of the house where she will "light a fire in the cool

evening and toast apples on my own hearth" (23). Jackson, in the early stages of The

Haunting of Hill House, makes it very clear that Eleanor, like the female personas of her short stories, is looking for her own "home," a theme that pervades the novel. Eleanor makes two significant stops before reaching HiU House. The first is at a picturesque country irm that "advertised itself as an old tnUl" (21). At a nearby table a family is having dinner: mother, father, son, and daughter. The little girl refuses to drink her mUk tmless she is aUowed her own special "cup of stars" (21). The mother tries to 113 wheedle cooperation from the little girl; the father has no patience with her stubbornness. "You're spoiling her," he growls. "She ought not to be allowed these whims" (22). Eleanor cheers for the child; she silently encourages her to "insist on your cup of stars" because "once they've trapped you into being like everyone else, you wiU never see your cup of stars again..." (22). Eleanor knows well the price of silence and submission, but perhaps it is not too late for the little girl to insist on her right to speak for herself, to insist on her dreams. Jackson also uses this "picture perfect" family to demonstrate that beneath the perfection of the patriarchal family unit, there is suppression and cruelty. Later, Eleanor will discover those same unpleasant truths about another family at Hül House. The closer Eleanor comes to her destination, the bleaker the landscape. In a small village called Hillsdale, an ugly clutter of "dirty houses and crooked streets," Eleanor stops for coffee at an "unattractive diner" (23). She tries to strike up a conversation with the bored waitress who responds to her questions about the town with duU, monosyllabic " Yeahs" (25). A man at the counter tries to warn Eleanor against continuing on; "People leave this town... [t]hey don't come here" (26; Jackson's italics). The man and the woman, a disillusioned couple (perhaps signifying a husband and wife), project an

"emptiness greater than Eleanor had ever known" (25); yet even this cold reception and forewarning cannot deter Eleanor from pursuing her romantic dream of finding love and a house at the end of the journey. The closer the road brings Eleanor to HiU House, the more the signs point to disaster. Her "little car stumbled and bounced, reluctant to go further" into the "unattractive hills." On either side of her, the trees are "thick" and "oppressive"; once she has to swerve to avoid a "vicious rock" in her path, another warning she disregards (27). Eleanor continues to affirm that she is "a new person" far from her past home that kept her a dutiful prisoner, but the tree branches reach out for her, as they did for Natalie, brushing against the windshield as the sun disappears and it grows steadily darker. At last she comes to another 114

"tall and ominous" gate, the only barrier now between Eleanor and the home she hopes to find at Hill House. The gatekeeper, Dudley, tries to warn Eleanor again, but she refuses to acknowledge his reluctance to open the gate, although she senses she is being given a "last chance" to turn the car around (30). Like Natalie, she has already come too far; there is no turning back now. Within minutes, Eleanor is "face to face" with Hill House. Eleanor knows immediately that the house is "vile. . . diseased," and that she should "get away from here at once" (33), just as the man in the diner warned her to, yet she cannot resist the compulsion to walk through the door into her destiny: "This is what I came so far to find" (35). The house, personified, is unmistakably male. It "reared its head back against the sky," spires erect, turrets protruding; the "enormous and dark" phallic tower looks down on her (35). The house is also evil:

No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky turned Hill House into a place of despair, more fiightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a comice... a house arrogant and hating, never off guard (34-35)

Eleanor hears a "sick" inner voice, like the detective voice in Hangsaman. warning her to

"Get cwayfrom here, get away” but she cannot leave what she has come "so far to find"

(35). "Journeys end in lovers meeting," she reminds herself, convinced that somewhere inside the house she will find the love and companionship she seeks. Indeed, as she enters the hah "overfull of dark wood" and "weighty carving," the house "comes around her" in a connubial embrace (37). Eleanor is assigned the Blue Room by the housekeeper, Mrs. Dudley, who operates on a schedule that would intimidate even the most rigid manic- compulsive. Mrs. Dudley recites: "I set dirmer on the dining-room sideboard at six sharp.

.. I clear up in the morning. I have breakfast ready at nine" (38). Several times she repeats 115 the litany, which is meant to provide comic relief for the guests of Hill House, who certainly need i t The silence of the house and its devouring presence are overwhelming; Eleanor feels like a "small creature swallowed whole by a monster," yet insists that coming was "my own choice" and repeats for the second, but not last time, that "journeys end in lovers meeting" (42). Later, after she has met the other members of the party, she constructs a new family for herself, headed, of course, by a patriarch, Dr. Montague, who resembles Arnold

Waite. Montague is "round, rosy, and bearded... a little man both knowledgeable and stubborn" (60). The doctor is trained as an anthropologist, the scientific study of the origins of humankind's physical and cultural origins; Montague's real interest, however, lies in discovering the psychic origins of Hill House. He is careful to defend his investigation as

"scientific" in nature, for his theories have not always found favor with his more rigorous colleagues. He cautions the others to leave behind preconceived notions about ghosts and haunted houses; to be "ignorant and perceptive" is all that is required of the subjects, who have (with the exception of Luke Sanderson) been selected on the basis of previous experiences with psychic phenomena. When Eleanor was twelve, the house in which she lived with her mother and sister was mysteriously hit with "showers of stones"; the stoning lasted three days, then stopped forever. Eleanor's sister blamed her for the occurrence, although the Eleanor herself was unmoved by the torrent of stones; she and her mother continued to live in the house without a recurrence of what Montague labels a poltergeist episode. Theo (or Theodora), the other female subject selected by the doctor, is also psychic; she has demonstrated an uncanny ability to "identify correctly eighteen cards out of twenty, fifteen cards out of twenty, and nineteen cards out of twenty held up by an assistant out of sight and hearing," a very impressive showing, according to Montague (8). Theo, who is unmistakably a real person, fimcdons primarily as Eleanor's double.

Theo is Eleanor's dark-mirrored image, an "image of the kind of woman Eleanor is afraid 116

even to dream of becoming" (Lootens 183). To reinforce the connection between Eleanor and Theo, Jackson assigns them almost identical, connecting bedrooms. They are also telepathic: each can read the other's thoughts, yet Theodora is "not at all like Eleanor" (8). She is "secular and much experienced, exotic and exciting" (Parks, "Chambers" 25). For Theo, "[d]uty and conscience" are attributes which belong properly to Girl Scouts" (8); she

delights in bright colors and extravagant behavior, both of which are an anathema to Eleanor,

who has been trained to repress any behavior that suggests passion or sexuality. Eleanor considers buying a pair of slacks, rather than a dress, a major (and delicious) sin, "something that mother would be furious over" (42); the two women are, as David Hogan

states, "opposite ends of a single sexual persona" (85). When Theo paints Eleanor's toenails the same red shade as her own, Eleanor cries out that it's "horrible. . . wicked" (117), yet she enjoys the attention and the suggestion that, with a simple application of make

up, she might become as bold and sensuous as Theo appears to be. Eleanor (Woolfs angel in the house, a dutiful, asexual, "utterly unselfish" servant of the patriarchy) and Theo (the seductive, selfish, sexually demanding and perennially unsatisfied whore) act out Eleanor's libidinous conflict When the four inhabitants of Hül House pretend to be fictional

characters, Eleanor chooses Mimi, the artist's model in La Boheme: "I live a mad, abandoned life, draped in a shawl and going from garret to garret" (62). When Theo asks Eleanor if she is "heartless and wanton," Eleanor replies that she has a "heart of gold" (62),

intimating that she is a prostitute. Theo actually functions as a catalyst for Eleanor; all the passion and anger Eleanor has repressed during her years as a "good girl" finds expression when she is with her bad twin, Theo: Eleanor begins to wear red and imagines herself in love with Luke. To take the comparison further by placing the two women within a

Christian context, Theo represents the insatiate Eve who, hungry for adventure and knowledge, disobeys the laws of the father, and Eleanor, at least on the surface, a sweet virgin Mary, meek and mild (and without the child), a demure (albeit resentful) innocent 117 who obeys the laws of the father. Theo instructs Eleanor in the art of seduction; the apple she offers is the possibility of an earthly, sensuous love if only Eleanor will drop her colorless exterior "I dislike being with women of no color" (116), Theo teUs her, suggesting the possibility of a lesbian attraction between the two, a possibility that has not gone unnoticed by critics. Maxwell Geismar writes in the Saturday Review that Theo and Eleanor engage in a

"curious kind of infantile lesbianism" (19). Precisely what Geismar has in mind is difficult to say; perhaps he means that exchanging sweaters and engaging in toenail painting are activities immature lesbians engage in? Or perhaps what Geismar meant to write was "infantile heterosexuals" In other words, a mature woman, a "real" woman, cannot find sexual satisfaction in a relationship that doe not include the phallus. John Parks is more cautious than Geismar, agreeing only that "at times Theodora's ministrations to Eleanor verge on the lesbian" ("Chambers" 25). Claire Kahane does not actually label Theodora lesbian, but only "androgynous" (341), but Jack Sullivan has no problem defining Theo as a "chic lesbian" (1035). As with Natalie and Tony of Hangsaman. there is no denying that the possibility exists for a lesbian attraction between Theo and Eleanor, but not necessarily on the information presented by Jackson in her final version of Haunting.

In an earlier draft of Hill House. Tricia Lootens found evidence that the "sexual tension" between the two women was intended by Jackson to be of a lesbian nature (182).

In one draft, Theo's lesbianism is "openly discussed and the attraction between the two women clearly acknowledged" (Lootens 182). However, in the final version of the novel, we know only that Theo is an unmarried businesswoman who shares an apartment with another person whom most critics assume to be female. The two have had a spat and Theo has run off to Hill House, possibly to give the quarrel time to play itself out, but more than likely for dramatic effect When Eleanor asks Theo if she is married, she hesitates before replying, "No" (88). Some readers use this hesitation as evidence that Theo is lesbian and doesn't 118 want anyone, especially Eleanor, to know. Perhaps. But isn't it just as reasonable to assume that Theo's roommate is male and that she is protecting a living arrangement that is not acceptable by most people's standards (at least at the time the novel was written)? The most we can say about the relationship between Eleanor and Theo is that it is a close one, and why wouldn't it be? They are the only two significant women in the house (Mrs. Dudley's presence is hardly felt), they are practically roommates, and, for Eleanor, Theo is the first woman-friend she has ever known. Theo's sexual preferences may not be " 100 percent AC" (King 284), but I do not find any evidence in the text that supports the lecherous lesbian tendencies some readers have attributed to her. Furthermore, in forcing the lesbian issue between Eleanor and Theo, readers have missed Jackson's hidden agenda in describing the sexual dynamics between the two: Eleanor Vance, like Natalie, Merricat, and Constance, demonstrates in her response to Theo's ministrations evidence of sexual abuse.

Eleanor is concerned with "dirtiness"; she worries that her hands and nails are not clean and comments about her mother's dirty hands (86). Natalie, too, was concerned about the soiled hands of men. When Theo tries to remake Eleanor in her own image by applying the nail poHsh to her toenails, Eleanor finds her touch at first comforting and nearly falls asleep. But, when Theo notices that Eleanor's feet are dirty (did Christ not wash the feet of a prostitute?), she reacts with revulsion and alarm. "I hate having things done to me," she cries, followed immediately by, "I don't like to feel helpless" (117). Whatever was done to

Eleanor in the past has convinced her that physical touch is a seductive threat One may feel at first comforted by physical touching, almost hypnotized by it but soon the strokes become "horrible" and then "wicked" (117). Many readers and critics assume Eleanor's mother abused her, and no doubt she did use her daughter as a servant in the same way

Merricat and Constance's mother uses her daughters as handmaidens. However, whether

Eleanor's mother abused her sexually caimot be determined on the basis of Jackson's final 119 version of Hill House. In fact, it is just as likely that Eleanor was abused by her father, not her mother, if we view the poltergeist incident as evidence. One month after her father’s death, when Eleanor is twelve, on the verge of puberty, "showers of stones had fallen on their house" for three days; Eleanor, not her sister or mother, was assumed to have caused the stoning. The traditional (Biblical) explanation for stoning assumes the victim has committed a sexual transgression. If Eleanor and her father were involved in an incestuous relationship, the stoning may represent Eleanor's subconscious guilt (her concern with dirtiness) for having participated. The stoning may also indicate her mother's resentment of Eleanor; this would explain why the girl felt that she, not her sister, owed their mother some kind of penance for the "wicked" sin committed with the father. Once again, the innuendoes speak louder than the written word; what is not said in Jackson's text may be more significant than what is said. In the case of Luke Sanderson, the final member of the Hill House foursome, very little needs to be said. Luke, the current owner's nephew and a ne'er-do-well, is one of Jackson's "charming and unreliable male characters" (Friedman 124), and probably the least developed of the four. In fact, I would imagme this is intentional on the part of Jackson, since Luke is a very good example of the immature male who seeks a mother substitute in every woman he meets. After dinner on their first night at Hill House, Dr. Montague gives his subjects a history of the house, one that is not designed to encourage them to remain there. "You will recall," the doctor begins, "houses described in Leviticus as leprous,' tsaraas, or Homer's phrase for the underworld: aidao domos, the House of Hades..." (70). Hill House is apparently one of these hideous domiciles, a house "bom bad" (again the suggestion that the house is a living organism), a "deranged house" (70-71). Montague continues:

Hill House was built eighty-odd years ago It was built as a home for his family by a man named Hugh Crain, a country home where he hoped to see his childien and gr^dchildren live in comfortable luxury, and where he fully expected to end his days in quiet. Unfortimately Hül House was a sad 120

house almost from the beginning; Hugh Crain's young wife died minutes before she first set eyes on the house, when the carriage bringing her here overturned in the driveway, and the lady was brought... lifeless. . . into the home her husband had buüt for her. . . Hugh Crain was left with two small daughters to bring up (75)

The passage is significant because it reads, on the surface, like the plot of a typical, predictable Gothic tale.9 HiU House and its master are far firom typical, however. The house may, indeed, have been built for children and grand-chüdren; it was not meant to be inhabited by wives or women old enough to be wives. HiU House, the creation of a man attracted to his own daughters, wants only children, or childlike women, women like Eleanor

Vance. Hugh Crain married again, twice, but neither of his wives survived to live in the house. His motherless daughters grew up in typical Victorian fashion under the care of governesses; one married, the other remained at HiU House, where she eventuaUy died. The house then feU into the hands of the old woman's companion, a young vUlage girl, who, "maddened by the conviction that locks and bolts could not keep out the enemy who stole into her house at night," committed suicide by hanging herself (81). I repeat this portion of the history here because it iUustrates a fascinating pattern of female doubles found throughout the novel. First are the two primary doubles, Eleanor (the angel) and Theo (the whore). There are also the two Crain sisters, one married (the angel) and one independent (the whore?); perhaps Eleanor and Theo are contemporary doubles of the two Victorian siblings, although this reading requires some alterations, since one unmarried Crain sister remained at HiU

House (Theo remains but is not married), whUe the other sister married and left HiU House (Eleanor is forced to leave HiU House, but she is not married). To further compUcate the issue, there is the elder Crain sister (who appears to be the Angel in this version) and her companion (the whore, since it is rumored the yoimg woman engaged in an iUicit backstairs affair); this pair may also resemble Eleanor's mother and Eleanor, one serving as servant- 121 companion to the other; or, as some readers prefer, Eleanor and the companion from the village, since the latter pair both commit suicide. Finally, there are Eleanor and Carrie.

Carrie, however, also functions as Eleanor's surrogate mother. It is no easy task to untangle this menage (there is just a suggestion of incestuous relationships here, a theme Jackson develops in more detail later in the novel). Jackson's habit of disguising herself as more than one character is visible here, but there is also evidence that this confused tangle of doubles results from the many revisions of the text. Eleanor originally began as Mary Bothwell Stuart Vance, or "Vancy. The reference to the (^ueen of Scotland is obvious; Bothwell was the queen's trusted confidant (and possibly one of her lovers) who betrayed her. In the name itself, then, we have the suggestion of a double. "Vancy," whom Lootens describes as the "feminine equivalent of the bluff, hearty bachelor narrator of so many Victorian ghost stories" (169), becomes a much less hearty and witty but "lonely and defensive" Erica Vance in another draft, and is finally distilled into the weak and submissive Eleanor (Lootens 173). Theo also has a draft history. She is originally called Theodora Vance (thus aligning her with "Vancy"). Lootens refers to this character as "Trapped Theodora" because she is "emotionally and economically" vulnerable and displays nowhere near the fortitude of her opposite, Vancy

(171). Somewhere along the way, as the drafts progressed, these two (or three?) characters,

Vancy/Erica and Trapped Theo, assume the attributes of their opposites: the independent and "sensible" Vancy/diminished Erica becomes the submissive, inexperienced Eleanor, while the insufficient Trapped Theo becomes the independent, sensible Theo. I must agree with Lootens that it is impossible to disentangle aU the doubles, although I think it is safe to say that there is among the pairs a dominant/submissive theme in the final draft Theo, the elder Crain sister, and Carrie are all dominant women, and they all have homes of their own. Eleanor, the younger Crain sister, and the companion are dependent on others and submissive; Eleanor lives with her sister and is unable to find a new home at Hill House, the 122 younger Crain woman never regains her place at HiU House, and the village companion is just that, a young woman paid to live at HiU House, a guest of her employer. Granted, the companion inherits the house, but she also commits suicide, thus reinforcing the fact that she does not belong there and is consequently rejected by HiU House and its ghostly inhabitants, just as Eleanor finaUy is. For the present, at least, Eleanor is convinced that she has found a home, a famUy, and possibly a lover at HiU House. Eleanor awakens on her first morning as a resident of HiU House surprisingly refreshed, in spite of the steady rain falling outside the window that washes the blue of her room into a colorless gray. To chaUenge the drab surroundings and to assert her new self, Eleanor tries on a new personaUty, one much more Uke Theodora's; she dares to wear a "wicked" red sweater and red sandals. Theo and Eleanor appear to draw closer together, suggesting, perhaps, Eleanor's desire to integrate the good girl (angel) and wicked sister (whore) sides of her personality. After breakfast, the "famUy" of four discover the discrepancies and irregularities of HUl House, which seems to have no rational plan: the rooms are designed to flow outward in concentric circles from the innermost room the parlor. Because of the roundness and "irrationaUty" of the design, many critics have seen

HiU House as a "mother house" of madness (Parks, "Chambers" 26), forgetting that its creator-progenitor (he who hopes to fiU the interior with chUdren and grandchUdren) is

Hugh Crain. If the house is mad then, as Lootens notes, it must reflect the "warped" design of its “vicious patriarch" (176) whose presence is everywhere seen or felt. The Ubrary exudes a grave-like odor of "mold and earth" (103); the lair of Dracula (he who sucked the life from women in order to sustain his own) is often described this way. Inside the Ubrary is also the narrow staircase leading to the tower. Eleanor is tmable to enter the Ubrary, the first sign that she senses danger where the others do not The drawing room is only sUghtly more hospitable, with its mauve-striped waUs and ornately flowered carpet. At one end of the room is a "huge and grotesque" marble statue 123 that looks "naked" to Eleanor, who covers her eyes (108). No one is sure just what the statue represents, but Theo, her eye on the genitals of the centerpiece figure, is certain that the statue is none other than Hugh Crain with his two nymph-like daughters in attendance. This is an intriguing reference which suggests, once again, that Hugh Crain's relationship with his daughters may have been incestuous. Nymphs are classically young and beautiful maidens who are usually the intimate companions of males. Nymph also describes a stage in insect development: a nymph is any insect that does not undergo a complete metamorphosis; in other words, it suffers an arrested development. If Hugh Crain preferred children to adult women, and if we recognize Eleanor as the childlike woman she appears to be, then she is indeed the lover Hugh Crain seeks. Eleanor may, in fact, be Hugh Crain's second daughter, the one seldom referred to in the novel who is needed to complete Hugh Crain's nursery-harem. 10 Indeed, shortly after her encounter with the statue, Eleanor is drawn toward the "grotesquely solid" tower jammed hard against the wooden side of the house with the insistent veranda holding it there" (112). It is impossible to ignore the sexual implications of this description: the house is round, built in concentric circles, female; the tower is solid, phallic, and male. The house and tower are locked in some kind of

"insistent" sexual embrace. By far the most disturbing room in the house is the nursery (just as it is in IM

Yellow Wallpaper), located not in the attic but at the end of the second floor corridor. In order to enter the room where Hugh Crain's girls spent most of their time, it is necessary to pass through what psychics call a cold spot. Entering the nursery is like walking through the "doorway of a tomb" (118); the repeated references to graves and tombs suggests the decay and depravity of the patriarchal family. The nursery is not attractive, certainly not meant for children; across the wall a "line of [painted] nursery animals seemed somehow not at all jolly, but as though they were trapped, or related to dying deer..." (119), another graphic warning. In spite of the frightening animals and in spite of the "two grinning 124 heads" above the door whose "separate stares and distorted laughter met and locked at the point where the vicious cold entered" (120), Montague is certain that the nursery is the "heart of the house" (119). Montague seems to miss the sordid implications of a room that is used to frighten and imprison little girls; or if he does understand the implications, he is no better than Hugh Crain, who believed little girls should be subdued and kept as pets for his pleasure. If this is the case with Hugh Crain, and I believe it is, then the lives of the little girls, the nymphs of the statue, were, indeed, the fixed center of Hill House and the fixed center (fixation) of Hugh Crain's existence. Certainly, at this moment, all four of the inhabitants of Hill House are sensitive to its potential for surprise, but they can only wait for the house to reveal itself. They do not have long to wait; the first "event" occurs that night, after the four explorers retire to their separate rooms, the doctor with a copy of Richardson's

Pamela, an obvious choice on Jackson's part. Pamela recounts the adventures of a "young, sensitive girl, experiencing for the first time and under extraordinarily trying circumstances some of the moral complexities and inconsistencies that make up actual adult life," an "emotional awakening" (Cowler 8-9). This description certainly applies to Eleanor's situation, particularly the reference to the "extraordinarily trying circumstances."

During the night a presence steals along the corridors, sniffing at Theo's door and then pounding on Eleanor's. "Coming, mother, coming," she cries out, fumbling for the light Then again, more irritably, "Coming, coming. . . just a minute. I'm coming" (129). In her half-awakened state, Eleanor imagines her mother is calling her. Then she distinguishes

Theo's voice in the next room and hurries to her through the cormecting bathroom. Theo's room is "terribly cold"; the knocking has diminished and now seems to come from the nursery at the end of the hall. The two women feel safe because the doctor and Luke, their protective males, are just across the hall, but the men are oblivious to the noise; the house is looking for a woman, and it does not give up easily. The disturbance continues: 125

It sounded, Eleanor thought, like a hollow noise, a hollow bang, as though something were hitting the doors with an iron kettle, or an iron bar, or an iron glove. It pounded, regularly for a minute, and üien suddenly more softly, and then again in a quick flurry, seeming to be going methodically from door to door at the end of the hall. (128-29)

The seeking, crashing sound is insistent Did it "go on feet along the carpet?" Eleanor wonders. "Did it lift a hand to the door?" (129). She screams for thething to "Go away," and miraculously the pounding stops; the women huddle together in Theo's bed, shivering. Then, "as though it had been listening, waiting to hear their voices and what they said, to identify them," the disturbance begins again, this time "hammering at the upper edge" of their door, "higher than Luke or the doctor could reach"; the "sickening, degrading cold came in waves" (131). Whatever is outside the door has "fotmd them" (131), although only Eleanor believes that the "thing" is alive. Only Eleanor seems to hear the "small seeking sounds, feeling the edges of the door. . . the little sticky, childlike sormds [that] moved arotmd the door frame" (131). A "thin little giggle" answers Eleanor's wild disclaimer, "You can't get in." The whisper escalates into "a mad rising laugh" that Eleanor hears "all the way up and down her back, a gloating laugh moving past them around the house..." (131). And then it is over. Luke and the doctor appear. The two men have heard nothing, were not even in the house, having been led outside on a wild goose chase by what they say was a stray dog wandering the halls. Whatever moves in Hül House wants to separate the men from the women; it emanates from the nursery and is both powerful and chüdlike. The thing is, perhaps, not one thing but two—Hugh Crain and his young daughter. Recalling the Gothic novel's identification of the house with its master, it is not unreasonable to assume that it is Hugh Crain, representing patriarchy itself, who wants to devour Eleanor, since she, alone, seems to receive this impression. 11 It is certainly Eleanor who is becoming more and more enamored of the house, although Montague cautions 126 against such an emotional response. He praises "the conscious, thinking mind" as "invulnerable," yet he seems to accept superstition as a healthy benefactor when dealing with the psychic world:

[The] menace of the super natural is that it attacks where modem minds are weakest, where we have abandoned our protective armor of superstition and have no substitute defense. Not one of us thinks rationally tiiat what... knocked at the door last night was a ^ost, and yet there certainly was something going on in Hill House We cannot say 'It was my imagination,’ because three other people were there too. (140)

Montague is telling us that the modem mind which tries to defend against the irrational will surely find that cold reason, by its denial of the very thing it fears, runs the risk of being consumed by it, and, indeed, shortly after this conversation, Luke makes a hideous discovery. Written in large red letters on the wall outside the purple room, where they usually convene, is the message, "HELP ELEANOR COME HOME" (146). Later that day, there is a similar, equally gmesome message scrawled in blood above Theo’s bed: "HELP ELEANOR COME HOME" (155). Theo’s clothes are shredded and splashed with blood; she is covered with the "atrocious" smelling liquid, and must borrow clothes from

Eleanor and share her room. At this point, it is reasonable to expect a merging of the two personalities; Theo tells Eleanor that sharing a room and clothes makes them "practically twins" (158). Eleanor does not welcome the idea of sisterhood with Theo, but instead reacts to Theo’s observation with an "uncontrollable loathing" (157). Instead of welcoming Theo as an ally, Eleanor rejects her. Part of her reluctance to allow the bold and sensual Theo into her life has to do with Eleanor’s fear of being controlled by another woman, since that has been her experience with her mother and sister. There is only "one of me," she insists, "and it’s all I’ve got I hate seeing myself dissolve and slip and separate so that I’m living in one half of my mind, and I see the other half of me helpless and frantic and driven" (160). Eleanor also distrusts and dislikes the part of her that desires, perhaps even lusts after, the 127

sensual. Bemie Selinger observes that even early studies in the function of the double in

literature and in art confirm that in "all cases an erotic component is concealed within the first selfs hatred for the second" (38). Ordinarily a rejection of the double is viewed as a step toward health; as Gilbert and Gubar note, a "double-character is sometimes created only to be integrated or destroyed" (Madwoman 78). However, Eleanor's rejection of Theo

may be seen as evidence of "the tragedy of one's own fragmentation and alienation from the self that Barbara Rigney writes of (10). Theo's mirroring of Eleanor is at once "fortunate, dangerous, erotic" (Lootens 183), and for these reasons, Eleanor does not, carmot integrate her angel and whore dichotomies; she does not (or carmot) accept that sexuality need not be

seen as evU or dangerous. As Lootens writes, the message "is clean Eleanor caimot cope with her own sexuality" (185), and thus she cannot become autonomous. She is not able to

rescue her little girl nor is she able to "grow herself up" by accepting all of herself as a woman. Having given up on the realities of earthly, sensual love, she allows the ghost- inhabited house to "seduce her into believing it wants her" (167) and slips further and further into submissiveness: "if only I could surrender," she tells the others (160). Eleanor becomes, increasingly, the willing victim of avaricious patriarchy as represented by Hugh

Crain and his omnivorous erection, Hül House, because she, like Metcalfs feminized

woman, caimot imagine a life outside the patriarchy. Hugh Crain is a dominating and devious figure in The Haunting of Hill House, and he

fits perfectly Judith Lewis Herman and Lisa Hirshraan's description of the Victorian patriarch who was despotic and very often incestuous. Within the Victorian farmly, fathers

are described as "perfect patriarchs" who rule households where female members of the family are "supervised, restricted... controlled. .. and isolated from the outside world"

(Herman and Hirshman 71-73). In Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Chüdhood Sexual Abuse on Her Work. Louise De Salvo supports Herman and Hirshman's argument that the tendency toward "sexually exploitive behavior" in Victorian males is "best understood, not 128 as a deviance from the ethics of family care, but rather as a logical outgrowth of how the patriarchal family is organized. . ( 8 ) . Virginia Woolf, in her own exploration of her incestuous experience, described her father’s Hyde Park house as a "cage" and herself as "an animal trapped within it, prey to any 'wild beast' who chose to harm her" (qtd. in De Salvo 125), a description that sovmds very similar to Jackson's description of the Hill House nursery. Woolf logically coimected the

"incarceration of yotmg girls and young women" to the "need of fathers to keep their daughters to themselves" (De Salvo 288). As a result of the patriarchal fixation on daughters, an entire pornographic industry devoted to the "cult of the little girl" emerged during the nineteenth century (Rush 56). Child molestation by "gentlemen" was rampant; just as damaging to "pretty, bright-eyed maidens" who went through "hell behind nursery and school shutters" (Pearsall 361) was the degradation suffered by little girls under the guise of giving them instruction in morals and virtues befitting a lady. This kind of

"pornographic instruction" is simply the theory that informed the practice of Victorian fathers who forced sexual relations upon their daughters in order to "break them in" correctly to the sexual role expected in marriage. 11 Hugh Crain was such a father.

In a hand-lettered book for her "enlightenment," Hugh Crain took the opportunity to reveal his physical attraction to his daughter. The book, appropriately called "Memories, for SOPHIA ANNE LESTER CRAIN;A Legacy for Her Education and Enlightenment

During Her Lifetime From Her Affectionate and Devoted Father,” is composed of

"horrible" prints of writhing snakes and burning corpses, illustrating Moral Lessons and

Deadly Sins, accompanied, of course, by Crain's own comments (167-68). One example is a "vividly painted" snake pit with snakes "writhing and twisting along the page" above the message, neatly printed, and touched with gold: "Eternal damnation is the lot of mankind..

. Daughter, hold apart from this world that its lusts and ingratitudes corrupt you not;

Daughter preserve thyself" (168-69). Preserve herself for whom? To an illustration of 129

Hell, Crain has added his own emphasis by burning away a comer of the page. "Daughter," he writes,

could you but hear for a moment the agony, the screaming, the dreadful crying out and repentance, of those poor souls condemned to everlasting flame! Could thine eyes be seared, but for an instant, with the red glare of wasteland burning always! Alas, wretched beings, in undying pain! Daughter, your father has this minute touched the comer of his page to his candle, and seen the frail paper shrivel and curl in the flame; consider Daughter, the heat of this candle is to the everlasting fires of Hell as a grain of sand to the reaching desert, and, as this paper bums in its slight flame so shall you bum forever, in a fire a thousandfold more keen. (169)

The passage is both suggestive and abusive. An explanation of the "candle" as a phallic symbol is unnecessary here; I do, however, want to point out that, as Blume observes, the incestuous use of female children by male parents or relatives is often accompartied by threats of punishment, from the perpetrator himself, or from an angry God who is, of course, patriarchal (44). Hugh Crain assures his daughter that in the "pure light of heaven the angels praise Him. . . Daughter, it is Here that I will seek thee," apparently with God's approval (169). Hugh Crain’s lessons on the seven deadly sins are from his pen, not his candle. Prominent among the lessons is "Lust" Jackson does not describe the drawing representing lust; she does not need to. The dialogue between Luke and Dr. Montague is enough to suggest the content Eleanor and Theo wisely choose to sit across the room:

"Here is lust" Luke notes. "Was ever a woman in this humor wooed?" "Good Heavens," the doctor responds. "Good heavens.'" 'He must have drawn it himself."

"For a child?" The doctor is outraged. (170) The exact degree of prurience in the illustration is impossible to determine, but it is safe to say, based upon what has already been revealed about Hugh Crain, that the drawing was 130 explicit and undoubtedly rendered some form of sexual intercourse. Whether or not the participants were father and daughter, again, is impossible to determine. I think it may be said that since Hugh Crain could not find among his lavish (or lascivious) prints one which illustrated copulation as he fancied it, or fantasized about it, he was reduced to giving his daughter a personal account of the act The last page of the book is the "very nicest" of all, according to Luke, who has been forced to adopt a flippant tone in order to lighten the load of everyone’s horror. The last page is signed with Hugh Crain's blood:

Daughter sacred pacts are signed in blood, and I have taken firom my own wrist the vital blood, with which I bind you. Live virtuously, be meek, have faith in thy Redeemer, and in me, thy father, and I swear to thee that we will be joined together hereafter in unending bliss. (171)

The significance of blood here goes beyond the concept of a loyal oath. Blood, for the Victorian male, had a special significance: it was often equated with semen.^2 Blood is the life-giving liquid; semen, too, carries life. Hugh Crain uses his own blood to sign himself "Thy everloving father, in this world and the next, author of thy being" (171). In doing so, the pen becomes his "metaphorical penis"; the blood that flows firom its tip, his semen. It should also be noted that Hugh Crain, in this passage, displays all the proprietary features of the Victorian patriarch who wishes to keep his daughter as his exclusive property during his lifetime, and after. It was not uncommon for a Victorian father to require a daughter to remain at home with him as housekeeper-companion, especially when the wife had died. The daughter, then, became a surrogate vwfe to her father-husband. Whether Hugh Crain had this in mind when he drew his "foul horrible" pictures for his daughter is difficult to say; he did, however, assert his right to claim her as his heavenly bride by aligning himself with "the Redeemer" (Hill House 71). He is appointed by God to preserve his daughter's purity on earth. In heaven, if she wiU avoid the lustful "pitfalls of this world," she and her earthly father will be joined together, if not in corporeal "bliss," at 131 least in spiritual copulation. Perhaps this kind of spiritual copulation is what Eleanor seeks as she moves closer each day to a union with the house. Perhaps Eleanor is prevented from accepting her sensual side out of fear of incurring the father's (Crain's) wrath. David Hogan refers to Eleanor as an "unhappy virgin" (85), implying that what she needs is the time-honored (male) cure for that condition. However, by denying the whore (her sensual nature), Eleanor becomes more and more the Virgin Mary or Angel figure who longs for reunion with her heavenly bridegroom, the ethereal Hugh Crain. Certainly, she seems unwilling to accept Dr. Montague's opinion that Crain is not a nice man and that his picture book is not "healthy, not at all healthy work for a man" (171), or Theo's view that Hugh Crain was a "dirty old man and. . . made a dirty old house..." (171). Everything from this point onward in the novel concerns Eleanor's journey deeper into the mystery of the house and its surroundings. Like Jane Eyre, she must travel through a wilderness to reach her destination; unlike Jane, Eleanor's journey does not end in "lovers meeting." Trees and woods in Jackson's fiction are almost always coimected to a patriarchal threat In fact, the similarities between Eleanor's journey into the wilderness and Natalie Waite's are noteworthy. The first time Eleanor ventures into the woods, Theo accompanies her, just as Tony walked beside Natalie during her wilderness episode; in this situation as with the other, the two personalities are slowly drifting apart "We are walking on either side of a fence," Eleanor thinks. There is "only the barest margin of safety left... " (173-74). Eleanor and Theo follow a path (just as Natalie and Tony did) which leads them deeper and deeper into the "silent" trees as the path "widened and blackened" in front of them. The trees dwarf the two women, standing like great pillars "white and ghastly against the black sky" (175). Eleanor feels Theo's presence, but the other woman is

"distant" (176), just as Tony was distant from Natalie in Hangsaman. The path leads

Eleanor and Theo to "its destined end," a garden, a secret garden, where they see the apparition of a family picnic; they can hear the children laughing and the "amused voices of 132

the mother and father" (177). Terrified, the two women turn back, beating and scratching "wildly at the white stone wall where vines grew blackly" until a "rusted iron gate" gives

way, fijeeing them to run blindly toward the house (177). The sexual imagery of trees and woods in Hill House is not quite as powerful or threatening as it is in Hangsaman: in Hangsaman. Jackson focuses on the power of the

patriarchy as it resides in individual men (Arnold Waite, the rapist, Arthur Langdon); in IM House, her focus is directed at the institution of patriarchy itself, specifically the family. Whenever Eleanor sees a family (the "cup of stars" family at the Mill, the Crain family,

even the family she has constructed using Montague, Theo and Luke), she is confronted with the inherent ugliness that resides just beneath the surface of these perfect ancestral units. Families keep "secrets," as is evidenced by the secret garden family that terrifies Eleanor and Theo, yet so strong is Eleanor's desire to belong, to be fathered and mothered,

loved, she cannot resist the pull of what she must surely sense holds disaster for her. The arrival of Dr. Montague's wife completes the family circle at Hill House. Mrs. Montague is one of Jackson's few domineering matriarchs (modeled no doubt after her own mother), a no-nonsense, take-charge woman who has no patience with her husband's

cautious approach to house spirits, and very little tolerance for her errant daughters, Eleanor

and Theo. She vows to get to the bottom of the banging doors and giggling ghosts. Using a planchette (an automatic writing board), Mrs. Montague makes contact with a lost spirit who

speaks to the group through the board's control, Merrigot ((in Jackson's next work, the

character who controls the action is called Merricat). The lost spirit is a child who is searching for "home" because it is "Lost. Lost Lost" (193). Mrs. Montague asks the child to identify itself. "NeU," she reads in the answer, "Nell. . . Eleanor Nellie Nell Nell" (192).

"I have been singled out again," Eleanor thinks, and indeed that night there is another episode of knocking and crashing emanating, again, from the nursery (194). Eleanor and

Theo huddle together one last time, experiencing the bitter cold, the "little swimming curls of 133 fear" on their backs. The door to the room is again attacked, as if the thing, the spirit, knows they are there. Eleanor senses that she is disappearing, inch by inch, into this house ..." (201). She vows to "relinquish my possession of this self of mine, abdicate, give over willingly what I never wanted at all; whatever it wants of me it can have" (204). Is Eleanor giving up the lost little girl of her past, the one Hancock tells us we must recover if we are to survive as women? Or is the lost little girl who wants into Eleanor’s room the "core self' Hancock talks about? It is doubtful that either is the case, for without much resistance, Eleanor has relinquished herself to the house, to Hugh Crain. In all likelihood, Hugh Crain represents Eleanor’s dead father, whose love she desperately wanted but could earn only through her complete submission to his demands; Jackson makes it abjectly clear that it is the Crain patriarch who wants Eleanor. It is Hugh Crain who strides down the hall to the nursery, pounding, demanding Eleanor’s obedience to his will, his little ghost daughter wheedling and pleading for her sister to come home. Whatever the case, the lover Eleanor is destined to meet at the end of her journey is personified by the house Hugh Crain built, and the house personifies the evil ego of its creator. WTierever Eleanor goes, Hugh Crain is there, waiting seductively for her to fall into his embrace.

When Eleanor tries to escape the house one last time, she feels Hugh Crain’s presence in the "hard branches of trees" (214). In the woods, someone or something calls to her: "Eleanor, Eleanor," and suddenly she is smothered by a feeling "firmness" and warmth. "Don't let me go," she begs. "Stay, stay," but the hardness that gripped her slips away, "leaving her, and fading" (215). This is surely a description of the male orgasm from a female perspective, and it is reasonable to assume from the sexual imagery of the "hard" branches of the piUard trees and the "firmness which held her," that it is Hugh Crain who called, "Eleanor, Eleanor." Indeed, as the sensory embrace fades, she hears the "vacant footsteps move across the water of the brook, sending small ripples going, over onto the grass on the other side, moving slowly and caressingly up and over the hill" (215). Do they 134 move in the direction of Hill House? Undoubtedly, for Eleanor's next and final encounter with the house follows shortly thereafter; it is an encounter, specifically, with Hugh Crain and his arrogant tower. That evening, sitting in the game room with the family she has now rejected, Eleanor hears someone walking and singing softly to her;

Go in and out the windows. Go in and out the windows. Go in and out the windows. As we have done before... Go forth and face your lover. Go forth and face your lover. Go forth and face your lover. As we have done before (226)

Journeys end in lovers meeting. That night, after the others have fallen asleep, Eleanor goes "barefoot and in silence" down the staircase, stopping outside the library which houses the entrance to the tower. "I can't go in there," she whispers. "I'm not allowed in there" (228). As if to remind her that she needs permission, a "soft little laugh" drifts down to her from the nursery. "Mother? Mother?" she calls out (228). But it is not her mother who seeks Eleanor; it is her father-lover, Hugh Crain. According to his bidding, Eleanor goes "in and out the windows" of HiU House while its "tiny mists" curl around her bare ankles: "Go in and out the windows. . . Go forth and face your lover." Eleanor dances with Hugh Crain's

"huge, leaning statue" (231), watching his eyes "flicker and shine at her" (228). Finally she moves inevitably to the library where the entrance to the tower is. "Thus I enter Hill

House," she proclaims. The room is "deliciously, fondly warm"; there is just enough light for her to see the "iron stairway curving around and around up to the tower" (232). Under her feet "the stone floor moved caressingly, rubbing itself against the soles of her feet, and 135 all around the soft air touched her, stirring her hair, drifting against her fingers, coming in a

light breath across her mouth," Hugh Crain's kiss:

Climbing the narrow iron stairway was intoxicating—going higher and hi^er, around and around, looking down, clinging to the slim iron railing, looking far far down onto the stone floor. Climbing, looking down, she thought of the soft green grass outside and the rolling hills and the rich trees. Looking up, she thought of the tower of HiU House rising triumphantly between the trees (232)

Obviously the soft grass, rolling hiUs, and leaf-laden trees are a metaphor for female

anatomy; the tower rising between the trees is obviously phallic; the entire scene is a metaphor for sexual intercourse. Eleanor has found her destiny, not inside a home with blooming oleanders and stone lions, but within the phallic tower of HiU House. Lootens sees Eleanor's entry into the tower as a "reversal of the birth process" (177); I find this a

little difficult to construe, since Eleanor would have had to enter the world through the penis. More likely Eleanor is moving toward some kind of orgasmic union with the house, but is

prevented from reaching fulfillment by Luke, Theo, and the doctor who appear below her. Eleanor wants to spiral upward through the trap door at the top of the house, but as Luke

climbs the stairs to rescue her, she finds herself creeping toward him, and "almost before

she could believe it," she is stepping back onto the stone floor of the Ubrary (235-36).

Within the patriarchal structure of the famUy, Eleanor has no choices.

PsychologicaUy immature and inexperienced, with no identity as an autonomous woman, she is unable to imagine herself as other than an obedient daughter to not one but two fathers, and therein Ues the conflict To obey Hugh Crain, she must remain at HUl House, thus defying Dr. Montague, who wants her to leave. If she obeys Montague and leaves, she

disobeys Crain. Eleanor tries to rebel: "The house wants me to stay, " she insists, but Montague is resolute. She looks to Theo for support: "... I can't leave... I want to stay here" (238-39), but Theo only reminds her that staying means being "waUed up aUve." 136

Here is where Shirley Jackson parts company with the standard Gothic plot The heroine, trapped within an evil mansion, the prisoner of an evü man, has been rescued by a young savior (granted, Luke is a poor substitute for the standard Gothic hero), but unlike most heroines of Gothic novels, Eleanor cannot live happily ever after with her hero because he does not want her. Having incurred the wrath of the Kings' or fathers' (Crain and Montague), having been rejected by her prince, Eleanor's only alternative is to return to the house in the city, which is yet one more bastion of the patriarchy where she will be forced to obey her brother-in-law's orders spoken through his accomplice wife, Eleanor's sister. Eleanor is caught in a maze of patriarchal scenarios, none of which offers her any possibility of a self-fulfilled life. Unable to choose such a life for herself, she chooses death instead. However "mad" the decision to die may seem to readers, it is Eleanor's one last act of autonomy (perhaps it is her only act of autonomy). As she drives away from the house, she sees the windows, the eyes of Hugh Crain, looking down on her as the tower rises against the dark sky. Perhaps, Luke, Theo, and Dr. Montague have no power over her after all. "Just by telling me to go away they can't make me leave, not if Hill House means me to stay

. . . they don't make the rules aroundhere,” she tells herself, defiantly (245). Then, "with what she perceived as quick cleverness," Eleanor presses her foot down "hard on the accelerator" (245). In one last and perhaps only completely selfish, rather than selfless, act she has performed during a lifetime of prim submissiveness, Eleanor heads the car toward a huge, phallic tree trunk:

I am really doing it, she thought, turning the wheel to end the car directly at the great tree at die curve of the driveway, I am really doing it, I am really doing this all by myself, now, at last, this is me, I am really really doing it by myself. (245) 137 But even for Eleanor (and thus for the reader), this last attempt at self-direction is inadequate. Just before the car hits the tree, she wonders, "Why am I doing this?" (246). As is the case with so many of her fictional predecessors, Eleanor's death only reinforces the traditional literary and cultural prescription that women who either rebel against contairunent or acquiesce to it are doomed to madness, as the persona of The Yellow

Wallpaper is, or to suicide, as Edna Pontellier is in The Awakening, hi their successful self- obliteration, these women do escape the patriarchy, but at what price to themselves, to the world, and in particular, to women's fiction? Eleanor Vance appears to be just one more female sacrifice to patriarchal dominion as affirmed by the novel's final paragraph:

Hill House itself, not sane, stood against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, its walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there walked alone. (246)

The ancestral rules remain and prevail. The specter of Hugh Crain's insatiable spirit stalking the halls and minds of lonely and immature women for its next victim is a vision more chiUing than any Jackson drew in the text Read from a feminist perspective, the novel is, as Lootens points out a statement about the very institution, the structure, the arrogant edifice of the patriarchy as well as a "brutal, inexorable vision" of patriarchal families that "kill where they are supposed to nurture" (167).

Hugh Crain is the epitome of the Victorian ruler whose (questionable) virtues we continue to extol today. Witness the rhetoric of "family values" which insists that aH social problems will be solved—alcoholism, drugs, delinquency, and crime—if we will only install a man at the head of every household. The term family values, used contemporarily, means patriarchal values. Yet research, not to mention the volumes of literature produced by women, has shown over and over again that a household (read culture) based upon the 138 patriarchal principle leads not to wholesomeness and sanity but to corruption and madness For this reason, Shirley Jackson in The Haunting of Hill House, as well as in several of her other novels and a number of short stories, makes it clear that a woman must not only have the right to freely move in and out of the fortress built to preserve the patriarchal landscape, but must own the portal through which she passes. Ownership of property is paramount in Jackson; it is not a matter of having a room of one's own as much as a home of one's own. Eleanor, in spite of her attempt to forge a life for herself, gains neither a room nor a house of her own in The Haunting of Hill House. Is she, then, just another pathetic and ineffectual heroine who simply reaffirms the trap traditional literature sets for every woman who tries to write her way out of subjugation? I don't think so. On the contrary, Eleanor makes an important discovery at the end of her journey, although it is too late for her to profit from it Just before the moment of impact between the car and tree, Eleanor utters "Why am I doing this?," confirming that Jackson recognized that self-aimihilation is not the answer. If we accept Claire Kahane's reading of HiU House, Eleanor kills herself in order to join Hugh Crain and his ghostly daughters; she has, according to Lootens, given her life to become "everything" and has "become nothing" (89). I am not as ready to accept the interpretation that Eleanor drives into a phallic tree (something like entering the phallic tower) in order to merge with the Crain family, but I do agree with Kahane that in the split second before the impact, Eleanor "begins to facea ... truth she has tried to flee: her self- sacrifice has been inadequate and ultimately pointless" (qtd. in Lootens 187). Does the loss of one woman's life have any effect on the persistence of patriarchal patterns? Does it change anything? Anyone? The novel responds with a resounding no. Theo returns to her apartment to take up her lifeexactly as she had left it before her visit to HUl House. Luke "took himself off to Paris," at his aunt's expense, to continue his life as a rake and a bounder. And Dr. Montague? This dedicated and beneficent gentleman gives up his 139 investigations of psychic phenomena altogether; but it is the "cool, almost contemptuous reception of his preliminary article analyzing the psychic phenomena of HiU House" which causes him to "retire from active scholarly pursuits," not the loss of Eleanor (246). Untouched, unchanged, not one of the characters has grown through exposure to HiU House, or as a result of Eleanor's violent death. What, then, is the answer to the heroine's dUemma of madness or suicide? For Jackson it is the destruction of the patriarchy, not the self. In her next work, We Have Alwavs Lived in the Castle, the female protagoitist does away with the patriarchal famUy, bums but does not entirely destroy the house, then revises both famUy and home to satisfy her own vision of feminist culture and space. CHAPTER IV

WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE

THE HEROINE'S DILEMMA: MADNESS, SUICIDE, OR MURDER?

From a female point o f view, the monster woman [or mad woman] is simply a woman who seeks the power o f self-articulation. Gilbert and Gubar

Many critics believe that We Have Always Lived in the Castle is Shirley Jackson's best novel. I am not sure that I agree, but it is certainly an important work because it combines a setting (the house) and a theme (a young woman's struggle to define and defend her identity) which Jackson was, by this time, thoroughly equipped to handle. Hangsaman had prepared her to deal with the itinerant longings and wanderings of the exceptional and sexually abused adolescent female; The Haunting of Hill House had given her an expertise with architectural confinement and women's subjugation within the patriarchal boundaries of the house. Most importantly, Castle attests to Jackson's recognition of the self-defeating choices available to insubordinate female characters, since capitulation is usually out of the question for these women. Inevitably, they either go mad (as in The Yellow Wallpaper) or

140 141 commit suicide (as in The Awakening and The Haunting of Hill House! Rarely do they destroy their oppressors, as Merricat does in We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

Mary Katherine Blackwood (Merricat), according to Lenemaja Friedman, is "unquestionably Jackson's finest character" (137). Certainly, she is her most satisfying female character because she is the "strongest of all Jackson's heroines" (Carpenter, "Domestic Comedy" 145). Merricat has aU of Natalie Waite's intelligence (as well as her perspicacity) and none of Eleanor Vance's timidity. She is, according to Oppenheimer, Jackson’s "boldest character" (65) and by far the "strongest she would ever invent" (235). Once again, however, as with Jackson's earlier characters, critics can agree neither upon Merricat's sanity nor her innocence. Friedman is certain that Merricat possesses a "sociopathic personality" and that she has "no moral sense at all" (136-37). Friedman credits Merricat with intelligence (it would be hard to deny it), but in the final diagnosis, pronounces her "totally mad" (137). Friedman also concludes that Merricat is a "Lizzie Borden" figure (144), an unfortunate comparison. In the first place, Merricat is much more subtle in her transgression than is Lizzie; secondly, this kind of "pop" comparison only reinforces Jackson's identification with the macabre and labels her as the creator ofcra^ ladies. Indeed, one critic praised Jackson for creating in one character a "lunatic, a poisoner, and a pyromaniac" (qtd. in Friedman 144). The general public, on the other hand, seems to have been less concerned with pondering the philosophical questions of Merricat's madness and morality. On the whole, these readers, most of them women, have found the novel "fascinating" and reported feeling "strongly identified with... the protagonist"

(Metcalf 198). Metcalf finds this identification curious, considering the fact that Merricat may be mad and a murderer as well. Just what is it these readers find to identify with in this complex, and some believe, perverse character? Perhaps, it is her madness; that is, perhaps it is her anger. 142

Consult a dictionary, or better yet, consult several dictionaries and you will discover a number of useful definitions for the word mad: suffering from a disorder of the mind; insane; deranged; lacking restraint; lacking reason; irrational; frantic, agitated; hysterical. At one time or another, in literature, and in the consulting room, all of these invectives have been used to describe women whose behavior has placed them outside the prescriptive sanctions for female conduct Most feminist critics "see madness largely as a political event stemming from female oppression in a male-dominated culture" (Parks, "Chambers" 16). The protagonist in The Yellow Wallpaper is diagnosed as a hysteric because she wants to write rather than mother; Zelda Fitzgerald was considered unstable when she wanted to become a dancer at thirty-two, crazy when she took up painting, and insane (literally confined to an asylum) when she finally published her first and only novel; Sylvia Plath was diagnosed by her doctors and by a number of literary critics (A. Alvarez among them) as a severe manic-depressive whose dazzling metaphors and disturbing images only confirmed the erratic mental processes of their creator. The same accusation is directed at Anne Sexton. That these women displayed symptoms of mental disturbance is not denied here; my question, rather, is were they "crazy" because of the symptoms or were they "mad" because of suppressed rage at finding their deepest desires for self-fulfillment denied?

Phyllis Chesler first asked the question, "When is a woman mad?" Following an extensive examination of the mental health care practices of psychotherapists and psychologists, Chesler concluded that

Most women who are psychiatrically hospitalized are not "mad." However, rather than challenge the psychophysical vocabulary of the female condition, they adopt its tone more surely than ever. They are depressed, suicidal, frigid, anxious, paranoid, phobic, guilty, indecisive, and without hope. (Women and Madness 164) 143 Chesler was particularly concerned with women who were wives and mothers, "slaves" of

the patriarchal family, but I believe she could have included all women whose growth is impeded by the extended family of the patriarchy, which includes male psychotherapists as well as husbands and fathers, for both the institution of marriage and that of psychotherapy are "based on a woman's helplessness and dependency on a stronger male figure" (Chesler,

"Patient and Patriarch" 373). Chesler recognized that therapists as well as husbands have a "vested interest, financially and psychologically, in the supremacy of the nuclear family" (Women and Madness 109).

All three of Shirley Jackson's completed novels discussed in this study also "strongly suggest that, as a patriarchal institution, the nuclear family is diseased" (Metcalf

255), and as we have seen in Chapter 3, Eleanor Vance, in particular, is representative of the frigid, anxious, guilty, indecisive woman Chesler describes, a "woman without hope"

(Metcalf 255). Metcalf labels these characters "feminized" ^ women, women who are "non-feminist, white, middle-class, tied to Mother or children, ruled by a father or husband, bound by family law and family romance" (156). The minds of these women are "closed off by the four walls of a living room" and by their "imaginative failure to construe

alternative modes of living" (Metcalf 156). I would add one more word to that list-angry. With each successive novel in the works discussed, the female protagonist becomes increasingly angry, although she does not always act constructively to express that anger.

Natalie Waite conceals (from herself) rage toward her father and the man who abused her,

by splitting away from both acts of male dominance, one intellectual, the other sexual; as a

result, Natalie is dismissed by critics as psychotic. Eleanor Vance projects the self-loathing she feels for her years of submissive servitude onto Theo, whom she at first idolizes and then comes to despise, because Theo chooses where Eleanor only complies. Eleanor is diagnosed as neurotic, increasingly psychotic, and her suicide is seen as the act of a 144 madwoman. The erratic behavior of both Natalie and Eleanor is attributed to the symptoms they display, rather than to the underlying and justifiable reasons for their anger. As Chesler points out, the condition of being "mad" and its subsequent treatment through psychotherapy "enables women to express and difiuse their anger by experiencing it as a form of emotional illness" (108-09). Writing, like therapy, also seems to encourage women writers and their female protagonists to "talk" (or write) about their anger (madness), rather than to act on it However, in Merricat Blackwood we have a woman who does act upon her anger and who does, as Metcalf suggests, "construe an alternative mode of living" (156). Where Natalie Waite only fantasizes about destroying the patriarchal house, Merricat actually completes the dream. In fact Carpenter sees Castle as a "most radical statement on the causes and consequences of female victimization..." ("Establishment" 32). Jackson's narrator in Castle is admittedly a "depiction of female emotional dissociation" (Metcalf 208), but her story is one of "female wrath," not madness, just as the central theme of We Have Alwavs Lived in the Castle is "not madness. .. but the imperatives of [female] anger, invisibility, and denial" (Metcalf 257). How did Jackson move from the dysfunctional inner world of Natalie Waite through the feminized timidity of

Eleanor Vance to Merricat's brazen act of murderous defiance? To answer this question, it is necessary to examine some of the issues Jackson was facing in her own life at the time she was writing Castle. From what is known of Jackson's life at the time at this time, it is clear that Merricat, more than any other character created by Jackson, represents the divided life and loyalties of her creator. With Castle. Jackson is "examining one of the central questions of her life—her own identity—and probing for a solution" (Oppenheimer 236). Jackson began writing Castle at the age of forty-three, when her concerns about childbearing, childrearing, and housekeeping should have been waning, leaving her the time and peace for writing that had always, it seems, been just out of her reach in a household crammed with children, cats, shopping lists, and Stanley's endless demands. Set free from 145 the vigils of motherhood (her youngest child was now ten), one would expect Jackson's sixth novel to have been the easiest for her to write; in fact, it was her most difficult In spite of a healthy financial return from the recently published Haunting, which should have inspired Jackson to confidence, she found it difficult to "get a grip" on her new novel (Oppenheimer 232). One of the problems, as she explained it in an unsent letter to Howard

Nemerov, was caused by reading an entry about Hangsaman in Sex Variant Women in

Literature, a book Stanley had ordered for her from England, purportedly as a joke. The author had called the book an "eerie novel about lesbians" (qtd. in Oppenheimer 232).

Jackson was furious, not so much at the suggestion of a lesbian relationship between Natalie and Tony (after all, that had been said before), but because she had once again been misunderstood and labeled as a writer of perverted or eccentric fiction, rather than the creator of a work of literary merit However, the real reason Jackson could not come to grips with the new novel was that most of her energy, at the time, was directed at getting a grip on herself. Although the focus of this study is on Jackson's texts, with Castle it is difficult to interrogate the text without acknowledging the connections between Jackson's personal circumstances, physical and mental, and her need to conceive a female protagonist strong enough to recreate a new order, a new life for herself and for her sister founded upon the destruction of the old one. With Castle, the relationship between Jackson's art and her life is too significant to ignore.

Shortly after Jackson conceived the idea for Castle, she began to suffer severe attacks of colitis. In addition to her health problems, Jackson suffered another shock, once more as a result of Stanley's licentious behavior. Always flirtatious and sometimes a sexual philanderer, Stanley "stepped over the line" shortly after his fortieth birthday and "fell in love with another woman" (Oppenheimer 232). For Jackson, this was not just a matter of casual sexual infidelity, something she had learned to tolerate if not accept throughout her marriage: this was betrayal. The wall of domestic vitality she had erected to protect herself 146 from the knowledge that she was unattractive and unkempt, began to crumble.

Oppenheimer's argument that Stanley's affair "never threatened the marriage" (233) and, therefore, it is presumed, never threatened Jackson's security is diffîcult to accept, for he was, indeed, her bulwark against criticism from her mother and her critics: Stanley was a part of that protective walk After her discovery of her husband's affair, Jackson began to have difficulty leaving the house even for the "simplest of errands—going to the post office, shopping" (Oppenheimer 232), and began to display the classic symptoms of agoraphobia,^ which she tried to blame on the colitis. In a letter to her parents written in 1961, Shirley explained:

The colitis induces a sudden attack of nausea, which causes an abrupt drop in blood pressure.. .which is exactly like getting kicked in the stomach, and I all but pass out... Like most fainting spells, it is entirely a matter of suggestion: once I start thinking it might happen, then of course it all starts. I stay home as much as possible. .. and so am making fine progress on my novel; there's nothing like being scared to go outside to keep you writing, (qtd. in Oppenheimer 242)

Like Merricat and Constance, Jackson created a cloistered life by refusing to leave the house. Jackson became Metcalfs "feminized woman," her mind "closed off by the four walls of her living room" (156). To understand Jackson's withdrawal from the outside world is to understand the process of Castle, and when I say process, I refer not merely to plot development, but to the very act of writing the book, which took Jackson three years to accomplish. So closely did Jackson identify with both protagonists of Castle that she literally wrote herself into a darkness from which she did not emerge until almost three years after the novel's publication. Once again, there is the universal split between two women-one aggressive, one compliant-witnessed in Tony and Natalie, Theo and Eleanor. This time, however, each persona represents Shirley as she is in the present, as she sits in 147 front of the typewriter. In Castle, more than any novel written by Jackson, the word and the writer are virtually one. The first notable occurrence for the reader who has followed Jackson's progress as writer-narrator, is Jackson's use of the first person "I" in We Have Alwavs Lived in the Castle. To my knowledge, nowhere else in her work (with the exception of her domestic fiction and her last unfinished novel) did Jackson risk the use of the first person. Like Virginia Woolf, Jackson was not comfortable with the sight of self-identified emotion on the page;3 her anger was always carefully masked with humor. This time, however, there was no buffer between Jackson and raw emotion; like Adrienne Rich, she had finally found the courage to acknowledge her anger and to write "directly" about experiencing herself as a woman fOn Lies. Secrets and Silence 44). In "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law," Rich writes about a woman who is "haunted by voices telling her to resist and rebel" (44):

Banging the coffee-pot into the sink she hears the angels chiding, looks out past the raked gardens to the sloppy sky. Only a week since They said: Have no patience.

The next time it was: Be insatiable. Then: Save yourself; others you carmot save. Sometimes she let tire tapstream scald her arm, a match bum to her thumbnail. (Poems 481

Here Rich acknowledges the fighting spirit she left behind when she entered the ring of domesticity, hr "Planetarium," Rich tells of her struggle as a writer to tell the story of herself as woman:

I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations into images for the relief of the body and the reconstmction of the mind. (148) 148 This is essentially what Jackson was trying to do with the writing of Castle. It was, in many ways, a novel of reconciliation which attempted to bring together the rebellious, precocious Jackson (Natalie), the part of herself she felt she had to deny in order to be a "good" wife and mother, with the less aggressive, domesticated Jackson (Eleanor), both of whom resided in her over-wrought psyche. Jackson once wrote that in writing, "the identity is all-important and the word is all- powerful" (qtd. in Oppenheimer 14). In Merricat, Jackson's early identity as a willful and rebellious child, and her anger (most of it self-directed) at having lost that child, meet head- on in the all-powerful word. Jackson makes it very clear, in the opening paragraph, that Merricat is a force to be reckoned with:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen-years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been bom a werewolf, because the two middle fmgers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloïdes, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my fantily is dead. (We Have Alwavs Lived in the Castle 1)

"My name... I am... I live... I like " It is impossible not to feel the strength of this persona who identifies with the werewolf, that lithe and fierce night prowler who can, at will, change from man to beast and back to man again, whose skin is "proof against shot or steel" (Brewer 1148). Merricat is eighteen, I* .alie's age; she likes her sister, Constance

(she who remains constant), Richard Plantagenet (misshapen and misunderstood murderer), and the Amanita phalloides (the death-cup mushroom, phallic, poisonous). It is important to note the connective hierarchy in the last two sentences of the opening paragraph. Constance is first in Merricat’s affections, then comes Richard Plantagenet, who murdered the members of his family who stood between him and absolute power, and finally there is the death-cup mushroom, innocent if left undisturbed, fatal if used unwisely. Taken together, these three 149 entities motivate, justify, and explain the last sentence: "Eveiyone else in my family is dead." The opening paragraph of Castle is a masterpiece of aphorism. Epigrammatic, axiomatic, it functions like the introductory paragraph of an essay, or a brilliant short poem: everything we need to know is there. Merricat's ability to say or write with precision is no accident She is a writer, a

lover of words, and, as Metcalf states, "throughout the text [her] language continues to behave as a writer's" ( 207). In fact Merricat is fascinated with words, their accepted and possible meanings and applications. In one scene, she interrogates the word "eccentric." Helen Clarke, a proper matron, someone considered "normal" by most people's standards, calls Uncle Julian "eccentric." The observant writer and speculative thinker in Merricat

recognizes that

if eccentric meant, as the dictionary said it did, deviating from regularity, it was Helen Clarke who was far more eccentric than Uncle Julian, with her awkward movements and her unexpected questions, and her bringing strangers here to tea; Uncle Julian lived smoothly, in a perfectly planned pattern, rounded and sleek. She ought not to call people things &ey arenot. ... (37; Jackson's italics)

Metcalf also notes that Merricat's word usage is "highly literate, verbally formal, exact and graceful," and the "heavily ironic overtones of Mary Katherine's speech suggests a writer's

consciousness of audience" (207). Merricat's ability to be “poetically explicit and

cunningly vague" is very much Shirley Jackson's style, as is her ability to "delay

information appropriately and sktiLfidly" (Metcalf 207). We Have Alwavs Lived in the Castle is not a novel that can be understood chronologically or logically (that is, linearly), nor can the story be "told along the lines of its plot; on the contrary, we must look in

between the structural elements to see the design" (Metcalf 24). The design of Castle, as

Metcalf notes, reflects the "non-hierarchical, non-linear, essentially intuitive design" of Merricat's mind (143). Events unfold in no predictable manner, they are "related 150 juxtapositionally, not casually," the way events in most of Jackson's fiction are related

(Metcalf 143). The two storytellers, Merricat and Jackson, are inextricably entwined, yet Constance, too, is there, less obtrusive, but a presence nonetheless. Constance is "all warmth, the complete homebody, a loving motherly" woman, much like Jackson appeared to those who saw her in what they assumed was her element,

the house (Oppenheimer 234). Merricat mirrors the other side of Jackson. She is uncivilized, bold and fierce, incapable of compromise, and thus incapable of domestic servitude, as Jackson was before she married and had four children. Jackson's daughter, Joanne, told one interviewer that her mother explained the two characters as "the same person, both Shirley" (qtd. in Oppenheimer 234).4 Or, as Oppenheimer sees it, the "yin and yang of Jackson's own inner self' (125). The characters appear to function well independently; "together and alone, Merricat and Constance are complete," according to

Oppenheimer (236). Yet I wonder. The two seem to function as complete and complementary entities only so far as they are sequestered from the outside world; as soon as someone violates their domestic tranquillity, their perfect whole and seamless world begins to disintegrate, just as Jackson's did when she felt she could no longer count on

Stanley's fidelity, or at least his discretion when managing his infidelities, or the presence of her children to complete the typical happy family circle she had tried to create in her domestic fiction. Merricat's family is neither happy nor typical. The Blackwoods were once a wealthy, aristocratic, family, aU of whom are dead now except for Merricat, Constance, and Uncle Julian. The circumstances of their death from arsenic poisoning have never been made clear, although Constance was tried and acquitted of the crime. Uncle Julian has since made it his life's work to vmtangle the web that obscures the guilt of the real murderer, and it is through his memory of the event that readers get the sporadic facts of the crime. Uncle Julian may also be seen as the one remaining vestige of the patriarchal Blackwoods, because in his desire to find and punish 151 the guilty party (Merricat), he acts as a surrogate for John Blackwood. Jackson leaves little doubt that, at least in her mind, the Blackwoods deserved their fate; they were a priggish clan who lived like divine rulers in an imposing country house surrounded by land that had been in the family for hundreds of years. During that time, very little had changed regarding the Blackwood's attitude toward themselves or those they considered unfortunate enough to live outside their privileged circle. Merricat gives a perfunctory recitation of the Blackwood history:

Blackwoods have always lived in our house, and kept things in order; as soon as a new Blackwood wife moved in, a place was found for her belongings, and so our house was built up with layers of Blackwood property weighting it, and keeping it steady against the world. (2)

The Blackwood wives are the property of their husbands; they do not disturb the patriarchal universe, and in so not doing, they help perpetuate its pattern of control and oppression. Like Mrs. Dudley in Hill House, the wives "rarely move things" and "always put things back where they belong" (2). Solidity and stability are commandments in the Blackwood realm; maintaining the status quo is the rule. Of course, the Blackwood family is a patriarchal one: Merricat’s father, John Blackwood (while he Uved), was the undisputed head of his household. In typical Victorian male style, he "sat naturally at the head of the table.. . with the decanter before him." John Blackwood took "pride in his table, his family, his position in the world" (note the repetition of the word "his") (47). In fact, Merricat's father took so much pride in his table that he watched what his family ate and how much; he never "stinted" or "begrudged" them food, according to Merricat's Uncle Julian, "as long as we did not take too much" (69). John Blackwood also allowed no one on his property without his permission; he "fenced his acres, erected a padlocked gate, and posted signs that read "PRIVATE NO TRESPASSING" (25). These strictures remain even after his death. Merricat's father was 152 a selfish and vain tyrant, a man "very fond of his person" who was "given to adorning himself," although (again according to Uncle Julian), he was not "overly clean" (113). Not a very attractive picture for a man or a father. Merricat's mother seems no better. Typically Victorian, Mrs, Blackwood was "delicate" and a "little silly" (48), or as Metcalf prefers, an "idle mother" and a snob (206). Mrs. Blackwood disliked the sight of common people (those who live in the village), who belonged on the highway and not on the roads or paths leading to "my front door which is private" (26). Merricat's mother never turned her hand at anything except to brush her hair with the "tortoise-shell toilet set" on her dressing table, which was never "off place by so much as a fraction of an inch" (2). It is Constance, as the oldest daughter, who cooked for the entire family. In one of Jackson's frequent touches of humor throughout the novel, a neighbor suggests to Uncle Julian that Mrs. Blackwood might well have done her own cooking. "Please," the old man replies. . . I personally preferred to chance the arseitic" (50). He is obviously referring to the fact that Constance was accused and acquitted of the poisoning murder of her parents, but one of the subtle intentions of this passage is to reinforce the portrait of the mother as a woman who had no concern for her daughters, who are expected to keep house for her.

Every Monday Merricat and Constance "neaten the house" paying particular attention to the drawing room, their mother's room (60); in the past, they were never permitted into the room, since Mrs. Blackwood could not "bear to see my lovely room untidy" (35). The girls continue to polish and clean the room long after their mother is dead while her portrait stares down at them from its lofty position above the fireplace. One would expect a family this wealthy to hire help from the village to perform these duties, but again Jackson is telling us that daughters in the Blackwood family have no value. John

Blackwood rules his immediate family and his younger brother as well. John's brother, Julian, weak in the face of his brother's declarations, in turn, rules his own wife who "did as she was told; our wives always did as they were told" (68). At the bottom of the pecking 153 order in the Blackwood family, as in most Victorian families, are the daughters who are controlled and used by everyone, male and female. Within the Blackwood family circle,

Merricat and Constance are servants to their elders, second-class citizens, prisoners. There is also more than a suggestion that Merricat, and possibly Constance, was a victim of incest Like many incest survivors, Constance "detests anyone near her" (36); Merricat also seems to fear human contact: she often sits apart from the others, sometimes in the shadows or in hidden in a comer (34). Merricat hates to be confined; the thought of her father's ring around her finger makes her feel "tied tight, because rings had no openings to get out of..." (111). Until she is released from the patriarchal spell, Merricat, like many incest survivors, needs the security of an orderly existence; she practices rigid rituals (especially when she goes into the village) and fears any alterations in her daily routine, any "surprises"; she is always looking for "omens" that signal a change in this protective pattern

(57-58). Most importantly, Merricat is very conscious of boundaries. She checks the fence that surrounds the Blackwood property at least once a week (59); she is constantly summoning magic words and talismans against some urmamed enemy (63), and she has

"hiding places" (76) where she can go to escape abuse, whether in the form of stares and taimts from the villagers, her father's (and later her Cousin Charles') demands upon her, and even, upon occasion, Constance's failure to love and protect her from patriarchal intrusions.

Merricat is always on guard against invasion. She sews the ground with "treasures... marbles. .. baby teeth... colored stones" in order to create a "powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us" (69). Males are clearly the priority in the Blackwood hierarchy, but only those males who are direct descendants of the patriarch himself, John Blackwood. Thomas Blackwood is the heir apparent to his father's estate, a boy who, even at the age of ten, was already "possessed of his father's more forceful traits of character" (49). In other words, young Tom was selfish, vain, and demanding, a favored son who is required to do nothing, except, perhaps. 154

annoy his elders and tease his sisters; he roams at leisure the property that wiU one day be

his, fishes and swims, as Natalie's brother did, fiee of all responsibility except that of being a male. Constance seems to accept her brother's special privileges as the given and proper

order of things; she is the "feminized woman" of Castle. Constance Blackwood is twenty-four, six years older than Merricat She functions

as the "mother" of the household after the deaths of her father, her mother, her brother, and Uncle Julian's wife, Dorothy. Spending most of her time in the kitchen, Constance is a "virtual handmaiden of nature, raising and canning fiadts and vegetables..." (Parks,

"Chambers" 26). When Constance is not actually cooking the food she grows, she is reading about it Her intellectual endeavors are limited to the domestic sphere: "What are you reading, my dear? A pretty sight, a lady with a book," Uncle Julian

remarks. "I'm reading something called The Art of Cooking, Uncle Julian."

"Admirable. " (3) Constance represses her feelings, particularly her anger, and advises Merricat to do the

same. "Never let them [the villagers] see you care," she cautions her sister, and when these

same people tease Merricat, cruelly, Constance encourages in her the Christian virtue of

turning the other cheek: "It's wrong to hate them" (12). Constance is the perfect lady who

sits "quietly on the sofa; she never fidgeted and her hands were neatly on her lap" (34). She

conducts tea in her mother's pristine drawing room when neighbors pay a rare visit, acting just as her mother would have. One can easily imagine that if John Blackwood had survived the poisoning, Constance would act as his surrogate wife. In fact, Constance may already have been the object of her father's sexual attention, since Merricat tells us that she does not

like to be touched and wants "no one near her but me" (36); it could also be that Merricat wants no one else near Constance, since the younger girl exhibits signs of jealousy and resentment when an actual suitor for Constance's hand arrives on the scene. Or perhaps 155 Merricat knows, fiom her incestuous victimization by her father, that "heterosexual romance is a dangerous illusion" (Carpenter, "Establishment" 92). Merricat is certainly very protective of her older sister, in many ways, although she is treated as a child by Constance, she is the more courageous of the two. It is Merricat who ventures outside the gate, while Constance never goes outside the boundaries established by her father. It is Merricat who dares the unfriendly stares of the villagers to fetch the mail and library books. It is she who possesses the key (to the gate), a symbol of masculine power. If we look carefully at the relationship between the two sisters, we see that it very much resembles the heterosexual pattern of husband and wife as well as that of mother and child. Six years after the death of their parents, Constance and Merricat continue to imitate and thus perpetuate the patriarchal family structure. Merricat assumes the male role (not very convincingly) when she locks and unlocks gates and goes into the village, duties (or privileges) that were formerly her father's. Constance is in charge of the kitchen and the child, a role Merricat assumes when she leaves the village and enters the house (Uncle

Julian, in his dependent state, may also be viewed as one of Constance's children). Merricat is not allowed to help in the kitchen nor is she allowed to prepare food (29). She is clumsy with dishes (she smashes the second-best milk pitcher), although she is allowed to pour mük on special occasions (55). She is also not permitted in Uncle Julian's room, nor is she allowed to feed or bathe him. Julian, who should have inherited the droit de seigneur from his brother, has been reduced to a dependent child: he cannot walk and is totally dependent upon the women for his sustenance. It is obvious even to the most obtuse reader that there are some very peculiar things going on here. In order to decipher the mystery of this dysfunctional trio, it is helpfid to look at the history of Jackson's familial ties, since both her father's family and later her own replicate the tyrannical pattern of the patriarchal family where the males have all the power. In patriarchal families where power is held by one over many, the incidence of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse of children, particularly 156 daughters, is alarmingly high. In Castle. Jackson writes firom her own experience as a daughter in such a family, and in doing so, connects her experience to the experience of many women. Jackson's childhood family was very much a patriarchal one, so similar to Merricat's that it is hard not to see Castle as an autobiographical map of Jackson's dysfunctional past

Her father, Leslie, like John Blackwood, was the undisputed head of the family and her mother a social climber, Metcalfs "idle mother," who had very little regard for her daughter as a person. Like Merricat's mother, Geraldine Jackson was more concerned with social status than she was with nurturing her daughter's obvious intelligence or in protecting Jackson from being taken advantage of by her father or other males in the family. Jackson's

Uncle Clifford, whom Oppenheimer suspects of molesting Jackson as a child, is prominent as Uncle Julian in Jackson's fictional family, the Blackwoods. The fact that Jackson renders Uncle Julian impotent indicates her desire to lessen his masculine influence in the otherwise aH-female household; if Uncle Julian represents the uncle who molested Jackson, crippling her seducer with her pen would be one way the adult Jackson could punish all males who rape and at least restore the balance of power for herself and all women who have been sexually abused. . The structure of the Hyman family was similar that of the Leslie Jackson family hierarchy. Stanley, like Jackson's father, was the undisputed head of his household; everything was run according to Stanley's wishes, and sometimes according to his whims.

This is not to say that Jackson was meekly deferential; she was not. But after the shouting was over, Jackson usually did what Stanley asked her to do. Jackson strictly enforced the division of labor in the household according to the gender roles favored by Stanley. She divided the chores among her children in a "rigidly conventional manner" (Oppenheimer 204). The boys, according to Oppenheimer, handled the typically "manly duties-mowing the yard, raking leaves, taking out garbage," while the girls "set the table, helped with 157 cooking, washed the dishes" (204). The girls were also required to wear skirts and were forbidden to cut their hair (Stanley's rule); Jackson's only overt act of rebellion against these rigid role expectations was her refusal to comb her daughters'h a ir.5 Shirley apparently did not challenge her husband's authority nor did she want to undermine the robust domestic portrait the Hymans liked to present to the world. Elaine Showalter, discussing Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, writes that both saw women writers as "artists whose creative energy has gone chiefly into the maintenance of myths about themselves and those they love" because to become "aware of the creation of a myth is to lose faith in it" (247). It is hard for anyone, but particularly for women who have invested heavily in the romance of husband and family, to give up the beliefs that sustain them. For Jackson, the myth of the patriarchal family was one she clung to and perpetuated, even in the face of her childhood experience of rejection and probable abuse which was repeated, to a lesser degree, in her own marriage. Jackson was furious when she wrote Castle, livid, mad, although her anger was masked by depression. But she could not fool the writer's eye which saw "clearly and without flinching, / without turning away" (Atwood 73). With Castle. Jackson's embrace of the patriarchal family is broken.

With Castle. Jackson is finally able to articulate, in fiction, what she and many women like her wanted to say aloud but were afraid to: that the father/husband figure is one which must be "eradicated." Metcalf describes a cartoon which appeared in the New York Times iust after Castle was published:

two women stand talking in the aisle of a bookstore, one is holding a copy of Castle and regarding it with fprplexity, and the other comments knowingly: "It's about somebody poisoning the table sugar andno one knows who." (199; my italics). 158 How many women trapped in the patriarchal maze of domestic drudgery have "dreamed the . .. dream of murdering one’s family. .. "? (Metcalf 245). Women, as I mentioned earlier, strongly identified with Merricat Blackwood. Where Constance (representing the good wife and mother) could not act, Merricat (the angry ormad woman) did.^ Shortly after the novel begins, we learn that Merricat's parents have been dead six years. The life the Blackwood sisters lead is one of quiet routine bordering on ritual. On Monday, Merricat and Constance clean house, "going into every room with mops and dustcloths, carefully setting the little things back after we had dusted, never altering the perfect line of our mother’s tortoise-shell comb" (60). Tuesday Merricat shops in the village; Wednesday, she patrols the fences, checking "to be sure the wires were not broken and the gates were securely locked," thus assuring the little household will be "safe another week" (59). Thursday is a special day for Merricat, her "most powerful day," when she goes into the attic of the house to dress in her parents’ clothes (60). The significance of this act is not quite clear, to dress in the clothing of another usually means to assume that person’s identity. In Merricat’s case, the act may be more one of rebellion, proof that she has assumed power over the house in place of her parents. On Friday, Merricat makes her last trip to the village for the week, repeating Tuesday’s routine exactly. In fact, there is ritual within ritual in the way Merricat moves through the village:

I played a game when I did the shopping. I thought about the children’s games where the board is marked into little spaces and each player moves according to a throw of the dice; there were dways dangers, like "lose one turn" and "go back four spaces" and "return to start," and little helps, like ’"advance three spaces" and "take an extra turn." (6)

The journey through the village is a game of chance for Merricat, a risk. The experience is so tortuous for her that she needs the protection of a self-imposed ritual to survive it. Significantly, the library is her starting point. Books are powerful talismans for Merricat. 159 Her final goal is the black rock that marks the beginning of the Blackwood land. In order to win the "game," Merricat must move up one side of the village street, and down the other without faltering. The village itself is ugly, very much like Hillsdale in The Hauntingof Hill

House. The people are hostile and unfriendly, although a waitress, Stella, is moderately kind to Merricat. Early in the novel, Merricat is still able to weather the cold stares and jeers of the townspeople, because she knows if she can just reach home, there lie safety and renewal, for on Saturday, the day following the village gauntlet, Merricat can renew her strength by working in the garden with Constance. On Sunday, she examines her safeguards, a box of silver dollars buried by the creek, a doll buried in a log field, and a book nailed to a tree in the pine woods; so long as Merricat's charms are in place, nothing can "get in to harm us" ( Castle 59).7 Merricat has another charm to rely on whenever she feels threatened: a house on the moon. Merricat refers to her moon existence twelve times throughout the novel. The image of the moon is clearly an important symbol of power and hope for her. In ancient culture, the moon was the eternal great mother, the eternal feminine. In many cultures, the "Moon goddess and the Creatress were one," and in the Basque language, some of which still survives today, the "words for 'deity' and 'moon' are the same"

(Walker 670). Wise-Women used to invoke the Goddess by "drawing down the moon" (Cumont 186); the moon "ruled the sexuality of women, sometimes making them scornful of the male- dominated society" (Walker 673). The moon symbolizes female power, the power Merricat seeks. Whenever she feels threatened, especially by men (no doubt as the result of her abuse and her fear that a man might reassert patriarchal power over her), Merricat "draws down the moon," just as the ancients did. When two men make fun of her at Stella's, Merricat tells herself, "I am living on the moon... I have a little house on the moon" (20). After she has been driven out of the coffee shop by their cruel references to Constance, Merricat conjures her moon world for protection: 160

I liked my house on the moon, and I put a fireplace in it and a garden outside (what would flourish growing on the moon? I must ask Constance) and I was going to have lunch outside in my garden on the moon. Things on the moon were very bright and odd colors; my little house would be blue. (21)

In order to endure the stares and taunts firom the villagers as she passes by their houses,

Merricat thinks of "catching scarlet fish in the rivers on the moon." When the village children jeer at her, with their parents' encouragement, Merricat chants, "I am living on the moon," like a blessing or a litany reserved only for those who speak the moon language, a

"soft, liquid tongue" that is sung "in the starlight... " (23). The images and the language here are decidedly female. Later in the novel, when Merricat feels threatened by a male invader of the female space she and Constance have tried to create, Merricat once again draws the protective power of the moon goddess around her:

On the moon we have everything. Lettuce, and pumpkin pie and Amanita phalloides. We have cat-furred plants and horses dancing with their wings. All the locks are solid and tight, and there are no ghosts. On the moon Uncle Jidian would be well and the sun would shme every day. (108)

With her continued references to the garden, to Constance and Uncle Julian, Merricat seems to be recreating the Blackwood house on the moon; or perhaps she wants to create a moon world on the Blackwood land, a moon land on earth.

The world that Merricat and Constance have created is female. In fact, their life resembles the lives of nuns in a convent Constance is the cloistered sister who never leaves the convent; Merricat the worldly sister-an extem-who has permission to travel outside the walls to conduct business for the order. The house itself and the properties that surroimd it resemble the all-female monasteries of the thirteenth century; these female strongholds were completely self-sufficient, producing everything needed in the way of food and clothing to 161 sustain them. The nuns who lived within the monastery walls also traveled fteely in the world and sometimes maintained an army of knights to protect their land holdings. Following the Order of Enclosure^ nuns were forced to give up their lands, retreat behind convent walls, and practice the vow of silence. It is not difficult to recognize similarities in the history of religious women and the life of the two sisters. Merricat and Constance, although they live a cloistered life, do receive visitors, but only on certain days, as nuns are permitted to do, and the visitors are allowed only in the front of the house as is usual in convents. At all other times, Merricat and Constance live their cloistered life entirely in the back of the house "on the lawn and in the garden where no one else ever came" (28). The one exception to their entirely female world is Uncle Julian, but he has been reduced to a powerless, doddering old man; his primary function is to act as the official convent historian, a function that becomes evident when two ladies from the outside world enter the sequestered Blackwood realm. Helen Clarke is an old friend of the family who stood by Constance during the trial; Mrs. Wright, the other visitor, is a spidery little woman who can hardly contain her curiosity about the Blackwoods. Merricat is not fond of either woman, since they threaten her relationship with Constance by encouraging Constance to leave the house. Merricat reacts meanly by needling the already nervous Mrs. Wright The last thing the woman wants is to eat or drink anything offered by Constance, who is an accused poisoner. As Merricat relates it, "I came from my place in the comer to take a cup of tea from Constance and carry it over to Mrs. Wright, whose hand trembled when she took it" (40). "Sugar?" Merricat asks, innocently, using the word no one dares speak; the Blackwood patriarch and his consort died from eating sugar laced with arsenic. "Oh, no, dear," Mrs. Wright titters. "No, thank you. No sugar" (40). As if speaking an aside to the reader, Merricat defends her behavior: "I couldn't help it" (40). Merricat continues to torture the poor lady by offering her rum cakes made with sugar. "My sister made these this morning. . . Do take two. 162

Everything my sister cooks is delicious" (40). Mrs. Wright, "hysterically polite," refuses again, but is intimidated by Merricat and finally takes one cake which she sets gingerly at the edge of her saucen "[Tlhat was not kind either," Merricat admits (40). These asides are meant to establish that Merricat knows the difference between acceptable and unacceptable behavior, they also serve to illuminate her ready intelligence and her sense of fun, two of the characteristics readers find endearing about her. Uncle Julian, too, has a way with a barbed word or phrase. When he explains to Mrs. Wright that reconstructing the crime is his

"life's work," Helen Clarke reminds him, primly, that there is such a thing as good taste. "Taste, madam," he replies with dignity. "Have you ever tasted arsenic?" (43). It is Julian, as the family recorder and the only survivor of the poisoning, who finally relates the details of the event to the reader. The night of the murder, every member of the Blackwood family except Merricat, "a great child of twelve sent to bed without her supper," was seated at the dining room table. "Merricat," Constance tells the visitors, was "always in disgrace. I used to go up the back stairs with a tray of dinner for her after my father had left the dining room table. She was a wicked, disobedient child" (48-49). Merricat is a rebellious daughter, a female child who does not obey her father, a girl who dares to defy the patriarchal edict. Her absence at the evening meal is not significant to her family, but to the reader it may be, for she is one of the three survivors of the poisoning. Constance, the third, prepared the meal which was consumed with the usual amount of gluttony on the part of John Blackwood and his son.

The two wives ate less, but still enough to kill them. Although she was never found guilty of the crime, Constance was arrested on circumstantial evidence. She had bought the arsenic, delayed calling the doctor, and had washed out the sugar bowl which contained the poisoned sugar. The "great unanswered question, is why?" (53). Probably Constance's aim was to protect the real murderer, or, perhaps in some way, she was cooperating with the murderer; perhaps Constance was even an accessory to the crime? She did tell the police 163 that her mother and father "deserved to die" (55). Constance, apparently, resented her parents as much as Merricat did, particularly her father who ordered her to perform the duties of a servant and who possibly molested her; however, lacking Merricat's courage, and perhaps her intelligence as well, she was unable to refuse him. As conditions worsened, it became necessary for Merricat to act in her sister's as well as her own behalf, which she did, knowing full well that she could depend on her older sister to protect her. Together, the two girls managed to pull off what Uncle Julian refers to as "one of the few genuine mysteries of our time," emerging from the ordeal if not entirely imscathed, at least intact (43). On the surface, it appears that Constance and Merricat have created an ideal female world; both women seem happy with the roles they play. The point (and the problem) is that these are roles, stereotypical roles: Merricat and Constance are both still children playing at house. Constance, more than Merricat, continues to honor and preserve the very tradition that enslaved her, although Merricat is also implicated since she never challenges her older sister, never takes any more responsibility for her actions than is allowed by

Constance. In spite of the murders, nothing has really changed. Like many of Jackson's feminized protagonists, both women continue to live by "strategies. .. designed to protect

[them] from the worst aspects of domination, but which perpetuate that domination"

(Metcalf 58). Constance continues to cook and mother while Merricat continues to behave as the wayward child who needs direction and correction. The Blackwood mansion remains essentially what it was when John Blackwood ruled it; his spirit is stiU very much in residence, and very soon he will materialize in the form of his nephew, Charles. In the way of intuitive people, Merricat senses a change coming in their carefully regulated and protected life; Constance, too, is behaving differently, expectantly. Her attention is no longer on the garden or house exclusively. Merricat often catches her gazing "outward, toward the trees which hid the fence, and sometimes she looked long and 164 curiously down the length of the driveway" (57). Jonas, Merricat's cat and familiar, is also restless:

From a deep sleep he would start suddenly, lifting his head as though listening, and then, on his feet and moving in one ripple, he ran up Ae stairs and across the beds and around through Ae doors in and out and then down the stairs and across the hall and over the chair in the dining room and around the table and through the kitchen and out into the garden where he would slow, sauntering, and then pause to lick a paw and flick an ear and tai£ a look at the day. At night we could hear him running, feel him across our feet as we lay in bed, running up a storm. (58)

Jonas, aligned as he is with Merricat's other symbol, the moon, represents female power, the quest for freedom, justice, and liberty for women; when those rights are threatened, the cat becomes restless; the cat, in effect, is Merricat's familiar. Jonas is a significant character in Castle, although he is mentioned only a few times. He is another omen that "spoke of change" to Merricat (58). Just before Merricat awakens one Saturday, she thinks she hears her parents calling her to get up, suggesting that whatever change is coming, it will in some way restore the old order. Merricat decides to "choose three powerful words, words of strong protection" that if "never spoken aloud" can prevent change (63). The first word is melody, which Merricat writes on her toast with the apricot jam before swallowing it The second magic word is

Gloucester because it is "strong"; it is also entirely appropriate since Richard Plantagenet is also the Duke of Gloucester (64). Her third magic word isPegasus : bearer of Zeus' thunderbolts, divine horse of the Muses, and Merricat's winged mount who carries her to the moon (32). Words—the ability to choose them, utter them, write them—signify power for Merricat: She swallows them to "safeguard herself against harm; she invokes words for control" (Metcalf 221). She also draws strength from her cave-space:

I had tom away two or three low bushes and smoothed the ground; all around were more bushes and tree branches, and the entrance was covered 165

by a branch which almost touched the ground. .. The trees around and overhead were so thick that it was always dry inside (76)

Trees, normally symbols of masculine power in Jackson’s other works, take on a new personification in this passage; they create a womb-like space where Merricat can retreat and renew herself. Gilbert and Gubar have said that the "womb-shaped cave is . .. the place of female power" (Madwoman 94-95), power Merricat will need to repel the masculine threat she senses is "already walking toward them" (78). "I hate snakes," she mutters. The intruder is Charles Blackwood, John Blackwood's nephew. Merricat, wisely,

does not want to let him in, but the man knows his prey; he is looking for Constance, who admits him to the house without question. "Behind him the kitchen door was open wide; he was the first one who had ever gotten inside and Constance had let him in" (82). Although

she does not say it in so many words, Merricat feels betrayed by Constance. This time her magic words and symbols, her moon and her cave, are powerless against the masculine invader, not so much because he is male, but because for the first time in these sister’s lives, something has divided them. Until this moment in the novel, Merricat and Constance have

presented a solid front against the outside world. The arrival of a man on the scene changes that unification significantly. A great deal of Merricat's anger, I believe, is subconsciously

directed toward Constance, the "weak sister," the one who cannot resist the need for male

approval and direction.

It takes Charles only one night to establish himself as the titular head of the Blackwood house: he achieves this by occupying John Blackwood's bedroom. Constance has already accepted Charles’ right to be in the house and in her father’s bed. "Cousin

Charles is here, "she tells Merricat. "He is our cousin" (88). What is tmspoken is that his wishes, his needs, are to come before anyone else's. After six years, the sacred ritual of the house has been broken. "Today we neaten the house," Merricat reminds Constance. "Later, 166 after Cousin Charles is awake" is her reply (89). The omens rush in as Merricat hears "the sound of a foot stepping upstairs where there had been silence before" (90). When Charles enters the kitchen, he addresses Constance familiarly as "Connie," using the "same voice as he had used last night," the voice that convinced Constance to open the door. Merricat presses herself into a comer. This man may be younger, may not look exactly like his predecessor, but this is someone she recognizes. Uncle Julian confirms her fears: "Charles.

You are Arthur's son, but you resemble my brother John who is dead" (91). Charles, indeed, does resemble his uncle in three consequential ways: he is selfish, insensitive, and greedy. Initially, Charles attempts to win Merricat's approval through Jonas (whatever else

Charles is, he is not stupid). "Jonas," he tells the cat, "Cousin Mary doesn't like m e ... How can I make Cousin Mary Uke me?" (97). To Merricat's dismay, Jonas appears to be listening—another betrayal. "Oh, well," Charles continues, still speaking to Jonas,

"Constance likes me, and I guess that's all that matters" (97; Jackson's italics). Charles slips easily into the role of suitor-father, seeming to know instinctively that is what a woman like Constance will respond to, and he is correct in his assessment She is solicitous ("We'll let father's room go this morning... because Charles is living there") and apologetic

("Charles has not seen [the drawing room] yet... I ought to have showed it to him right away" [99-100]). Constance is ready to assume the role of subservient wife. In fact Uncle Julian several times refers to her as Dorothy, the name of his deceased wife (101). Poor

Merricat is at a loss. For the first time in six years of semi-connubial bliss with her sister, charms and rituals have no power to prevent change and invasion. What was once familiar and constant is now strange, uncharted territory. Once again she feels like an alien among the others, the one who does not belong, precisely the feeling she had while her parents were alive. There is even the suggestion that Merricat's father was considering sending her away.

Uncle Julian reports hearing her parents arguing behind closed doors: '" I won't have it,' she 167 said, T won't have it, John Blackwood,' and 'We have no choice'" (32). That night they died. How will Memcat react this time to the threat of patriarchal acrimony? Merricat's initial strategy for coping with her status ofpersona non grata is an interesting one. As soon as she has been told by Constance that Charles has been installed as the new "Father" of the household, she tells Jonas that Charles "is a ghost" (101). This is not the first time Charles is referred to in this way. When Merricat tries to deny his presence in her father's bedroom, Constance suggests that perhaps a "ghost is sleeping in

Father's bed" (88). Merricat hopes that Charles is a ghost, for then he can be driven away, which leads to her next strategic ploy, one that has worked in the past to keep annoying visitors at bay (89). While Charles is eating his breakfast, she begins to recite the characteristics of the death-cup mushroom:

The Amanita phalloides. . . holds three different poisons. There is amanitin, which works slowly and is most potent There is phaUoidin, which acts at once, and there is phallin, which dissolves red corpuscles, although it is the least potent The first symptoms do not appear until seven to twelve hours after eating, in some cases not before twenty-four or even forty hours. The symptoms begin with violent stomach pains, cold sweat, vomiting — (104)

Merricat's recitation has no effect on Charles, and Constance merely laughs at her sister, dismissing her as "Silly Merricat" (105). Merricat is being demoted from her role as

Constance's protector and provider to that of a mildly irritating but insignificant child. The most crushing blow of all, however, is the discovery that Charles will henceforth be making the biweekly trip to the village for supplies. However painful these forays into enemy territory were for Merricat, remaining behind as a useless child, locked inside the fence and the house, is worse. "So, I'm taking little Cousin Mary's job away from her," Charles tells her, smugly. "You'll have to find something else for her to do, Connie" (104). Merricat's power, what little she has been able to amass, has come from her freedom to move inside 168 and outside the Blackwood domain at will, power derived jfrom the key to the gate once held by her father, and now given over to Charles by her sister, her former ally now turned nearly traitor. Constance, the feminized woman, has fallen prey to one of the oldest myths about womanhood, that only a man can provide security; without male protection, women alone are defenseless. "Women alone like you are, you shouldn't keep money in the house" (108),

Charles tells her, and she seemingly believes him, oblivious to the fact that she and her sister have done very weU for six years without him. What Constance fails to realize, and what Merricat is unable to articulate, is that the threat to women living independently does not always come from the outside. It may be found on the inside, perhaps in an actual structure like the Blackwood mansion, or within the feminized mind, a mind that has internalized not simply that she should not do a given thing, but that she cannot do any thing without the help and approval of a man. In this novel and in her life, Jackson displays the traumatic ambivalence experienced by many women writers, particularly those who wrote during the

Forties, Fifties, and early Sixties, women who were driven to compete for their place in literature, yet who felt incomplete as women if they did not obey the commandment to "Be fruitful and multiply." Self-immolation is an act of desperation; so is madness, and so is murder. Jackson succumbed to the first, flirted with the second, then projected her desire to armihilate her oppressor (not just Stanley, but the institution of the patriarchal family) onto her fictional alter ego, Merricat

Merricat is a murderer; however, the crime that premeditated the poisoning of

Merricat's parents was her crime of being bom intelligent and female. Merricat possesses an acute intelligence; however, as far as her family is concerned, she is possessed by intelligence, an undesirable and unbecoming trait in a woman. Instead of recognizing and nurturing Merricat's unique gifts, they lavished their love and attention on her selfish and much less capable brother, causing Merricat to feel rejected and unloved, or at least not 169 loved for who she really is. Because her parents could not envision an identity for Merricat other than that of sweet and obedient female, her misbehavior and petty rebellions were misunderstood as deliberate acts of meaimess, or perhaps madness, rather than the desperate bids for approval they really were. Deeply and permanently wounded, she struck back in the only way she knew how, through the use of her intelligence and cunning, the very faculties which resulted in her being punished and isolated in the first place. Merricat's crime against her parents and the one she is about to commit, if it is a crime at aU, is not one of passion; she does not gun down her oppressor. Merricat's activity against the enemy is subversive, an act of guerrilla warfare, and like any accomplished underground warrior, the first thing she does is to reconnoiter the enemy's territory:

I looked in at our father's room, which now belonged to Charles .. there were the things belonging to Charles on the dresser where our father's possessions had always been kept; I saw Charles' pipe, and handkerchief, things that Charles had touched and used dirtying our father's room. One drawer of the dresser was a little open, and I Aought again of Charles picking over our father's clothes. .. I was not surprised to find that he had been looking at our father's jewelry (110)

In this passage, Merricat's energy is focused on the interloper, and not on her father. She does not consciously acknowledge that the two are one, both oppressors and controllers of women. She does recognize that her father's belongings—a "watch and chain made of gold, and cuff links, and a signet ring"—are symbols of power (110), and desiring that power for herself, she takes the watch and chain into her room, where it "curled again into a sleeping gold heap" on her pillow (111). Once in her possession, the watch and chain become Merricat's property, just as the gate key once belonging to her father was her property until

Charles appropriated it Merricat believes she has reclaimed her power. "While Constance made gingerbread in the kitchen, and Uncle Julian slept in his room, and Charles walked in and out of the village stores, I lay on my bed and played withmy golden chain" (111; my 170 italics). Later she nails the watch and chain to a tree, converting them into a talisman. In one of the few predictable moments in the novel, Charles discovers the amulet on his way home from the village. What ensues clarifies his motives for everyone, it seems, but Constance, who remains "blissfully ignorant" in his presence. When Charles returns with the watch, he is livid. "In a tree," he tells Constance, his voice shaking. "I found it nailed to a tree, for God's sake" (112). He is incredulous when Constance teUs him it's "not important" How can it not be important to Charles, whose real motives for courting "Connie" are mercenary? "It's made of gold. . . It's worth money"

(112). Charles insists on putting the watch chain "back in the box where it belongs" (113); only Merricat notices that he knows exactly where the chain is kept thus confirming her suspicion that he is searching for valuables and assessing their worth when he finds them. Only Merricat among all of them, has the situation figured out Merricat who is supposed to be a "wicked," perhaps even psychotic, child. Once again Jackson demonstrates her belief that what appears to be normal, acceptable behavior is not always ethical or even intelligent Playing the eccentric child does give Merricat the advantage of not being taken seriously; thus she avoids punishment "Silly Merricat" is all Constance will say about the incident but Charles is on his guard now; he knows Merricat has been in his room. The stakes have risen between the two. Charles is no longer a "ghost"; he now poses a real threat to Merricat's safety and the survival of the female universe she and Constance have created:

It was quiet in the kitchen; Constance was in Uncle Julian's room, putting him to bed for his afternoon nap. "Where would poor Cousin Maty go if her sister turned he out?" Charles asked Jonas, who listened quietly. "What would poor Cousin Mary do if Constance and Charles didn't love her?" (113)

This is, I believe, the same threat leveled at Merricat by her father on the night he died, when he and his wife argued behind closed doors. It seems reasonable that if Uncle Julian heard 171 them, so did Merricat, just as she hears Charles repeat the same threat to send her away if she does not accept that it is his place to rule and her place to obey. Time is running out for Merricat: she had "hoped the house would reject him by itself," but instead the house seems to embrace the new master. His presence is felt everywhere:

Already the house smelled of him, of his pipe and his shaving lotion, and the noise of him echoed in the rooms all day long; his pipe was sometimes on the kitchen table and his gloves or his tobacco pouch or his constant boxes of matches were clattered through our rooms. He walked into the village each afternoon and brought back newspapers which he left lying everywhere, even in the kitchen... A spark from his pipe had left a tiny bum on die rose brocade of a chair in the drawing room. (113)

Diab Hassan has written that Jackson, in Castle, "spoofs the detective novel," and he is correct; there is ample evidence to support Merricat's involvement in both "crimes." Jackson gives us many clues to upcoming events in the novel, yet these clues do not carry the weight of a grave presentiment The reader is more likely to be amused by Jackson's little nods toward the future. Watching an intention unfold in Merricat's mind, even a murderous one, is like watching the intended victim hang hhnself. Is her plan a deliberate one? Is she conscious of acting against Charles? Or is she just allowing events to take their natural course? Perhaps she is only nudging the fates to take exception to Charles' habit of leaving his pipe burning in the wrong places because it amuses her to do so. What is not so amusing to Merricat is Constance's change in attitude toward her. This, more than anything, motivates her to act. Merricat continues to work through proper channels for Charles' departure. She would prefer he leave of his own volition; this certainly supports the fact that Merricat is not a homicidal maniac, as some readers have suggested. One "bright morning" she asks Constance, very casually, if Charles has "said anything yet about leaving?" The reply is not one to set Merricat's mind at ease. "I've told you and told you that I won't hear any more 172

silliness about Charles" (114). Merricat is very perceptive; she understands that Constance is falling further under Charles' spell, just as she did her father's; that she is more and more preoccupied with the possibilities of a life with Charles that will replicate the one

she lived with her father, rather than the new life the sisters have carved out of pain and

perseverance for themselves:

[Constance] was increasingly cross with me when I wanted Charles to leave; always before Constance had listened and smiled and only been angry when Jonas and I had been wicked, but now she frowned at me often, as tiiough I somehow looked different to her. (114)

Metcalf defines the feminized woman as one who "fails to listen to her voices" (242), presumably those inner promptings that tell women that what is best for us may not be what others expect from us. To listen to one's inner voice is to acknowledge the autonomy of

self, something Constance is unable to do since who she is (and consequently what she

does) has always been defined by others, namely her father. Metcalf considers Merricat to be a feminized woman as well. I disagree. She alone among the characters in the novel not only listens to her iimer voice, her self, but has an iimer voice to listen to. The rest are at the

mercy of or are driven by outside forces: Constance by domestic priorities, Charles by the need (greed) for power, and Uncle Julian by his obsession with the past Merricat relies

upon "subjective knowing" or "women's ways of knowing" to guide her (Belinky 54). She

listens to the "still small voice" within her and trusts her own "subjective authority as

knower," even though that authority may be in conflict with the external authority of her

fathers (John and Charles) (54). Merricat is a woman who recognizes the subjective truth of the situation whereas Constance only responds to Charles' external or objective authority.

When Merricat points out that Charles makes Uncle Julian "sicker," Constance responds that Charles is "only trying to keep Uncle Julian from thinking about sad things all the

time." In other words, Constance agrees with Charles: Uncle Julian should be "cheerful" 173 (114). Merricat recognizes the reality of a situation Constance prefers to deny. "Why," she asks, "should he be cheerful if he’s going to die?" (114). Constance's preoccupation with duty and propriety becomes almost obsessive: "I haven't been doing my duty," she tells Merricat, "I have let you run wüd; how long has it been since you combed your hair" (11). However deeply wounded Merricat is by this criticism, she understands that the impetus for it comes not from Constance but from Charles. Merricat controls her anger against Constance, treating her as a victim of Charles' avaricious ambitions. She realizes her sister needs protection "more than ever before," and if she, Merricat, becomes angry or, worse, ignores Constance's behavior, both "might very well be lost" (115). This is not the voice of someone either insane or tmaware. In Castle. Constance is the feminized woman, Merricat the feminist Merricat understands and accepts that Constance is unable to speak either for herself or for the others; she is being led steadily and easily in the direction of Charles' atavistic needs and desires. "Uncle Julian should be in a hospital," Constance tells Merricat, echoing Charles. "And you—" (116).

There is no need to speculate where Charles (and now Constance) believes Merricat should be. Either in school, or worse, in an institution. Charles confirms this when he wonders aloud in front of Merricat: "[CJome about a month from now, I wonder who will still be here? You ... or me?" (116).

The situation worsens rapidly. Constance continues to behave more and more like a distracted mother to Merricat "I think we are going to have to forbid your wandering," she tells her. "Does the 'we' mean you and Charles?" Merricat wonders (118). Even Uncle

Julian in his dotage cannot miss the implications of the change in Constance. He calls Charles a "dreadful young man" who is "dishonest" just as his father was "dishonest" just as John Blackwood was "dishonest" (121). The patriarchy is corrupt; the line that binds the two women to their father (specifically Constance to Charles) must be broken, or at least be allowed to unravel. 174

Memcat first tries to alter circumstances rather than disrupt them. On Thursday, her most powerful day, she removes her father's power symbols (the objects Charles covets) from his bedroom room, replacing them with "pieces of wood and broken sticks and leaves and scraps of glass and metal from the field and wood" (128). Unconventional, perhaps, but effective. "I can’t believe it... I simply can't believe it" is all Charles can say when confronted with Merricat's alterations. He threatens to punish her, and, for once, Constance intervenes, but not with much conviction; her voice is "strange. . . imcertain," and she insists on taking the blame for her sister "It's all my fault anyway" (131). When she demands that Merricat "explain" her behavior to Cousin Charles, the girl is "chilled" (132). Charles is still in control, and he wants Merricat punished. "Punish me?" she cries incredulously. "Punish me? You mean send me to bed without my diimer?" (137). The circle of meaning is now complete. There is no mistaking Charles for anyone but her father, and Constance is his acquiescing accomplice in the eradication of Mary Katherine, Merricat, the undutiful daughter. I carmot emphasize too strongly the theme of the betraying mother here. Constance, the surrogate mother, refuses to protect her female child; instead she complies with the father's (Charles') desire to control and destroy the daughter. It is a theme that occurs over and over again in Jackson's fiction. In "I Know Who I Love," Mrs. Vincent refuses to intervene in her husband's sexual persecution of Katherine; Mrs. Waite does nothing to help or protect Natalie as she struggles to free herself from her father's domination; and in Castle. Constance repeats her mother's role by allowing Charles to threaten and punish "their daughter," Merricat

Just after this unfortunate scene, Merricat slips away to an abandoned summerhouse which is "all wet and dark" inside, suggesting a womb image. Sitting on the floor, Merricat the writer revises the night of the murder, making it clear to the reader that the needs of the child, the little girl, were never met by her parents. Neither a "useful daughter nor a male heir, [she] had no useful function in the family..." (Carpenter, "Establishment" 33). 175

Merricat, more than anyone, was a "ghost" in the family circle; even after the murders. Uncle Julian ignores her, treating her like an orphan, saying she is of "little consequence," and telling people she died in an orphanage (135). In her version of the story, Merricat makes her presence felL Merricat envisions herself at the table, in my "right and proper place," the center of a conversation that demonstrates love and acceptance, not rejection: "Mary Katherine should have anything she wants, my dear. Our most beloved daughter must have anything she likes." "Constance, your sister lacks butter. Pass it to her at once, please."

"Mary Katherine, we love you." "You must never be punished. Lucy, you are to see to it that our most loved daughter Mary Katherine is never punished." " ... Our beloved, our dearest Mary Katherine must be guarded and cherished. Thomas, give your sister your dirmer; she would like more to eat." (139)

In this passage Merricat reveals the depth of her wound. This is how she longed to be treated, deserved to be treated by her parents. Instead, the patriarchal benevolence was reserved for Thomas, her brother, leaving Merricat feeling bereft and powerless. In order to reclaim her power, she must reclaim the house. She climbs the stairs for the last time, going at once to Charles' room. The bed has been stripped and neatly remade by Constance; the pink saucers Charles uses for his pipe have been restored to their proper places by Constance. In one of them rests his pipe, still warm, tobacco embers glowing. Merricat knows what to do. Charles has been warned;

Charles is careless. Merricat casually brushes the "saucer and the pipe into the wastebasket" where they "fell softly onto the newspapershe had brought into the house" (145). Within minutes the Blackwood mansion is ablaze.

While the fire rages, Charles' only concern is to get the safe into the yard. Merricat and Constance are left to save themselves, which they manage to do by hiding in the 176 shadows at one end of the porch. The greatest ordeal for them is not the loss of the house or their belongings, but the curious stares and cruel comments of the villagers who have swarmed to the site of the fire. "Let it bum," a woman screams. "Should of burned it down years ago," someone else adds. "And them in it" (152-53). When the fire is under control, the villagers pillage and loot the place, breaking windows, smashing dishes. Constance, predictably, collapses, and Merricat is once more in control She leads Constance away to the leafy refuge, her cave-space by the creek. In the morning, the women survey the ruins of the Blackwood mansion. Where once the house had stood tall, "reaching up into the trees," it now ends "above the kitchen doorway"; all that remains of the upper story is a "nightmare of twisted wood" (167). Parks sees the fall of the house of Blackwood as a "tragic mystery" ("Chambers" 27); it hardly seems either, tragedy or mystery. Through his own carelessness with the lit pipe and his determination to rescue the safe rather than his cousins, Charles has destroyed the very thing he came to claim, the Blackwood dynasty. There wül be no more male heirs bom and bred in the Blackwood mansion. The fire has destroyed everything but the ground floor, the floor closest to the earth: the bedrooms where the Blackwood patriarchs ruled their wives and the attic museum where the trappings of the old order were once preserved, are gone, and with them the remnants of the old patriarchal order. Even Uncle Julian is dead, yet the garden, the grass, and the apple trees still bloom through the ashes, and

Constance's marble bench (the new throne of a female dynasty?) has also survived. Once more Parks misreads Jackson's intent when he insists that the resurgent landscape and the vine-covered ruin are not "the triumph of nature [female] over human [male] arrogance," but a symbol of the Blackwood sisters' "guüt-burden of the murders" ("Chambers" 27). He seems unable to accept the fact that the arrogance he refers to nearly destroyed the identities, if not the lives, of the two women. In fact, the purifying fire^ has spared all the areas 177 formerly inhabited by the two women, including the kitchen. But that room has been drastically "altered":

Two of the chairs had been smashed and the floor was horrible with broken dishes and glass and broken boxes of food and paper tom from the shelves. Jars of jam and syrup and catsup had been shattered against the walls. The sink. . . was filled with broken glass. . . Drawers of silverware and cooking ware had been pulled out and broken against the table and the walls, and silverware that had been in the house for generations of Blackwood wives was lying bent and scattered on the floor. Tablecloths and napkins hemmed by Blackwood women, washed and ironed again and again, mended and cherished, had been ripped from the dining-room sideboard and dragged across the kitchen. (168)

With its ancestral heirlooms used over and over again by wives and daughters who never question the repetition, Jackson seems to be saying in this passage that women contribute as much to their domestic captivity as do men. 10 It is worthwhile here to recall Arnold Waite's observation on the princess-in-the-tower theme:

It has always been my opinion, you know, that princesses are conJSned to towers only because they choose to stayconfined, and the only dragon required to keep them there was their own desire to be kept. And I further beheve, now, that if you erect a tower, princesses will flock to it demanding to be locked up therein. (Hangsaman 176^

If it is Jackson's intention in We Have Alwavs Lived in the Castle, and earlier in Hangsaman. to admonish women to stop retreating behind walls and to come down from their towers (pedestals), to free themselves from domestic tyranny, these two passages certainly support that. Of course, for Jackson and for most women of her generation, simply walldng away from the family and home was not a viable option for many reasons, not the least of which were the problems of self-support and the accusations of "bad wife" and "unfit mother" that would surely follow such an act of self-assertion. Self-abnegation seemed the only route for most women, accompanied sometimes by minor acts of rebellion 178 from within the patriarchal structure. There may have been very little breaking out for these women, but there was certainly breaking from within. Jackson may be saying that it is not necessary to destroy the entire structure of the patriarchal system, but only to alter it to suit the needs of women. In effect, what has occurred as a result of the fire is what Merricat attempted to accomplish by reordering Charles' (and her father's) room earlier. She does not wish herself or her sister to be homeless, only houseless-free of the service-on-demand mentality required of generations of Blackwood women who gave up their identities, their freedom, to live as servants and "slaves" to the Blackwood patriarchs. After the fire, nothing is ordered and "nothing is orderly" (169); there are no calendars to teH Constance which day to neaten the house and which day to can, and there are no clocks to divide the days into fragments of pancakes, rarebits, and roasts. When she asks Merricat, "How are we going to know what time it is?," Merricat responds: "Why do we need to know what time it is?"

(182). A very simple exchange, and yet a significant one. "Time is male," Rich writes in

"Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law"; now time as a linear concept is finished for Merricat and Constance; the clipped ticking of the father's gold watch has finally been silenced. In its place, subjective time has returned to her dwelling place in the rhythm of a woman's pulse. A new world awaits the sisters, but it will not come into being without their participation. The remainder of Castle is concerned with the rebuilding of this world.

Not surprisingly, the kitchen, the domestic center of the house, the "female world" of Hangsaman. becomes once again the center of existence for Merricat and Constance. This time, however, Jackson underscores the idea that this center of female being is not a position of weakness, but a bastion against the conventional world which decrees that its female citizens should stand fast in front of a stove ("barefoot and pregnant and in the kitchen").

This time the female protagonists choose to operate from self-defined positions of strength.

Since the celebrated fantily-crested silver and the dainty, dowered teacups (the domestic trappings or entrapments of Blackwood brides) have been destroyed, Merricat and 179

Constance are ftee to create a "female world" according to their own vision. One of their first acts is to board up the house against intruders. The shutters in the drawing room, the room "our mother had loved, are closed" (174-75). For a moment, the "great shadowy room" comes together again and then falls apart "forever" (175). They close the drawing­ room door behind them and "never opened it afterwards" (176). Merricat systematically closes aU the shutters, blinding the windows to the outside world, and then locks the front door. The blackened stairs are no longer a threat: no father or father figure will ever again descend from the bedroom above to give orders to Blackwood women. Even so, Merricat barricades the stairs, then surveys her new kingdom, or perhaps I should say, queendom:

I stood at the foot of the stairs, looking up, wondering where our house had gone, the walls and the floors and the beds and the boxes of things in the attic; our father's watch was burned away, and our mother's tortoise-shell dressing set I could feel a breath of air on my cheek; it came from the sky I could see, but it smelled of smoke and ruin. Our house was a castle, turreted and open to the sky. (177)

The house as a castle is not a romantic configuration here; its symbolic significance is not derived from a fairy tale. The complex symbol of the castle derives "at once from that of the house and that of the enclosure or walled city" (Cirlot 38):

Walled cities figure in medieval art as a symbol of the transcendent soul... The castle. .. [fits shape, form, and color, its dark and light shades, all play an important part in defiiiing the symbolic meaning of the castle as a whole, which, in the broadest sense, is an embattled, spiritual power, ever on the watch. (Cirlot 38)

The fact that Merricat and Constance are no longer prisoners of their castle, but willing inhabitants, makes a great difference in how we interpret their fate. J. E. Cirlot writes that the "black castle" usually signifies captivity; he believes that it is "very possible that the underlying symbolism of all medieval tales and legends" about castles relates to the 180 concept of the "castle owned by a 'wicked knight' who holds captive aU who approach his domain." The Castle of Light," on the other hand, is the "ledemption-aspect" of this same image (39). Merricat and Constance inhabit a castle of light; they have saved themselves and redeemed their value as women. In the weeks and years that follow the fire, a number of changes do occur, but always outside the house. Village children often come to play in the yard, families picnic on the lawn; most intriguing are the baskets of food left on the front step by villagers who seem to have repented their cruelty toward the women. Or perhaps they are afraid to be cursed by the "witches" who live inside. One man brings a chicken: "I sure hope you can hear me Miss Blackwood. I broke one of your chairs and I'm sorry" (202). The very people who refused to go near the house, as well as those who were allowed inside but who were afraid to take food from Constance and Merricat, now supply food for them. With the cooperation of the community that once rejected them, Merricat and Constance are able to live quite happily, at peace with the world and at peace with themselves. Charles Blackwood returns only once to try to persuade Constance to open the door; this time she refuses without prompting from Merricat "I am so happy," she tells her sister. "Merricat, I am so happy" (211). Merricat responds with an answer that confirms once and for aU that the two women are living, exclusively, in a female world. "I told you that you would like it on the moon" (211), a world envisioned by Merricat, brought into reality by Merricat, but maintained cooperatively by the two women working together.

Did Jackson write the conclusion to Castle as a plea for a woman-centered community? Probably not Still, there is a palpable longing in those last pages for a life free of domestic expectation, free of schedules, deadlines, and responsibility to others. That longing evenmally found expression in Jackson's final work, "Come Along With Me."

Unfortunately, we wül never know whether her new persona, this time neither an adolescent nor a frightened spinster but a woman Jackson's age, ever fulfilled the promise she so 181 clearly demonstrates in the first chapter of the novel Angela Motorman's growth potential was interrupted by Jackson's death. We can, however, glean firom those powerful early pages an independence and strength of purpose not found in any other Jackson protagonist Although I close this dissertation with a study of a work that was never fully realized, I believe "Come Along With Me" pointed the way out of the darkness for Jackson; for this reason alone it should be considered a remarkable achievement for a writer who had been, until the day she began the new novel, floundering in one of the deepest wells a writer can fall into. For three years after the publication of Castle. Jackson's creative power had been at a standstill. She was blocked. Yet in the end it was writing that released her, although the words she forced from her typewriter were not the well-crafted prose of Jackson the novelist. The rough phrases and disconnected images depict a written record of a woman finally facing her demons, a woman struggling to free herself from the past, forging a new identity for herself as woman and as writer. CHAPTER V

WOMAN ALONE, WOMAN FULFILLED?

SHIRLEY JACKSON'S FINAL ESCAPE

The frame through which I viewed the world changed. Greater than scene, I came to see, is situation. Greater than situation is implication Greater than all o f these is a single, entire human

being who will never be confined in any frame. Eudora Welty

None saw the whole o f her, none but herself. For the light which she was was both her mirror and her

body. None could tell the whole o fher, none but

herself. Laura Riding

In the three Shirley Jackson novels discussed in this study, Hangsaman. The

Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Alwavs Lived in the Castle, there is a discernible thematic dilemma: how can an intelligent, perhaps even artistically gifted woman reconcile her desire for freedom and independence with the condition of being female in a culture that obstructs these rights? Each of Jackson's protagonists, in her own way, challenges this

182 183 predicament, and each in predictable ways, fails to achieve victory, or at least complete victory. At the end of Hangsaman. Natalie Waite has recovered her equilibrium; however, she is only eighteen and has a lifetime of conflict and compromise ahead of her. Whether she will be able to keep herself (her self) intact is a question left unanswered in the novel.

Jackson's primary objective inHangsaman is to demonstrate that almost from birth onward,

a woman's life is pulled in (at least) two directions: the first is the thrust toward self-

actualization which requires a certain self-centeredness or attention to self (listening to one's voices, however peculiar that activity may appear to others); the second impetus (not necessarily self-directed) is toward the conventional expectation for females of marriage and children, both of which require an attitude of selflessness. To further complicate Natalie's condition, there is the problem of her sexual abuse which she appears to resolve in a highly creative (some would say eccentric) maimer. Did Jackson resolve her own abuse experience

with the writing of Hangsaman? Apparently she at least came to terms with it, although in The Haunting of Hill House, there is an unmistakable inference of sexual abuse involving Hugh Crain and his daughter, and it is likely that Merricat and Constance Blackwood were also abused by their tyrannical father.

In The Haunting of Hill House, there is no actual adolescent protagonist, although

Eleanor Vance can be considered in some respects to have been emotionally arrested when

she was forced to subordinate her life to the care of her mother at the age of twenty-one.

Eleanor is locked into a domestic vacuum from which she emerges only briefly during her journey from her sister's home to the house of Crain—in other words when she moves from one domestic prison to another. This journey of perhaps three to four hours is the only time in Eleanor's life when she is entirely on her own, independent of others. Her inability to become autonomous, to separate from her mother and then refuse the patriarchal dominance of Hill House costs Eleanor her life at the end of the novel. Although Eleanor

commits suicide when she drives her car into the tree, Jackson makes it clear that Eleanor's 184 choice is an ambivalent one ("Why am I doing this?"). Eleanor chooses death only because there appear to be no other living options for her. Eleanor lacks Natalie’s adolescent vision and perseverance, and the fierce determination to capitulate displayed by Merricat in We Have Alwavs Lived in the Castle. The description of Eleanor Vance in Hill House as a frail, shy, mousy woman hardly resembles the Shirley Jackson we are accustomed to in print, the large, brash, energized dynamo who seems larger than the page. Yet Eleanor does resemble Jackson; the fearful, diminutive Eleanor is the Shirley we do not see, the Shirley hidden from others. Fear was as much a part of Jackson's life as retrieving the daily mail; she had always been afraid "of practically everything. .. People, buildings, planes, electricity, machinery, public speaking, private comments" (Oppenheimer 234). But fear can manifest itself in anger; while Eleanor may be meek, she is not mild, and in this respect she represents many women who disguise their anger at the patriarchy beneath the sweetly compliant exterior of the angel in the house. Increasingly, in the novel, Eleanor demonstrates an ever-widening mean streak, a predilection for spiteful behavior that is most often directed at Theo. Eleanor is projecting her resentment toward her mother, her sister, and all the authority figures she believes have kept her confined, but the real source of her anger is herself. "Self-sacrifice generates bitterness" (Showalter 245), and that is the primary impetus for Eleanor's anger. When Showalter analyzes the works of early twentieth-century women writers, she notes that although "the outspoken contempt for male selfishness" is a dominant theme in this fiction, there is also a feeling of "intense self-hatred" in the prose: "Women gave in and despised themselves for giving in" (245). With her suicide, Eleanor punishes herself more than the society that represses her. Eleanor's life ends with the closing of the novel, but Jackson's did not In her life and in her work, Jackson continued to display her anger at others and her disappointment in herself, without directly expressing it With Castle, this inferno, suppressed for years, finally breaks out; it is no coincidence that fire is the metaphor for 185 revenge and cleansing in the novel But did the flames, once released and allowed to bum, do their job? The novel burned itself out, but Jackson's anger did not; writing a book every year or two could not prevent the inevitable collapse from within. In this respect, Jackson's life not only informs the lives of her female protagonists, but also mirrors the lives of many women, the women Chester writes about who one morning wake up to the fact that a house in suburbia with its attendant car-pools and PTA meetings is not the answer to Freud's question, "What does a woman want?" Yet, in the midst of her collapse, Jackson, Hke Merricat, still believed that words are powerful restoratives and that writing could save her. "Writing is the way out writing is the way out writing is the way out," she recorded in her journal during the period in her life when she could no longer fictionalize her pain (qtd. in Oppenheimer 258). Indeed, her new novel, "Come Along With Me," did prove to be the way out for Jackson, since it is a fictional record of Jackson’s final escape from the entrapments of family and the diminished dream of romantic love. In Private Demons. Judy Oppenheimer describes Jackson's entire life as a series of entrapments and escapes. As a child, and later as a young woman, Jackson felt "trapped by her parents, hounded by their expectations, unable to begin her own life" (Oppenheimer

249). With Stanley's help, she "emerged" from the "shackles," only to find herself restricted and controlled by the needs and expectations of another family, her own. When that family began to disperse, instead of finding freedom, she found herself trapped again, probably because like so many women of the Fifties, Jackson could not imagine a life without a husband; this time, as Oppenheimer notes, the "constrictions were even tighter" (249) and much more terrifying, self-imposed by her own physical and mental condition.

In order to understand the impetus for her final novel, "Come Along With Me," it is necessary to understand just how far Jackson pushed herself (or allowed herself to be pushed) into the oblivion Natalie Waite fears so much: that "nothing space where you don't 186 have to worry any more and no one ever hears you. . . and you can say anything. .. "

(Hangsaman 1371 Jackson's son, Barry, describes his mother's "enormous body" wracked with "chronic bronchitis, asthma, smoking two or three packs of unfiltered Pall Mails a day..."

(qtd. in Oppenheimer 249):

I remember hot, dusty, oppressive afternoons in the summer when she'd be lying in bed sweating and trying to take a nap, and the various piUs would be having their up and down effect Maybe ^ e realized that she wasn't going to turn the comer, that she'd gotten too old to stop drinking, stop smoËng, stop eating a pound of butter a day. (qtd. in Oppenheimer 249)

This is perhaps not very sympathetic picture, especially the suggestion that Jackson deliberately overate, smoked, and drank. Perhaps she did. But Jackson had been heavy for years, used alcohol in generous amounts (as did Stanley and all their friends), smoked heavily (easy to do in the days before the Surgeon General's warning labels), and enjoyed

the rich dishes she prepared for Stanley. In fact, Stanley encouraged Jackson's appetite. Her editor at Viking Press, Carol Brandt, recalls lunching with Stanley and Jackson and

watching him, "for reasons of professional jealousy or whatever," ply Jackson with food.

"She was very fat," Brandt remembers, "maybe over two-hundred- fifty pounds. 1 had to

watch him stuffing her like a goose" (qtd. in Oppenheimer 219). The pills were another matter.

Until very recently, the common remedy for people (particularly women) suffering from depression and acute anxiety was the prescription of amphetamines and tranquilizers, precisely what Jackson's doctor recommended for her. But her drug use began even before her bouts with depression and agoraphobia. In 1949, while she was still living in Westport, her doctor prescribed "diet pills" (what Jackson called "magic pills") to help her lose weight; soon amphetamines were as much a part of her daily routine as the alcohol she 187 mixed with them; no one at that time, including her doctor, realized that the two taken together could prove fatal to the consumer. Later, to curb the effect of the "speed," she took tranquilizers, again prescribed by her doctor (Oppenheimer 148). As the years went by, prescription drugs became a "household staple"; the amphetamines "charged her up, making her even more high-strung, so she took tranquilizers and alcohol to combat them: Thorazine, Miltown, Phénobarbital, bourbon" (210). The wonder is that Jackson did not collapse, at least physically, before the mental breakdown that eventually required her to seek psychotherapy. The decision to seek help was not an easy one for Jackson; like Natalie, she feared that to reveal the contents of an original mind to anyone, but particularly to someone who might not understand its workings, was to lose the gift For a long time she preferred to wrestle alone with her demons, using her journal as a resource. What could not be said in print or to someone else, ftiend or stranger, could be revealed in private:

since so much of my daily life seems to depend on what Stanley does or says first think about Stanley. .. i do not want to quarrel with Stanley bwause no matter what he thiriks he is still fond of me and yet aU my ailments seem to come from him why because I feel that he is always belittling me why because i am always belittling myself why because i feel inferior why because i am inferior. 1 (qtd. in Oppenheimer 250)

This is the first time Jackson had dared to come to terms with her fear of and anger towards her husband; it is the first real indication, in writing, that she knew she was not the confident woman she presented to the world. In her journal, Jackson also agonized over her inability to write and to meet Stanley's standards for her writing:

i used to be able to write but no one even thinks of me any more when it is writing no one includes me no one talks kermeth [Burke] doesn’t any more no one even the kids i am a writer i used to be a good writer and now no one even Stanley says to students that i used to be. (Oppenheimer 250) 188

It is clear in this passage that much of Jackson's confidence came not from the woman, but from the writer. When Stanley fell in love with another woman, he dealt his wife a cruel blow, yet it was one she could recover from because they still shared the common bond of her writing. However large and ungainly she grew, however unattractive she might seem to him, he could not resist the appeal of her intellect, her talent, and above all, her energy, fr she could no longer write, what would happen to the bond between them? Jackson’s inability to write was a serious problem, one that initially affected her more than it did Stanley (unless, of course, the bills went unpaid); the house was another matter. Jackson's condition not only interfered with the smooth running of the Jackson household, it affected the quality of Stanley's life. Oppenheimer insists that Stanley was not a "callous" man, but an "eminently practical man when it came to his own needs" (251). Perhaps not callous, but eminently selfish. It would appear that no one intervened for Jackson or suggested psychotherapy until the "home machine" stopped functioning, until "the carpooling-cooking-cleaning mechanism" Stanley had become accustomed to had

"groimd to a halt" (251). Stanley, like other husbands of the Fifties, valued his wife more for her domestic contributions than for her literary accomplishments. Stanley, with the help of several friends, began to work with fervor to persuade Jackson to see a psychiatrist; she finally agreed, reluctantly (251). Her first visit reveals just how weak this giant of a woman had become:

I was fortified with my usual tranquilizer and a sedative injection from Oliver [her regular physician], two stiff drinks and Stanley and Barbara [a friend], Barbara to dnve and Stanley to get me from the car into the office I think getting out of the car in front of the office was the most terrifying minute of my life. (qtd. in Oppenheimer 251) 189 Dr. Toolan, Jackson's psychiatrist, diagnosed her problem as a "classic case of acute anxiety," which identified only the symptoms, not the real causes of her problem. Still, the "talking cure" combined with medication seems to have allowed Jackson to make rapid progress, although it is easy to see the old Jackson emerging, rather than the new, as her sessions continued. She took pride in reclaiming, as best she could, her former position in the family as driver and procurer of supplies, but her missions were not always successful

She was able to drive herself to her appointments with Dr. Toolan, but shopping continued to present a challenge Jackson could not always meet Her daughter Joanne recalled one visit to the store that ended in failure for her mother. Jackson, determined to bring home a special kind of rye bread "prized" by Stanley, tried valiantly to make it to the bakery, but got only "as far as the cabbage." She just "turned around, put her hand on her forehead, and said she'd meet me in the car" (qtd. in Oppenheimer 256).

Jackson's most formidable challenge, however, remained her writing, her fiction, which she could not bring herself to attempt "Why do I not write?" was a question she asked herself often (Oppenheimer 257). Finally she forced herself to sit at the typewriter and depress the keys; she "made up her mind to sit at the typewriter for at least an hour" every day, if she could manage it, and to write whatever came into her head (Oppenheimer

258). At first she speculated on the nature of her next work, which she wanted to be "different" from the books she had written in the past In her journal, Jackson explored the possibility of writing "novels about husbands and wives," but rejected the idea as not being her "thing," then decided that her next book should be a "funny book. . . a happy book" (qtd. in Oppenheimer 258). Here Jackson still seems to be avoiding the real issues that caused the writer's block in the first place. She doesn't want to write about "husbands and wives" because she would have to confront her own marriage; she continues to believe that by denying the pain and anger, by putting on a "happy" fictional face, she can reconstruct personal happiness. Jackson also felt guilty about using the journal for personal 190 exploration. "Who is looking over my shoulder," she wondered in one entry (qtd. in Oppenheimer 258). The specter was not her mother, as Oppenheimer suggests, but Stanley,

who, she believed, would regard her as a "criminal waster of time, and self indulgent besides," for writing for her own pleasure and enlightenment (Oppenheimer 258). "Think

about me think about me think about me," she reminded herself over and over. "Not to be uncontrolled, not to control. Alone. Safe" (qtd. in Oppenheimer 259). The last two words of this statement are significant, signaling a subtle breakthrough in Jackson's thinking about

herself and her situation. For the first time, Jackson considers the possibility that escaping

the demands of others and living entirely on one's own might, indeed, provide the safe harbor she has been unable to find. The idea of a woman providing her own security is a radical one for Jackson, as it would have been for any woman of her generation, yet her journals continue to reflect her realization that the battle she is fighting must be won by herself alone. "Depend on Stanley, he is your rock," one friend advised her. Jackson knew this not to be the case; the only person she could depend on was herself (252):

I must do it alone; do I have the courage? I am shaking. One new symptom is a kind of sadness, almost a sense of loss; I am giving up something very precious and am withdrawing from something very important The new life is worth it, I do believe that But I carmot always remember that what I am losing is cancerous. To be separate, to be alone, to stand and walk alone, not to be different and weak and helpless and degraded and shut out My focus is gradually turning on myself, which is where it should be. (qtd. in Oppenheimer 259)

This shift in priorities marked the beginning of the end of the writer's block that had

afflicted Jackson for nearly three years. Not long after this last entry, Jackson did what she

had been unable to do for the past three years, what she had almost come to believe she would never do again"; she began to work on a new novel, "Come Along With Me"

(Oppenheimer 260). 191

The new work was like nothing Jackson had ever written before and should be viewed as a "celebration of new beginnings" (Carpenter, "Domestic Comedy" 148). This time the heroine is free of "family, friends, and place... a woman who creates herself [or recreates herself] on the spot" (Oppenheimer 260). This time the female protagonist is in charge of her own destiny. "Come Along With Me" was written not to please Stanley or to pay the bills, but Shirley Jackson. But the work is not an entirely new creation, the seeds for "Come Along With Me" having been sown in two earlier short stories that once again demonstrate Jackson's desire to escape entrapment After she began therapy in February of 1963, Jackson discovered that her breakdown "started perhaps eight years ago, and has been getting worse ever since" (qtd. in

Oppenheimer 253). I believe Jackson's troubles had begun earlier than that date, but it was in late 1954, after the publication of The Bird's Nest, that she began to experience her first serious symptoms of depression and anxiety. Nineteen-fifty-fom: was also the year her dependency on drugs began. Feeling very "tired and depressed" and "without energy or spirit," Jackson consulted her familyphysician,^ who told her the "depression and tension were due to overwork," implying that novel-writing and mothering put too much strain on a woman. He recommended that Jackson rest more (not write?) and prescribed tranquilizers^ This is the first time Jackson's condition became obvious to her family and friends; the real problem that lay behind her emotional discomfort, however, was not obvious to anyone except, perhaps, herself. In a short story written in 1952, "A Day in the Jungle," Jackson is already exploring the possibility that her depression might have more to do with her marriage than with the strain of writing a book every year.

Elsa Dayton has been married to Don for a number of years. During that time, she has left her home only once, while her husband moves fieely in and out of the house, traveling to and from his work, spending evenings (and sometimes the entire night) with his friends while Elsa waits at home for him. Finally, Elsa's resentment breaks through the 192 finished exterior she has cultivated for too long. She decides to run away; the decision seems to fuel her anger at Don and at the institution of marriage. Elsa is surprised at how "shockingly" and "abominably easy" it is to leave an institution that only pretends "to be stable on such elusive foundations" (Come Along With Me 130). Preparing to leave her husband, she is "angry" as she washes stockings, "angry" when she finishes the diimer dishes, "angry" about having dirmer alone, "angry" at Don for not coming home at aU, and "angry" while she thinks up "bitter" things to say in the note she plans to leave him (131). The biting repetition of the word "angry" indicates that a subterranean vein of indignation has been tapped. The act of leaving Don induces the promise of freedom for Elsa, but also brings with it a sense of unease that eventually develops into a palpable fear of the unknown. What would it really be like to live without a man, without Don? In "Jungle," Elsa (and probably

Jackson) discovers she is not quite ready to make the break; as evening falls, she becomes apprehensive about the prospect of spending the night by herself in the city. To be alone in familiar surroundings, at home, is one thing; to spend a solitary night in a strange hotel room is another. When Don phones Elsa, she agrees to meet him at a restaurant. On the way there, Elsa experiences a nightmarish vision of neon signs swinging down upon her with "no one to hide behind, no one to say Watch out, there!'" (139). She recognizes that she is "almost alone" on the street while "most people were at home or in restaurants or at least somewhere not on the streets" (140). Comparing herself as a single woman to others who are (from her perspective) content to be coupled in homes or in restaurants, Elsa rapidly loses her nerve:

She saw herself turning and going back to her hotel, explaining to the desk clerk and the elevator man that she had changed her mind about going out, that it looked like rain or that she had sprained her ankle. She turned once and saw with siitking horror the precarious rocking of the signs overhead, the dangerous slipping sideways of the upper stories of the buildings, the final and unutterable emptiness of the street. (140) 193

Elsa's response to the gaping street with its attendant horrors and possibilities of annihilation is symptomatic of agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces. The reader can sense Elsa's terror (and Jackson's) at the thought of being turned loose, alone, in a world that does not protect solitary women. "Who wül help me," Elsa wonders, and then, "What am I doing?" (140), words reminiscent of Eleanor's question just before she struck the tree. Elsa tries to dispel her terror—"I am not supposed to be afraid of anything; I am a free person, and the path I have chosen for myself does not include fear" (141)—but at the end of the story she surrenders to her husband and the familiarity, if not the fulfillment, marriage offers. Don is

so wonderfully safe and familiar in the worn gray suit she had seen as many times as he had seen the red dress she was wearing; she waved and smiled and thought, I have been alone for so long. (142)

It seems strange that a woman who could plan her escape so meticulously is unable to survive alone for longer than a day. One must remember, however, that for Elsa and women like her, there were few precedents for the single life. AU these women knew from birth onward was that they must eventuaUy marry, for "better or for worse." When the marriage turned out for the worse, the alternatives for revising their lives were few. In "Jungle," Jackson attempts to explore those options realisticaUy; the story is literaUy a trial run for her other fictional attempts to write herself out from under the burden of a marriage that provided security (at least that was what marriage was supposed to do) and at the same time smothered and used her. The experience of living entirely on her own, of registering at the hotel desk for the first time, of sitting alone in the bar, of deciding how she wiU spend her time without having to consider the needs and wishes of another, is exhilarating for Elsa, as perhaps it would have been for Jackson. "This is what I have always wanted to do," Elsa 194 tells herself, "this is the way I have been waiting to live" (136), ftee and "at peace and alone and no one to worry me" (139). hi 1960, Jackson made another attempt at escape in fiction; this time the protagonist is unmarried, but she, too, is seeking an identity separate from her family. According to Stanley Hyman's chronology, "Louisa, Please Come Home" was written in 1960. I wonder, however, whether the story was only finished at that time, or whether it had been started earlier. Louisa, the protagonist, displays many of the characteristics of a yotmger Jackson during the time she was a student at Rochester University, where, at the end of her second year, she flunked out; Elsa, too, has been asked to leave college because of poor grades. Louisa may also be another composite of Jackson and her daughter, SaUy, since the story was written (or revised) at the time We Have Alwavs

Lived in the Castle was in progress.

Louisa Tether (the last name implies captivity), like her predecessor Elsa, "always knew" that she was "going to run away sooner or later" (154). Tired of being a "good girl," Louisa makes her escape on the eve of her sister's wedding, another significant factor in her decision to leave before she must participate in a ceremony she has little regard for. Louisa, who is nineteen (Merricat's age), plans her adventure carefully and takes a circuitous route to her final destination. Chandler, a "city big enough for me to hide in" (154). On the way, she purchases a nondescript raincoat ,which makes her look "much too fat" (and more like

Jackson), yet also causes her to become indistinguishable from the other college girls who travel on the train with her. As her journey progresses, Louisa begins to create a new identity for herself. For a while, she is a college girl journeying home for her sister's wedding; when she finally settles in Chandler, she tells her landlady, Mrs. Peacock, that she is "Lois Taylor" who has come to the city to "save money and take a secretarial course" (163). Louisa (Lois) creates a new family for herself: a widowed mother, a married sister and her husband who live with "Mrs. Taylor," and a brother, Paul (Paul is actually a 195 neighbor with whom Louisa grew up). Mrs. Peacock becomes the ideal surrogate mother, a woman who takes care of Louisa, but does not nag her or impose impossible expectations upon her. Jackson must surely have been thinking here of her own mother, Geraldine, who drove her relentlessly and criticized her unmercifully, even after Shirley had been married and a mother for years.4 On the third anniversary of her disappearance, Louisa's mother broadcasts an appeal for her to "please come home," a plea she finds amusing but resistible. Then, a chance meeting with Paul (who has been unscrupulously searching for anyone who resembles Louisa in order to collect reward money for her return) destroys her cover, and she decides to return home with him. Louisa is uncertain as to whether she really wants to resume her old life, but she is curious to see how much her parents have missed her. What Louisa discovers is that you cannot "go home again"; her parents refuse to believe she is their daughter (they have been fooled too many times by Paul). There is also the suggestion that they never really knew Louisa for who she was or wanted to become; hence, they are unable to recognize her now, although it is unlikely she has changed that much in appearance. Whatever the reason for the rejection, Louisa must leave her home (or is it her home?) forever. She is now, as she once wanted to be, entirely on her own, without any connection to the past except the reminder once a year that whoever she used to be (the little girl who denied herself to please her parents) is the daughter who is missed by her parents. The new Louisa (Lois) will never be accepted by them.

"Louisa" reflects Jackson’s fear that if she leaves the identity she has assumed in order to please Stanley and the children (and her mother), she will be rejected by them.

They will no longer recognize her (love her), and she will be forced to live alone, disconnected from the ties that bind as well as sustain. Jackson’s final trap results from a dependency she and Stanley forged early in their relationship, convincing her then, as now, that "Stanley was nothing less than her anchor against insanity" (Oppenheimer 85). 196 Unfortunately, he was also the cause of much of her "insanity," which resulted in large part from his "horrendously domineering" presence and "incorrigible" flirtations (Oppenheimer 82). Was there no way, then, that Jackson, or any married woman, could reclaim her independence without losing everything (the loss Jackson refers to in her journal entry is the one she cannot always remember is "cancerous")? Will her freedom ever be a matter of her own choosing, or must fate intervene to rescue her? In Jackson's final work, "Come

Along With Me," she creates a character who is released from her prison by circumstances beyond her control (thus she is not responsible for producing them) and who, once legitimately freed firom domestic entanglements, is able to construct a new and guilt-fiee identity. From the charred remains of Castle's purging, and the darkness into which Jackson settled after its completion, a new woman emerges. Jackson would have laughed at the thought of herself as a phoenix rising from the ashes; by the time she began her last unfinished work, she was too heavy to rise firom a couch without help. A better metaphor for Jackson's recovery might be that of the potter who has been trying for years to find in the clay the shape that has been haimting her dreams. In most of her published work, and especially in the novels discussed in this dissertation, Jackson struggled to mold a female protagonist who could rescue and preserve herself, but who would also rescue the artist who created her. Hangsaman was Jackson's first attempt, her novel of promise. With it she acknowledged the battle of adolescence,

Natalie's (and her own) fight to preserve the integrity of her being. The Haunting of HiU House is what actually transpires after Natalie's apparent victory over parental influence: it is the answer to the question of whether Natalie can keep her spirit intact Hill House is the failure of Hangsaman’s promise. We Have Alwavs Lived in the Castle marks a return to the potter's wheel. It is a réinscription of Natalie, only this time the adolescent protagonist lashes out slaying her oppressors in the mistaken belief that this act will free her. Jackson's 197 entire career as a writer was largely concerned with a remaking of this same heroic figure, and with Castle, the firing and hardening of the figure was competed. Yet even this almost-

perfect ceramic shape (very much like the Dresden lady belonging to Merricat's mother)

failed to achieve for Jackson the freedom she needed to survive. Instead of turning back to the clay, Jackson broke the mold completely with "Come Along With Me." Angela Motorman (the name she chooses for herself),^ Jackson's last female protagonist, resembles Jackson as she was at the time she began the novel. Angela is forty- four, wears a size forty-four, loves to eat, and "dabbles in the supernatural" (Come Along With Me 10). Like Elsa and Louisa, Angela has left her old life behind to find a new one in

the city. This time, however, the husband (Hughie) has been conveniently (but not violently)

removed from the picture by a natural death. Instead of living on in the house they shared, Angela sells it along with aU of the furnishings. All of Hughie's canvasses (he was an artist), books, letters, "old dance programs and marriage licenses" are sealed in boxes and stored in an old bam, which served as his studio (4). Angela does not destroy Hughie's belongings because there is no need to. She does not hate her late husband but recognizes that Hughie's "things" belong to him; she must create her own life with accessories to

match. Angela, like Louisa and Elsa, has been planning and waiting for her release for

years:

I'd thought about it for a long time of course-not that I positively expected I was going to have to bury Hughie, but he had a good life—and everything went the way I used to figure it would. I sold the house, I auctioned off the furniture, I put all the paintings in the bam, I erased my old name and took my initials off everything, and I got on the train and left (4)

Once these plans are completed, Angela allows the events in her life to unfold without

purpose or design. No more schedules, no more deadlines. She doesn't actually choose the city of her destination, but arrives there because her travel fare runs out She is pleased that 198 it is a city of "good size" because she is hungry for contact with people. "More than anything else, more than art, movies or zoos, I wanted to talk to people; I was starved for strangers" (5). Jackson expressed this same longing many times after her recovery from the breakdown. She wanted to "get out into the world. . . to see new places and people" (Oppenheimer 264-65).

Angela rents a room from Mrs. Faun, another widow who is self-supporting. Mrs. Faun is not a mother-figure, but an equal with whom she can discuss the disadvantages of husbands and marriage without fear of appearing callous or thankless. They understand each other perfectly, as the following dialogue confirms: "I've just buried my husband," Angela explains. ""I've just buried mine," Mrs. Faun answers. "Isn't it a relief?" Angela offers. "What?" is Mrs. Farm's reply (Come Along With Me 11) Angela, concerned that she might have been too candid, allows that Hughie's death was a "very sad occasion":

"You're right," Mrs. Faun replies. "It's a relief (11). Mrs. Faun does have house rules; however, the way she presents them and the way

Angela responds parodies the Ten Commandments and reminds the reader of a wedding ceremony, which is surely Jackson's intention: "You may not cook in your room."

"I promise."

"You may not smoke in your bed." "I promise." "You may not make noise at night"

"I promise."

"Thou shalt not-I mean, you may not keep dirty pets." 199

"I promise." (11) Angela's new room is also very much to her liking. Unlike the rooms in Hül House, her room is "perfectly square"; everything meets neatly; there are no aberrant angles either in the room or in the house like those found in Hill House:

The house. . . was almost square. It had three floors and a basement, and neat trim porches on three sides. .. everything was neatly cornered and as near as possible the same size; that one door matched the next almost perfectly and where there were doors they were as often as possible right in the middle of the wall, with an equal space either side of them. The windows were perfectly correct (18)

Angela's concern with perfect angles and uniform measurements suggests her need to control her environment in order to prevent a return to the life from which she has only recently emerged, a life she felt she had no control over, a life that did not reflect her individuality. The concern with perfectly balanced dimensions also signals a return, on Jackson's part, to the healthier, more balanced environment of The Sundial, a work which reflects the hope of a new life for the protagonists. Angela's new room is entirely without personality, containing only a dresser and a desk with empty drawers. Angela, not Hugh, wiU decide "what to put in them" when the time is right (14). The empty bookshelf will hold, according to her estimation, "perhaps eleven books" which she will choose "very carefully," writing "Angela Motorman" on the empty fly leaves (15). The desk in Angela's room is hers alone, and the books that eventually fill the shelves wiU be hers alone. One of her first acts is to hang a painting of her own on the wall; even though "it had been painted with Hughie's paints," Angela had "painted it myself' (20). As she puts away the two dresses she has brought with her, Angela assures herself that she will buy "new clothes" from the department store. She lays her brush and comb on the dresser, as weU as her

"sleeping pills" and "reading glasses," everything she owns. "I had no pets, no address books, no small effects to set around on tables or pin on walls, I had no lists of friends to 200 keep in touch with and no souvenirs; all I had was myself' (15). A new being is coming into focus right before our eyes:

"It's all right, Angela," I said very softly out the window, "it's all right, you made it, you came in and it's all right; you got here after all." And outside the dim nameless creature named herself Mrs. Angela Motorman and came steadily to the door. (15)

It is expected that some readers will be disappointed by the "Mrs."; wouldn't it be better to sever all ties to marriage? Perhaps ideally, but not realistically. Jackson still loved Stanley, in spite of their differences, and she had enjoyed the companionship of husband and children for nearly twenty-five years when she began "Come Along With Me." Any title or name assigned to Angela is chosen by her and is entirely her own. She has been created to satisfy Jackson's dream of freedom, not the reader's. Furthermore, Jackson may be making the point that it is never too late for any woman, married or single, to recreate herself in her own image, not in the patriarchal image of the self-denying wife or daughter. What is really significant in the passage is the powerful act of recreation that has taken place. Angela has given birth to a self renewed, and it is a self that includes and accepts the mysterious and often rejected ("lost") little girl of Jackson's childhood. Jackson devotes two pages of the story to a recounting of Angela's psychic experiences as a child.

According to Angela, her first encounter happened when she was twelve, Eleanor's age when she had her poltergeist experience. Jackson also had similar encounters as a child, but was "trained" by her mother to keep such "insane" occurrences to herself

(Oppenheimer 18-20). As a result, she seldom talked about them to others, even as an adult, but what she saw and heard that others did not found its way into her fiction. Her penchant for noticing details which escaped the adults around her caused Jackson, as a child, to feel even more different and isolated than she already felt as a result of her appearance and precocity. Some of her confusion and discomfort is audible in "Come Along With Me." 201

Angela’s mother tells her to "stop gawking at nothing and shut your mouth and comb your hair and get out with the other kids" (17). Jackson's mother told her the same thing in so many words, according to Dorothy Ayling (qtd. in Oppenheimer 25). "That's not an easy way for a girl to grow up," Angela tells the reader (17). Angela fills her days with meaningless activities; when she feels like it she helps

Mrs. Faun with the housework, drinks coffee, eats as much and as often as she pleases, and chats with the other boarders. She holds a seance but thinks better of doing so when she begins to receive messages that might be coming from Hughie. Apparently someone is "asking, asking; a message for a wife" (24). Mrs. Faun is not interested in the other­ worldly demands of a man, either. "I don't want it Tell him to go away again; I don't want to hear anything he has to say" (24). Husbands are not welcome in Angela's new world. There is no real feeling of hostility here, only a thinly disguised resentment of husbands. Angela recalls that "Hughie used to be all lost, really frightened when I got into a fight Avith a department store..." (27). As if in defiance of Hughie, Angela decides to steal something "just for the experience"; she wants to "try my hand at shoplifting" (26). When

a salesgirl wonders about her activities, Angela responds: "I'm trying my hand at

shoplifting" (26). In another store, Angela actually manages to slip a candle into her pocket

(is she trying to appropriate a phallic symbol?), but she is seen again and challenged. Rather than succumb to guilt or further accusations firom the salesgirl, Angela simply takes the candle from her pocket and repeats that she is "Just trying my hand at shoplifting" (28). It is difficult to know just what Jackson intended by the shoplifting attempts. Certainly, Angela is exploring what we today call an "alternative life style"; however, it is

unlikely Jackson intended a career in crime for her protagonist Rather, there is something innocent about Angela's activities; like a child, she sees a pretty object and reaches for it Her candor in responding honestly when questioned by the salesgirls is also characteristic of children who have not yet learned to dissemble. Angela's childlike characteristics are 202 certainly in keeping with her sense of becoming a "new creature," someone recently bom

(or reborn). In some respects, Angela's childlike behavior is similar to that of stroke victims or victims of severe head injuries who must, through a series of patterning exercises which take them back to the early stages of infancy, learn to walk and talk again. Does Angela see herself as a newborn, or more to the point, does Jackson see Angela as a woman newly bom? Yes. Just after Angela has christened herself and before she enters the house she will call her home, the woman she is leaving behind observes the new identity:

So Mrs. Angela Motorman walked slowly and decently up the walk to the fine old house with the sign in the window saying ROOMS. She was carrying her suitcase and her pocketbook and her fur stole, and she stopped for a minute to look the house over very carefully; a lady carmot be too wary of the company she may find herself among, a lady chooses her place of residence with caution. As she set her foot on the steps she put her shoulders back and took a deep breath: Mrs. Angela Motorman, who never walked the earth before. (10; my italics)

A few minutes later, when introducing herself to Mrs. Faun, Angela marvels at the fact that "in the history of the earth, no one has ever heard the sound of her name before. . . I am giving birth to myself’ (11). Jackson could not be more straightforward about her motives, but as if to reinforce the message one final time, just before the chapter ends Angela successfully steals a box of birth armouncements which proclaim: "I'm a girl. I'm a girl. I'm a girl" (29). We will never know what plans Jackson had for Angela Motorman or for her own life. Guy Davenport believes Angela's life wiU tum out to be one of a "deeper loneliness, but one more tolerable because it is at least on one's own terms and by one's own choices" (4). All we can be certain of is that with her last work, Shirley Jackson's intelligence and spirit did not fail her, as she feared they would, although her body did. Stanley Hyman spoke the truth when he wrote that through Jackson's work we gain insight into the life a "complex human being" who confronted the world "in many different roles and moods" 203

(Preface viii). In her work, Jackson tried to "express each aspect of herself as fully and purely as possible" (Hyman, Preface viii); she succeeded far better than she or her husband could have imagined at the time of her death. In many of her works, but especially in the works discussed in this study, Jackson wrote almost exclusively about her experiences as a woman, and those experiences included childbearing, childrearing, as weU as her intellectual and writing life, sides of Jackson that, because of societal and patriarchal prescriptions for women, were not always compatible. It should come as no surprise, then, that so many of Jackson's female protagonists are divided or split into more than one character and that, as a result of this doubling, the "situations of Jackson's short stories and novels are [often] rooted in aberrant female psychological experience" (Metcalf 56). Unfortunately, as

Metcalf also notes, these situations are "frequently read as deviant, rather than universal" (56), a misreading that has placed Jackson among vraters of supernatural and horror fiction, rather than among writers concerned with feminist themes. In Chapter 1,1 offered Alix Kate Shulman's definition of feminist writing as writing which "centers on what it is to be a woman in this culture, dramatizes the constraints on women under patriarchy" while at the same time it "examines the patriarchal institution" which enforces those constraints (72). One of the conditions of being female that Jackson deals with in her fiction is the effect of childhood sexual abuse on the lives of women. Hangsaman is her strongest indictment of the patriarchal institution, specifically the family, which encourages the use and abuse of female children for the gratification of adult desires.

devastating effects of emotional, and probably sexual, abuse at the hands of a controlling male. By definition, then, Jackson surely qualifies as a feminist writer.

Using the device of the double, Jackson also articulates the condition of many women in this culture by depicting the divided lives of her female characters: Natalie Waite, at first a passive and obedient daughter, must project her desire to act on her own behalf 204 onto Tony until she becomes strong enough to take charge of her own life. Eleanor Vance is another obedient daughter, a "good girl" who projects her repressed sexuality onto Theo, an independent woman who not only expresses her sexuality by behaving provocatively (as Eleanor secretly wishes to do), but who also, perhaps, shatters the patriarchal taboo against lesbiaitism, and in doing so, shatters the patriarchal taboo against women being subservient to or dependent upon men. In The Haunting of Hill House. Jackson also dramatizes the disabling effect of patriarchal control and enclosure upon the life of one woman and, in doing so, illuminates the situation of many women who suffer this same constraint upon their lives. Finally, in We Have Alwavs Lived in the Castle. Merricat Blackwood represents the clever, rebellious daughter who murders her parents, while her cloistered sister, Constance, does penance for her unraly sister's transgression by continuing to act the role of submissive servant to the patriarchy. In each of the three novels, Jackson projects her own anger and desire to rebel against the patriarchy onto Tony, Theo, and Merricat, while at the same time denying such unbecoming behavior in a female by creating the compliant Natalie, Eleanor, and Constance. In both The Haunting and We Have Alwavs Lived in the Castle, and to a lesser degree in Hangsaman. Jackson also "strongly suggests that as patriarchal institutions, the nuclear family is diseased" (Metcalf255):

In both works this sickness is symbolized through a house. Castle goes further than Haunting, however, in suggesting through the persona of Mary Katherine that we have 5U lived in not only the world of her home, but also in the world of her mind. We live in them still. In this world, we worship, idolize, and romanticize the institution of family, as we romanticize, idolize, and worship royalty. (Metcalf 255).

The "all" referred to in this passage must surely mean all women, which prompts me to offer another definition of femirtist writing which focuses on audience. Toward what segment of the reading population has the writer directed her message? More specifically, who did Jackson consider to be her intended audience, or as Rabinowitz prefers, her 205 "authorial audience," the "hypothetical audience the writer imagines" (21)? Because most critics who responded to her work were male, it has been assumed that she expected her audience to be primarily male. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the first place, as I have already pointed out, Jackson neither curried critical favor, nor did she disdain it whenever she believed the reader understood her intentions; the critic's (and also the

reader's) responsibility, according to Jackson, was "to know and understand, not to like or

dislike" (qtd. in Friedman 23). Who, then, did Shirley Jackson write for? The "widest possible audience," according to Hyman (Preface viii). Women, in particular, according to

my reading of her texts. "Texts are incomplete when we get them," according to Rabinowitz; they must be "put together according to the principles of the reader's interpretive community" (28). Women were the people Jackson wrote about and for, her community of readers, because "like most authors, she tends imaginatively to project the human condition through the condition of the sex which is her own" (Metcalf 58). Who

would recognize, could recognize (and understand) Jackson's "feminized Everymen" better

than another woman? To the majority of readers and critics, Shirley Jackson remains an enigma, although

Rabinowitz cautions against "blaming the text rather than the bias with which we approach it" (212). Jackson seldom talked about her work with friends, and she "consistently refused

to be interviewed, to explain, or promote her work in any fashion, believing that her books

would speak for her clearly over the years..." (Come Along With Me ix). I believe they

do. My focus in this study of Shirley Jackson's fiction has been primarily on the texts; however, it is impossible to determine a writer's impact on her times as well as on the future without an understanding of the writer, herself. In an attempt to connect the woman to the

text, I have relied heavily upon Oppenheimer's biography of Jackson because it is the only

source available at this time. As Metcalf laments, a "serious effort to reconstruct Jackson's psychological biography through her work has not yet been undertaken" (60), although it 206 should be. Jackson's drafts, diaries, journals, letters, even her shopping lists notes, await the scrutiny of a reader who is able to decipher the material without falling prey to the "easy readings," the "misinterpretations," and the "spurious biographical" (Metcalf 60-61) allusions that have plagued her reputation for so long. Certainly, a feminist critic should be "better able to piece together Jackson's life and art than a traditional critic" (Carpenter, 147), one more reason that her entire body of work deserves a critical restrospective. Shirley Jackson was more than just the housewife who wrote "The Lottery"; she was a woman and a writer who made important contributions to feminist literature. She was a woman and a writer who refused to give in to the cultural edicts about femininity or female intelligence that prevailed so strongly during her lifetime. Finally, she was a woman and a writer who took herself and the women who were her readers seriously when no one else did. Notes

Chapter I

1 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar consider "The Lottery" an example of "female sacrifice." Although they acknowledge that the title implies that "anyone, male or female, could be marked out for such a fate," they find it significant that the story is written by a woman about a woman who is "ceremonially slaughtered as the result of a lottery whose machinery is administered and justified by men" (No Man's Land 114).

2 Dorothy Canfield Fisher suffered a similar fate. Mary Anne Ferguson notes that in "The Bedquilt," Fisher "clearly elicits sympathy for Aunt Mehetabel," and in doing so,

"contributed to her dismissal by literary critics as a writer of "domestic fiction." Ferguson also reminds readers that the genre itself was "first scorned three-quarters of a century earlier by Nathaniel Hawthorne as the 'product of scribbling women'" f (Images of Women in Literature 340).

3 To distinguish between Jackson's unfinished novel, written as "Come Along With

Me" in my study, and a collection of short stories (one of which happens to be the unfinished novel) using the same title, I underline the title of the collection (i.e. Come Along With Mel.

207 208

Chapter n

1 Interestingly, the titles of both Hangsaman and The Catcher in the Rve are derived from Old English ballad stanzas. The first version, quoted by Friedman, reads:

Slack your rope, Hangsaman,0 slack it for a while I think I see my true love coming,Coming many a mile.

Friedman verifies that in one version of this ballad, the word "'father' is substituted for 'true love'; and perhaps that word might have been more appropriate in Jackson's case" (94). The Catcher in the Rve title derives from Holden's misunderstanding of the refrain stanza of Robert Bums' ballad-poem, "Coming Through the Rye," which is itself an alteration of an Old English ballad of the same name. The original reads:

Gin a body meet a body— Coming through the rye;

Gin a body kiss a body-

Need a body cry? Holden substitutes the word "catch" for "meet" (Salinger 173).

2 Virginia Woolf said the same thing fifty years earlier, in A Room of One's Own. when she wrote "... the values of women differ very often from the values. . . [of men] naturally this is so. Yet it is the masculine values that prevail" (92). 209

3 Although no record exists of Jackson's response to the eclipse of Hangsaman and Catcher's climb toward the sun, she must have wondered, and she must have suffered. J. D.

Salingerwas, from time to time, a guest in Jackson's Westport home, as were a number of other successful male writers such as Peter De Vries and Ralph Ellison (Oppenheimer 147.) What effect must this have had upon Jackson, who served cocktails and casseroles to Salinger, remaining in the background while Stanley and his English Department colleagues praised the brilliance o fThe Catcher in the Rye?

^ Ahce Miller defines Freud's drive theory as the explanation for neurosis which derives from any situation wherein a yotmg child's drive to satisfy infantile sexual desires is thwarted and repressed. She distinguishes the drive theory from Freud's original trauma theory of neurosis which was based on the repression of an actual physical or psychological trauma experienced by the child. MiUer embraces the latter theory because it assumes that what a child reveals about sexual abuse is fact not fantasy (114).

5 Stanley Hyman was well-known for his flirtations and affairs with Bennington college students. He had quite a reputation, according to Helen Feeley. "The minute you'd give him a couple of drinks, Stanley would be chasing girls" (qtd. in Oppenheimer 173.).

Although Jackson appeared to dismiss the incidents as harmless, she once "gave way completely in front of her three children," running into the street in her bathrobe. Her daughter, Joanne, "reeling in helpless horror and pity," managed to take control of the situation, got her mother back inside and up to bed, where she talked her down throughout the night (Oppenheimer 240). 210

6 Virginia Woolf, at the age of fifteen, developed a fictional double whom she called "Miss Jan" and who resembles Jackson's early Natalie character in that both personae provide their authors with the means for expressing emotions that might have been "difficult or dangerous. . . to express overtly" (De Salvo 238). De Salvo in her book, Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work, has documented the devastating effect of Woolfs childhood and adolescent trauma on her life (specifically the ending of it) and work.

7 Emily Hancock observes in The Girl Within that there is "buried at the core of women's identity" a "distinct and vital self first articulated in childhood, a root identity that gets cut off in the process of growing up female" (3). It is this "self-possessed child" that Natalie not only preserves but frees in Hangsaman: her struggle to identify herself as

Natalie, separate from Arnold and Charity, is the driving force of the novel, Natalie's

Bildungsromm.

8 For those who have difficulty imagining a diary entry, let alone a poem, addressed to the writer, I call attention to Adrienne Rich's "Dear Adrieime" dialogue:

Dear Adrieime: I'm calling you up tonight

as I might caU up a friend

as I might call up a ghost

to ask you what you intend to do with the rest of your life... She "signs" the poem "In sisterhood/ Adrienne" (Your Native Land. Your Life 88). 211

^ Emily Hancock ■writes of an "intermediate zone of childhood" which occurs "between the make-believe of preschool and the thrall of adolescence" when the eight-to-ten year old occupies... an interim space between fantasy and reality that fosters creative self­ ownership" fThe Girl Within 8). Natalie does not quite fit that pattern, perhaps due to the inadequacy of the model rather than the subject

10 For a lesbian reading of Shirley Jackson’s fiction, see Karen Jean Hall, "The Lesbian Politics of Transgression: Reading Shirley Jackson." Thesis, Ohio State

University, 1991.

11 Blume writes that the dreams of many incest and sexual abuse survivors are "horror-filled, terrifying. .. full of images of entrapment and violence" (98). They ate often concerned with blood. Natalie daydreams about murder and blood as she sits enclosed in her father's study during their tutorial (Hangsaman 15).

Chapter HI

1 It was not until the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century that anyone, male or female, could retire to rooms (called privacies) separate from the rest of the house in order to "integrate" thoughts and dreams (Witold 18). Eventually, men retreated to their

"studies" where serious work of the mind was contemplated and writing accomplished; women, if they had any "privacy" at all, found it in a sitting room, a place where they "sat," rather than studied or wrote. 212

2 Jane Austen also demonstrated a tendency to "discount sexual passion" in her

early works such asLove and Friendship. Her later novels also tend to praise the value of "quiet domestic bliss" (Figes 81). Austen, too, was concerned with rooms and houses and with the "impossibility of women escaping the conventions and categories" of patriarchal dominion ( Gilbert and Gubar Madwoman 113). Austen, according to Gilbert and Gubar,

admitted "the tenets and discomforts of the patriarchal roof," but had learned to "live beneath it" (121). Note, also, the names of two of her works, Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey, the latter "a gothic story as frightening as any told by Mrs. Radcliffe" (Figes 143).

3 See Charlotte Smith. Emmaline. The Orphan of the Castle (London: Oxford UP,

1971).

4 For a fictional treatment of Bertha Mason's early years as Antoinette Cosgray, and her subsequent marriage to Rochester, see Jean Ryss’s Wide Sargasso Sea. For a treatment of Jane Eyre and Antoinette Cosgray as doubles, see Elizabeth R. Baer, "The Sisterhood of

Jane Eyre and Antoinette Cosgray," in The Voyage In. eds. Abel, Hirsh, and Langland.

5 Virginia Woolf also wrote in "The Lady in the Looking Glass" that "a room... has its passions and rages and envies and sorrows coming over it and clouding it, like a human being" (A Haunted House and Other Stories 88).

6 There are other similarities worth noting between The Sundial and The Haunting of Hill House. Both novels employ the device of the phallic tower. In The Sundial, the tower is used as a possible form of punishment for its female characters. In The Haunting 213 of Hill House, the tower exerts an irresistible pull on its female protagonist; she is literally

seduced by it Both the Halloran mansion and Hill House were built by "wealthy, autocratic, domineering" men (Friedman 125); in both novels, the houses were built for a wife who dies early in the marriage; finally, even though both men who conceived the houses are dead, their patriarchal spirits still dominate the lives of the women who live there.

7 In male literature, the house is often personified as female. For example, at his

birth, David Copperfield emerges from one womb into another, the female parlor at Blunderstone. When he is driven from his beloved womb-home, David seeks shelter and nurturing in the boat-house, where he feels snug and safe, "like an embryo in a womb"

(Dickens 115). Bachelard quotes a passage from Henri Bosco'sMalicroix, in which he describes the house as the "human being in whom I sought shelter. .. The house clung close to me, like a she-wolf, and at times, I could smell her odor penetrating maternally to

my very heart. That night she was really my mother" (45). In fact, almost all of Bachelard's discussion of the house and its metaphors has to do with the male's longing to recapture the

past, to return to intimacy with the nurturing, protective mother.

8 The significance of the stone lions is not quite apparent in the novel. Although Jackson was undoubtedly fond of the pair that sits outside the New York Public Library, I

assume their appearance here has another coimotation, or perhaps, several. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable suggests several possibilities; The chariot of Cybelle,

Mother Goddess of Phrygia and goddess of the mountains, was drawn by two lions. In

addition, "to meet a lion in one's path is to encounter a daunting obstacle" (649). Double this and it is easy to see why Eleanor was overwhelmed by her situation. Finally, a lion at 214 the feet of crusaders or martyrs signifies that they died for their cause. Perhaps it is too much to suggest that Eleanor is either a crusader or a martyr, yet she does defy her sister and go forth into the unknown, alone, believing that she is destined to meet Hill House, and she does, finally, pay with her life.

9 Although some of the inspiration for the house in The Haunting of Hill House can be found in Jackson's interest in the Gothic novel, she discovered her material through careful research into the field of psychic phenomena and an encounter with an actual house. In "Experience and Fiction," Jackson writes that before she began the novel, she happened "by chance to read a book about a group o f ... nineteenth century psychic researchers, who rented haimted house and recorded their impressions." (Come Along With Me 201) The idea excited her; she thought of it "so entirely" that "everything I saw turned to it" (201). At least one of the things she saw in New York City, outside the 125th Street station, was a "building so disagreeable that I could not stop looking at it," yet the structure seemed to "disappear" as soon as the train began to move. The building had burned in a” disastrous fire which killed nine people" (201). Most significant for Jackson was the fact that the building could be seen fromonly one angle. The fire had burned everything but one side, the rest was a floating shell. This kind of structural apparition had great appeal for Jackson, because, again, what one recognizes as real is always a matter of perspective.

10 Florence Rush devotes an entire chapter to "The Demon Nymphette" in her historical overview of the sexual abuse of children. Rush documents the appearance of the "carnal child"—the little girl-seductiess—in literature and art (and later TV and cinema) begiiming with the seventeenth century. Whether cherubic two-year olds or pubescent 215

Lolitas, these little girls are viewed as "little femmes fatales" by male pedophiles and the kiddie-pom industry (The Best Kept Secret: The Sexual Abuse of Children 128).

11 Horence Rush, in The Best-Kept Secret, offers a detailed discussion of this

"defense" in which she locates male justification for the incestuous abuse of young girls in the historical tradition of both the Christian and Judaic religions. See Chapters 2 and 3.

12 It is not surprising that the cult of the vampire flourished in Victorian England and in the United States during this time. The fascination with blood and blood-sucking phantoms, as well as the connection between blood loss and the loss of semen (masculine power) has been well-documented by Leonard Wolf in A Dream of Dracula: In Search of the Living Dead. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972). Vampires, including the greatest of them all, often referred to their victims as "little girls"; stories of vampires stealing children were also popular at this time. One must wonder about the coimection between fictionalized child-stealing episodes and the actual existence of child prostitution, the procurement and sale of young girls for sexual use and abuse by upper-class Victorian males.

13 Jamaica Kincaid's character in Lucy remembers "what my mother had said to me many times: for my whole life I should make sure the roof over my head was my own; such a thing was important, especially if you were a woman" (144). 216

Chapter IV

1 Metcalfs definition of the "feminized woman" is derived firom and further developed in Kathy Ferguson's The Feminist Case Against Bureaucracv (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1984).

2 In their discussion of "infection in the sentence" (the hidden but "crucial" tradition of madness in women’s writing), Gilbert and Gubar note that the classic symptoms of this tradition are claustrophobia, anorexia, and agoraphobia (The Madwoman in the Attic 56-58).

3 Woolf wrote of Charlotte Bronte that she admired her "genius" (A Room of One's Own 72) but was uneasy with her predilection for self-revelation. "She would," Woolf

wrote, "write of herself ('I love. . . I hate. .. I suffer') where she should write of her

characters" (Women and Writing 106).

4 Jackson also told Joanne that the two protagonists of We Have Always Lived in the Castle represented her daughters whom she, in turn, felt represented her own divided

personality. "The Constance part is me," Joanne told Judy Oppenheimer, and "the Merricat part is Sarah" (234). "Sarah was like an exorcist for Shirley," Joanne continues. .. She

had the powers Shirley had worked for-writing skills and magic" (235). Oppenheimer

writes that Jackson put her daughters into the book and "told them they were meant to stand for parts of herself' (235). If this is the case, whether Joaime is Constance or Sarah is

Merricat hardly matters; what is significant is that Jackson created and molded two daughters who seem to act out her irmer conflicts, and when this didn't work, recreated them as fictional characters in a novel. 217

5 Jackson and Stanley once went out of town for a week leaving Joanne and Sarah each with a different fiiend. Both women "immediately grabbed the little girl left with her, and dumped her into the bathtub to wash her hair" (Oppenheimer 159). Helen Feeley, one of the women, was sure their hair had never been combed. When Jackson returned, she was furious; she felt the women were trying to "show her up." After all, she must have reasoned, "[w]hat sort of mother lets her daughters' hair get in such a mess?" The answer, of course, is a "mother who is trying to do other work [write] at the same time she is raising children" (160). Jackson was defensive and guilty, caught in the conflict between her desire to write and her responsibilities as a mother.

6 Jackson's temper was evident from an early age. Her mother found her daughter's "fits of rage" unbecoming to a little girl and worried about her "headstrong" and

"unpredictable" behavior (Oppenheimer 15).

7 Jackson also had her talismans. Anyone "visiting the Hyman house could see the evidence at once. Shirley's magic collections, books, devices, amulets, memorabilia, were everywhere" (Oppenheimer 223).

8 For a more thorough history of women in the Catholic Church, see.Gerald Noel, The Anatomy of the Catholic Church: Roman Catholicism in an Age of Revolution (New

York: Doubleday, 1980).

9 Fire, symbolically, is "allied with the concept of superiority and control. . . an expression of spiritual energy." Fire is also a symbol of "transfiguration and regeneration" which can result in either the "purification or destruction" of evü forces (Cirlot 105). The 218 fire that almost ruins the Blackwood mansion does both, destroys and purifies. Menicat's act of sweeping Charles' pipe into the wastebasket can be seen as her way of gaining control over circumstances that have put her existence in jeopardy; the fire that results from Menicat’s recognition of Charles' carelessness or disregard for property is an expression of her "spiritual energy."

10 Metcalf, in her treatment of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, calls attention to the fact that women also "serve as torturers" as Merricat makes her way through the village on her enands (234). "In her guise as mother, woman is most fiightening In this position she has a modicum of power herself, and utilizes it against less powerful females" (235). Metcalf believes that in much of Jackson's fiction, "women can only share the perverse and competitive side of their unity with other women" (236). Certainly, with the arrival of a man on the scene, Constance gradually shifts her loyalty from Merricat to Charles. Whether she would have agreed to send her sister away from the house is a matter for speculation; what is evident is that when the two cease to work together, both suffer the consequences.

Chapter V

1 An interesting and revealing feature of Jackson's writing at this time is her refusal to capitalize. Perhaps she felt diminished by her condition, or, perhaps, this was her first attempt at using the word I to describe her experiences. 219

2 Throughout Private Demons, there are annoying discrepancies regarding dates and

names. Oppenheimer reports the name of Jackson's family physician as "Dr. Durand" (119); Jackson refers to him as "Dr. Oliver" (253). Both doctors prescribed tranquilizers

and anti-depressants for Jackson.

3 The physician treating the protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper prescribes a rest cure for what would now be diagnosed as post-partum depression; specifically he recorrunends that she refrain from writing. Gilman's own physician. Dr. Weir Mitchell, recommended the same treatment for her when she suffered a breakdown after the birth of

her daughter. All of Jackson's children had been bom when she wrote The Bird's Nest, but she has referred to the conclusion of a novel as the "worst time, when the baby has been sent out into the world..." (qtd. in Oppenheimer 243). Undoubtedly, some of the

depression and anxiety that seemed to follow the publications of several of her novels can be attributed to the "empty nest syndrome." What Jackson needed most at these times was to write; instead, she was told to "rest"

4 Geraldine often fotmd fault with Jackson's housekeeping and her appearance. Her response to Castle's excellent reviews was to ignore them and berate Jackson for an

unflattering photo she allowed to be published:

Why oh why do you allow the magazines to print such awfid pictures of you?. . . I am sure

your daughters at school are proud to show off your picture and say 'this is my mother.. .Tour children love you but they also want you to be worth looking at too. If you don't care what you look like or care about your appearance why don't you do something about it for your children's sake and your husband's? (qtd. in Oppenheimer 245-46) 220

5 Angela tries on several names before she decides on the one she keeps:

I thought of Laura, but Laura was my mother’s name. I didn’t want any more of Hughie and his names, and Bertha was my grandmother and who wants to be named Bertha, particularly after her grandmother? I thought of Muriel but that just soimds like someone who gets raped and robbed in an alley. .. I thought of Jean and Helen and Margaret, but I knew people called by aU those names... I thought of Gertrude and Goneril and I thought of Diana, which was dead wrong and Minerva, which was closer but siUy (Come Along

With Me 91 Angela wants to be herself; she wants a name that begins with the new life she has chosen, one that has no ties to the past. ’’Angela” may refer to the purity of a new beginning, but most likely it is simply a name that appealed to Jackson at the time. Motorman, however, is a surname she arrives at after riding the streetcar to her new address. Motorman also suggests that Angela is guiding her own destiny. Works Cited

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