Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction. - book reviews

Joan Wylie Hall's treatment of Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) primarily through a study of her short fiction is in general a commendable effort, though the interested reader would have benefited from an additional feature in this otherwise well-assembled collection of materials: an overview of Jackson's entire life, noting her progressive debility and deterioration. This pathological condition not only affected her late work but was heralded by distant warnings in her much earlier work and by an interval of depression in 1936. Such an overview is provided in Gale's Contemporary Literary Criticism (60 [1990]: 209-11) and can illuminate an analysis of Jackson's writings and a discussion of her environmental influences as well.

Hall divides her materials into three sections: a consideration of the short fiction (the pre-eminent tale, "The Lottery" [19481, permeates her entire book); articles about and by the writer herself; and a brief assortment of short critical pieces. A chronology, selected bibliography and index complete the book. In surveying the bulk of Jackson's voluminous output, Hall focuses on the 25 or so stones in the 1949 collection The Lottery; or, 7he Adventures of James Harris, the 16 stories in Come Along With Me (1968), and the numerous uncollected short stories. Throughout, there are helpful comments on thematic or character relationships among these briefer fictions and on Jackson's six novels and two volumes of child-rearing memoirs, My Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. What matters here is Jackson's split-plane perhaps "cubist" is a better term) view of her world and herself

Commentators evoke such authorial names as Kafka, Poe, Ionesco, Beckett, and Pinter when speaking of Jackson's fiction. But as the story analyses, critical views of Jackson and writings about her - in Hall's study - make clear, there are complications in Jackson's case going beyond the Gothic, the absurd, and the displacement of political minorities between major wars. Hall sees her as "an eloquent voice of the Age of Anxiety," an observation that seems mild indeed, considering our daily newspaper headlines of the worst actualities of human destruction everywhere. Hall also remarks on the narrow, circumscribed lives of Jackson's female characters, "more susceptible than the men and children to huge losses of love identity, and existence itself." Jackson, to Hall, "expresses the vulnerability of the powerless." But how is one really to "get a handle" on Jackson?

There are certain essential strands in her thinking and imagining, turning up in various combinations in her fiction, that must be factored in here. First (though the order is random), her strong interest in magic, witchcraft, and the occult. Then, her predilection for dream situations and characters (imaginary children, nightmarish scenes, etc.). Next, her special sensitivity to children, who are seen as dangerous unknown quantities (for example, in "A Cauliflower in Her Hair"). Also, she has a strong underlying antipathy to village life and the narrow village mentality. Here, Sinclair Lewis's concept of "the village virus" comes to mind. Then there is a deep desire to escape from everything: family, responsibility, town. Next, a deep fascination with the "mysterious stranger" figure. Prominent among the representatives of this type is the "daemon lover," familiar in folklore, and Hall does an excellent job of tracing Jackson's handling of this character. Not to be overlooked is Jackson's lurking suspicion (sometimes, her realization) that she is simply unable to cope.

A few stories will illustrate. "The Lottery," treated at length by Hall, seems an almost inevitable reaction to North Bennington, Vermont, given Jackson's imagination of evil and disaster, her interest in cultural lore (one feature of which, historically, has been human sacrifice), and her having experienced prejudice there. The female protagonist of "Pillar of Salt" is deathly afraid to move about on her own, and finds herself in a nightmarish, no-escape plight because through some mysterious process her normally functioning mind has ceased to provide its expected maintenance services for her. "The Bus" depicts a confused old lady who, on a bus trip home, is treated harshly by the bus driver, who lets her off at an unheard-of town, in the rain. After a painful series of terrible misadventures, she is transported to her childhood home, where her old toys terrorize her. Wakened harshly (from her dream, it appears), she is confronted once more by the same hostile bus driver and deposited at the same unheard-of town as before. A number of Jackson's stories, Hall's book makes clear, were but gimmicks turned out for quick profit. Yet there is enough good material in the canon of this mentally disturbed, perversely inspired writer to warrant a respectable place for her in twentieth-century, American literature. Hall's book is a very useful introduction.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Studies in Short Fiction
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group