"The tension between socially acceptable housewifery and creative ambition is certainly easy to find in Jackson’s life, but it’s rather harder to locate in her fiction. There’s no question that, in her books, the house is a deeply ambiguous symbol—a place of warmth and security and also one of imprisonment and catastrophe. But the evil that lurks in Jackson’s fair-seeming homes is not housework; it’s other people—husbands, neighbors, mothers, hellbent on squashing and consuming those they profess to care for. And what keeps women inside these ghastly places is not societal pressure, or a patriarchal jailer, but the demon in their own minds. In this sense, Jackson’s work is less an anticipation of second-wave feminism than a conversation with her female forebears in the gothic tradition. Her stories take the figure of the imprisoned "madwoman," as found in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" or Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and make her the warder of her own jail."
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Horror authorsShort story writers from the United StatesMemoirists from the United StatesWomen authors from the United StatesNovelists from San Francisco
Original Language: English
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Sources
Zoë Heller "The Haunted Mind of Shirley Jackson" The New Yorker (10 October 2016)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Shirley_Jackson
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Shirley Jackson
Shirley Hardie Jackson (December 14, 1916 – August 8, 1965) was an American writer known for her works of horror and mystery. Over her writing career, which spanned more than two decades, she composed six novels, two memoirs, and over 200 short stories.
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