Author's Life

Shirley Jackson made an impact in the lives of many women in her tragically short life. Shirley Jackson was an American writer who was born in December of 1916 in San Francisco, California and lived a life dedicated to writing stories telling the tale of tragically oppressed and misinterpreted women. She married a literature critic named Stanley Edgar Hyman and had four children with the man. While on the outside she was seen to have a decent marriage, many of her books actually symbolized life at home. Her marriage was miserable for her. Hyman was domineering and controlled the household finances while leaving Jackson to forcibly become a housewife for him. She met her husband at college; she graduated from Syracuse University with a Bachelor of Arts and then settled for the rest of her life in Vermont. In her life, she published 25 stories and gained national recognition but left 200 stories unfinished after her death. Unfortunately, she died in her sleep of heart failure in 1965, and she only lived until the age of 49 years young. (Pagan)

Shirley Jackson’s life was a rebellion. It was a rebellion against the political system and the oppression of women. Shirley Jackson wrote largely feminist, specifically on the issues of mother/daughter, home/lost, insecurity, and many mental health struggles overall. She was largely considered the mother of gothic horror and the greatest female horror writer of all time. Many of her characters had a reputation for having an outwardly polite facade but being twisted and creepy on the inside, which many people said was just like her herself. She overall had a very complex writing style with many different themes being explored in singular short stories. She tried to examine the evil and chaos under everyday life as a woman in an age where women were largely thought of as emotional and unexplainable. One of her largest themes explored the ambivalent bond between monsters and daughters. Many of the houses and liminal spaces that are seen in her books are representative of oppressive and psychologically fractured places, where the daughter is stuck in a transitional phase that rejects the average ideal of femininity as well as representing internal imprisonment of the daughter. Many of the young women in her books face feelings of alienation and insecurity. Her biggest goals in her writing were to express themes of ostracism, repression, dysfunctional families, and to explore the minds of unhappy and unstable women all through humor and horror. (Burrow)

With her books, Shirley Jackson’s impact on society was immeasurable. Largely, she fueled the feminist movements that emerged during her time and became a legacy for later feminist movements after she died. Largely, in the time around 1950, social classes and standards were heavily shifting. During World War Two, there emerged a sense of “women as the caretakers” with immense force. While that had already been standard, with the women working as red cross workers, the standard became further ingrained in society. With that came a domestic focus for women, keeping women inside of the house as the caretakers and the ideal of a “suburban housewife”. Shirley Jackson was one of the first people to challenge that. There was also systemic inequality that had been the “norm” for years with society legally and culturally restricting women. Shirley Jackson laid down the foundations for the second-wave suffrage movement and the later, politically organized second wave feminism. (Rubenstein)

While she was long-misunderstood, she later became a significant part of these feminist movements. One of the many issues that caused Shirley Jackson's outrage was the concept that, even though she was a writer, she would only be seen as a homemaker. A famous instance of people treating her as if she is only a mother of children is when she checked into the hospital to deliver her third baby and, despite her saying she was a writer, the nurse just said “I’ll just put down Housewife.” This enraged Jackson. Even though she was a brilliant writer with a bachelors for her art, she would only be seen as a homemaker. Even though her work was more profound than her husband's, she was still just “the humble housewife.” This is one of the many instances that inspired her writing. She wrote significantly within two genres. Domestic satire and gothic fiction. Domestic satire uses humor and irony to mock the dysfunction within a home. Her main goal with these genres was to critique the structural trap of patriarchy and bring to light the struggles that women face in and out of the home in a male-dominated society.