Did her household comedy militate against her rendition of the insults and blackness suffusing American culture? What can we make of the charm of “domestic” narratives even when they infiltrate her ominous works? Or do the two modes complement each other so profoundly that we accept that the ordinary is often the appropriate context for terror. As a result, she had a divided reputation: as a writer of “domestic” comedy, with her humorous accounts of raising her children, and as an author probing the fears of chaos, social and supernatural, lapping around normal lives. What Jackson did achieve in the face of such neglect was the development of a “counternarrative,” and here it is important to quote Franklin: Jackson’s “body of work constitutes nothing less than the secret history of American women of her era.” Her stories reveal “the unhappiness and instability beneath the housewife’s sleek veneer of competence.”Īlthough Jackson’s fiction is notable for its effect and narrative rhythm, her work is often marked by a rough-grained anxiety and a resigned bitterness. Nevertheless, the callousness, especially of her mother, and the serial adulteries of her husband, the eminent literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, blocked her need to be loved and valued. She offers us a gifted author who was devoted to, and claimed by, literature. In this regard, Franklin’s work is luminous as well as lucid. On all counts, Franklin’s book succeeds.Īlthough it is usually futile to question the specific origin of an individual talent, it is enormously helpful to see how a writer responded to, and claimed, a subject-in other words, how a writer impressed her signature upon the substance of her work. As the subtitle of Franklin’s biography indicates, Jackson was, indeed, haunted-haunted so much so that we can suggest that her fiction was apotropaic, something of an amulet countering what shadowed her life.
Franklin provides the reader with a context as well as a concept she not only places her subject within the generation of women addressed by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) but also analyzes Jackson’s fiction within the development of the gothic sensibility, particularly an American gothic temper.
Now that so many of Shirley Jackson’s works are accessible, Ruth Franklin’s timely biography offers us a welcome comprehension of her life and fiction.
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