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osprey_archer) wrote2021-02-25 07:37 am
osprey_archer) wrote2021-02-25 07:37 am
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Book Review: Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life
I started reading Shirley Jackson’s work because I wanted to read Ruth Franklin’s Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (a rather backward way to go about things, I know), but once I finished all the novels, I let the biography ride for months… until this week, when I blazed through it in two days.
I didn’t always agree with Franklin’s interpretations, but she did write about Jackson’s work in a way that made me want to reread all the novels, dive into Jackson’s short stories, and read her two picture books, which I hadn’t realized existed, so kudos for cluing me in. (The library has Nine Magic Wishes. Do I care enough to interlibrary loan Famous Sally? Sadly, I probably do.)
One thing that struck me as I was reading the book is that the movie Shirley got one of Jackson’s main themes exactly backward. In the movie, Shirley gives an impassioned speech about how she understands Paula Weldon, a student who disappeared from Bennington College, because Paula was one of thousands of invisible girls, with the implication that Jackson, too, has felt invisible, or fears invisibility.
But in Jackson’s work, to be invisible, independent, free and unencumbered is the never-realized dream that animates many of her characters. The animating fear is to be forever visible, surveilled, watched and judged and possibly thrown rocks at by petty, cruel, inescapable neighbors, who will exist and watch wherever you go and can never be escaped.
With the book as a biography, I did have some quibbles. Often I wanted more quotations, as for instance when Franklin mentions that Jackson’s mother Geraldine tended to write critical, nagging letters. But Franklin doesn’t actually quote them until late in the book, at which point my hitherto-fuzzy understanding of Geraldine snapped into focus. Why not quote Geraldine earlier? It would have illuminated not only Shirley’s character (her mother was a dominating force in her life) but also her fiction, which often deals with tense, fraught, occasionally matricidal mother-daughter relationships.
I also didn’t find Franklin’s discussion of lesbian themes in Jackson’s work satisfactory, although I’m not sure that it’s possible to make that satisfactory in a biographical context. Jackson was clearly not comfortable with that reading of her work and tended to disavow it, and I don’t know that it’s really good practice to read beyond, say, the intensity of Eleanor and Theodora’s relationship in The Haunting of Hill House as if it says something definitive about Jackson’s own sexuality. (God knows what some future biographer might decide about my sexuality on the basis of my fiction!)
But insofar as Franklin is writing about Jackson’s books as well as Jackson’s life (and she discusses many of the books at some length), it seems like a mistake to dismiss those themes just because Jackson did. A theme can exist in a work whether the creator intended that meaning or not.
Also, the book stops quite abruptly with Jackson’s death. In a way this makes sense, of course, but I was left wanting an epilogue to tell us about the fate of the rest of the family (how did the children cope with their mother’s death, especially when their father remarried relatively quickly?) and explore the way that reactions to Jackson’s work have changed over time.
I didn’t always agree with Franklin’s interpretations, but she did write about Jackson’s work in a way that made me want to reread all the novels, dive into Jackson’s short stories, and read her two picture books, which I hadn’t realized existed, so kudos for cluing me in. (The library has Nine Magic Wishes. Do I care enough to interlibrary loan Famous Sally? Sadly, I probably do.)
One thing that struck me as I was reading the book is that the movie Shirley got one of Jackson’s main themes exactly backward. In the movie, Shirley gives an impassioned speech about how she understands Paula Weldon, a student who disappeared from Bennington College, because Paula was one of thousands of invisible girls, with the implication that Jackson, too, has felt invisible, or fears invisibility.
But in Jackson’s work, to be invisible, independent, free and unencumbered is the never-realized dream that animates many of her characters. The animating fear is to be forever visible, surveilled, watched and judged and possibly thrown rocks at by petty, cruel, inescapable neighbors, who will exist and watch wherever you go and can never be escaped.
With the book as a biography, I did have some quibbles. Often I wanted more quotations, as for instance when Franklin mentions that Jackson’s mother Geraldine tended to write critical, nagging letters. But Franklin doesn’t actually quote them until late in the book, at which point my hitherto-fuzzy understanding of Geraldine snapped into focus. Why not quote Geraldine earlier? It would have illuminated not only Shirley’s character (her mother was a dominating force in her life) but also her fiction, which often deals with tense, fraught, occasionally matricidal mother-daughter relationships.
I also didn’t find Franklin’s discussion of lesbian themes in Jackson’s work satisfactory, although I’m not sure that it’s possible to make that satisfactory in a biographical context. Jackson was clearly not comfortable with that reading of her work and tended to disavow it, and I don’t know that it’s really good practice to read beyond, say, the intensity of Eleanor and Theodora’s relationship in The Haunting of Hill House as if it says something definitive about Jackson’s own sexuality. (God knows what some future biographer might decide about my sexuality on the basis of my fiction!)
But insofar as Franklin is writing about Jackson’s books as well as Jackson’s life (and she discusses many of the books at some length), it seems like a mistake to dismiss those themes just because Jackson did. A theme can exist in a work whether the creator intended that meaning or not.
Also, the book stops quite abruptly with Jackson’s death. In a way this makes sense, of course, but I was left wanting an epilogue to tell us about the fate of the rest of the family (how did the children cope with their mother’s death, especially when their father remarried relatively quickly?) and explore the way that reactions to Jackson’s work have changed over time.
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Oppenheimer's book also has less about Stanley in it, which really annoyed me about Franklin's book. I don't need a giant pages-long detailing of his "legendary" course (which sounds Gravesian and awful)! Unless it had an impact on Jackson in some way! But Franklin never went into the details of whether it did or not, she just really liked writing about Stanley apparently.
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It's great in that we now have a lot more archival material on Jackson, tho, especially her letters and diaries.
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I also feel that bisexuality might be a useful metric by which to approach Jackson's sexuality (with, again, the caveat that we don't really have enough information to know), and this is a possibility that never comes up in the text.
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