Ear-piercing screams, gory scenes, and monsters lurking around every corner are probably what comes to mind for most people when they think about the horror genre. The kind of stuff that makes you turn on cartoons to ease your mind, or sleep with your bedroom lights on. One solace for horror-lovers is that the stuff they are witnessing (or reading) is ultimately fake.
But what about the horrors of real life? Shirley Jackson was a 1950s writer who skillfully used the domestic horror genre to reveal the real-life horrors experienced by women every day.
And this is how it still relates to you (all quotes below are from Shirley Jackson herself).
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”
Home is the place we are supposed to feel the most safe. It’s warm and comforting, and a place to decompress after a long and hard day at work or school. In domestic horror fiction, home is the exact opposite of comfort. Home represents anxiety and isolation, and is the ultimate betrayal of safety. Instead of the danger of being outside in strange and unfamiliar places, it lurks right in the places you feel the most comfortable. The uncanny is a tactic often used in this genre, instead of being out-right terrifying, tension and dread slowly build, turning the place we know and love into a psychological battleground.
“A pretty sight, a woman with a book.”
Shirley Hardie Jackson was an American writer, who wrote many well-known horror and mystery novels, such as the book (and now Netflix adapted show) The Haunting of Hill House. She resided in Vermont for most of her life where she was extremely ostracized by her community, causing her to develop severe agarophobia. Jackson was deemed too eccentric. She was an ambitious and creative-minded person. And despite her numerous literary achievements and being the main breadwinner of her house (a novel concept at the time), her achievements were constantly disparaged by the fact that she was a woman. She died at the age of 45, writing 6 novels and over 200 short stories.
“In the country of the story, the writer is king.”
To a more trained eye, Shirley Jackson is more than just a horror-novel writer. She is a woman who utilized her writing skills to inform people of her disapproval of the rigid gender roles of her time. In her memoirs Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons specifically, she critiques the patriarchal society she (and we) live in, talks about her personal experience in the suffocating domestic sphere, and what life is like for women who don’t fit into societies expectations of how they should look and behave. Jackson’s earlier novels (like The Lottery) are about problems she saw with society as a whole, and her later novels (like We Have Always Lived in the Castle) narrowed down how these problems affected women specifically.
“When shall we live if not now?”
Shirley Jackson’s writings allow us to glimpse into the female experience during her life-time, and a lot of the problems she talks about in her writings are still relevant today. Her work aligns with modern conversations of balancing ambition and family-life, and her life itself is a model of how society treats women who are “too independent” and “too ambitious” and don’t conform. Jackson’s works like We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Renegade highlight the historical pattern of women being labeled as irrational and sensitive, and the expectation put on women to minimize their discomfort from a very young age. This kind of fiction doesn’t arise from disgusting monsters and sudden violence, but from normalized isolation and inequity that reminds readers the worst kind of horrors are not from imagination, but real life.
“I delight in what I fear.”
Shirley Jackson’s impact is undeniable both on the literary and real-world. She is a pioneer of psychological terror elements and creating subtle feelings of dread in fiction, and has had influence on modern horror-fiction writers like Stephen King. A real-life anomaly, she worked to support her family all throughout her life, and through her writing she encouraged others to question the rigid gender-norms of her time. Jackson’s fiction is more relevant now than ever, as it continues to mirror the anxieties of modern society and show us the unseen horrors that women face.
