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osprey_archerI 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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Date: 2021-02-25 01:30 pm (UTC)And yeah, themes can definitely be apparent in writers' works that the writers hadn't planned.
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Date: 2021-02-25 10:53 pm (UTC)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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Date: 2021-02-26 02:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-26 02:55 am (UTC)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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Date: 2021-02-26 02:59 am (UTC)(When I was a sulky Natalie-type teenager, my mother read my diary ONCE and found a lot of "I hate Mother!!" in it, and that set off a cataclysm. I don't even want to imagine what might have happened if she had gone through everything regularly.)
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Date: 2021-02-26 06:13 am (UTC)Two of my kids were obsessive diarists for a while, and it just--I would never, ever have thought of doing something like that. Like there's a huge taboo in my mind over that... almost so huge that I wonder where it came from. Maybe that scene in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader where Lucy eavesdrops magically on her friend. That made a big impression on me.
I mean, I kept a diary too, but it never had anything very private in it--but I can't imagine my mom ever trying to read it OR my mail.
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Date: 2021-02-26 02:39 pm (UTC)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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Date: 2021-02-26 02:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-26 02:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-26 03:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-26 03:40 pm (UTC)I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who come to a place they consider empty and decide/expect they can live there essentially like hermits (but with the benefits of groceries, a supply of heating oil or firewood, and people to repair things when those things are needed), with no obligation whatsoever to interact with the people who are providing those things. Yeah, if that's your expectation and mode of interaction, you may possibly generate some hostility.
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Date: 2021-02-26 08:58 pm (UTC)Accounts not just of Jackson's life but in general about Bennington College tend to emphasize the hostility between the old Vermonters in the town and the newcomers at the college. These accounts tend to take the newcomers' side more or less reflexively, but I do think it's pretty clear that the college people came in without any interest, really, in integrating with the local community, and generally saw the locals as somewhat beneath them. That didn't create the hostility toward them (clearly the locals felt some antipathy based purely on the fact that these people were outsiders) it undoubtedly strengthened it.
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Date: 2021-02-26 09:15 pm (UTC)(At this point I realize I should read the book but... I'm more interested from the sidelines)
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Date: 2021-02-26 11:53 pm (UTC)ETA: Geraldine comes across as one of those people who has a will to dominate, so while the patriarchy shaped the content of her attempts to dominate her daughter, the will itself is probably just her personality. Why are some people like this? I don't know.