Shirley Jackson’s feminine intellect was not unique

The writing of American gothic extraordinaire Shirley Jackson has received renewed interest in recent years as critics have come to appreciate her work as more than a flash in the pan. Novels like Hangsaman and The Haunting of Hill House are being revisited as enduring works in the American canon rather than gimmicky horror novels.

In her lifetime, Jackson was best known for her essays on family life collected in Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. Seemingly quite the departure from her psychologically intense, edging on the paranormal fiction, these often light-hearted reflections on raising her four children detail the domestic life. Her children were, it seems for Jackson as it is for many women, the focus of much of her life.

Not only did Jackson devote much of her time and labor to the raising of her children and managing of various pets and household projects, but she also took care of her husband. Many a critic is aghast that Jackson’s husband, scholar Stanley Edgar Hyman, expected her to dote on his every need—whilst she paid the bills for many years with her writing. Legend has it Hyman would not so much as deign to warm his own bowl of soup. Anecdotes like these raise the hackles of many a critic who rails against Hyman as a symbol of the patriarchy writ large. There’s an underlying assumption that Jackson’s work was held back by her controlling, demanding, philandering, and generally unpleasant spouse.

This reading makes some unwarranted assumptions. For one thing, Jackson, born in 1916, lived in a time when many men presumed domestic labor was for women. There is nothing particularly atrocious about Hyman’s attitude. To be sure, he did a fine job rendering himself hard to like with his serial and notorious affairs and his pathetic and controlling behavior (at one point forbidding Jackson from writing letter to friends and family because the use of her talent was unpaid—Jackson quipped that Hyman calculated her letters were worth $40 a page). But his expectations for his wife were not necessarily the unforgivable sin that our culture views them as. In fact, talking to women who have married older men, even in the past two decades, reveals a generation not yet castrated by feminist demands.

Is it terribly “fair” that some men never lift a finger in the daily tasks of family life? Certainly not. Arguably, as the head of the household, he would do well to take part in the tasks he so confidently delegates to his wife and children. On the other hand, for the man who refuses to wash the cloth diapers and fix his own dinner, what is a woman to do? Nag and berate him into submission? Historically, that has failed to produce the desired results. As for physical intimidation, women will likely find, as with a mother who discovers that one can physically move an irate three-year-old but a 12-year-old is another story, physical force is likely a dead end with a full-grown man.

Far from base enslavement, Jackson willingly married Stanley, with full knowledge of his intention to continue near-constant flings. The years went by with outrageous and notorious goings-on, which played a part in driving the increasingly obese, anxious and depressed Jackson to dependency on a variety of drugs. The result of all this rough living, it seems, was death due to heart failure at the age of 48. The problem with Hyman and Jackson’s marriage, perhaps, is not the supposed misogyny and oppression but their mutual tolerances of each other’s sin.

Along with the very bad, there is also something admirable about their odd union. One writer noted, “Shirley and Stanley had achieved a sometimes painful but nevertheless invincible symbiosis that no outsider could ever penetrate. He championed her genius from their undergraduate years, when he read one of her stories in their college newspaper and vowed to marry the author sight unseen (a true story). Stanley’s unflagging faith in her work keeps the fragile Shirley from losing it entirely. The price she pays is putting up with his ephemeral affair.”

Whatever the backstory of Hyman and Jackson’s marriage, it did not inhibit Jackson’s writing in the way that many critics so glibly assume. As a recent collection of Jackson’s letters reveals, Jackson reveled in the chaos of her domestic reign, and, indeed, it was in many ways her kingdom. What many people fail to understand about the oppressed housewife is that she may have, within clear confines, the liberty of a great artist. Within constraints, she can create, cultivate, order, and enjoy a world of her own.

What mystifies many critics is that Jackson’s accounts of daily life are apparently jovial rather than despairing, ridiculous and self-deprecating, perhaps a bit like the Home Life series by Alice Thomas Ellis. Sam Sacks in the Wall Street Journal cannot fathom that the same effervescent quality running through Life Among the Savages is present in Jackson’s letters detailing the trials of being a housewife. Rather than stew in bitter resentment at her oppression (as women are now coached to do), Jackson made light of horrific episodes like sewage backing up while the ground was too frozen to get to the septic tank.

Sacks notes with seeming surprise that Jackson’s quip, “As always when i get creative, i am creating more children,” “sounds more proud than rueful.” In a world in which women are constantly told that they need more time, more space, more empowerment, more recognition, the idea that welcoming babies and pursuing art could go hand-in-hand is unthinkable. And yet, women do not create as the isolated male genius; many women artists create in concert with every aspect of who they are: mothers.

Sacks adds that “there must have been satisfactions in the heterodoxy of collapsing the border that separated household duty from the life of the mind.” He suggests, “The labors of domesticity and artistry are fused in these letters in a way that seems to me unique.” This hardly seems the case.

Examples abound, especially among successful women, of mothers who were intimately involved in domestic labor and raising children while also producing an astonishing volume of creative material. In many other cases, financial pressure—as in the case of Elsa Beskow and Tasha Tudor—regular commercial output that no doubt aided the artist’s development.

Our age has developed a fixation on Jackson’s oppression as external—her unlikeable husband and brood of children. What if, in fact, these cumbersome people were the secret to her remarkable accomplishment, the writing of so very much in a life cut short? Perhaps the oppression that took a toll on Jackson’s spirit was not the external but the internal.

From our post-modern vantage point, we want to view Jackson’s writing as about misogyny and some deep-felt need for second-wave feminism. But it is? As one critic rightly observed in reviewing the biopic Shirley, “The real Jackson loved being a homemaker, especially cooking and raising children, but she also sometimes felt trapped. For all its inaccuracies and elisions, Shirley really does get at its namesake’s ambivalence about domesticity and marriage.”

So obsessed are we with identifying the supposed forces holding women back that we ignore those that will not change (physical reality) and those that do not inhibit women in inhabiting a life of the mind (domestic labor and raising children). As Tasha Tudor wryly observed,  It’s an admirable profession, why apologize for it. You aren’t stupid because you’re a housewife. When you’re stirring the jam you can read Shakespeare.”

Perhaps it wasn’t despite the chaotic circumstances of her family life that Jackson wrote so much but because of them.