Home as Prison: Shirley Jackson’s Writings

Diplomarbeit

Zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades eines Magister der Geisteswissenschaften

an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz

vorgelegt von Elizabeth LATTACHER, B.A.

am Zentrum für Inter-Amerikanische Studien Begutachterin: Ao. Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. phil. Roberta Maierhofer M.A.

Graz, 2019

8 Betreuerbestätigung

Hiermit bestätige ich, die vorliegende Abschlussarbeit betreut zu haben, und ich befürworte damit die Abgabe der von mir insgesamt benoteten Arbeit.

…………………………………………………………. Datum und Unterschrift des Betreuers

………………………………………………………….. (Name des Betreuers in Blockbuchstaben)

Annahme durch das Zentrum für Inter-Amerikanische Studien am: ………………………………………………. von: ……………………………………………….

9 Ehrenwörtliche Erklärung

Ich versichere hiermit, dass ich die vorliegende Arbeit selbstständig ohne fremde Hilfe verfast und keine anderen als die angegeben Quellen und Hilfsmittel benutzt habe.

Graz, am ______Unterschrift: ______

10 Kurzzusammenfassung

Shirley Jackson wird von vielen als Ikone der Schauerliteratur angesehen. Sie hat ihren ganz eigenen Stil von Schauerliteratur entwickelt und damit ihre Leser geschockt und in Terror versetzt. Neben der eben genannten Schauerliteratur hat sie auch eine fiktive Beschreibung ihres Lebens als junger Mutter im Buch ‚Life Among the Savages‘ verfasst. Diese Darstellung der kleinen Triumphe und großen Probleme des Elterndaseins wurde von Kritikern gefeiert. In dieser Arbeit werden neben dem Hintergrund von Shirley Jackson vor allem die literarischen Elemente ihrer Werke Spuk im Hill House, Wir haben schon immer im Schloss gelebt und Life Among the Savages näher beleuchtet. Das gewählte Leben in Gefangenschaft in ihrem eigenen Zuhause wird erklärt und die Rolle des Heims im Leben der weiblichen Charaktere wird genauer untersucht. Bekannte Schauerliteratur Schriftsteller werden verwendet um Jackson’s unterschiedliche Methoden zu veranschaulichen sowie Parallelen zwischen den dem Leben des Autors und den eingesperrten Charakteren gezogen. Mittragende Faktoren, die zur Gefangenschaft der Charaktere geführt haben werden genauestens analysiert. Abschließend werden die Leben der beliebtesten von Jackson’s Charakteren veranschaulicht und illustriert warum und wie sie in die Gefangenschaft ihres Heims gekommen sind.

11 Abstract

Shirley Jackson has been considered by many to be a master of gothic fiction. She used her own specific type of gothic fiction to instill shock and terror within her readers. Along with her gothic fiction, she wrote a fictionalized account of her time as a young mother in the book Life Among the Savages which was well received for its portrayal of the perils and triumphs of raising children. In this thesis, the background information and the literary elements of The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and Life Among the Savages will be explored. The means in which each character faces a life of captivity within their homes with be explained. This thesis will give an in-depth analysis of the role of the home in the lives the female characters in the literature of Shirley Jackson. Several well-known gothic authors’ will be used to illustrate the different methods Jackson used in her work. The thesis will also show the parallels between the life of the author and those imprisoned characters. Other important contributing factors to the captivity of the characters will be illustrated here. I will discuss the individual trials and tribulations of some of Jackson’s most beloved characters and also illustrate the “incarceration” of these characters within their homes.

12 Acknowledgments

Firstly , I would like to thank Ao.Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr.phil. Roberta Maierhofer, M.A, who was my mentor for this thesis. She supported me through what was an extremely and at times trying endeavor and I am very grateful she agreed to help me.

Thank you to my family, my parents Michael and Jeanmarie Leist, my sister Catherine and my brother-in-law Shawn for their love and support in all things. My grandparents, my aunts and uncles, and all of my equally brilliant cousins.

I am eternally grateful to the wonderful educators that inspired my drive to be the best teacher I could be myself. Thank you to Dr. Frances Spielhagen for seeing something in me, when at times I could not see it myself. Thank you to Mag. Sister Anna Kurz, who is not only a supportive boss, but also a wonderful friend. Thank you to my past and current students who have given me the gift and trust of being their teacher.

Finally, I would like to thank my husband Hannes. Thank you for your encouragement and love throughout this process and in all things. There are not enough words to say how grateful I am that you are in my life. Thank you to my darling son Liam-Johannes, who has shown me that being a mother is one of the best jobs a woman can have.

I would like to dedicate this thesis to the memory of my son Jack-Josef Lattacher and to the ever-bright spirit of my mother-in-law, Mag. Anna Lattacher, whose love of teaching and her family has helped me every day I worked on this thesis. Without Anni, I would not be where I am today.

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Table of Contents Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………8

1. Entrapment and Enclosures in Family Settings in the Gothic tradition……….11

1.1 Retelling the Gothic……………………………………………………………..11

1.2 The Familiar is Strange …………………………………………………………16

1.3 Shirley Jackson as a Specific Gothic Writer ……………………………………22

2. Contributing Factors of Captivity in Jackson’s novels…………………………..32

2.1 Women and Society …………………………………………………………….35

2.2 Agoraphobia and Mental Illness ………………………………………………..40

2.3 The Supernatural ………………………………………………………………..44

3. Life Before Capture ……………………………………………………………….47

3.1 Eleanor Vance …………………………………………………………………..48

3.2 Mary Katherine “Merricat” and Constance Blackwood ………………………..49

3.3 Shirley Jackson, “the housewife” ………………………………………………50

4. Life After Capture ………………………………………………………………...50

4.1 “Eleanor is the house.” …………………………………………………………50

4.2 Oh Constance, we are so happy.” ………………………………………………60

4.3 “Our house is old, and noisy, and full” ………………………………………...67

Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………………72

Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………………….78

14 Introduction

Shirley Jackson is an author that has for generations, captured the minds of all who have read her fiction. She has been emulated and exalted by writers since she first published on of her most famous pieces of fiction, The Lottery in 1948, and her popularity has grown again in the last year after an extremely popular and successful television mini-series has been created based on The Haunting of Hill House. When she was alive, she was a master story teller on both paper and in reality. She told stories about characters that were on the outside of their communities. The female characters in her books feel like they are real people because they go through real challenges, whether it be raising children or escaping an abusive family, but at the same time, the familiarity is changed into something strange and abnormal. Jackson was a master of using different elements of the Gothic genre and using them in her own specific way. Jackson also had a tendency to tell her own life story through her books and when going through each of her stories, it is easy to find pieces of her in almost everything she ever wrote. Her life experiences and her love for reading, helped her to weave stories using Gothic themes in more modern times. Her life was full of interesting characters, superstitions and heartbreak, much like a Gothic novel. This thesis will look at how the Gothic genre is present in her work and how even in her non-Gothic fiction, her writing style never changes. I hope to show how Shirley Jackson used a specific formula to show how characters can become trapped both in their own minds and within their homes, which normally is a place of safety.

While she is now widely celebrated, when she was in her prime, she was still looked down upon as simply a housewife with a hobby. Jackson’s life revolved around her family and her writing. Her life began with her aristocratic and controlling mother and then her both neglectful and influential husband and her four loving children. This thesis will explore how Jackson used the Gothic genre as well as her own style of writing to create fiction centered around the process of captivity for the female characters in her books. First, the origins and characteristics of the Gothic genre will be explored, and we will look at the background information on Jackson’s life. I will discuss how her own family history laid the foundation for her obsession with houses and look at the specific people and events that influenced her life, specifically her mother, grandmother and her husband Stanley Hyman. Houses played an integral role in the fiction she wrote. In each of her books, we could even consider that the homes become their own characters. Her family has a rich history in the designing and building of houses for the

8 wealthy. Many of the families in the stories she wrote live in homes very similar to the ones her ancestors built. Jackson’s family influenced almost everything she did in her life. Her mother would remain a constant source of pain for Jackson for almost the entirety of her life. Jackson’s relationship with her religious fanatic grandmother and her aristocratic, distant mother will also be discussed. Many of the characters that Jackson created, including the ones discussed in this thesis have negative feelings towards their own mother because of this. Looking at Jackson’s life is important because it tells us why and where she came up with the ideas for the books she wrote. Jackson herself eventually became a prisoner in her own home after a life of anxiety caught up with her. Jackson seems to have written herself into her characters to show how she felt that she was being held captive for various reasons.

In order to show how the female characters of Jackson’s novels become captives in their own homes, we must look at Jackson as a writer of Gothic fiction. First the origins of Gothic fiction will be briefly explained and then Jackson as a general writer of Gothic fiction will be discussed. Jackson used many different literary devices in her fiction that have been used since the “creation” of the Gothic genre in the late 1700’s. I will compare Jackson’s use of devices, such as the uncanny to other well-known pieces of fiction like, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman which was published in 1892. The supernatural, which is perhaps one of the most used themes in Gothic literature will be discussed as well along with examples of use of the supernatural in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Then Jackson’s specific kind of Gothic fiction will be explored. Themes like how she used humor mixed in with macabre subjects and most importantly, how the captivity of her characters was a slow process. Jackson used real life situations to highlight how “normal” can actually be terrifying and strange. In order to fully explain how Jackson used themes like family secrets in her books, I will also be using Beloved by Toni Morrison to aid in my analysis. Jackson’s specific writing formula, known as “garlic in fiction,” and why it worked so well for her will be discussed.

For theoretical work I will be using texts on the meaning of what a home is and also the entomology and explanation of different kinds of captivity. I will be using the well-known text A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, to show how a captive often will find themselves cooperating and even at some point sympathizing and accepting their captivity. This text will be used to show how captivity, even in a situation where a person is kidnapped can be a process of changing the opinions life of the captive. Even though this

9 text is not a Gothic novel, Jackson’s books can be read as captivity stories, there is no better American captivity narrative to use, to illustrate this point. I will also discuss the differences between the concept of the words “home” and “house,” using the text The Idea of Home: A Kind of Space by Mary Douglas to discuss the reasons why it is so important to distinguish between these two words in order to understand how Jackson’s characters become imprisoned in their homes. I will write about how Jackson used the homes in her books to create a new space for female characters to tell a story about their family histories and their current lives. There will be a summary of Jackson’s family history and her connection to house building. Both sides of her family will be discussed in order to show how Jackson used both the idea of a house and home as a way to entrap a female character. With her specific brand of Gothic fiction, Jackson used the home as a place to tell a story that was seen through the eyes of the female character, rather than seeing them just as a woman who is observing those around her. The female’s in Jackson’s books are emotional and often have negative and unlikable characteristics, which only make them more believable.

The novels and their backstories will be then introduced and so will the other contributing factors of captivity. For this thesis, three specific factors including the role of women, agoraphobia and the supernatural were chosen. Each of these other contributing factors will be explored with examples for each of the texts. I will be briefly discussing the lives the characters had before their captivity began in each home from each of the texts and how life outside was either a positive or negative experience for each of those characters. An in-depth analysis of each novel will be given and will point out the specific events and experiences of the characters that play a role in their slow captivity. For each novel, I will begin with the initial event that starts the process of imprisonment for the female characters. Using quotes and my own analysis, I will show how each character’s life changed and how they became complacent and accepting of their new lives as a prisoner in their own homes. I will illustrate how the captivity of these character is not a quick process, but rather a slow one and after the victims have accepted their captivity, why this can cause fear in the reader. All the characters accept their new lives at a massive cost. Jackson’s own personal experiences while writing each book, and how what she was experiencing in her private life made its way into each other chosen novels. In conclusion I will write about the last years of Jackson’s life and how she managed to contribute to her own self imprisonment and early demise. I will summarize my findings through my analysis of each text and talk about my own personal reasons for writing this thesis.

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1. Entrapments and Enclosures in Family Settings in the Gothic Tradition

There are no prisons in the fiction of Shirley Jackson, there are only houses. Houses themselves are not usually looked as malicious entities. They are defined are mere shelters for people to find some protection from the outside elements. Jackson’s houses are much more than just a place where a family lives or where a family history can be told. Each of the houses in her stories become their own characters. They often become members of the family that they are housing and, in some cases, even interact with their inhabitants. Jackson is not the first writer to use houses in this particular manner. Entrapment is a motif that has been used since the creation of the Gothic genre and is used by Jackson is several of her novels. The house itself is the source of enclosure of the character. The home becomes the prison that the character does not actually want to leave. The entrapment of the female characters comes from many different places. Some of the women are heavily influenced by society and by their family’s demands. Other characters become captive by their own minds through mental illness (Entrapment, 2019).

1.1 Retelling the Gothic

Shirley Jackson is most known for her specific style of Gothic fiction. She took the well-known genre and used it to create stories about families and specifically women who have singular experiences with several different Gothic characteristics. Each of her character’s are personality wise very different, but almost all of them are the same in that they have interactions with houses that become their own characters. Before looking at the specificity of Jackson’s Gothic fiction, it is important to look at where the Gothic genre comes from. The Gothic literary genre comes from several different literary styles and elements used together in a certain way to elicit a specific response from the reader. Gothic fiction is associated with creating a feeling of terror, dread and even foreboding within the reader by using elements like the macabre, melodrama, insanity and suspense. The genre is founded upon the late 18th centuries obsession with the Medieval time period. Art, music, architecture and eventually literature were all heavily influenced by the past, specifically a romantic view upon the world. Superstition, the supernatural and a focus on architecture and art were heavily prevalent during this time

11 (Swansen, 2016). The first accepted example of Gothic fiction is The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. Walpole wrote the book using his home, a castle he built in the Gothic style called Strawberry Hill House and his obsession with the Medieval time period. The story is about a family that is plagued with untimely deaths and misfortune. The patriarch, Manfred is a lord over a castle that has been named in a prophecy. This prophecy states that the castle will eventually fall under other ownership, which frightens Manfred terribly. Through a series of melodramatic and suspenseful events, Manfred eventually becomes the villain of the novel after his obsession with ownership of his home causes him to ruin his own family, even murdering his own daughter. The book is infused with several typical elements of Gothic fiction. The imposing castle is filled with secrets, both about the true nature of its inhabitants and the house itself contains secret passageways and twists and turns, there are noises that no one can explain and the air of the supernatural constantly makes it seem that the living people are not truly alone (Walpole, 1791).

While Horace Walpole is considered the first author to create a Gothic novel, Ann Radcliffe should be seen an equally important for the genre. Radcliff who was an English writer as well, was an anomaly for her time in that she made a career as a writer and was widely considered to be a good writer at that. Like Jackson, Radcliffe was born into a wealthy family and married another member of the literary world, William Radcliff who was a journalist and supported her writing as an occupation. Radcliff’s style of Gothic is a mixture of romanticism and horror. Ann Radcliffe also used an element of fantasy in her books. The most famous of her novels is The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Like Walpole’s Otranto, Radcliffe’s novel focuses on a castle that is filled with secrets and aptly named mysteries. The main character Emily St. Auburn is an orphan who is sent to live with her late father’s sister and her husband in their castle which is situated in France on sprawling grounds. Emily was well received by readers because she was steadfast in her morals and was virtuous. She is also frightened by the unexplained happenings inside the castle and because of her dramatic reactions to these events, such as Emily believing that she hears ghosts moving through the walls of the castle. Like Jackson, Radcliffe formulated her own type of literary device, which is now referred to as “supernatural explained.” (Forysch, 2006). Radcliffe would have a seemingly frightening and supernatural event take place like Emily hearing ghosts and then, towards the end of the story, a character and in this particular case a servant in the castle Ludovico, explains to Emily that there are actually secret passage ways in the castle that were built by pirates and the sounds she

12 hears is merely wind and the house breathing. Jackson differs from Radcliffe in the respect that she did not focus on romantic elements in her stories but rather the experiences of the female characters and their own takes on what was happening in the story. Without Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliff, writers like Jackson would never have had the basis for her to create her own type of Gothic literature.

The genre has withstood the test of time because author’s have been able to translate it into modern times. One of the most prevalent characteristics of Gothic fiction is a focus on the setting of a story. Perhaps no other writer of this genre put as much detail into the setting as Jackson did. Shirley Jackson did just that by using her own kind of female American Gothic to tell her stories. Jackson led an unusual life for a woman of her time. While she was undoubtedly a gifted writer, she was completely devoted to her children and to her husband Stanley Hyman, a famous literary figure in his own right. And while she made it a point to make both parts of her life work simultaneously, Jackson did not grow up a happy young woman. If her life was written as one long story, it would even be considered Gothic fiction. She grew up in many massive, ornate homes, with distant parents, and insane family members. Jackson consistently tried to create homes for her family that would give them the acceptance and safety she never felt as a child. She dabbled in the occult and claimed that she was a witch. She was melodramatic and often exaggerated events to the point of unbelievability. She fell in love with a rakish young writer, who loved her but treated her badly and, she would eventually find herself trapped inside of her own home just as her most famous characters eventually found themselves. Jackson did not need to look far for inspiration for her stories, her family had enough history and strangeness about them that they provided her with endless material. Perhaps the most prevalent theme to Jackson’s work is her attention to detail in the setting of her literature. More specifically she put an immense amount of detail in her texts about what the houses of the characters looked like (Franklin, 2016).

To understand why Shirley Jackson had such an obsession with houses, homes and family sagas one doesn’t need to look farther than her family tree. The best way to come to an understanding of Jackson’s continuing theme of houses and the homes that they do or do not become is to look at the members of both her maternal and paternal sides. Jackson’s maternal great-great-grandfather was the prestigious Samuel C. Bugbee, and one the first preeminent architects of San Francisco. Samuel Bugbee and his son Charles Bugbee (Jackson’s great-grand uncle) would open an architectural firm for the upper-class citizens of the ever-expanding Bay

13 Area and would design and build mansions and villas for the most- wealthy people of the time including railroad tycoons Charles Crocker and Leland Stanford. These homes were built in the area known as Nob Hill. Three hundred and seventy-six feet above sea level, Nob Hill was removed from the city noise and was a spot for the wealthiest citizens to showcase their positions in society with huge imposing mega-mansions. Eventually, there was a cable-car installed at the bottom of the hill so that the resident would no longer have to use horse and cart to reach their homes (‘‘Nob Hill: A Touch of Class,’’ n.d.). In the 1870’s when, Leland Stanford’s home was finally completed it was built almost entirely out of granite and had fifty rooms all containing extremely expensive and gauche furniture. But behind its grand front door, the Stanford family would not stay very long in their granite mansion after the death of their teenage son. While still under their ownership, the room where their son had slept was kept in the exact same condition it had been when he was alive up until the house was destroyed along with all the other Nob Hill mansions in the infamous earthquake of 1906. Her grandfather’s success however would not last forever. Samuel Bugbee unexpectedly died in September of 1877 and in the following year all four of his sons would follow him to the grave in strange ways. Charles, his oldest son would die while walking in the street, his son Sumner, Jackson’s great-grandfather died on a train in New York, his brother John had a stroke in the middle of a political speech in Alaska (Franklin, 2016).

The house she ended up basing Hill House on was called the Gray House. It is not actually known if one of her ancestors had built the home but as fate would have it a photograph of the house was amongst her mother’s possessions. It was one of those “big old California gingerbread houses” that she believed had a specific kind of disease and decay (Franklin, 2016). The Gray House was bought by the Barber family in 1892. The house was big and beautiful but like most of the houses her family name was connected to, had a tragic story. The Barber family faced early deaths and one of their daughters was institutionalized and later killed herself. It is easy to see where most of the inspiration came for the wealthy aristocratic families in Shirley Jackson’s stories came from. It seems like she was trying to convey that even the biggest, most beautiful houses can contain pain, horror and tragedy (Franklin, 2016).

Shirley Jackson had two imposing matriarchs in her family that both shaped and inspired both her own and several of her character’s home life. Her grandmother Evangeline “Mimi” Field Bugbee, was both an interesting and strange woman, after her husband’s death she would go

14 live with Shirley and her family in a house her husband had designed for them. She became a Christian Scientist during her marriage to perhaps combat her issues with her husband’s philandering. The Christian Science movement was founded in 1879 by Mary Baker Eddy, its main tenants focus on using prayer as a means of spiritual healing, God as a loving omnipotent being and that the events in life both positive and negative are a result not of God’s creation but that of the human (‘‘Christian Science,’’ n.d.). Along with this belief in faith healing, Mimi also was a follower of the spiritualism movement and often used Ouija boards and took part in séances. Jackson witnessed her grandmother’s belief first hand when her brother broke his arm and her grandmother and mother spent the entire day praying over him to repair the break (Franklin, 2016).

Along with her grandmother’s religious beliefs’, Jackson also had to contend with her mother’s endless need for perfection. Geraldine Jackson grew up as an aristocrat in the San Francisco area and was accustomed to both the rigid social structure and obsession with propriety for the time. She would control everything her children would do and was consistently reprimanding Shirley on everything from her appearance to how to raise her children in her home through telephone calls and letters. Jackson would complain most of her life about her mother’s overbearing nature and this showed in her literature. Several of the characters in Jackson’s stories have absent mothers. In both The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, both mothers have been killed off in the beginning of each story. Geraldine’s criticism of Shirley would continue well into Jackson’s later life, specifically about her appearance. After an unflattering picture of Jackson was printed in Time magazine, Geraldine berated her on her appearance and accused her of not caring about what she looked like. Jackson wrote a heat-breaking letter back to her mother defending her life choices and demanding that her mother treat her finally as an adult (Franklin, 2016).

Jackson’s love for writing began with poems and diary entries. She kept diaries for most of her life and often kept several at the same time. Her numerous diaries each help a specific purpose. One for day to day activities, one for perspective story ideas and others for various different purposes (Franklin, 2016). Her diaries, which have been preserved by her children, paint a picture of an emotional girl and eventual woman who was constantly looking to belong. She gives the impression that she very much felt trapped by the disappointment she created within her mother. At one point in her teen years she even dances around stating that she had attempted

15 suicide in some way. For many people suffering from depression, which it is clear Jackson battled with for most of her life, suicide seems to be a way to escape from the pain and loneliness they feel. This feeling of the need to escape to something better plays a heavy role in much of Jackson’s literature. Jackson’s first published novel was The Road Through the Wall, which was published in 1948 (Franklin, 2016). This story is about a small town with seemingly normal families. However, many of the town’s inhabitants harbour secrets such as murder and anti-Semitism. Jackson, whose parents did not want her to marry Stanley Hyman because he was Jewish, seem to make a quasi- appearance in this book by way of the prejudicial family. Jackson was supported by her husband to write as much as she could. However, Stanley could be overly critical of Jackson’s work and would sometimes put her down. He kept his career as a literary critic up until his death. It seems clear that though he supported and saw how talented his wife was, he was always jealous of her work. Jackson was desperately in love with Hyman until her death. She did not ever think of truly leaving Hyman even with his cheating and absence from the lives of their children. The publication of the short story The Lottery also in 1948 brought a huge amount of attention to Jackson. It was her first nationally published Gothic short story and several critics found it to be very well written. With the success of this short story, Jackson would go one to write several short stories and 6 full length stand-alone novels.

1.2 The Familiar is Strange

Why is Jackson considered to be a Gothic writer? Before going into specific traits of Jackson’s work, she needs to be looked at as a general Gothic writer. Each author of Gothic fiction uses it in his or her own style, however many pieces of literature in the genre use core elements to create the work. Jackson is in good company when it comes to other female Gothic writers. In order to show how Jackson used the literary elements of the genre in her own work, we can look to those other female writers to see how each of these elements can be and have been used in the past. Jackson, like many Gothic writers used the idea of “the uncanny” in her writing. The feeling or device called the uncanny was made famous by world renown Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freund and describes the act of something being familiar and mysterious or frightening at the same time (Freud, 1919). The uncanny has been and is still used in different kinds of literature in order to elicit a response from the reader, to instil a feeling that what is written on the page is perhaps not what it seems. (Hamilton, 2015) One of

16 the most famous Gothic texts, which was written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is The Yellow Wallpaper. Published in 1892, the text was first seen in a magazine much like Jackson’s early published pieces. Since its publication there have been several different interpretations of the piece of fiction, however it has overwhelmingly Gothic characteristics. At its core the story is about an unnamed female narrator who, like many of Jackson’s characters, moves into a new home with her husband and finds herself by the end of a story, a captive to a house and madness. The story begins when the narrator moves with her doctor husband John, into a colonial mansion for a summer. She immediately points out: “Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it.” (Gilman Perkins, 1892). This is the first instance of the uncanny being used within the text. We know little about the house other than it has been built in the colonial architectural style. Colonial architecture in this case, replaces the castles and abbeys often seen in other Gothic literature. Just as Jackson did in her novels, this text gives the reader a setting of a house. Other than the narrator’s strange feelings about it, there is nothing out of the ordinary about it. However, the author uses a specific tone to infer that something other than normal is going on. The narrator describes her husband and her brother as doctors. Obviously, everyone is aware of the profession of being a medical doctor. It is a widely held belief that doctors are supposed to treat people with illness and help them to become well again. This narrator however, has a feeling that her husband’s and her brother’s aims are not to treat her, but to appease her with useless treatments. John decides that the couple with use the top floor former nursery as their bedroom so that the narrator will get as much fresh air as possible. When the narrator enters the room, she is immediately struck by the “repellent, almost revolting: a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slowturning sunlight.” (Gilman Perkins, 1892). This is a very strange reaction to a room simply covered in wall paper, the reader is given the feeling that the wall paper itself is some sort of harbinger for the narrator because of its frightening description. Jackson uses a similar type of description of Hill House when she talks about both the grandeur and the decay of the house. At the climax of the story, the narrator has ripped all of the wall paper down as her astonished and horrified husband is locked out of the room. The narrator believes that since she has removed the wall paper, she will be free of the captive presence it held. When her husband finally enters the room, she is making slow circles around the bedroom, never stopping even after her husband faints. Like a few of the characters analysed in this thesis, the narrator is a woman living in a home with her family, but because of strange circumstances, the familiarity of the situation is changed into something stranger. What happens behind the front door, is something that Jackson asked her

17 readers to try and figure out for themselves. It is one of the reason’s Jackson’s books and The Yellow Wallpaper have withstood the tests of time. These stories make us question if our own lives are in fact as normal as they seem (Hamilton, 2015). It could be asked why the uncanny works is used in both of there writer’s fiction. While the answer is complicated, there is one overarching reason as to why the uncanny elicits the response from the reader it does in both The Yellow Wallpaper and its Jackson’s stories as well. Both authors use repetition in their work to reinforce the idea that there is something occurring that is strange and perhaps not based in reality (Hamilton, 2015). In Hill House, Eleanor often takes things that she sees and tries to convince herself that they are things that she has actually experienced. She tells the other guests that she owns a cup with stars painted on it. In her final decent into madness, Eleanor is told by Theo that the two of them can leave Hill House and go get her cup of stars. Eleanor must then tell Theo that, even though she has told the others about it, and she has been believing that she owned the cup herself, there was no cup (Jackson, 1959). Eleanor was in a diner before she came to the house and saw a little girl asking her mother for a “cup of stars.” (Jackson, 1959). Something as silly and innocuous as this cup may seem trivial at first, but because we have heard Eleanor think about the cup as hers the entire novel and then to freely admit that she doesn’t have one if truly frightening. We think we know that Eleanor is sick with a mental illness or is being tormented by the house, but we also learn that she is a manipulative person as well. In the Yellow Wallpaper, the wallpaper itself is referenced so many times in order for the reader to feel that it is not just wall covering but that the narrator is experiencing real fear of what is behind and in the wallpaper. It seems that she had begun to see her own image behind the wallpaper ad could not stand to see herself trapped. When she finally rips down the wallpaper, she doesn’t want to leave the room that she originally could not stand because she finally has reclaimed power over the room (Hamilton, 2015).

The presence of a supernatural being or feeling in Gothic literature is one of the genres most famous plot devices. The supernatural in the genre is often used to symbolize other things in the story and is the opposite of rationalism that was popular at the time that the “first” Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto. In order for the reader to believe that ghosts or vampires are real, they have to suspend their belief in reality. This belief in superstition and magic goes back to the Middle Ages when people actively believed in witchcraft and magic affecting their daily lives. Jackson used the supernatural in her books, but never outwardly showed the reader some sort of vampire or witch, whom are two often used supernatural beings in the genre. The

18 supernatural that Jackson uses in her own fiction is most often left up to the reader to decide whether it is actually occurring or if the characters are having some sort of shared delusion. Jackson was heavily influenced by her grandmother’s obsession with Christian Science and her interest in spiritualism. She grew up in a home that her grandmother believed that life is not truly reality, all things are thought into creation. The supernatural is used often in Gothic literature because people often fear what cannot be explained (Franklin, 2016). How Jackson used the supernatural in the three chosen novels for this thesis will be explored and explained later and in detail. However, it is important to look at how the supernatural was used by other female writers of Gothic fiction. In many cases the supernatural is used in an uncanny fashion within the genre. An appropriate example of using the supernatural along with the uncanny would be Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1823). Mary Shelley has an interesting connection to Jackson in that during their careers they were often dismissed and their work heavily criticised because of their sex. Shelley’s Frankenstein is of course one of the most well-known “monster” books of all time. The story has been made into countless films, TV shows and plays. The story itself is about a young doctor named Victor Frankenstein who creates a humanoid monster, made from the body parts and tissue of dead men. The story is told through a series of letters from Captain Robert Walton to his sister. Captain Walton is on an expedition at the North Pole and happens upon a weak and feeble Frankenstein who tells him his life’s story and how we created his monster. Victor recounts his tale of woe to the captain and talks about growing up with a wealthy family and studying not only the natural sciences but also the occult sciences. When Victor goes off to university after the death of his mother, whom he was extremely close to, he studies anatomy and wants to find a way to create life. He works endlessly on creating a creator made from the bodies of deceased males. With a massive strike of lightening, the creator is brought to life and is able to communicate with Victor even though he is a monstrous mix of several bodies. While the creation of the monster is science based in the novel, he is a creator of supernatural origins. Victor, after the death of his mother throws himself into studying and creating this new life in the absence of those who he has lost. It is a human response to feel immense grief after the death of a parent, all of this is familiar to the reader, however, this feeling of grief is changed into the desire to create a life and play god. After Victor eventually abandons the monster, the monster demands that Victor create him a mate because he is lonely. Even though he is an unnatural being, the monster is experiencing the same human emotions as Victor. Even though the story which is filled with typical Gothic genre elements, like melodrama and dramatic deaths, it ends with Victor dying alone and his creation going off on

19 his own to die. The monster, which was created by a human actually outlives his creator (Duncan, n.d.). The use of the monster in this story is to frighten the reader. The description of the monster:

“Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.” (Shelley, 1818)

The language here has been carefully chosen to elicit a specific response from the reader. Shelley wanted this book to: “curdle the blood and quicken the beatings of the heart.” (Thate & Davies, 2017). Even though the monster is created from the bodies of men, he is something else. Shelley’s use of contrasting descriptions is all a part of her tone. The reader can picture beautiful black hair and white teeth, but then they also have to imagine the horrible black line of a mouth on the monster. Tone is important in the use of the supernatural. Jackson uses this in The Haunting of Hill House when describing the house. As mentioned in this thesis, Jackson never explicitly shows any supernatural creators that cannot be argued as the character’s own damaged psyche. But she uses it for example when Eleanor Vance sees a ghostly family having a picnic. The family is not doing anything frightening or malicious to Eleanor, she is merely watching them have fun. The terror from this supernatural occurrence comes from the fact that Eleanor is just standing and watching these ghosts in the middle of the day and there is another person, Theo, is also watching something. It becomes evident that Theo is seeing something much more terrifying than Eleanor and begs her to run.

A family that is surrounded by secrets is often seen in Gothic literature. Shirley Jackson’s own family was a great source of material for her novels. The families that her ancestor’s built houses for and her own interesting family was a model for many of the strange and mysterious families in her stories. A family that is plagued by secrets is a common theme in Gothic literature. In Life Among the Savages, Jackson describes her family as a very typical 40’s / 50’s family unit. Her husband goes off to work every day, her children go to school and she does stereotypical “mother” work in the house. Savages is a fictionalized version of Jackson’s experiences raising her children in Vermont. The narrator lovingly describes her children and her life in the rural community. However, the nature of these stories is somewhat strange. Her son tells the story of a boy named Charles who is the worst behaved child in his class. He tells his parents that Charles disobeys his teacher and terrorizes his classmates. Much to the

20 narrator’s chagrin, she and her husband come to find out that her son is actually Charles. The narrator wants to believe that her son could never behave the way the imaginary Charles does but, must accept that her child is not perfect and is also an adept liar. While Jackson was a very devoted homemaker and was able to balance a writing career at the same time as raising her four children, her husband Stanley was having extra-marital affairs and Jackson had experienced anxiety and depression for most of her life. In We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the Blackwood family lives in an ornate mansion, they are successful and have a social stature that the other townspeople are envious of, but at the same time, their daughter is a homicidal child who is plotting to murder her entire family in order to have her sister all to herself.

Like Jackson, Toni Morrison used family secrets in her widely popular novel Beloved which was published in1987. Even though this book was written two decades after Jackson’s death, it follows the Gothic tradition of a family that is plagued by secrets and tragedy. It also contains supernatural elements and the uncanny (Tu, 2012). Morrison’s book is an amazing book in that it takes the experiences of slaves in America and uses their experiences in the Gothic tradition. In Beloved, Sethe, a slave in the post-civil war south is plagued by the memories of her life as an abused, enslaved young woman on a plantation. Sethe eventually has to make the horrific decision to either return with her three children to life on the plantation with their sadistic master Schoolteacher or kill her children to spare them. Sethe kills her daughter, called Beloved and must go on with her life after she is released from jail for fleeing the plantation and killing her daughter. The ghost of her daughter haunts Sethe as both an apparition and as a corporeal ghost that lives with Sethe in her house. With the appearance of her daughter in this form of a young woman, Sethe is constantly reminded of the murder of her daughter at her own hands. The one thing in Sethe’s life that she would want to keep a secret and to hide from the rest of the world appears in her home and the new form of Beloved demands all of Sethe’s attention and energy. Beloved’s presence is only banished from Sethe’s life after Sethe’s memories come up again and she remembers why she killed her daughter. This family that was already abused and enslaved as slaves, is held captive by their own deeds (Tu, 2012).

Through this general use of standard Gothic fiction literary devices, Jackson as well as other equally famous female writers were able to weave intricate and often times frightening, heart breaking stories. What is also interesting is that in each of these other novels, several of the character’s find themselves in some sort of captivity. The narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper

21 wants to get out of the room and the curious house for the entire novel and yet at the end, after she has ripped down the wallpaper, does not leave the nursery. She mindlessly rounds the room over and over thinking that she has somehow won against the monster that was living behind the walls (Hamilton, 2015). Victor Frankenstein attempted to run away from his creation and his failure, only find himself chasing after the monster at the North Pole. Victor dies alone with his sadness and failure. The creator drifts off on a large piece of ice, never to be seen again, telling the captain that it is better that he removes himself from the world rather than being a part of it (Shelley, 1818). Sethe in Beloved is not only a literally captive and slave, but also a captive to her own actions and memories. She is haunted by the murder of her daughter and then this sadness seems to manifest as a full-bodied apparition of Beloved who torments Sethe further (Morrison, 1987). All of these characters become as trapped as those discussed in this thesis.

1.3 Jackson as a Specific Gothic Writer

Shirley Jackson had a very specific formula for creating the method capturing her characters. The basis of this formula is always the house. She said that she used a method called “heaven-wall-gate” in order to arrange the stories in her novels. She describes this as:

“I find a wall surrounding some forbidding lovely, secret and in this wall a gate that cannot be passed.” (Franklin, 2016, p. 385)

This particular formula is so important to understanding Jackson’s style of writing because it deeply affects her characters. The houses in her novels are first and foremost family homes. Hill House, The Blackwood mansion and the house in Vermont where the Hyman family lived, are all built with the intention of a large family inhabiting it and using it in all the traditional ways. However, all three of these homes become a sort of jail for each of the female main characters. This is a theme that was used in several of Jackson’s other works like The Sundial and her first published novel The Road Through the Wall. The homes in Jackson’s stories made for a new place to tell stories. As opposed to other genre’s the homes in Gothic literature often are places where macabre and strange occurrences take place. This is true of Jackson’s work in several of her novels. Life among the Savages and We Have Always Lived in the Castle both take place in Vermont, while it is assumed that The Haunting of Hill House also takes place on

22 the East coast of the United States. It seems that Jackson, while taking inspiration from the houses her ancestors built in San Francisco, used her love for the east coast as a place that she could picture her characters living in because she did so herself. In Jackson’s houses secrets lie behind the walls and even charming old house like the one in Castle hide terrible people and events. All of the houses described in each of the stories are surrounded by gates. A gate could be used for two different purposes. To keep the people who live in the house from getting out, or to keep the people who do not live in the house from coming in. In Jackson’s books, this is usually ambiguous. By the end of all three books, the female characters are happy to keep the outside world out and focus on what is in the house.

It can be argued that specifically, Shirley Jackson was a writer of Female Gothic. The Female Gothic was defined by Ellen Moers as Gothic fiction that is written by a woman, is the story about a woman or a Gothic story written for women (Moers, 2004). Jackson’s stories focus on the plight of being a woman of the modern age. Several of her character’s struggle with a dichotomy that even women today experience. These female character’s struggle with the role society has places on them, wife, mother, care taker and the need to be free and independent of societal norms. Jackson herself experienced this while writing and taking care of her children. She wanted to be a good mother to her children and to take care of her husband, but at the same time she loved writing and enjoyed creating stories that were meant to shock. Jackson’s short stories and novels often contained controversial subject matter for the time. After the Lottery was published, several male and female readers and critics commented of the disturbing nature of the story and questioned her morals as a woman and mother. She was often dismissed because of her sex and was not taken seriously because she had children (Franklin, 2016). The female character’s in her novels often experience terrible and dramatic events such as murder, death of loved ones and verbal abuse. They have experiences with guilt, like Eleanor who feels like she let her mother die in the Haunting of Hill House and Constance who feels the need to care for her sister and uncle. Jackson in Life Among the Savages feels the pressure to make sure her children have a several course meals every night for dinner, even though none of them actually eat it. And while those characteristics seem unimportant, they are vital to the characters because it shows how human they are. Because the home is where the characters analysed in this thesis begin and end their journeys, the homes become a new place to tell a story. The stories told within the Female Gothic subgenre are told from the woman’s perspective. Their thoughts and feelings about being mothers and wives could be told without the influence of

23 men (Moers, 2004). For all three of these homes, the history of the houses is mentioned. These houses, which become homes when the families move into them, are described by the people who lived there. Each house is a place that contains a family narrative. The Hyman’s home in Vermont was passed down through many hands, starting with a wealthy doctor’s family and eventually making it the setting for Life Among the Savages. Hill House was built by an eccentric man who was obsessed with religious purity and kept his two daughters there to keep them away from the outside world. The Blackwood mansion was a place where the Blackwood family could showcase their wealth, while also separating themselves from the outside world.

When looking at the idea of what a house is and actually provides, it is important to realize that the concept of home and the word house are two very different things. We sometimes use them interchangeably, however, the two words could actually not be more different. A house according to Webster’s dictionary is “a shelter or refuge,” (“house”, n.d.) while a home is defined as “the social unit formed by a family living together.” (“home”, n.d.) When the phrase “I am going home” is used, it doesn’t ever have to necessarily mean that the speaker is going to a dwelling with four walls and roof. A house can be a mansion, or it can completely lack a barrier to nature and be a cave out in wilderness, as long as it provides some sort of shelter to the inhabitant it can be considered a house. Mary Douglas talks about this concept extensively in her article The Idea of a Home: A Kind of Space. She writes that there are certain activities that we have assigned to houses that change the dwelling from a shelter to a home with positive characteristics. She mentions that we differentiate the house that is also home from other buildings because homes serve as a place for certain activities that a family would participate in. For example, having a Christmas meal or learning to walk as an infant. It is hard to imagine these activities taking place in a building that was not designated as a house. For example, you would not expect to raise children or have a Thanksgiving meal in a train station or a school building (Douglas, 1991). While people often put emotional values on their home, it is not the dwelling itself that had participated in the memories that the inhabitant may have. The home is a place to contain the lives of the people living within it. You can put things in a house that you will need, for example several different types of food items and those items will be in your pantry or kitchen cabinets whenever you go to retrieve them. The house did not produce the items for you, it is merely the vessel that holds them for the family (Douglas, 1991). One could have happy memories of sitting in a warm living room with a roaring fire and a comfortable chair and it would be easy to associate that warm memory with the house itself, but it still is

24 just the inanimate object that contained the items that helped you to create that memory. Verlyn Klinkenborg writes that “Some people never find another after once leaving home. And, of course, some people never leave the one home they’ve always known.” (Klinkenborg, 2012) The house can be looked at as the vessel for the family unit that lived there. This the immense value we put on the home is an interesting dichotomy. When we are feeling sad or upset, we tend to long for the safety of a home to shield us from negative experiences, however when we view a house that was the scene of a negative experience during childhood, as an adult we can see that the house which held the home-life, is just another house on a street, or an apartment in a building. Just as a house can become a home, it can still remain just a dwelling due to the lack of a family unit or the positive activities we think should take place in a home. If there was no food in the pantry or no heat in the living room one could just as easily have an aversion to a particular dwelling and a house as a home could be a foreign concept. A house can take on the symbol of captivity easily by the experiences one has while inside of its walls. I have spoken about how a house can hold positive experiences for those who lived in it. Now I will discuss how these homes can be changed into prisons by the experiences people have outside of the home.

The captivity process in Jackson’s novels can sometimes read like a captivity narrative. In several of Jackson’s works, the female characters find themselves living in a house that somehow has made them a prisoner. There is no specific physical being that puts them in chains or locks them away in a cage, but they are unable to leave the dwelling because of forces either within the home or outside of it. Before looking at the specific case of each home and its corresponding characters, it is first important to look at captivity as a concept itself and see how it has been used in literature previously. Webster’s Dictionary gives several definitions of the word captive including: “held under control of another but having the appearance of independence” and “one taken and held usually in confinement.” In both of these definitions it is alluded to that there is a human being that is doing the actual imprisoning and most often times it is a human being taking ownership over another human being. Thinking of the word captivity, one wouldn’t immediately think of a house as a place of imprisonment. Captivity often brings about a picture of an animal or a person locked away in a cage, or perhaps a slave chained up by their master. Benjamin Allen says in the introduction to the book Captivity, Past and Present:

25 “Prison and confinement do not always require cages of impenetrable steel and concrete patrolled by uniformed agents of the state, although complexes of this nature incarcerate the largest numbers of modern captives. Historical and more recent examples indicate that culture and geography can also serve to confine both psychologically and spatially. Evidence also suggests that, far from static, the process of captivity is dynamic.” (Allen & Messara, 2010, xv)

This quote supports the idea that the idea or concept of captivity is no so easily defined. Usually, when one thinks about the word captivity or imprisonment, an actual detention center or kidnapping situation comes to mind. A person may be abducted forcefully, but during the course of the ordeal s/he may find “captivity” more agreeable than what once was perceived as freedom. It is important to mention that this phenomenon is now a psychological term known as transference and culturally known as Stockholm Syndrome. Transference is the action of one person taking past experiences of another person, perhaps a parent or someone who has had a large impact on them and then putting the feelings or emotions they had for them onto another person. For example, if a person has a negative relationship on with their father, they may treat other father figures with distain (Vollmer, 2010). The phrase Stockholm Syndrome is often used in our modern times to describe any situation where one or more people sympathize with another person who may or may not be trying to control them. It was created after an incident in Stockholm in 1973, when four bank employees were taken hostage by Jan- Erik Olsson, a young convict. What should have been a quickly handled hostage situation turned into a six-day ordeal in which Olsson made several demands, but also won over his own captives. The bank employees ended up supporting Olsson’s demands and began telling police that they were more afraid of them than the man that had taken them at gunpoint. The term is used so much in modern day language that most would believe they know the “textbook” definition of the phrase. In actuality, there needs to be three specific actions taking place in order for the situation to actually be transference. The first is that the captives need to develop negative feelings towards authority figures, next the captives must begin to feel positive emotions (such as sympathy) towards their captor and finally, the captor must have positive feelings towards the captives. While there are many factors for each of the novels that will be discussed pertaining to the captivity of the female characters, in certain situations we can see that transference is taking place (Fuselier Ph.D, pp. 22-4).

The texts of Shirley Jackson often read as an account of the captivity of the character’s because we are shown through the eyes of the narrators how they become victims to the homes and

26 situations they find themselves in. This type of writing is similar to the genre of captivity narratives. The captivity narrative has been around for hundreds of years. Typically, these stories of human captivity follow a specific pattern, especially those based on the experiences of women in pre-revolution America. These American captivity narratives are usually autobiographical accounts of women being taken captive by Native American tribes through violence. These narratives go on to regale the reader of the plight of these women and their fight for survival amongst the “uncivilized” natives. The most famous of these American captivity narratives is perhaps, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson written by Mary Rowlandson herself published in 1682. Rowlandson, a white Puritan, mother and wife, is captured in 1675 along with her children when the plantation they live on is attacked by the Wampanoag Native Americans. The reasoning for Rowlandson to write the account comes back to her Puritan faith. Puritans believed that one needed to make a covenant with God and follow the bible closely. They also believed that hardships were all a part of God’s plan and that their faith would be tested and the reward for keeping the faith was God’s favor (Burnham, 1996). After the attack her older two children are taken away by another group while her youngest, Sarah is wounded and dies early on in their captivity. Rowlandson and her two living children were sold to different natives and she sees that they are being treated like objects rather than people. She equates this with the savagery of the Natives and speaks of them as if they were animals rather than people. She was made to accompany the Natives on their quest to flee from the English army (Rowlandson, 1682).

Throughout the account, Mary remains in the thought that while she can sometimes understand and even feel grateful towards the Native Americans who have taken her captive, she is superior to them because she is white and a Puritan Christian. She often contradicts herself in the wording that she uses, she describes the natives as monsters and blood thirsty, but also mentions that they see her discomfort and bring her nourishment. Her style of speech changes slightly throughout the novel in her description of the actions of the Natives (Scarbrough, 2011). When she describes the initial kidnapping, she uses vivid language, and by the end of the story, she no longer uses these fantastical descriptors. There is no true moment of Rowlandson ever accepting her capture it seems she just adapts enough to help herself survive. She also always relates these moments of strength to her faith in God, not her own will to live. Rowlandson also has a few brief interactions with other white captives and even with her own son. She never gives up the hope that she will be set free and will re-join her husband back in Massachusetts. Because she is able to keep her faith through the entire ordeal, she could write

27 her account and could be used as an example of what a good God-fearing woman should be like in the face of adversity. She eventually is returned back to her home and with her husband, moves to Boston with their two older children (Scarbrough, 2011).

Looking at the works of Shirley Jackson we can see how these three novels could be looked at as a sort of combination captivity narrative and Gothic novel. However, one of the main differences between Jackson’s captives and those in other narratives is that there is no return for the characters in Jackson’s books. These women are never returned back to their lives before they were taken prisoner. Looking at text The Haunting of Hill House, one could see how this definition could apply to the main character Eleanor Vance. Eleanor is desperate to leave her old life behind after the death of her mother. She sets out for the first bout of independence she has ever had, only to arrive at Hill House and almost immediately become a prisoner to its powerful thrall. It is important to point out that while the homes in each of the aforementioned texts become prisons, they obviously do not serve the same purpose as a traditional prison. The characters are not being punished for any broken law, they are imprisoned by the need for a feeling of belonging or because they have given up on a life outside of the four walls they have chosen to live within.

We can see that this is evident in the three, original works of fiction discussed here. The houses in Hill House, We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Life Among the Savages are all imposing structures surrounded by fences. From the biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, by Ruth Franklin, Jackson meticulously researched and planned out what each of the houses in the four novels analysed here would look like, and she goes onto describe them in great detail. All three are much like that of the great Nob Hill mansions that Jackson’s ancestors built with imposing Victorian architecture and all of them are surrounded by fences that are designed to keep the outside world away. The only home that is not an amalgamation of many houses is the house in Life Among the Savages, which is based on the home the Jackson lived in with her young family in Bennington, Vermont. In each of these homes she creates a Gothic influenced captivity narrative that does not have a resolution that seems logical to the reader. Each of the characters discussed in this thesis is a prisoner in the houses that they enter or live in, with the exception of The Haunting of Hill House, all the women who become captives have interactions with other characters that manipulate them into staying. In We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Merricat Blackwood uses her sister’s love as a weapon in order to keep Constance with her at all times. Jackson’s own husband, who remains nameless in Life

28 Among the Savages, leaves at a moment notice to go have time with his friends, leaving her alone with three small children in a house in the wilderness (Jackson, 1953).

The main questions this thesis asks are: how do the female characters become captives in their own homes and what are the events that led up to their capture? While each story is very different, they all contain a few of the same elements. Each woman has either a contentious relationship with their mother, or their mother is dead at the beginning of the story. We know from Jackson’s life story that she had a life long struggle with the relationship with her own mother and it seems that it touched very many of her stories. Because of these absent mothers many of the characters are looking for a way to create a home for themselves that they have control over. As stated previously, the people who live within a house with you, will often either create or destroy the image of what a home should look like and because of this, the characters try to transfer their own experiences on the houses in the novels. Another theme that is always present but presented in different fashions is that each of these women will become imprisoned in their home, often by their own psyche, but also because of other circumstances. There are specific moments for each woman where they begin to lose their grasp on the freedom of the outside world and come to accept that living within a home and having little to no contact with the outside world is a better option for them. This process of captivity is different for each character. Some experience a moment of fear or possibly a supernatural influence that frightens them into staying within the confines of their homes. For others, their captivity is a slow process over time, done through grooming by another person, often times another female family member. The process in each of these books is not immediate. The process is slow and specific to each of the characters. The time it takes for the character to realize that they would rather remain inside then be part the outside world is what makes their descent into captivity all the more frightening for the reader to become aware of. For all the characters their new lives as captives in their homes become a new type of normal for them. Even though Eleanor Vance knows that Hill House is dangerous, and the rest of the house’s guests are warning her that she is becoming too attached to the house, she accepts that she belongs there and that the house needs her for some purpose. She decides that even though the most likely supernatural events that are occurring around her are not in the least bit normal, she is accepting them as a part of her new reality. This slow change of Eleanor seems much faster because she is so unstable at the beginning of the story, but in fact she is groomed either by her own mental state or the house’s evilness and is basically watching herself become a victim.

29

Constance Blackwood in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, is manipulated by her sister and Charles Blackwood for almost the entirety of the novel. In the beginning of the story, she is a somewhat normal young woman, taking care of her remain family members. She still has semi- regular contact with non-family members and wants to eventually re-join the outside world. Through the efforts of her sister, she is never able to make the transition back to the real world. Merricat starts a fire in the home and Constance suffers from some sort of mental breakdown. Constance accepts that she is an outsider and will remain so for the rest of her life. Constance had been controlled by her sister’s actions since before the events of the novel when her sister murdered their family. Jackson herself finds that both her desire to be a perfect mother and societies demands make her believe that she is better off inside her house rather than trying to navigate the outside world with her four children. By the end of the novel, she realizes that even though several negative experiences have occurred in the house and she is more often than not alone, she wants to be in her home. The real Shirley Jackson began to hide herself away from the world because she felt like she was misunderstood and was overwhelmed by her popularity.

One could ask, why are these stories so frightening? This is not an easy question to answer. On the surface Hill House could be considered a ghost story because of the banging on walls and words painted in what could be blood. Any of the supernatural occurrences in the book could be frightening for the reader. What is shocking and tarrying most of all however, is the fact that Eleanor while strange, is a normal woman. When her mother dies, she could have gone anywhere she wanted and experienced life for the first time. Instead, she goes from one imprisoned life to another when she makes the decision to go to Hill House. The reader immediately gets a foreboding feeling that something is going to go terribly wrong for Eleanor the moment she gets in the car. Constance and Merricat Blackwood of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, were at some point two “normal” girls. Constance was just another member of her family when her sister made the choice to murder their remaining family members by poisoning them. Even though Constance knows that Merricat was the murderer, she remains loyal to her sister and goes to trial. Constance is a sympathetic character because it is implied that something horrible happened to her while she was on trial. She is a frightened and anxious woman when she returns back home to the mansion and is helpless to her sister’s scheming.

30 The reader anticipates that something terrible will happen to her because it almost feels that she is too good, when so many of the other characters show undesirable character traits.

Jackson herself would go onto coin her own literary formula for making a good, Gothic story. In order to write an interesting story that would keep her readers focused on the characters she used what she called “garlic in fiction.” (Franklin, 2016) She meant that the writer would have to think carefully about where to use plot devices and dialogue in order to not take away from the story. She compared the use of symbols and imagery in fiction to cooking with garlic. Too much garlic could spoil the meal, so the writer needs to carefully think out and plan where to place the “garlic” in the story. Before writing, Jackson would already assign the symbols that she wanted each character to have and would use them again throughout the story after they were initially introduced. She also thought of the words that would be used to describe the character or what words the characters would use. She was very careful to choose words that would make sense for the specific character and to once again repeat using the word work as much as necessary. Deviating from a romantical type writing style she told students and other attendees at her lectures that they should not take “side trips into unnecessary spots of beauty.” (Franklin, 2016) It was Jackson’s belief that the writer should do most of the “heavy lifting” for the reader. It was the writer’s job to grab attention immediately and use their words wisely to keep their hooks in the reader. This is nowhere more prevalent than the opening chapter of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Jackson begins the book with an introduction of Merricat Blackwood that is strange and alarming:

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 born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers 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 phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead (Jackson, 1962, p.1).

Right away the reader is introduced to this teenager, whom without reading further seems unhinged in some manner. We don’t know if this book will about a werewolf, or simply a book about an outcast girl. Jackson wanted to be able to show the reader that her characters were actually living in her books rather than performing a function for the story. The focus of her stories was not focused on minute details but rather on the whole picture. She used a chair for an example once. She said that rather than describing the details of what the chair looks like, have the chair serve some function for the character. Have the character use it as a means to

31 support themselves after bad news is revealed. Jackson also had a specific way of working with dialogue. She liked her characters to have a certain repetition to their speech. Most people use certain phrases or speak in a specific manner to where they grew up or how they grew up. Jackson made it clear that characters in a story should speak the way normal people speak, but what they say should serve a purpose, not be flowery prose just for the sake on the page (Franklin, 2016). She often used humor along with the macabre. In Hill House, the character Theo often cracks jokes about the house and makes fun of Eleanor. In Castle, Uncle Julian shouts at Charles, calling him the wrong name. At first it seems that Julian is doing it because he is senile, but it becomes apparent that he is doing it to bate Charles into an argument to make him leave the house. Perhaps the funniest book Jackson wrote, Savages is filled with hilarious stories of her children. Her youngest daughter has a wild imagination and often refers to herself at different names throughout the novel. Here again we see Jackson putting herself within the story, she too as a young girl would refer to herself with different names. Inserting herself into her stories was also a large part of how Jackson set herself apart from other Gothic writers. Her experiences growing up and also her interest in the occult made for first-hand experience for her characters. She liked to research her topics intensely before she wrote, which made for more interesting stories (Jackson, 1953).

2. Contributing factors of captivity in Jackson’s novels

Life Among the Savages, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, were written at three distinctive periods in Jackson’s life and are three very different books. While writing these three books, Jackson was going through major changes in her family. After an analysis of each novel, it is easy to find Shirley Jackson in each of these stories. Life Among the Savages, is one of two fictionalized autobiographies that Jackson wrote. Published in 1953, it tells the story of a young family navigating life in rural Vermont. The book differs greatly from Jackson’s other works for obvious reason. Immediately, the reader can see that this book will not have the typical Gothic features of macabre and terror. While the house that family moves into is old and imposing, Jackson’s favorite kind of house, it is a place of warmth and safety. This was not Jackson’s practiced genre and the book could have possibly been a disaster. However, the writing is just as practiced and nuanced as her other Gothic fiction and was well received by literary critics as well (Franklin, 2016). The original drafts were actually much more factual than the final product. As the mother in the book, Jackson is much more even

32 keeled and anecdotal. In reality, Jackson was beginning to experience real bouts of anxiety in her life. Her experiences in the book at much more positive and she regards him as a lovable idiot. We know from Jackson’s diaries and her letters to friends and even Stanley her husband, that they had a turbulent marriage at times and were often at odds with his choices. Jackson does manage to insert a quirky chapter at the end of the book about a haunting within the home, it almost seems that she could not help herself. The stories within the novel were originally written as short stories that had been submitted to popular women’s magazines. The stories themselves were very well received by female readers and what’s more, Jackson’s mother, who she had been trying to please her entire life, enjoyed them as well. The book is written as a sort of case study of Jackson’s children. She is an observer and a participant in the organism that is her family in their home (Franklin, 2016).

The Haunting of Hill House has become perhaps, Shirley Jackson’s most well-known novel. It has been a piece of inspiration for countless authors and has been adapted into two films and an extremely well received Netflix series. The book was written between 1958 and 1959. During this time Jackson felt the weight of her husband’s dalliances and his, at times, cruel criticisms of her. In a letter to her husband Jackson berates him that he has all but abandoned her. She writes:

“you once wrote me a letter (I know you hate my remembering these things) telling me that I would never be lonely again. I think that was the first, the most dreadful, lie you ever told me.” (Franklin, 2016, p. 407)

In the draft of Hill House, the main character Erica (later Eleanor), is being nagged by her sister to get married. The character does not want to get married, she thinks that her sister is only pushing it on her because the sister is miserable in her own marriage. This is of course eventually changed, Eleanor is a spinster, who is desperately searching for a home where she belongs. It seems that Jackson was going to use marriage as an allegory to show how once a woman yields to matrimony, she will lose herself, just as Eleanor eventually becomes prey to the house. Eleanor is a typical character for Jackson. She is strange, is unmarried and has a difficult relationship with her mother. Hill House, even with its decay and murderous history, gives her the home she needs. She gives herself over to the house and ends up becoming just another thing that must remain in the house forever. Jackson put an immense amount of work into writing this novel. She took her own pain and experiences with loneliness as well as her knowledge of houses to create a house so evil that it seems to trap and eat people, especially

33 women alive. In her biography, we can see the hand drawn sketches by Jackson of what the house looked like and where each room is in the house. The quote that best describes Hill House, perhaps the most famous and quotes lines from the book is as follows:

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, 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.” (Jackson, 1959, p. 410)

The description of the house leads us to believe, as Jackson intended, that the house is alive and is its own character. The book is not a straightforward ghost story. It is up to the reader to decide if the ghosts and supernatural occurrences in the book are real or a shared delusion by the other guests in the mansion. The book is perhaps beloved because the reader must decide whether to believe Eleanor or to see how the house has contributed to her crumbling mental state.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, was Jackson’s last full-length novel. Published in 1962, it is a story that is heavily influenced by Jackson’s life in every character and every event in the novel. The book took her longer to write than her previous novels due to illness and her own self-doubt. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is about the Blackwood sisters and their lives after almost their entire family is murdered. While most of the town believes the older, beautiful Constance is the perpetrator, the younger sister Merrricat consistently shows murderous tendencies throughout the book. The relationship between the sisters can be described as completely codependent. Castle, however, has some of the most interesting background information. Jackson got inspiration from a famous murder case from England where a man name named Charles Bravo died by poisoning. The case gained notoriety because it involved an upper-class family and it was never solved. Initially, the story was about two sisters who conspire to murder the character Jenny’s (who would become Merricat) husband. Jackson ran all of these ideas about the novel by a surprising source. Jackson had received a fan letter from a younger woman named Jeanne Beatty (Franklin, 2016). Jeanne loved literature and wrote as both a fan and as a perspective pen pal for Jackson. Jackson was delighted by Jeanne’s correspondence and wrote to her obsessively. It is clear through their letters that Jackson becomes dependent on Jeanne’s letters because of her severe colitis and her growing agoraphobia. She was having a hard time writing the book and relied on Jeanne to distract her and to write about different ideas without the criticism of her husband and editors. This

34 relationship seems to be the basis for the codependency between the Blackwood sisters, the cannot exist without each other and Jackson could not function without her pen pal. We can also see other parts of Jackson’s live within the book. Constance and Merricat seem to be based off of Jackson’s daughters Joanne and Sarah. Sarah, opiniated and stubborn was the opposite of her quiet sister Joanne (Franklin, 2016). Jackson asked friends for books about poisonous plants and we can see these definitions in the novel when Merricat recites them back to the nefarious cousin Charles. This novel was critically acclaimed by intellectuals and critics alike for its strangeness and for the character Merricat in all her murderous insanity. It is also worth mentioning why this book is considered to be one of her strangest works. The book is narrated in the first person by Merricat Blackwood. Instead of being a sort of spectator to the events happing like in her other books, the reader becomes complicit in Merricat’s crimes because we can see what she is thinking and feeling. We immediately feel sympathy for Constance’s character because we are told how good she is by Merricat. It is very difficult to feel that same sympathy for Merricat. She sees s little to no good in anyone who isn’t her sister and outright thinks that she wouldn’t mind murdering anyone who threatens their life inside the house (Murphy, 2005).

Each novel contains the story of one of more female characters that eventually find themselves locked away in their home. While each individual story is very different, Jackson’s formula for writing can be seen in each character’s journey to becoming a captive. While the houses play a role in each act of captivity, there are three significant factors that also play a role and these include society, agoraphobia and of course, supernatural elements.

2.1 Women and Society

The role of women in the home has remained very much the same for thousands of years. Still even now in times of the push for equality in both the home and in the work place, women are still expected to be the caretaker for the home. Shirley Jackson was raised by a mother who came from a long line of subservient women who were taught to never question their husbands and to produce as many children as possible and raise them within the acceptable moral standards that dictated society at the time. Jackson resented her mother heavily for trying to mold her into one of these women and often rebelled against her mother by instead focusing on her own wants and desires. However, Jackson would eventually succumb to the expectation to have children and to raise them basically on her own since men were expected to have little

35 to no input on the rearing of their children. After World War Two, men and women returned home from the military and military related jobs and wanted to focus back on “normal” life. According to the article Motherhood, Multiple Roles, and Maternal Well-Being: Women of the 1950s:

“… with the 1950’s in the United States a time of particularly intense emphasis on traditional values of home and family. Women in this postwar period were encouraged to bear and raise children, be good wives, and leave the full-time jobs to the war veterans.” (Miller, Moen, & Dempster-McClain, 1991, p. 565)

Shirley Jackson’s first novel was published in the late 1940’s. Along with her family’s wealthy background she would have been expected to become a bastion of her home. It is an interesting story of Jackson’s journey to motherhood because before she became pregnant, she and her husband were a part of a group of bohemian writers in New York. It was not common for couples in this group to have children. Jackson would turn out to want motherhood more than to be a part of the bohemian lifestyle because she went onto to have four children. This need and desire to become a mother and a good house keeper can be seen in the portrayal of Constance Blackwood in We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Even though Constance has gone through this terrible ordeal, enough to break any person, she still keeps an immaculate home. She cleans her house every week, keeps a garden, and cares for her mentally unstable uncle and her homicidal sister. When Constance is confronted with the prospect of a possible marriage to her cousin Charles, she takes on his opinions and ideas. When Charles is upset with Merricat, Constance joins in, even less severely so, with the admonishment of her sister. In The Haunting of Hill House, Eleanor Vance was an unmarried, 32-year-old woman. Since she had no prospects of marriage and her mother’s health was failing, it was left to her to stay at home and care for her mother, even if she resented it terribly. She is told by her married sister, who seems to be of elevated status simply because she is married and has a child, what she will and will not do with the family car even though she is no longer needed to take care of their late mother. Eleanor is not typical for the women of her time and is treated differently than her sister. Theo, who is another guest at Hill House represents the freer more independent women of the 60’s. She lives with a roommate and her sexuality is left ambiguous. Where Eleanor is conservative and is obsessed with people’s perception of her, Theo lives a care free existence.

Jackson had spent her youth in a rather unconventional manner until she married her husband. Since she was a child Jackson was a disappointment to her prim and proper mother Geraldine. She enjoyed sports and being outside and had a proclivity to get herself into trouble. She also

36 was not conventionally attractive, and this bothered her mother immensely since she herself was considered a beauty in her time. Shirley never wanted to be a part of the stuffy aristocratic life her parents had lived. After she graduated from a high school in Rochester, New York, where her family had moved while she was in her early teens, she attempted to begin her high education at the University of Rochester, where she could be watched over by her parents. It seems that she purposely flunked the majority of her classes and had a miserable time under the watchful eye of her mother. She decided that in order to really begin her life, she would need to get away from her stifling family and she enrolled at the University of Syracuse in upstate New York. She had been a writer for most of her life by the time she enrolled at Syracuse University where she eventually would meet her future husband Stanley Hyman. Jackson had written several short stories, most of them revolving around young girls and the plight of youth. There were also often appearances by overbearing mothers in these stories. No one really took her seriously until she took a creative writing class at Syracuse and began writing for the university newspaper. While at school she met other young writers and began to really pursue the opposite sex for the first time in her life and was noticed by a few young men at school. She was able to publish stories that contained heavy subjects like her Janice, a 250 - word short story about a teenage who attempts suicide (Franklin, 2016). Because she was so far from her parents, she was free to write about whatever she wanted without having to worry about their disapproval. Her stories caught the attention of another sophomore at the school named Stanley Hyman, two years her junior, he wanted to be a literary critic and travelled in the same social circles as Jackson. Stanley was extremely charismatic and pursued Shirley outright. She kept the relationship a secret from her parents on the grounds that Hyman was a Jew and her family did not support mixed religious marriages and also that he happened to be a member of the Young Communist League. Stanley had an immense pride in Shirley’s work and had no problem bragging to others how brilliant he thought she was. The only problem was that he was not afraid to tear her down when he felt like her writing was lacking and cheated on her from the time they began dating up until her death. He liked the fact that he felt he had discovered her, and she once admitted “…he could break me mentally if he chose.” (Franklin, 2016) While Shirley was a very intelligent and pragmatic women, she was very much in love with Stanley and it seems that she would have stayed no matter what he would do to her, including throwing his other affairs in her face. She stayed with Hyman throughout their college years on and off, all the while working on her craft and eventually become the fiction editor of the university literary magazine. Stanley was not experiencing the same type of success and often found himself over come with jealousy. The young couple came to the point of trying to decide what they would do after graduation. Shirley, once believing that her

37 father would pay for a spot at Colombia’s writing program withdrew the offer because of Hyman’s religious and political status. Her parents we not supportive whatsoever of the match and were loath to thin that their daughter, who was raised in luxury and propriety would be living with a near penniless, unemployed literary critic. (Franklin 67-9)

Luckily for the young couple Stanley was awarded a prize of a summer job in New York at a magazine. Without even thinking, Shirley said she would follow him to New York City. Even though she had the talent to possibly make it on her own, she was not going to be without Stanley. And even though Stanley supported and helped her with her writing, he would always be a kind of object in her way, through his criticism and failure as a partner in a marriage. Before the couple was married in New York in 1940. Her parents made a concerted effort to try and steal her away back to California, where they had returned to live. The came with gifts and brought her to a show and gossiped with other high society members about how Shirley loved and belonged back in California, making no mention of her fiancé. In her decision to marry Stanley, Shirley was attempting to satisfy two parts of herself. She wanted to be with Staley and become the writer she had always wanted to be, but she also craved a supportive and loving home. She wanted a place where she could feel the acceptance that she never felt from her mother and father. Through her letters and diaries, we can see that she often questioned why she got married and she never took Stanley’s last name professionally. She was a slave to Stanley’s moods and often selfish behavior because it was during this time that a woman simply did not question the behavior of her husband. Shirley and Stanley considered themselves Bohemians and stayed within literary circles that almost always was full of couples who did not have children. The wife of another writer once said that “it was the men who needed looking after.” (Franklin, 2016) But Shirley was determined to create a home and family that she felt she was robbed of. When their first child, Laurence is born in 1942, she throws herself into this new role of motherhood. Jackson still wrote while she was raising her four children, joking that for every child she produced she wrote a book to follow, but was at times lost in her need for a loving home. She would often draw cartoons for Stanley out of humor but one in particular shows a frazzled and unkempt Jackson serving her infant son and neatly made up husband a bottle of milk and a bottle of wine on a serving tray. She captions the cartoon with Stanley saying: “Now dear the doctor told you not to lift anything heavy.” The majority of women during the 1940’s and 50’s stayed home with their children for the duration of their lives. Research by the authors of the Motherhood article found that many mothers who stayed home to raise their young children would find themselves completely isolated from the outside world. On the opposite end, mothers who worked during this time period though that

38 because they were away from the home, they were inadequate mothers. (Miller, Moen, & Dempster-McClain, 1991) Society at the time Jackson was writing her novels heavily influenced her characters from her own experience and those experiences of the women around her. All of the female characters in Jackson’s novel have some sort of domestic knowledge. Eleanor Vance was her mother’s nursemaid, she took care of the house and when she comes to Hill House, feels a maternal instinct there to protect it. Constance Blackwood’s entire existence revolves around taking care of her sister and uncle within the family home. She is an excellent cook and cleans obsessively. Even after her home is almost completely destroyed, she insists upon keeping the house in order. Jackson, who grew up in relative luxury, becomes the mother she longed to have an devotes herself to her children. She cooks all their meals, plays with them and takes care of her husband and every home they move to. Jackson straddled this life of working mother and stay at home mother. Stanley was never expected to leave his job at any point even if Jackson’s success was immense. Because of the time, he was afforded much more freedom to do as he pleased, and Jackson was left with many responsibilities. Even though Jackson is now considered to be a staple of Gothic fiction, while she was alive her prowess as a writer was usually acknowledged with the caveat that she was a good writer but still a female writer. Reviewers often focused only on the surface of her short stories and books. When she published The Lottery, her agent advertised the book as “the most terrifying piece of literature ever printed.” (Franklin, 2016) Most people expected her to be happy that so many people would want to buy her horror story, but Jackson wanted to read it to make them think, not just to consume it as a means to frighten. Male interviewers made sure to mention Jackson's interest in the occult almost any time they could. There is one particularly concerning instance where author W. G. Rogers took Jackson out for drinks first, waited until she was drunk and then began to ask her about her experience with black magic. He also asked her opinion of other writers and told Rogers that she did not like Truman Capote (Franklin, 2016). In our day and age of the #metoo movement, this entire scenario is alarmingly familiar. Even though Jackson was recognized as a good writer, men in particular made it a point to find some way to make her less of a serious author. After the publication of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Time magazine referred to Jackson as “Virginia Werewoolf. Among the séance-fiction writers.” (Franklin, 2016) A comparison to a writer like Virginia Woolf is a compliment of the highest standard, but still managed to dismiss Jackson as a writer when he made this cartoonish nickname. Jackson’s interest in the occult would always manage to make its way into people opinion of her work as well. Unfortunately, one of the most famous descriptions of Jackson was produced from this interview: “Miss Jackson writes not with a pen but a broomstick.” (Franklin, 2016). Jackson herself would use interviews to out forth the image that she was

39 regular a housewife as any other woman. Because of the time, Jackson would say things like she spent the majority of her time caring for her children and home and then would use writing as a way to relax. Jackson had a tendency when under a microscope to say things she thought people wanted to hear. If she were alive now, it would have been easier for her to admit that writing, other than her children was the great joy of her life (Franklin, 2016).

2.2 Agoraphobia and Mental Illness

Mental illness, or madness as it is most often referred to in Gothic literature is an interesting literary device. When a character displays symptom of a mental disorder is other genres of fiction, it is easy for the reader to assume that the character is sick with a mental disorder. Using the Yellow Wallpaper again as an example, the narrator experiences anxiety from the moment she walks into the house she is expected to take a “rest cure.” Her husband tells her that she is suffering from a nervous disorder that is rendering her hysterical. It was highly typical of the time when this book was written to diagnose women with nervous disorders. It was common up until the turn of the century to say that a woman was “hysterical” if she was exhibiting any behaviour that was not within societal norms (McVean, 2017). She enters the nursery with the yellow wallpaper and is immediately affected by something within the colour and the appearance of the room. The narrators husband wants her to remaining the room with the windows open to calm her nerves and restore her health. The narrator however begins to experience what could be and most probably are hallucinations of monsters behind the walls and eyes staring down at her. In Gothic fiction, one must always assume that perhaps the character is having symptoms or complaining of mental sickness because of other nefarious or supernatural reasons.

Towards the end of her life, Shirley Jackson struggled with crippling agoraphobia. According to the Mayo Clinic, agoraphobia is an anxiety disorder than can completely cripple a person’s life. Agoraphobia is usually triggered by a negative experience outside of the home. Symptoms of the disorder include feeling a loss of control and a feeling of rapid heartbeat and difficulty breathing. More females are diagnosed with agoraphobia than males. This disorder is very often accompanied by drug and alcohol use, which was exactly what happened to Shirley Jackson in the years before her death in 1965. Jackson’s agoraphobia seems to have been triggered by the backlash from her short story The Lottery published in June 1948 in the New Yorker magazine. The Lottery tells the story of a small, sleepy town in America that has a

40 sinister secret. The town conducts an annual ritual of human sacrifice. This ritual is performed to appease some unnamed deity and to ensure that the town will have a good harvest come Fall. At the end of the story, a woman named Tessie is chosen to be the sacrifice and is killed by her family and the townspeople by way of stoning. The story was immensely popular with the magazine’s readers for a plethora of reasons. Many intellectuals wanted to dissect it and find the deeper meaning of Jackson’s use of the American town and its horrifying sacrificial ritual. Many average readers however, found the piece to be deeply disturbing and began to write letters to the magazine and to Jackson’s home in Vermont. Jackson kept the majority of these letters in a scrapbook. While she held a certain strange pride in these almost all negative letters, the attention it brought to her seemed to do something to her mental health. Jackson said of this time:

“One of the most terrifying aspects of publishing stories and books is the realization that they are going to be read and read by strangers. I had never fully realized this before, although I had of course in my imagination dwelt lovingly upon the thought of the millions and millions of people who were going to be uplifted and enriched and delighted by the stories I wrote.” (Franklin, 2016)

As with anyone who wants their work to be received well by the public, Jackson did not anticipate that she would get hundreds of seething letters, questioning her integrity and accusing her of an array of different charges such as being a witch or even a traitor to America. The setting of the story also played a role in the negative attention that was bestowed on Jackson. She based the story on her own little Vermont town of North Bennington. Naturally, people felt that she used the town’s image in a negative manner and it seems that because of the letters she began to see a certain hostility directed towards her from the people of Vermont. She was asked to give lectures on the story and was also asked to record The Lottery on tape. These outings were stressful for Jackson and she began to develop an aversion to New York City, which had once been her home early in her marriage. This short story is not mentioned in Life Among the Savages, but we can see Jackson’s dislike of New York starting to come though when she visits her former apartment and finds that it doesn’t have the same charm as their home in Vermont. Jackson, the mother in Savages likes to be in her home, she enjoys doing domestic activities and when she does leave the house, she very often writes that she is stressed and would rather be at home. Jackson’s agoraphobia eventually would begin to rule her life. When The Haunting of Hill House, was made into a film in 1963, it was a struggle for her to make it to New York to get to the premier. It is hard to reconcile that the somewhat

41 content mother from Savages, was actually beginning to experience feelings of fear of the outside world. Jackson developed a series of ailments in her late 30’s to her death. Jackson says on the first page of Savages, that her home is filled with thousands of things that belong to her family. While this seems harmless, this accumulation of house hold items, is actually an occasional symptom of agoraphobia. Jackson was also very overweight and experienced extreme pain because of this. At this time, barbiturates were often prescribed for pain and unfortunately are very addictive. In addition to the prescribed medication, she also was a heavy drinker, this affected both her ability to leave her home and also her relationship with her children, who were warry of their mother’s shifting moods.

It can be interpreted that Jackson began to put her fears of the outside world into her characters. The character that displays symptoms of agoraphobia is Constance Blackwood of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Constance has experienced severe trauma at the hands of her sister. After Merricat murders almost their entire family (their uncle is the only survivor of the poisoning), Constance goes through a trial of which she is eventually acquitted and is returned to the Blackwood mansion to live with her two remaining relatives. When the reader is introduced to Constance, she is waiting for her sister at the garden gate. She never actually makes it further than the gate because of her own anxiety. Her sister, who wishes to never leave the family home, worries that Constance will eventually be able to leave the confines of the garden. Constance is able to welcome visitors into her home, but never leaves the home for almost the entire duration of the novel. She only leaves after the house catches fire and even then, the sisters remain on the property. Even though Constance loves to cook and work in her garden, she never goes to town to get supplies herself. The sister’s nefarious cousin Charles comes to steal away the family fortune by way of wooing Constance. Constance never expects to leave the house, she believes that she and Charles will remain there and will become a family. When the house catches on fire, a mob forms in front of the house and Constance is terrified that someone will see her. Whatever happened to Constance during the trial of her family’s murder affects her deeply enough that it makes it impossible to leave the property. Constance’s agoraphobia creates a shift in the story after the fire. Initially, she and her sister are the outsiders and they are shunned from their community. The children of the town make rude songs about them and taunt them during the fire. A visitor in their home questions Constance about the murder without tact and proves that people in the town still think that she is evil. After the fire destroys a portion of the home and Charles shows his true desire to steal the family fortune, Constance uses her home as a barrier to the outside world. She purposely shuts the world out,

42 changing their house from the family home, into a fortress that will keep her safely inside. When the townspeople bring food to their doorstep out of guilt, Constance takes it gladly but maintains that she no longer has need of the outside world. This is clearly based out of fear of a potential negative reception by the town.

Looking again at The Haunting of Hill House, By the time Eleanor Vance has made it to Hill House, she has had very few relationships with other people. She has mainly only interacted with her mother and her sister for most of her life. It could be said that while Eleanor’s mother abused her power over Eleanor, Eleanor was completely codependent on her mother. Codependency is defined as:

“A psychological condition or a relationship in which a person is controlled or manipulated by another who is affected with a pathological condition.” ("codependency," n.d.)

Eleanor has no identity outside of caring for her sick mother from the time she is a young girl, until she is thirty-two years old, unmarried and without any other meaningful relationships. When Eleanor meets Theodora at Hill House, she immediately latches onto her as a friend and a possible person to tell Eleanor what to do. Eleanor is going through a massive change in the book as she sees that’s the house can possibly offer her everything she has ever needed, including a place where she truly belongs. In this case, Eleanor is the one who craves a relationship with Theo that will extend after their time at Hill House, even though Theo has been distancing herself from Elanor since the “supernatural” events have begun. Theo believes that most of the occurrences in the house have been orchestrated by Eleanor and she also feels that Eleanor is attempting to latch onto her. When Theo rejects Eleanor, she moves her focus onto the house, which in the end, is the reason why she dies.

43 2.3 The Supernatural

As previously mentioned, the supernatural is one of the most used themes within Gothic literature. Jackson was a master at creating terror in her fiction. She was able to do this by creating an atmosphere of suspense and terror while never actually revealing any specific monster by using a certain tone in her writing. Most of the fear her characters feel happens because of the other people in the book. However, the supernatural does play a pivotal role in most Jackson’s work. She used Gothic elements of terror and foreboding in order to catch the reader’s attention from the beginning of her stories until the very last page. When one hears the word “supernatural,” it is easy to immediately picture something nefarious in nature, perhaps the word conjured a monster or a witch. Merriam-Webster defines it as “of or relating to an order of existence beyond the visible observable universe.” (supernatural, n.d.) Therefore, the supernatural is anything that could be considered not of this Earth or anything that cannot be seen with the human eye. Shirley Jackson’s interest in the supernatural came to her at an early age with the influence of her grandmother who was heavily enmeshed in spiritualism. The presence of her grandmother’s belief in the supernatural and her religious belief in Christian Science impacted Jackson in both positive and negative ways. Jackson would go on to produce some of the finest horror ever written but would also be haunted by the memory of her grandmother for the rest of her life. According to her biographer Ruth Franklin, after an interaction with one of her grandmother’s friends, she felt like a malignant spirit followed her for the rest of her life. Jackson began to cultivate her life-long interest in witchcraft while she was enrolled in the College of Rochester. She wrote a paper for school on witchcraft after devouring several texts about the subject. She, along with her friends experimented with tarot cards and incantations. Jay Williams, a friend of Stanley’s and a member of the teaching staff at Syracuse, was heavily entrenched in the occult and would often give her texts and amulets to learn from and use for protection (Franklin, 2016).

It was during her friendship with Williams that she experienced different events that seemed to have directly influenced her writing. While studying a medieval text that was used to prove the existence of witches, she read about a haunting in England where the house was plagued with the sounds of some phantom drummer. In Hill House, there are several occasions where the guests hear pounding on the walls that gets louder and louder as the night progresses. The other event was when Jackson and Stanley visited Williams’ home and took part in a quasi- black mass. Williams apparently attempted to conjure some sort of demon. Jackson took part

44 in the summoning with trepidation. She was afraid of the outcome of the ritual and did ever actually look to see what Williams had possibly conjured in the apartment (Franklin, 2016). Eleanor and the other guests at Hill House only have interactions with actual “ghosts” twice in the novel. The doctor and Luke chase a phantom canine through the house and onto the grounds of the house, only to give up and make their way back to the house, laughing off the experience. Towards the end of the novel, while Theo and Eleanor are walking outside the house, they happen upon the apparition of a family having a picnic with the previously mentioned ghost dog. Theo suddenly screams at Eleanor to run back to the house and not to look back. Like Jackson, Eleanor is afraid to look at whatever supernatural element could possibly be frightening Theo. The Haunting of Hill House has perhaps the most famous instances of the supernatural of all of her books. Eleanor Vance, along with her sister, experiences a supernatural occurrence when she is a young child that leads her to be chosen by Doctor Montague as a candidate for his Hill House research. When Eleanor was young stones fell on the roof of her childhood home for some time and then mysteriously stopped. Eleanor’s mother was convinced the neighbours were doing it, and strangely, Eleanor never actually gives it a second thought that is other-worldly event took place in her life. While staying in Hill House, Eleanor experiences disembodied voices, apparitions and the feeling of being motivated to end her life by some unseen force (Jackson, 1959).

While We Have Always Lived in the Castle, does not contain any outright supernatural events, Merricat Blackwood fully believes in the power of suggestive magic. Like Jackson, Merricat uses a type of witchcraft for personal gain, Merricat collects items of significance belonging to her late family members to protect her home. She takes items like her late father’s pocket watch and books, puts a thought or energy towards that item and then proceeds to scatter them about the perimeter of the property. Some items she buries and others she nails to trees. She does this as a way to ward off unwanted intruders. Constance either does not know that she does this, or simply indulges Merricat’s childlike obsession with the supernatural. Merricat believes that if she uses her own thoughts as an incantation, they will manifest a barrier to keep her sister away from the outside world, ultimately keeping Constance all to herself for eternity. As previously mentioned, Jackson had several interactions with the occult in her childhood and early in her marriage. The only real difference between Merricat’s use of the occult and Jackson’s is that Jackson held a fear of the supernatural and Merricat uses it with confidence that her charms actually work. Because of the novels tone and the consistent eeriness throughout the book, it

45 almost seems that Merricat’s use of charms at the beginning of the book actually work because she and her sister end up alone, together in their house, just as she predicted they would be. Many people believe, including Jackson’s biographer Ruth Franklin, that Merricat’s use of the occult is an allegory for female power. When Charles finds Merricat’s charms and talismans, he is angry and frightened by it. Because Merricat’s interest in the occult and her love of fantasy is shunned by her late family and Charles she reacts with vengeance towards them (Franklin, 2016).

It is worth mentioning that while Life Among the Savages is not a typical Gothic novel, it does have instances of the supernatural. Jackson claims that the house itself is alive and chose children for the rooms rather than the other way around. The so- called “Appendix Handbill” tell the account, written is a hilarious dialect, of their own haunted house. The account tells us that their house was inhabited by some sort of poltergeist and the family was plagued with its annoying behaviour. The account comically concludes that anyone who wishes to see the haunting can come to their house and look around for a small fee (Jackson, 1953). Even her most “normal” story Jackson uses the supernatural as an event in the story. While this supernatural poltergeist is most certainly made up, Jackson enjoyed the fact that she felt some sort of otherworldly connection to her house. Of course, the theme of the haunted house is one of the staples of Gothic fiction. Breaking the phrase “haunted house “down, the Cambridge dictionary defines the adjective haunted two ways: “often visited by ghosts” and “showing signs of worry or anxiety.” (haunted, n.d.) Both of these definitions could be applied to the houses and people in Jackson’s stories. What does a house need to be haunted? Does it need apparitions like ghosts or poltergeists? Or can negative experiences and memories haunt a house. As previously discussed, a house is meant to contain a family unit. A house itself is not living but may contribute to the experiences had by someone who lives there. The most frightening ghosts that live in Jackson’s haunted houses are not actually ghosts at all, but the people who live there or lived in the house previously and are no longer alive. Eleanor Vance brings the “ghost” of her mother to Hill House in the form of guilt. In the middle of the night, she awakens to hear her mother calling her, only find that she is asleep in Hill House and not in her former home. The Blackwood sisters never see the ghosts of their murdered family but their presence and the weight of Merricat’s crime lives in the house with them always. A haunted house in combination with the uncanny is a way to frighten the reader. Everyone has lived somewhere in their lives. When we look at the façade of a house, no one expects to see

46 supernatural or other-worldly happenings going on inside. Jackson takes family homes and turns them into prisons that hold secrets. This other type of haunting is present in most of her books. The kitchen in the Blackwood mansion is not just the place where Constance spends most of her time preparing meals for Merricat and Uncle Julian. The kitchen is the place where Merricat put poison in the sugar bowel that would be brought to the dining room table for her family to eat and then die. In Hill House, rooms like Eleanor and Theo’s bedrooms and the house grounds change from a living space to places where supernatural events take place. They become a conduit for the house to communicate with Eleanor.

3. Life Before Capture

Before each of characters chosen to be discussed for this thesis found themselves captives in their homes, they lived lives that were seemingly normal. Each of the women discussed held positions in the world, whether student, care taker or mother, they all had roles to be fulfilled before the change came. When a character becomes a captive in a story it is important to look at what kind of life they had before. Before understanding why, a person would be willing to let themselves become a captive to their life in a house, the persons personality and characteristics must be looked at. We can ask; Who were these women before? What caused them to want to lock themselves away from the outside world? In my opinion, only Jackson herself had what could be considered a “normal” life before she had children and moved to Vermont. Other than the terrible relationship with her mother, Jackson did have a relatively normal upbringing. She attended school, had boyfriends and went off to not one but two different colleges after the first did not work out. She studied a major she loved in college and was able to use her own talent and the skills she learned at the University of Syracuse to create fiction that has been enjoyed by thousands if not millions of readers. However strange and at times eccentric Jackson could be, her life was never as weird as that of her characters. As previously mentioned, the captivity process in Jackson’s novels is not a fast one, it is over time and a slow process. Almost all of the characters focused on here, were in some way “groomed” for their captivity through different experiences. Eleanor Vance has never ventured outside of the home she grew up in. she had been controlled by her mother and sister her entire life. Merricat and Constance lived with a family that had a distaste for the outside world that was not a part of their brand of aristocracy. Jackson herself as the unnamed mother in Life Among

47 the Savages, had never learned to drive a car and what completely devoted to her husband in all matters, even if it was a detriment to her own sanity.

3.1 Eleanor Vance

Before Eleanor Vance’s decent into madness in The Haunting of Hill House she had what could only be described as a rather pathetic life.

“Eleanor Vance was thirty-two years old when she came to Hill House. The only person in the world she genuinely hated, now that her mother was dead, was her sister. She disliked her brother-in-law and her five-year-old niece, and she had no friends.” (Jackson 1959 p.6)

Jackson describes Eleanor’s whole adult life up to the point of entry to Hill House as her mother’s caretaker. The only real excitement she had ever experienced in her life was a strange occurrence when she and her sister were both teenagers and for three days stones fell from the sky onto the roof of their home. The cantankerous mother of the girls said it was their neighbours who were responsible for the assault. Strangely enough when the girls were moved to another house, the stones stopped falling, they moved back home and it was never resolved. This supernatural event, which had been recorded at some point is why Dr. Montague, the researcher responsible for the meeting at Hill House, contacts Eleanor. But, even without this event, the character clearly would have gone to the house anyway. Eleanor is desperate to leave her mother’s home and participate in any event that is occurring in the outside world where she can find a place to belong. When Eleanor is travelling to Hill House, she begins to project her longing for a real family home on the different buildings and houses she passes. She creates an entire narrative of living alone in a grand home and being cared for by an old maid who feeds her dinner on a silver platter. Eleanor is desperate for a normal home, even if she is the only one living there. This goes back to Douglas’ theory in how the home is created through a series of regular activities by the inhabitant (Douglas, 1991). In a way, Eleanor is primed to become a victim to Hill House. As we can see early on, Eleanor is unreliable in her narration and is often distracted by fantasy. She has a clear vision that Hill House is what she has been waiting for her entire life and that the experience she will have there will change her life for the better.

48 3.2 Mary Katherine “Merricat” and Constance Blackwood

Mary Katherine, known as Merricat and Constance Blackwood, the two main characters of the novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, are already living in their pseudo-prison when the novel begins. It is explained that almost the entire Blackwood family is wiped out one night by poisoning from sugar on blackberries. It is assumed by the town that it was Constance who killed the family even though she is acquitted of their murders. From our narrator Merricat and the senile Uncle Julian, from what they know their only living relative, the Blackwood’s were a wealthy and aristocratic family, not unlike the families who had lived in the homes Shirley Jackson’s family had built. The manor in which the live is set high upon a hill surrounded by a large fence which was installed by Merricat’s father before his death. Their mother was against of people using their garden as a shortcut to get to town and had her husband install a gate with a padlock. We can already see the making of the Blackwood house becoming the prison that will always hold the Blackwood sister’s captive. We know from our narrator that the Blackwood’s were a strict and traditional family that was resistant to change and were seemingly completely self-reliant.

“All the Blackwood women had taken the food that came from the ground and preserved it, and the deeply coloured rows of jellies and pickles and bottled vegetables and fruit, maroon and amber and dark rich green, stood side by side in our cellar and would stand there forever, a poem by the Blackwood women.” (Jackson, 1962, p.60)

Merricat and her ever loyal sister Constance are able to sustain themselves in the house by continuing the same type of life as before the murder of almost their entire family. It is never revealed what actually takes place after Constance is arrested for the murder of her family. Whatever did happen changes Constance into a meek and nervous young woman who has very little contact with the outside world. What little we know of Merricat is that she was sent away to an orphanage during the trial and then returned to sister after she was acquitted, also for reasons that are never made clear.

49 3.3 Shirley Jackson “The Housewife”

Using Jackson’s biography and from what she writes in Life Among the Savages, we know that Jackson had a difficult time with her parents and finding her place in the world while growing up. Jackson, who seems to have had a talent for writing from her earliest years had the potential to always have been a wonderful and successful writer. The Jackson that lives in the world of Savages, is much like the Shirley Jackson described by historians and her biographer. She was a young mother living in New York city with her two oldest children. The lived in a cramped city apartment that they had to leave because their landlord had rented it out to someone else. Unlike her other books, here we have actual real-life information about what the “character” was doing before the events of the book. Jackson had been living in New York City since she had married Stanley Hyman, her college sweetheart. During this time, Jackson chose to use her maiden name as her business moniker and writing name and privately went by Mrs. Stanley Hyman. They chose to live in the city because it was an epicentre for the literary world and was a hub of activity for the bohemian’s generation (Franklin, 2016). Stanley and Shirley found themselves mixed in with other literary couples and artists of the time. They were two very modern people living in the 40’s when Jackson got pregnant with their first son Laurence in 1943. With their family growing, the Hyman family no longer fit the bohemian life style of Greenwich Village. Their daughter Joanne was born in 1945 and she could already feel them outgrowing the apartment. From what is written in the novel and the accounts of Jackson’s children, we know that she was a doting mother and tried her absolute best to make sure her children wanted for nothing.

4. Life After Captivity

4.1 “The house is Eleanor.” – Shirley Jackson

For the sake of this thesis, the trapped character that will be analysed form The Haunting of Hill House, is Eleanor Vance. As previously mentioned, she was a thirty-two-year-old woman who was desperate to get away from the memory of unremarkable life as her invalid mother’s caretaker. The first time Eleanor sees Hill House, she does not have the expected reaction since

50 she had been wondering and fantasizing about all the magical things that laid in wait for her at the house.

“She turned her car onto the last stretch of straight drive leading her directly, face to face, to Hill House and, moving without thought, pressed her foot on the brake to stall the car and sat, staring. The house was vile. She shivered and thought, the words coming freely into her mind, Hill House is vile, it is diseased; get away from here at once.” (Jackson, 1959, p. 32)

This quote of course leads back to the very feeling Jackson was looking for in her search for inspiration for Hill House. However, even with her initial uncertainty about the house, Eleanor almost immediately comes under its spell. Eleanor has an interaction with the Dudley’s, the cold and robotic couple who are the mansion’s only two staff members. Mrs. Dudley who is described as “sullen” and “neat, and yet she gave an indefinable air of dirtiness, quite in keeping with her husband,” Mrs. Dudley gives her the rules about when the table is set for meals and that she does not remain at the house after dark. She and her husband return to their home and do not return until the next morning. Eleanor is frightened by this speech but, is quickly distracted by the free-spirited Theodora, an enthusiastic young woman who has come to Hill House both because she was asked by Doctor Montague and because she has had a fight with her roommate and wanted to leave her apartment. Theo, as the other guests call her, has an interesting reaction to Hill House. She regards it as merely as a house whereas Eleanor is entranced by it. Like Eleanor, her initial assessment of the house is that it has a sinister edge to it:

“It’s the home I’ve always dreamed of,” Theodora said. “A little hideaway where I can be alone with my thoughts. Particularly if my thoughts happened to be about murder or suicide or—” (Jackson, 1959, p. 43)

The two women talk while they are settled into their adjoining rooms by Mrs. Dudley who recites the exact same speech that she gave Eleanor. Theo is nonpulsed and light heartedly makes conversation with Eleanor about how dreary the house is. When Theo dresses in bright yellow, this motivates Eleanor to put on a red sweater and red sandals. For the first time in her life, Eleanor can dress as she pleases, without her mother or sister commenting on her choices. After changing, the two women decide to have a look around the house. They stand on the veranda and see that the house is surrounded by hills. Theo says that she thinks the house should have been placed on a hill. Eleanor remarks:

51 “If it were on top of the hill everyone could see it. I vote keeping it well hidden where it is.” (Jackson, 1959, p. 50)

This quote brings us back to Jackson’s inspiration for the houses in her stories, most notably, those gilded mansions high up on Nob Hill. While strolling on the grounds of the house, Eleanor and Theo have a humorous conversation about the possibility of them being related. They talk about their odd families and come to the conclusion that they must be cousins. On the surface this may seem to be just small talk but, as we have seen from Eleanor’s past, this is exactly the thing she craves, a family connection that doesn’t want to control her but to have fun with her and to live together in harmony. The ladies have a small scare when a rabbit frightens them while they are having a pretend picnic.

Luke Sanderson is the next character Eleanor meets when they arrive back at the house. Eleanor deduces that he is a relative of the family who owns the house and he confirms that he will indeed someday inherit Hill House. Luke like Theo doesn’t have any particular emotional feelings about the house referring to it as “this stately pile.” (Jackson, 1959, p.41) He informs the ladies that Doctor John Montague, the reason they have all gathered is inside the house and waiting. They all sit in a parlour to have libations and cake and reintroduce themselves. Eleanor proclaims:

“And you are Theodora,' Eleanor said, 'because I am Eleanor.' An Eleanor, she told herself triumphantly, who belongs, who is talking easily, who is sitting by the fire with her friends.” (Jackson, 1959, p. 61)

Eleanor is taking part in more light- hearted conversation and has already told herself that the people she has just met, total strangers, are her friends. Eleanor is already feeling that the house is giving her a “home” feeling. After drinks, Doctor Montague gives them a short tour of the rooms that they will be using during their stay and the group attempts to make their way to the dining room for dinner. The guest remark that house contains an incredible amount of rooms and doors and that the house itself is extremely dark. Without the lush furnishing of the Victorian era, this could easily describe a prison as well. Sitting at the dinner table, Doctor Montague teases the guests with the salacious history of Hill House. He gives the first warning of the houses dark tendencies:

52 “Suppose,’ he said slowly, ‘you heard the story of Hill House and decided not to stay. How would you leave, tonight?’ He looked around at them again, quickly. ‘The gates are locked. Hill House has a reputation for insistent hospitality; it seemingly dislikes letting its guests get away. The last person who tried to leave Hill House in darkness—it was eighteen years ago, I grant you—was killed at the turn in the driveway, where his horse bolted and crushed him against the big tree. Suppose I tell you about Hill House, and one of you wants to leave? Tomorrow, at least, we could see that you got safely to the village.” (Jackson, 1959, p. 67)

A death on a dark road, on a frightened horse could be easily explained away by a number of reasons. However, in this first warning, Jackson gives the reader a brief creeping suspicion that the experience that the guests will have is not going to end positively. Doctor Montague moves the group to back to the first room they all sat it to regale them with the tale of Hug Crane the original owner and architect of the house. Mr. Crane went through a series of tragedies losing not one but three wives, the first moments before she walked through the door of the newly completed Hill House, the second died of a fall within the house and the third died after leaving the house because of her health. The first Mrs. Crane had two daughters with her husband, unfortunately the two girls are left behind when the third Mrs. Crane falls ill and must travel to Europe for a cure. The two sisters grow up in Hill House and eventually the younger of the two got married, while the older sister decided to remain at Hill House with just a female companion as company. The two sisters bickered about the house for the majority of their lives. When the older sister died of pneumonia, her companion claimed that the house was left to her and of course the younger sister said the house was hers. The companion remained in the house, living a miserable existence of insomnia and harassment from the villagers who believed that she had stolen the house from its true owner. After years of abuse the companion hung herself from one of the turrets in the house. It seems as the doctor explains, that she was desperate to leave Hill House and the only way to get away was to remove herself all together. Ownership of the house eventually passed to the Sanderson family and Luke is the next in line. The suicide of the companion is the third female death in Hill House. Her death is very different from the first two in that there is a very real possibility that she wanted to leave Hill House and get away from the negativity that thrived in the house and the harassment from the villagers. The doctor closes his story by telling the others that the younger Crane sister is still alive, but will not enter the house. After so many deaths close to her, and the poor relations with her older sister, it seemed the younger Crane daughter felt as though something was wrong in Hill House.

After the party says goodnight, Eleanor goes to bed and finds that Hill House actually has a lot of luxury and comfort to offer its guests. The bed is comfortable and there are extra quilts for

53 warmth. Just as she is grabbing one of those quilts, Eleanor suddenly thinks that the door is moving on its own. We don’t know if it actually moving or if it is just Eleanor’s nerves. However, she doesn’t alert Theo or scream, she climbs in bed, pulls the covers tight and goes to sleep. The next morning Eleanor feels renewed and is rested for probably the first time in her life. This first morning shows us that Eleanor is starting to make the connection that Hill House is not just a house, it is also a home. The house is where she meets her new companions, sleeps well and finds that she has some sort of real purpose other than her mother’s care taker.

Eleanor eats breakfast with the others and the doctor goes into more detail about the floorplan of the house. While he names several new rooms that the guests have not been to yet, Theo says: It’s a filthy, rotten house.” (Jackson, 1959, p. 73) Even though she says this with a laugh, we can tell that Theo still has an uneasy feeling about Hill House. This is a stark contrast to Eleanor who woke up and felt renewed in a house that she was frightened to enter just the day before. Eleanor does however, have a visceral reaction when the group is about to enter the library. She says that she cannot enter the room due to a negative memory of her mother. More specifically Eleanor does not want to enter the room because of the smell. This goes back to what Mary Douglas said her article that negative experiences can change hoe feel about home. Eleanor is starting to feel at home in Hill House but, she still has the memories of her old home as well. After they leave the library they make their way through the kitchen and end up on the veranda that looks over the grounds of the house. Eleanor wanders around and looks up at the imposing towers the house has and thinks:

I will never look down from those windows, she thought, and tried to imagine the narrow iron stairway going up and around inside. High on top was a conical wooden roof, topped by a wooden spire. It must have been laughable in any other house, but here in Hill House it belonged, gleeful and expectant, awaiting perhaps a slight creature creeping out from the little window on to the slanted roof, reaching up to the spire, knotting a rope. . .. (Jackson, 1959, p. 113)

She is ripped from this fantasy by Luke’s voice as he warns her that she could fall at any moment. Why was she thinking about this? What is the story from the night before, is the house trying to show her, trying to catch her? This remains unclear for the reader but one can make their own inferences that something is happening to Eleanor. The ladies retreat to their adjoined bedrooms and Eleanor watches as Theo paints her toe nails. Theo remarks that she would paint Eleanor’s toe nails as well but her feet are dirty. Eleanor panics at the thought that Theo finds

54 her dirty and immediately brings up her mother. Theo tries to calm her but Eleanor seems to be already back in her mother’s home. She thinks that Theo is laughing at her, we can see Eleanor’s worry that this home might be just as bad as her old one. The next room the groups visits is the nursery, strangely the room feels ice cold to the guests. When one thinks of a nursery, hopefully a cold, old room is not the image that is conjured. The word nursery comes from the Old French terms norture, norreture and it is translated to "food, nourishment; education, training." In a house, the nursery is where babies sleep and young children play, but in Hill House it is a room that gives Eleanor the feeling that the house wants her to be cold. The doctor notices that Eleanor is nervous after they make their way back down stairs she tells him that she feels something is coming, something will happen. Doctor Montague tells her "Promise me absolutely that you will leave, as fast as you can, if you begin to feel the house catching at you. " (Jackson, 1959, p. 91) Again, the doctor hints that he knows the house will take and capture them but, Eleanor will not leave.

That night the first big event happens while the group is sleeping. It begins with Eleanor sleeping and hearing her mother calling out to her and banging on the wall. She yells back that she will “be there in a minute,” but she wakes suddenly and realizes where she is and realises that Theo is experiencing the same phenomenon. The knocking becomes louder and seems to surround them in Theo’s bedroom. Eventually, the knocking ceases when the doctor and Luke can be heard in the hallway. Like the women, they had their own strange experience, chasing a phantom dog for nearly two hours. For such an unusual event, it is not particularly acknowledged as such. The next morning, Eleanor awake yet again in a state of euphoria. At the breakfast table the others share in Eleanor’s strange excitement. Luke explains to the others that even with the other-worldliness of the night before he never actually felt that he was in any physical danger. Theo exclaims that she was excited by the whole event much to Doctor Montague’s worry. He agrees with Luke that he believes they weren’t in any physical danger, but also says that there is no way the four of them shared some delusion and that they had experiences something. Eleanor remarks that she could easily say that she imagined the other guests. The doctor takes Eleanor’s jest seriously and says: “If I thought you could really believe that,’ the doctor said gravely, ‘I would turn you out of Hill House this morning. You would be venturing far too close to the state of mind which would welcome the perils of Hill House with a kind of sisterly embrace.” (Jackson, 1959, p. 140) The choice of the word “sisterly” alerts the reader that the doctor is aware that the house has the power to trick people into thinking they

55 belong. Eleanor has always wanted to feel loved and safe in a home, the house could be her family. The house, or whatever seems to be within Hill House makes its first direct contact with Eleanor of this same morning. Luke goes out into the hall and immediately rushes back into the room to tell Eleanor to come look in the hallway. “HELP ELEANOR COME HOME.” (Jackson, 1959, p. 146) Eleanor is shocked that it is her name on the wall and worries that the house is singling her out. She questions the other guests of whether they had written it as a joke, but as Eleanor knows, and the reader knows, the entire group had just been all together. This is the first-time accusations are also made against Eleanor. Theo says that Eleanor could have done it herself and that the reason she would have done it is because she felt a kindred spirit with the companion of the older Crane daughter. Not only is she singled out by name, giving her attention that she craves, but she is also separated from the group because of this accusation. This is an interesting conclusion made by Theo. She sees Eleanor as a weak individual who is desperate enough to create a connection between the house and herself. It would appear that Theo is already seeing Eleanor’s growing attachment to the house before Eleanor even realizes it herself. Theo says that the companion would want to speak to Eleanor because she wanted to communicate with someone who is weak, Eleanor doesn’t actually try to negate what Theo has said. She even says that if the companion was trying to contact her, it was only because Eleanor was sympathetic to her story. This is interesting because from how Eleanor has been acting up to this point, she does seem sympathetic to the house in general, acting as if it were a living person.

The first real instance of the Eleanor’s separation from the group is the beginning of her descent into actual madness. Theo screams for Eleanor, when Eleanor enters Theo’s room, she is hit immediately with a putrid smell. Theo’s things are covered in what appears to be blood and naturally assumes that Eleanor is the perpetrator. The rest of the group joins the women only to find that “HELP ELEANOR COME HOME ELEANOR,” is written over Theo’s bed in the same blood in the same way as their first encounter with the ghost writer. It is never revealed to the reader who, or what painted the words or ruined Theo’s clothes. Theo had been napping before she made the discovery, it would have been difficult for Eleanor to have come in, climbed on the bed and painted above her sleeping friend. The doctor removes Theo from the room and speaks with Eleanor about the incident. Doctor Montague feels like Eleanor is not reacting in a similar manner to the others and points this out to her. This is the moment that

56 Eleanor begins to explain away the actions that are going on around them, taking the blame away from herself and justifying what should be a truly terrifying moment:

“It’s too silly,’ Eleanor said, trying to understand her own feelings. ‘I’ve been standing here looking at it and just wondering why. I mean, it’s like a joke that didn’t come off; I was supposed to be much more frightened than this, I think, and I’m not because it’s simply too horrible to be real. And I keep remembering Theo putting red polish . . .’ She giggled, and the doctor looked at her sharply, but she went on, ‘It might as well be paint, don’t you see?’ I can’t stop talking, she thought; what do I have to explain in all this? ‘Maybe I can’t take it seriously,’ she said, ‘after the sight of Theo screaming over her poor clothes and accusing me of writing my name all over her wall. Maybe I’m getting used to her blaming me for everything.” (Jackson, 1959, p. 156)

Other than the initial writing on the wall incident, Theo has been very kind to Eleanor, and it seemed that they had a warm friendship. Eleanor is almost angry with Theo that she reacted so emotionally over what Eleanor thinks to be trivial. Eleanor’s behaviour is almost similar to that of an abused woman who makes excuses for their abuser. Also, after both of these events, Eleanor never says or thinks that she should get in her car and leave at once as the doctor had previously requested. This could be because Eleanor feels like she is already in her new home, that is why she downplays the house’s “behaviour.” Eleanor’s behaviour towards Theo changes from normal to aggressive, she thinks about hitting Theo in the head with a stick, killing her even. Theo attempts to make conversation with her when they are alone but Eleanor is rude and says that Theo doesn’t care about her at all. Whether it is Eleanor’s own strange personality or the actual house, she is now thinking about removing someone who she feels is speaking negatively about her and the house. It is at this point in the novel where Eleanor admits that’s she needs to give in to the houses wants and let herself be captured:

“Look. There’s only one of me, and it’s all I’ve got. I hate seeing myself dissolve and slip and separate so that I’m living in one half, my mind, and I see the other half of me helpless and frantic and driven and I can’t stop it, but I know I’m not really going to be hurt and yet time is so long and even a second goes on and on and I could stand any of it if I could only surrender——” (Jackson, 1959, p. 160)

The others immediately react to Eleanor’s choice of the word surrender and begin to worry, even more than they have already. That night, Eleanor experiences another experience in what can only be described as a “grooming” process. Even after their tense exchanges, Eleanor and Theo sleep side by side in their beds. Eleanor grips Theo’s hand tightly as she begins to hear a disembodied voice of a child. The child’s voice goes from a laugh to a pleading scream, Eleanor is convinced that someone is attempting to hurt the child in question. We know that Eleanor has been yearning for a purpose and a home. She strongly feels that she must protect the child

57 at all costs. When Theo is startled awake Eleanor realizes that she was not holding Theo’s hand after all and loudly exclaims “God, God- whose hand was I holding?” (Jackson, 1959, p. 163) Whether it is Eleanor’s own rapidly declining mind or the house itself, this is the first time Eleanor has an actual physical encounter. Now that something has touched her and she has been overwhelmed with emotion Eleanor is further under the spell of the house.

The next day, Eleanor and Luke has a discussion about his life growing up without his mother. He tells Eleanor that he feels selfish because he desperately wants to have what everyone else had, a mother. During this conversation, Eleanor thinks about the answers that she believes Luke would want her to give him. She has no real feelings toward him except that he is as selfish as he says he is. Eleanor has barley any personality left from what little she had come to Hill House with. Eleanor finds herself alone with Theo once again to have another tense exchange. Theo bates Eleanor about speaking to Luke alone and says that Eleanor should return to her home away from Hill House. They take a walk outside on the house grounds where they encounter what Eleanor believes to be a family having a picnic with small children and a dog. She says that she is frightened yet she only moves away from the scene when Theo suddenly exclaims for them to run and not look back. They make it back to the house where Eleanor rambles on about the picnic while Theo is in hysterics about whatever it was that she saw. At this point it seems that Eleanor is beginning to see things that she wants while at Hill House. A mother calling for her in the night, a child who needs protecting, a family to spend an afternoon with. The house is supplying her with everything she has ever wanted. Her life in Hill House has the potential to be better than her old life with her late mother. (Jackson 1959)

Mrs. Montague arrives later that day and brings with her an assistant named Arthur. Mrs. Montague considers herself something of a medium and has come to assist her husband in discovering the secrets of the house. Mrs. Montague seems to be an amalgamation of Jackson’s grandmother and mother. She is bossy, rude and is a spiritualist. She immediately sets to work telling the other guests how things should be done and cares little when her husband explains that the current guests have experienced traumatic events. She decides that in the evening they will convene in the library to take part in a session with a spirit board called a planchette board. When all are gathered, Arthur and Mrs. Montague seem to a connect to a spirit named Nell. The spirit repeatedly tells the group that they need to go home and a mother needs to be with its child. This interaction with the spirit board is open to interpretation. The impression that

58 could be given is that Eleanor’s true feelings are coming through the board, that she is already a part of Hill House. Another possibility could be that the house itself is once again grooming Eleanor into accepting surrender. In the night, the original group gathers in the doctor’s bedroom. The pounding on the walls and the drop-in temperature starts again this time becoming more intense moment by moment. Eleanor sits and thinks to herself:

“I am disappearing inch by inch into this house, I am going apart a little bit at a time because all this noise is breaking me; why are the others frightened?” (Jackson, 1959, p. 201)

Eleanor no longer has a connection to others and knows that she is letting herself be caught by the house. The next morning, Mrs. Montague and Arthur explain that they slept soundly through the night and were hoping that they could help instigate actual manifestations. Eleanor goes to Theo and tells her that when they do leave Hill House, she would like to live with Theo. Theo aggressively rejects her and tells Eleanor that she isn’t wanted. Eleanor slips into a state of deliria for the last two chapters of the novel. She reveals that she has nowhere to go, that she stole the family care to get to Hill House and that she either consciencly or subconsciencly let her mother die by ignoring her pleas for help. The novel ends in a spectacular and surprising way. Eleanor has been enraptured by the house and the others had finally attempted to get her to leave the house. Eleanor however, has no plans to actually leave the house. She is ushered into her vehicle by the doctor and Theo and gives the others a happy goodbye. As Eleanor is pulling down the drive her psyche finally gives complete way and she begins to speed towards the big tree that was introduced in the beginning of the novel where a worker had hung himself. She gleefully tells herself:

“They can’t turn me out or shut me out or laugh at me or hide from me; Hill House belongs to me.” (Jackson, 1959, p. 245)

As she is hurdling towards the tree, she is in the same state of euphoria that she had been experiencing while inside of the house. She is almost proud that she is making the decision to crash her car because she is doing it on her terms. It becomes evident to the reader that the plan is that she will kill herself to be able to always remain at Hill House, just as others before her had done. At the last moment, before she crashes reason seems to make an appearance in Eleanor’s head and she asks herself why the others are not stopping her. She asks frantically why she is going to crash the car but of course at that point it is too late and Eleanor, who had always wished to belong to a place becomes the houses next prisoner.

59

4.2 “Oh Constance, we are so happy.”- We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Shirley Jackson’s 1962 novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle is another classic considered to be a masterpiece. As previously said, Merricat and Constance Blackwood are two sisters living in their family home with their invalid uncle, Julian. After the death of their entire family, they are completely isolated from the rest of the town, both purposely by the town’s people and by themselves. The reader can tell that something is strange with Merrricat immediately in that she has such strong positive emotions towards her sister and borderline homicidal feeling towards the people living in the town and potentially anyone who could affect her family dynamic. This novel differs from The Haunting of Hill House in that not only does the house act as a prison for the characters, but the main character is actively trying to keep her sister hostage by way of murder, magic and her own mental instability. When we meet Constance Blackwood for the first time, she is waiting by the garden gate for Merricat to return from the village, after shopping.

“Past the turn I might find a mark of Constance's foot, because she sometimes came that far to wait for me, but most of Constance's prints were in the garden and in the house. Today she had come to the end of the garden, and I saw her as soon as I came around the turn; she was standing with the house behind her, in the sunlight, and I ran to meet her. "Merricat," she said, smiling at me, "look how far I came today." "It's too far," I said. "First thing I know you'll be following me into the village." (Jackson, 1962, p. 27)

The reader never learns what has happened to Constance in the time before, during and after, the trial for the murder of her family. The only clue we have of the Blackwood’s treatment is the mean-spirited songs the local children have made up about the Blackwood sisters and their supposed deeds. It is also evident that Merricat has no desire for her sister to leave the comfort of their aging home. She goes onto describe the near hero worship of her sister and says she once views her as “a fairy princess,” and Constance is a sort of other- worldly princess, locked away not in a tower, but in a great Victorian house. Constance does all the house-keeping, cooking, gardening and is the caretaker for Uncle Julian all herself. On this particular day in the novel, Constance has cleaned a seldom used parlour just for the visit from a local woman

60 named Helen Clarke who comes to visit every Friday. Merricat and Constance are caught off guard when they see that Helen Clarke has brought another woman named Lucille Wright. Both girls are nervous about the added guest, Constance attempts to calm Merricat’s nerves but both are still apprehensive. Merricat gives an extremely unflattering description of both women. She compares Helen Clarke to an ungraceful ballerina and comments several times on the scattered nerves of Mrs. Wright. During polite but awkward conversation, Helen suggests that Constance re-join society again since she is still - young and beautiful. Merricat is horrified by the idea of Constance leaving both for selfish reason and with concern that something could happen to her. It is during this interlude in the novel that Uncle Julian regales the women with the event that led to the death of the other Blackwood’s. It becomes evident that Mrs. Wright has only joined Helen Clarke for tea because she is interested in seeing what the living Blackwood’s are like. Julian tells Mrs. Wright that the family was poisoned while eating dinner and sweet, gently dispositioned Constance, waited to call for help until the almost the entire family had died and washed the sugar bowl where the poison had been located. Julian acts as a sort of story teller in the novel, even though he is senile and an invalid, he reveals several parts of the back story behind the family tragedy. At the end of this painful encounter the sisters debrief the afternoon:

“Finally, I had to ask her; the thought had been chilling me all afternoon. “Are you going to do what she said?” I asked her. “What Helen Clarke said?” She did not pretend not to understand. She stood there looking down at her hands working and smiled a little. “I don’t know,” she said.” (Jackson, 1962, p. 56)

Merricat is clearly testing her sister to see if the possibility of her leaving will happen and after the disastrous visit, notices a slight change in her sister’s behaviour. Merricat makes weekly checks of the perimeter of the Blackwood property. She believes that through the physical fence and her use of folk magic, they will be protected from the outside world. Any question that she is not of stable mind are answered when she describes how she plants certain items in the ground to make the grass grow. Merricat makes a prediction with her “magic” (a litter of baby snakes that she kills, and a book nailed to a tree has fallen) and with Constance’s alarming behaviour that a big change will be coming for them. The events that lead to The Blackwood sister’s life sentence within their home begin the morning their cousin, Charles Blackwood comes to the house demanding to speak with Constance. Merricat immediately decides that Charles is nothing more than an intruder. His cause is not helped by the fact that according to

61 Constance he looks very much like their late father who has been murdered by either Constance or Merricat. Julian calls Charles’ motivations early and comments on how both the girls’ father and Charles’ father who were Julian’s brothers were both wealthy men. He also says that Constance is a well-known beauty. Charles tells everyone his father has died and left him nothing.

Constance offers to make Charles breakfast and even though he says he is there for benign reasons, he hesitates before eating the food. When Constance goes to bring a confused, disoriented Julian outside, Charles attempts to coerce Merricat into conversation by playing with her beloved cat Jonas. He says: "Oh, well," Charles said to Jonas, "Constance likes me, and I guess that's all that matters.” (Jackson, 1962, p. 97) After this interaction Charles makes off putting statements to Merricat about her cold behaviour including "I wonder if Cousin Mary knows how I get even with people who don't like me (Jackson, 1962, p. 101)? Constance makes Merricat further nervous when she begins to wear her late other’s jewellery. Merricat realises that Constance is attempting to make herself appear more attractive for Charles with his veiled remarks he also begins to make changes to the order of the house. He questions Constance as to why she allows Julian to sit with them during meals and also says that he will go into the village to do the shopping, which was formerly Merricat’s only interaction with people other than Helen Clarke. As Merricat becomes more and more angry listening to Charles, she blurts out a biological summary of a deadly plant in order to frighten Charles. He does not however back down and tells her to be quiet. The reader can now see that Constance is being pulled in two very opposite directions by two people that can offer her home situations. Merricat is her beloved sister and friend. They have always lived together in their home which they both show immense pride in. Merricat is very much a child at 18 years old and relies on Constance for nearly everything. Charles, who looks like her father, gives her a glimpse of what their lives were like before the murder. He says he will do jobs around the house and tells her she is lovely and sweet. After Charles finds their father’s gold watch nailed to a tree (one of Merricat’s safeguards) he says that it would have been worth a great sum of money and he will get to the bottom of whoever broke it. (Jackson 1962)

Merricat’s home with her sister and uncle begins to unravel further when Charles begins to manipulate Constance into believing that she has not done right by living in solitude with the other two Blackwood’s. Constance begins to scold Merricat about the “wandering” around the property and tells Merricat that she should be in the outside world making friends, specifically

62 “boyfriends.” Charles again finds an item of Constance and Merricat’s father outside, this time a scarf, and announces that he will look through the rest of their father’s clothes and he will look through the office at the official documents for the house. Constance plays piano for them in the evening and peruses the parlour for valuable objects. He sends Merricat and Julian away so that and Constance, who he is now referring to as “Connie” can talk about their future plans. Merricat decides the next day, that she would let Charles know that it was time to leave the house. She stops her father’s newly fixed watch from ticking and puts wood, twigs and dirt all over the room where Charles’ sleep, which used to be their father’s room. Charles is furious when he sees this and demands an explanation. Merricat refuses to speak to him and he becomes enraged when Uncle Julian begins to scream at him about how he no longer wants Charles in the house. He expects Constance to punish Merricat but Constance does not understand why Charles is so upset. Merricat runs away to a previously unmentioned summer house that belongs to the Blackwood family. She goes inside and imagines the scene from the last time her family all sat down to eat dinner and remembers each place that sat. She imagines her family to have a discussion about how well-behaved and perfect she is. She fantasizes that her mother says: "Our beloved, our dearest Mary Katherine must be guarded and cherished.” (Jackson, 1962, p. 140) It is now evident to the reader that it was not Constance who had poisoned the family, but Merricat who had orchestrated the entire dinner. It seems that Merricat arrives at a decision about Charles and goes back to the main house for dinner. She enters Charles’ newly cleaned bedroom and sees that her mother’s saucers, originally meant for tea cups, are being used by Charles as ashtrays. She says that Constance was letting Charles use them and they were being scattered around the house. This inherently bothers Merricat because as mentioned at the beginning of the book, her mother was obsessed with everything being in its proper place. it is implied that she knocks his still hot pipe into the wastepaper basket. She is scolded once again by Charles and to her surprise Constance also. While Charles and Constance argue over what to do with Merricat, the house begins to fill with smoke. Charles immediately suspects Merricat and rushes up the stairs when Constance says that it’s his pipe. Merricat sits gleefully at the table and tells her sister that it is Charles’ fault. Instead of worrying about the safety of the others Charles attempts to save both himself and the money kept in the family safe.

“Charles had the front door open now and turned on the doorsill to call to Constance. "Don't try to carry the safe," he said, "put the money in a bag. I'll be back as fast as I can get help. Don't panic." He ran, and we could hear him screaming "Fire! Fire! Fire!" as he ran toward the village” (Jackson, 1962, p. 148)

63 Constance calmly helps Julian to his room to collect his papers and belongings and Merricat goes upstairs to close the door of the burning room. Merricat believes that the fire will be contained to the one bedroom and all traces of Charles will be wiped away from their home. While the fire begins to move through the house, we see where Constance’s loyalty finally lies and how they react to the fire:

"We will have to go outside," I said. I knew that she was frightened, so I said, "We can stay on the porch, behind the vines, in the darkness." "We neatened it just the other day," she said, "it has no right to burn." She began to shiver as though she were angry, and I took her by the hand and brought her through the open front door and just as we turned back for another look the lights came into the driveway with the disgusting noise of sirens and we were held in the doorway in the light (Jackson, 1962, p. 149).

Both women react in a similar calm fashion. While this reaction is strange to the reader, the Blackwood sisters are protective of their home and seem to believe that even though it is on fire, it will all be alright in the end. Charles arrives along with the local fire brigade and he tells them to not worry about Merricat, Julian and Constance since he had warned them and to remove the safe from the house. Uncle Julian is not outside with the girls and it appears that something might actually be wrong. Constance is concerned about how the soot and ash will affect her cleaning, Merricat is happy to hear this and thinks: “I was pleased that she thought of the house and forgot the people outside.” Merricat constantly tells herself that the fire was Charles’ fault and that the fire would be put out quickly. Other villagers begin to arrive and tell the firemen to let the house burn down. When the fire is under control the townspeople descend upon the still smouldering house to smash and break the silverware and glassware in the kitchen. Constance watches on in horror as her most beloved possessions are ruined. Jim Clarke, who is the town’s doctor announces to the mob that Julian has died in the fire and that everyone should leave in peace. Charles asks if Julian was murdered and looks for help with the safe. Jim Clarke sends them away and the girls make their way down the property to hide from the mob. Merricat finally admits to the murder of her family when she realizes the destruction the townspeople have caused:

"One of our mother's Dresden figurines is broken, I thought, and I said aloud to Constance, "I am going to put death in all their food and watch them die." Constance stirred, and the leaves rustled. "The way you did before?" she asked. It had never been spoken of between us, not once in six years. "Yes," I said after a minute, "the way I did before." (Jackson, 1962, p. 162)

Merricat was the perpetrator of the original murder and Constance had taken the blame for her out of love and loyalty. Merricat murdered her mother, father, brother and aunt out of the desire

64 to have her sister and her house all to herself. The next morning after spending the night outside, the Blackwood sisters make their way back to the house. Merricat is concerned that they never got to eat their dinner the night before and Constance fusses over her as usual. Constance at this point has a very loose grip on reality and it seems that she has relinquished control of her life over to the house that she had been wanting to leave with Charles. When they come to the kitchen, Constance’s favourite room and “heart” of the house, Constance is heartbroken to see that much of it has been destroyed. The only saving grace is that the preserves that she and the previous Blackwood women had made were still there in the cellar. She sets off to make Merricat breakfast and manically talks about all the food she will still make. Constance suddenly seems to remember that Julian had perished in the fire and is over come with sadness about the funeral that will most likely be given by the town, however it is evident that neither will go. Constance is now fully under the thrall of the house after the fire. She tells her sister in a calm voice: “We are going to lock ourselves in more securely than ever." (Jackson, 1962, p. 172) Constance has been aware that they have tried to keep others out, and now she freely admits that they should lock themselves away to keep the dangers of the outside world away. Constance says that they should clean up and they set about their ritual of “neatening” up the house. Constance says that everything should go back where it belongs and Merricat says that she will close all the shutters. They are effectively creating a prison for themselves inside the family home. While they clean, Helen and her husband Jim come to the outside of the home and make a plea for Constance and Merricat to come home with them where they will be safe. The sisters hide and Constance worries that they won’t leave and then their soup will boil over. Neither sister wants to leave the home and think very little about going with Helen, they are even annoyed with the thought that she may come back to try again. Constance obsesses about getting the house clean and in order and even says she will clean Julian’s room because the house needs to be back to the way it was even though most of it has been affected by the fire. While the sisters speak about fortifying their home, Jim Clarke and another town doctor, Doctor Levy come to the house to once again beg the women to leave the house. They tell them that they will have to leave at some point, all the while, the sisters sit in the kitchen quietly eating biscuits. Both have completely accepted that their lives with connections to the outside world have ended and that they no long need anyone but each other and their home.

While clearing out Julian’s room they realize that they only have the clothes on their backs and Constance says that they will need to wear Julian’s remaining two suits, robe and pyjamas since they will no longer be leaving the house. Merricat insists that she is not permitted to touch

65 Julian’s things even after Constance tells her that she is allowed now that he is dead. Constance continues to be energized by the idea that they will be alone and repeats over and over that they are going to lead such happy lives. Strange events begin to take place outside the front door of their home. People begin to leave food for the girls in what seems to be a miraculous change of heart from the fire. With the food are short notes about the broken house items from the day of the fire. Merricat waits until night, and of course after Constance has cleaned the dishes and napkins and returns them to the homes of the townspeople. The saga of the Blackwood sisters ends with one final encounter with their cousin Charles. He brings a photographer to the house to report upon the massive wealth that is still locked inside with the girls in the safe. He attempts to sweet talk Constance to open the door but it is to no avail. Constance does not answer him because she has given up her life on the outside of the front door. (Jackson 1962)

Merricat began her own imprisonment inside the house the day she poisoned her family at the dinner table and let her sister take the blame for it. She wanted a home that was just she and her sister and nearly succeeded. She accepted that Uncle Julian would have to be a part of their lives but he was no threat because he was an invalid. She was able to keep Constance hostage with her immaturity and homicidal urges. Constance, it seems at one point was willing to become a captive of Charles, but once her house was threatened abandoned that idea for the comfort of her home which in the end was closed up and fenced off, just like the prison Merricat always wanted it to be. From the opening paragraph the reader can tell that there is something very off about Merricat. For an 18-year-old girl, she lives very much in a fantasy world. She has a complete disregard for anyone but herself, Constance and very occasionally Uncle Julian, whom she tolerates because he was so badly affected by the poisoning. Because Constance enables Merricat’s behaviour, Merricat is able to create a space in their home for them to live without interference from the outside world. Constance seems to have an actual fear of non- family members and is terrified to leave the family home. Her sister is not afraid to keep everyone out. She likes it that way and that is what makes her to frightening to the reader. Merricat was only 12 years old when she poisoned her family, she became a murderer before she was even a teenager. The way Merricat uses intimidation and her own form of witchcraft to protect their house makes the reader see her not as a young woman damaged by a dysfunctional family, but as a deranged human masquerading as a young woman. The way that Constance and Merricat accept their lives in the hollowed-out house after the fire is a foreign and strange idea for the reader. It does not make any logical sense for anyone to want to live in a house that has been badly damaged. The two women do not even have any other clothes to wear but they still refuse to go live somewhere else. (Jackson 1962)

66

4.3 “Our house is old, and noisy, and full.” – Life Among the Savages

Life Among the Savages is a somewhat surprising book of Jackson’s if you are only familiar with her gothic genre books. While we can still see the same house and home formula, what is different is the family that we meet. Jackson’s unnamed mother (herself) and the idiotic but well-meaning father (her husband Hyman) and their eventual four children (based on her own four.) For all intents and purposes, they are a very normal American family except that the mother and father are both respected members of the literary world. Several of the events that take place in the book have been verified by Jackson’s children, if not embellished upon as was Jackson’s way of storytelling. The book begins with an interesting take on what home-life was like for Jackson’s family. She describes their lives as being overwhelmed by objects that a family accumulates over time like doll dresses and “literally thousands of socks.” (Jackson, 1953, p. 1) She says that she and her husband are so bogged down by the objects that they have bought and acquired through their own marriage and the that they have just accepted that they will never escape. As previously mentioned, the family must find a new place to reside after their landlord tells them that the lease on their city apartment is quickly coming to an end and he has already rented the space to other tenants. Jackson calls around for a vacant city apartment and is met with no luck either because of lack of availability or the apartments are too expensive. Jackson reveals that she and her husband had always wanted to move to Vermont and has a rather fantastic idea of what life would be like once they finally move to their ideal home, in a small town. The couple knows of another family who moved to a small town and their lives were supposedly filled with happy children and stunning views of a picturesque mountain range. They decide to leave their children with their grandparents and partake on a journey to Vermont by train in order to look for a new home. They are woefully under prepared for the weather in Vermont, as it is winter time and snowing. They come with the idea that they will only be able to rent a property and try to explain this to a local woman, Mrs. Black, who is helping them to find a house. Mrs. Black takes them to several different homes, each large and would accommodate their family but lacking in some major repair. One house in particular would be well suited, if it had not been completely without indoor plumbing. The husband tries to explain to Mrs. Black that they simply do not have the money to buy a house at the time and would prefer to rent. They are not ready to make the commitment to a home that they will live in forever and the husband does not make enough to buy a house outright. Just as the young

67 couple is about to give up on their search, a local grocer tells them that one last house, The Fielding House, could be a potential option for them and that they should get in contact with the current owner (Jackson, 1953, p. 12). It turns out that the house, as with most of Jackson’s houses has a long history of wealthy families owning it. It was built by a doctor who wanted a Greek styled home for his farm. The final owner of the house was a local man who was happy to rent out his family home to the young couple but warned them that there would need to be some repairs made. Styled architecturally in the Greek revival style, the house had a set of massive white pillars in the front. Jackson remarks to Mr. Fielding that the house is very “imposing” and is hesitant at first. However, once she goes inside she has a change of heart:

“Once among the pillars the sense of the house came upon one with a rush; here was a house…” (Jackson, 1953, p. 12)

When Jackson used italics to show the immediate emotion she felts when she entered the house, she was showing the reader that it was a sense of home she was getting from this great house. In her other books. Jackson would use the opportunity to use the character’s initial interaction with the house to set the tone for the rest of the book. Jackson’s houses usually have a sinister undercurrent to them. Mr. Fielding is so willing to let the young family live in the house that he offers them the entire estate for forty dollars a month and will take care of all the needed repairs himself before they move in. Even with the feeling that she got and the house and the generous offer of Mr. Fielding, she is still hesitant to make the commitment to the house. It seems that she had already came to the idea that the house would be an immense undertaking and that the dream that they had been waiting on, came much quicker than she anticipated. When they do move in, Jackson gives a humorous account of how they try to settle into their much larger dwellings. She describes the house as a living being, this time without the hidden malevolent undertones of her previous novels. She says that what little furniture they did have, had to be left to settle in places of their own choosing. No close line would stay up in the backyard, the door to the attic would lock with someone inside and other doors refused to close at all. She describes her children’s room like this:

“One bedroom chose the children, because it was large and light and showed unmistakable height-marks on one wall and seemed to mind not at all when crayon marks appeared on the wall- paper and paint got spilled on the floor.” (Jackson, 1953, p. 19)

Obviously, the house itself is not the living being, but Jackson’s memories and immediate emotional attachment to the house give it this sort of life. She begins to see that life in the city was not as wonderful as she originally believed it to be. In their new house, she took up all

68 sorts of new home-maker type activities like baking and gardening. She thinks that her life in the city had been much busier and she was never able to accomplish anything at all. She recounts one occasion when she left her children with a neighbor to take the train back to New York and go shopping. She goes back to their old neighborhood and remarks that the building lacks the pillars of her new home and is lacking. After this trip she begins to fall into the pattern that makes the house into their home. Jackson writes that she throws herself fully into country life and wants the reader to believe that she enjoys it, however, she slips in that she feels it is “back-breaking labor” (Jackson, 1953, p. 21) and that the time in the house never really changes. She does the same types of things every day and there is no major event other than a hurricane that ruined a bushel of raspberries she was growing. She marks one year living there, the year her third child was born with the purchase of a new winter coat. She talks about how each month comes and goes and with each season, she loses track of things like the growth of her children, or even the day of her own birthday. However, we know from Mary Douglas that these memories and events are what create a home atmosphere inside a house. Jackson write about several humorous events that take place in the house like, her son inventing a naughty child in school who is actually himself, a bat becoming trapped in the home and becoming pregnant with her third child. She is almost military like in her preparation for her third child. She washes and gets all the baby clothes ready and carefully packs her away bag. Even though she consistently says how much she loves her home and her family, she is desperate to get away with a bag full of comfortable bed clothes, two pounds of fudge and novels to read. On the day she goes into labor, she attempts to be calm for both herself and her family and even takes a taxi by herself to the hospital. There, she has one of Jackson’s most famous literary exchanges:

“Name? the desk clerk said to me politely, her pencil poised. “Name,” I said vaguely. I remembered and told her. “Age?” she asked. “Sex? Occupation?” “Writer,” I said. “Housewife,” she said. “Writer,” I said. “I’ll just put down housewife,” she said.” (Jackson, 1953, p. 66)

The clerk completely disregards her legitimate career because she is a pregnant woman. Even though she has left her house, her children and her husband at home, she is still considered just a housewife. She meets another pregnant woman in the maternity wing that is also pregnant with her third child. The talk about how the other woman has been experiences “false alarms” and Jackson sympathizes that these false labors are often looked at as taking advantage of the

69 time away from home. With the births of her third and fourth children, Jackson describes the events almost as if they were vacations.

The first time the house lets Jackson and her family down is the first time her husband leaves on an extended trip to New York. She tries to lift her own mood by making her children a special dinner and dessert. This does not however help her nerves that night when she attempts to go to sleep only to wake up a few times convinced that the house is on fire. It seems that Jackson was all too aware that she was alone, in this great house with her children and had very little experience in this kind of situation. When the family wakes in the morning, they quickly come to the realization that the house is freezing and that the furnace has turned off, Jackson goes downstairs to the basement but admits that the day it was installed, she was not paying attention and figured her husband would be there to fix it in. case something like this ever happened. She rushes her children to get ready for school, only to find that her car will not start, and no one is available to fix it. She has to take a taxi to get the children to school and then starts calling around to see if someone can fix the furnace. She finally reaches a neighbor who sends her husband over to have a look. Much to her chagrin, he says that the furnace only needed to be started again and that she could have easily done it by herself. (Jackson 1953)

It seems Jackson will finally get a reprieve from this insanity when her neighbor invited her over for cards. She desperately wants to go but, realizes that she has no money to bring to the card game because she had to pay a mechanic for both the car and the furnace and will have to buy milk for her children. She is completely bound to the house at this point. She cannot leave, even for an evening with friends because she has out all of her energy into her children and the house that she so loved in the beginning. Her husband calls her that evening and asks her is he should come home to which she replies no, that she handled the entire ordeal by herself. Both Jackson and her husband had invested money and their lives into the house that they wanted to make a home for their children. She has very happy memories within the house but feels like she is let down when she needs the house itself to help her. The last scene in the book is when Jackson brings home her youngest child back home. Her older children surround her and take in the sight of their new sibling referring to him humorously as “it”. The children, who act very typically in that they want to seem aloof to their mother who has in their mind abandoned them to have their brother, quickly let their facades fall and hug and kiss the narrator. It’s Jackson’s oldest son, referred to as Laurie in the book that says a curious but poignant line. As he is leaving the room where his mother and new brother sit, he says to her “I guess it will be nice for you, though. He said at last. “Something to keep you busy now we’re all grown up.”

70 (Jackson, 1953, p. 226) This seems like a rather normal thing for a somewhat jealous older brother to say of a new baby. But it also illustrates how children are very much unaware of the amount of time and energy is put into raising them. Laurie believes himself to be so grown up that he doesn’t need his mother anymore. He also infers that his mother’s entire life is just devoted to raising her children. Even though Jackson was a well-established writer by the time her fourth child was born, her children never saw that she had any other career than being their mother. Jackson wanted to be taken seriously as a writer but was always help captive by the fact that she needed to be a wife and mother first and foremost. This book is not meant to frighten the reader. It is rather light hearted throughout and is resolved in a peaceful way with a baby being born into the world. The strangeness that comes from the normality of this book is because we know of the background information. Jackson was a gifted writer and without the pressure she felt from her husband to take care of the home and produce well written material, she could have perhaps written even more. In our modern world, the idea that a woman would accept that her husband would leave for days at time while she knew he was having extra marital affairs and she was left with three small children under the age of ten. It is impossible to read this novel in this day and age without feeling some sort of sympathy towards the narrator. The actual frightening parts of the book come from the real-life events that can change a family forever. In both the book and in real life, Jackson’s son Laurence was hit by a car when he rode his bicycle into the street from their driveway. Laurence suffered a skull fracture and for days his parents had to wait to hear if their son had brain damage from the accident (Franklin, 2016). Luckily Laurence only suffered from a concussion, the small fracture and a broken thumb. His mother however, would suffer from the after effects of nearly losing her son for long after the accident. As a mother, this event must have shaken Jackson to her core. The accident is covered in the book in a light-hearted way. When her son is brought home from the hospital, he is concerned about who cut his clothes off and when he can get up again to play. There is perhaps nothing worse for a parent then their child being gravely injured. In reality, where there are no ghosts that go bump in the night or vampires lurking around in graveyards, the loss of a child is the most terrible tragedy anyone can experience.

71 Conclusion

As said in the introduction to this work, the purpose of this thesis is show how Shirley Jackson used her specific type of Gothic fiction as a means to tell stories about female characters who become captives in their own homes. Jackson’s writing style allowed her to create fiction that was from a female perspective but could be understood by all. Jackson took her own life experiences and used them to show how ordinary people can be trapped in their everyday lived. She infused these stories with the supernatural and the uncanny in everyday objects like a house. The process of captivity is a slow journey for both the character and the reader. The reader often has to look on in horror as the female character slowly allowed herself to be taken prisoner by her own lost will to be a part of the outside world. The terror of being a captive never leaves these characters after they allow themselves to block out their former lives. The homes of each of these characters becomes a place to tell a story about the mysteries of family life and how women are usually at the center of these stories. This uncanny treatment of houses and the women who live in them created very specific stories about how normality can be terrifying. The reason why Jackson’s stories work so well is because she created her own formulas to capture the reader’s attention as well. Her “garlic in fiction” style helped her to create stories that elicited frightened responses from the reader because she stuck to a straightforward way to showcase the plot.(Franklin)

The historical and theoretic framework helped me to really look at how the history of Gothic fiction helped create Jackson as a writer. Many of the literary devices used in the Gothic genre form the basis for her work and she used them in a masterful way. It was extremely interesting to find how the other novels and short stories used to illustrate these literary devices had similar feelings as those of Jackson’s. I attempted to use the oldest tests of Gothic fiction like The Castle of Otranto and The Mysteries of Udolpho to show how this genre was born and how even those books have their own style of using the genre. I included Toni Morrison’s Beloved because it is a modern Gothic novel that still uses many of the same devices that Jackson and other Gothic writers have used. It became clear that the characters that became captives in their homes, had certain characteristics that foreshadowed their imprisonment. Eleanor Vance, Constance Blackwood and Jackson herself as the unnamed narrator in Life Among the Savages, all experienced life altering experiences that caused them change how they thought about the world. Eleanor Vance is finally freed of her mother after she dies, only to fall completely under the spell of Hill House. Eleanor was a woman of weak self-esteem to begin with and was

72 desperate to find a place where she would be accepted and loved. Even though Hill House was built as a family home for the original owner’s family, it becomes a prison for the women who lived there. After the murder of the Blackwood family, Constance first became a social pariah because the townspeople believed she poisoned her family. Whatever took place during this time when she was on trial is left up to the reader to make inferences. The way Constance is terrified to leave her family home leads us to believe that she was abused in some way while she was away from her house and her sister. Because the story is told from the point of view of Merricat, the true murderer, we can see what is happening to Constance but are powerless to help her. Shirley Jackson dreamed of moving with her family out into the country to raise her children. However, once they get there, her husband is absent often, she has very little experience taking care of a home and must navigate the stressful and rewarding job of raising children without the help of her husband. She tells the reader that she is happy with her life, but occasionally slips in the monotony and stress of child rearing are difficult and disappointing. The characters in Jackson novels are not all good. Her characters have negative emotions and opinions, they are selfish and enable others to continue bad behavior. The female characters in the books analyzed in this thesis are not moral pillars. They are sisters, wives and daughters who experience trauma and events that cause them to turn their back onto the work and create prisons for themselves. They take the safety that a house is mean to offer and turn it into a place of captivity.

In this thesis, I have tried to insert Jackson’s personal life into each chapter because what she was experiencing at the time of writing was so influential on what her characters go through in their respective novels. As previously mentioned, Jackson was plagued with anxiety and then eventually agoraphobia as well. A turn of events in the last years of her life directly contributed to her own self imprisonment. After the publication of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Jeanne Beatty, Jackson’s beloved pen pal stopped writing to her abruptly. Jackson lost a confidant that she had relied on heavily in the time when she was writing the novel. A friend, a student of Stanley’s seemed to fill this role that Jeanne had vacated. Barbara Karmiller and her husband Murray moved into a guesthouse of the Hyman family home. The Hymans and the Karmillers enjoyed each other’s company and it seemed that Jackson found a new bosom companion in Barbara. During this time, Barbara worked with Stanley on his book reviews for The New Yorker and he also put out a few books. While the book reviews were well received, his books were not. He had spent more than a decade researching the writings of evolutionary scientists like Charles Darwin. The response to the book was nowhere near the kind of reviews

73 and attention Shirley books got. Jackson was critical of her husband, giving him the same treatment that he often gave her. After the poor reception of his book, Stanley began an affair with Barbara that he did very little to hide from his wife. Jackson was devastated that her best friend and her husband would betray her in this manner. Even Jackson’s children became aware of the affair. This was the event that began Jackson’s decent into being controlled by her agoraphobia (Franklin, 2016).

After this event, any time Jackson attempted to leave her home, she began to experience panic attacks. She began to experience delusions and horrific nightmares. She reluctantly saw a psychoanalyst who prescribed tranquilizers which she became addicted to. Her husband and Barbara forced her to then also see a psychiatrist. While Jackson was taking the pills to aid in the relief from the panic attacks, she continued to consume alcohol. Jackson was unable to write anything during this time and was too hard on herself. She stopped going to the lectures she once enjoyed giving and no longer accompanied her husband to social events. Jackson’s daughters returned home to care for their mother, Sarah especially was a great help to Jackson although to her own detriment because she lost her place at university. Jackson could not even attempt to write until 1963 when she finally felt well enough to work, but still not to leave the house. She wrote in her diary “writing is the way out (Franklin, 2016).” If she could no longer, and would no longer go out into the world, she would use her work to reach and communicate with other people. In the following two years with the aid of therapy and the unfortunate crutch of prescription drugs and alcohol Jackson was again able to leave her house, though seldomly. In April of 1965, Jackson attended a lecture given at her alma matter the University of Syracuse, where she read the first chapter of the new novel she was working on. In the summer of the year, she was meant to be given an achievement award by the university. Jackson was feeling much more like herself and enjoyed the questions that the students had for her after the lecture. She wrote and produced several short stories and was even able to nurse Stanley, who had broken off with Barbara back to health after he suffered from an illness. She attended writer’s conferences and helped her husband lose a massive amount of weight, while she gained more and more.

In what is probably the saddest diary entry Jackson ever wrote, she writes about the prospect of writing a new novel: “perhaps a funny book. A happy book. (in) a new style.” (Franklin, 2016) Her unfinished novel Come Away with Me was this new funny book, in a new style.

74 Jackson would never finish this new book. She would get pneumonia in the winter of 1965 and it would weaken her already failing health. In a last trip with her husband, she spent a few weeks of the summer on a road trip with Stanley, their youngest son and their nephew through Canada. Jackson’s son remembers his mother on this trip as weak but very happy. In a letter to her dear friend Carol Brandt, Jackson said that we would be leaving on a journey and would be expecting to meet new people. In what could only be described as a Gothic foreshadowing it sees that Jackson felt her impending death was near and was letting her loved ones know that she would be leaving them soon. Jackson died in her sleep in August of the same year. In death, she finally escaped her anxieties and the unworthiness she felt throughout her life (Franklin, 2016).

Jackson’s ability to write about life but at the same time show that not all people are good was what she was most praised for and heavily criticised for. Jackson’s biographer perhaps describes her best: “her role as a writer was to draw back the curtain on the darkness within the human psyche.” (Franklin, 2016) The response from Jackson’s family, friends and fans was massive. Her family received letters from all over the world professing their admiration for Jackson. One woman wrote: “She was one of us, and greater and smarter and funnier than any of us, it was so good to know she was there.” (Franklin, 2016) What is truly interesting to me about the aftermath of Jackson’s death is how Stanley coped. He was devastated by the loss of his wife, even though on all accounts he treated her badly from the moment they met and only a year after her death married a former student who had written the Hyman family a condolence letter. He spent the years after her death promoting his late wife’s work and reputation as a serious writer and had a few of her unseen short stories published with the permission of their children.

There are several reasons as to why I wanted to write my thesis about Shirley Jackson. I first read The Lottery in my 7th grade English class. We read it out loud together and discussed how the story made us feel. The overwhelming response is that we were scared. The language and tone she used was easy for us to understand. We were able to put ourselves into the story with the characters. After we read the short story, our teacher asked us what we would do if we had to take part in a similar ritual. The consensus was that none of us would most likely do anything different because our parents would be telling us what to do and we wouldn’t know any better.

75 Reading this story revealed a lot of the children sitting in the classroom. We looked around and realized that most of would go ahead and stone one another if our parents told us to do it. This was a very frightening realization for a 13-year-old. Reading Jackson’s stories again now, I can see that the feeling I got when I initially read her stories is exactly the feeling, she wanted me to have. She wanted the reader to look around and not take the perfect family next store at face value. She let us know that every family has secrets, and nothing is truly as it seems.

Shirley Jackson came back into my life when my son was born in 2016. I took the first year of my son’s life off from work so that I would be there for him when he needed me in those first critical months. In this time, I also went back to college to finish my master’s degree. I was met with constant criticism that even though I was taking a leave of absence from my job as a teacher, I was taking classes three times a week and would be away from my baby. In my second semester of school, I decided to take only one class and search for a topic for my thesis that I would have to inevitably write. I consumed every novel by Shirley Jackson quickly and was surprised by Life Among the Savages the most. While I adored Jackson as a Gothic writer, Jackson as mother writing about her experienced raising her kids in a new environment away from her family struck an enormous chord. The book was funny, but also a little sad. I knew that it was a fictionalized version of her life in Vermont with her family and had read A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin after I had finished the novels. While the book is a light-hearted read, I knew that Jackson struggled with her marriage and also with feeling inadequate as a mother. For the first time I felt like an author was another human being rather than just being someone whose work I loved reading. What fascinated me further is how much Jackson put of herself in her books. Whatever she was feeling or experiencing at the time are her writing can be found somewhere in the book. It became clear to me that Jackson had a pattern in the books that she wrote. Usually, there would be big house and within this house a family with secrets would live. The women who lived in these homes would eventually find themselves trapped in the house. I, as a young mother felt like at times, I was trapped in my own house because of how people here feel about how mothers should behave. I am happy that I chose “home as a prison” as my thesis because it is my hope that with the new interest in Shirley Jackson more people will read her stories and she will get the recognition she deserves.

For further research on this topic, I believe it would be interesting to compare how other Gothic writers have used captivity in their literature. I believe it would also be prudent to look at how

76 the treatment of female writers has gotten better since Jackson’s death. To conclude this thesis, I would hope to say that I have proved how Jackson used home, and other contributing factors to show the plight of captivity of the female characters.

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