This is Shirley Jackson, writer, housewife, and
master of that most unsettling and uncanny of genres: domestic horror. I say most unsettling
and uncanny because the domestic is all about the home and, in an ideal world, home is a safe
space - whether ‘home’ for you is your house, your favourite table at your favourite cafe,
or your favourite person. It’s not unreasonable to expect, from home, a sense of security and
comfort. But what if the home is the seat of your worst nightmares? What if your soothing sphere of
domestic stability and normality is shot through with the hellish and the macabre? I’m going to
examine Jackson’s use of the uncanny in three short stories, ‘The Renegade’, ‘Of Course’,
and ‘Got a Letter from Jimmy’, to understand how her unique brand of homespun horror takes
shape. In these stories, Jackson never shouts, never relies on loud plot twists. The menace that
thrums under the surface of her stories whispers, and trust me when I say that unpicking the
mastery behind Jackson’s technique will leave you more impressed and unnerved
than you’ve been in a very long time. But before we get into all that, welcome - I’m Dr
Rosie Whitcombe and this is Mousey the short cat, and on this channel we make videos
on all things bookish and freaky, so please subscribe if that’s your jam. Today, we tend to think of Shirley
Jackson as a master of home-centric horror. But did you know that
it wasn’t actually her chilling, unsettling fiction that earned her fame and
literary acclaim? Jackson made her name (and a lot of money) writing ‘sentimental fiction
about children and homemaking’ for magazines like Good Housekeeping and Woman’s Home Companion.
According to her biographer, Ruth Franklin, though she didn’t love writing in this style,
Jackson was well aware of the financial benefits: She wasn’t happy with the kind of pieces the
magazine required her to write [...but knew that] “at a thousand bucks a story, i can’t afford to
try to change the state of popular fiction today, and since they will buy as much of it
as i write, i do one story a month, and spent the rest of the time” on
serious work, she explained blithely. But are these separate strands of Jackson’s
writing - the ‘dark, suspenseful fiction’ and the ‘warm, funny, household memoirs’
and stories really so disparate? I don’t think so. I agree with Franklin that they
are in fact ‘profoundly interconnected’: Her horror stories, which always take
place primarily on a psychological level, are grounded in the domestic [...] Meanwhile, the domestic tales often need only the
gentlest tap to slide into the dark. It’s this creeping overlap, between the homely -
in british sense of the word - and the disturbing, that is supremely uncanny. Freud wrote about
the concept of the uncanny at length in his 1919 essay, ‘Das Unheimliche’, which literally
translates to ‘the unhomely’. The uncanny is something familiar, like the home, like routine,
or a safe domestic space - but there’s something a little bit off about it - like you’re
looking at the place you feel safest but through a discomfiting, distorted lens. ‘The
home in Jackson’s works is distinctly uncanny, as the synthesis of comfort and terror is
central to its essence’. Anything homely in Jackson teeters on the edge, carefully
bringing us into a space entirely unhomely, unheimliche, uncanny. The question is: why? Why,
in Jackson, is the home a space of such menace? In 1950s America, arguably Jackson’s most prolific
decade, women had very little agency. Above all else, they were expected to be housewives and
mothers, first and foremost. In her ficitonalised memoir, Life Among the Savages, Jackson gives
us a little taste of this as she recounts her experience at hospital prior to the birth of
her third child. A member of staff asks her: ‘“Age?” she asked. “Sex? Occupation?” “Writer,” I said. “Housewife,” she said. “Writer,” I said. “I’ll just put down housewife,” she said’ Housewife first, writer second. Raising a
family and keeping house was a woman’s duty; suppress your desires and live
to serve. But what if you wanted more? This question is at the heart
of the ‘problem that has no name’, as put forward by Betty Friedan in her seminal
1963 publication, The Feminine Mystique: The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years
in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning
that women suffered [...] Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds,
shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children,
chauffered Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even
of herself the silent question—"Is this all?” After the end of WW2, the men who
had been fighting, and who survived, came home and went back to the jobs they’d left
- jobs that the women had taken over - meaning the women were expected to slot back
into the role of housewife and mother, and to be happy about it. But, for
many women, the yearning for more persisted. Freidan articulates this
in 1963; but as Neil Gaiman writes, 'Almost two decades before The Feminine Mystique
[...] Jackson’s stories and nonfiction chronicles were already exploring the exploitation
and the desperate isolation of women, particularly married women, in American society.' This is the uncanny: attaining everything you’re
supposed to attain - a handsome husband, a beautiful home, happy children - but still feeling
a sense of dissatisfaction, or even worse, fear. L. N. Rosales has written a fantastic essay on
Jackson’s uncanny domesticity that I recommend you check out if possible, I'll put a link below. The
essay explores ‘the dread of domestic failure’ and ‘the intense pressure on women to thrive in that
sphere in midcentury America’. It wasn’t only feeling dissatisfied with your lot, it was the
fear of failing at it. What if you find yourself unable, mentally and physically, to keep house?
This was something Shirley Jackson wrestled with in her private life - and, of course, we
find it in her stories. She reveals ‘the unhappiness and instability beneath the
housewife’s sleek veneer of competence’. Once you look for it, it’s everywhere: characters,
mostly women, trapped in domestic spaces that they simultaneously cherish and fear, husbands they
love and resent, children they care for and are horrified by. The home is the woman’s space,
her domain, and Jackson shows us just how easily it becomes haunted - not by ghosts, but by fear,
isolation, and the glimmers of a life forbidden. In ‘The Renegade’, Mrs. Walpole is haunted
and hounded by everyone she meets - by her new country neighbours, random locals, her grocer -
and even by her own children. As Rosales tells us, ‘The disturbing and uncanny child is a recurring
figure in Jackson’s short fiction’. Children blithely menacing and terrifying their
mothers crop up time and again in Jackson, and not just in her short stories. Look at
this passage from Life Among the Savages: Sometimes, in my capacity as mother,
I find myself sitting open-mouthed and terrified before my own children,
little individual creatures moving solidly along in their own paths and
yet in some mysterious manner vividly reminiscent of a past which my husband and
I know we have never communicated to them. This is the uncanny distilled into a
sentence. Jackson’s children are familiar, they’re her children; but they are also
mysterious, individual entities that startle and frighten. Children can horrify their
mothers, and this is one of the most disturbing features of ‘The Renegade’’s climactic
final scene; but we’ll get to that later. Let’s deal with Mrs. Walpole’s husband first of
all. How does he figure into the story? Well, he’s pretty much absent - not literally, but
emotionally. She puts his breakfast on the table like clockwork to which he responds with a single
word ‘without glancing up’. What we get is a tense opening scene in which Mrs. Walpole is juggling
an array of thankless tasks. She’s frustrated, ‘her mind full of unfinished sentences that
began, “Don’t you think other people ever have any feelings or -”’ her train of thought is cut off.
If there was a sparkling veneer of 1950s homelife here, it’s disintegrating quickly - the children
are going to be late for school, Mr Walpole is largely silent and unaffectionate, devoted not to
her, but to the newspaper. And through all this, Mrs. Walpole strives to maintain a sense of
competence and composure, her internal monologue tense and frustrated while she moves through the
perfected motions of housewifery, setting down her husband’s breakfast ‘as softly as she could’.
Malcontent simmers just below the surface of this breakfast scene. And this is all before
Mrs. Walpole receives that fated phone call. The Walpoles have recently moved from the city to
the country, and they have brought with them their children, Judy and Jack, and their dog, Lady.
Lady, according to the neighbour on the other end of the phone, has broken into their chicken
coop and killed some of their chickens. This event is the catalyst of the story, and the plot
follows Mrs. Walpole as she works out what to do. The level of menace in this story is
constant, tense, and incredibly alienating. Mrs. Walpole is very much alone, husband
and children and dog all absent in one way or another. She is on the outside of a close-knit
community, and the story explores this isolation, and the threat that lurks beneath social
norms and platitudes. Take the woman on the end of the phone: she seems reasonable, even
considerate. She’s upset about her chickens, but she’s not making outrageous
demands of Mrs. Walpole… right? ‘“Of course we’ll take care of the
damage,” Mrs. Walpole said quickly. “No, no,” the woman said, almost
apologetically. “Don’t even think about it.” “But of course—” Mrs. Walpole began, bewildered. “The dog,” the voice said. “You’ll
have to do something about the dog.”’ ‘A sudden unalterable terror’ takes hold of
Mrs. Walpole as she realises what is being asked of her. It’s this subtextual suggestion
that amps up the terror for me here: there’s not an explicit demand being made; what
we get is a subtle, menacing threat that oozes through the niceties, the apologetic
politeness, the mannered back-and-forth. Look closely at each line of dialogue here:
pay attention to those italicised words: 'of course', don’t even think about it',
'but of course'. Jackson is showing us just how much this phone call is a performance of
social interaction, a sparring match disguised behind a veneer of friendly discourse. It’s
my fault, no it’s my fault, I’ll make amends, no I’d never expect that of you: Jackson
italicises words to uncover their insincerity. Then look at that last sentence; no italics.
Here, we get to the real meat of the issue, the truth of the matter: the dog. Something must
be done, and we all know what that something is. Throughout the story, Mrs. Walpole meets an
array of neighbours, each of whom suggest increasingly nauseating and brutal ways to
deal with Lady, the chicken-killing dog. Old man White goads her when he says, “Guess
you’re not going to have any more dog”, and grins while suggesting her husband shoot
Lady. He also suggests the tried and true method of tying a dead chicken round Lady’s neck
until she effectively goes mad with the stench, leaving it to rot “until it gets ripe enough
to fall off by itself. See, the head….” Mrs. Walpole cuts him off and leaves shortly
after. The terse men at the grocery also ask if Mrs. Walpole will have Lady shot, warning her that
it “Won’t do to have a dog going around killing chickens”. The grocer suggests another repulsive
solution that involves shoving a boiling hot, rotten egg down the dog’s throat, “red-hot
and smelling to heaven”, and forcing her mouth closed so she has to swallow it. And, just
like Old man White, he’s gleeful about this, he reminisces about the time his dad force-fed a
boiling, stinking egg to their dog, and he laughs. Mrs. Walpole is increasingly sickened,
bewildered, and upset as people suggest other means of dealing with Lady, like trapping
her in a pen with a mother hen who has chicks to protect until the hen pecks out her
eyes. This is gruesome, heartless stuff, and Mrs. Walpole seems to be the only person
affected by it; everyone else laughs and grins, which is unsettling enough. But more unsettling
is that everyone she meets already knows what has happened. Word travels fast in this small country
community, faster than Mrs. Walpole has time to formulate her own opinion or work out what to do,
and this in itself is sinister: as she encounters more people, each of whom offer different medieval
solutions that amount to little more than the torture of a beloved family pet, she feels worse
and worse, sick and faint, all while having to feign some sense of pleasantry to the people
who are causing, and revelling in, her pain. Only one character in the story
shows compassion to Mrs. Walpole, and offers a comparatively tame solution
that doesn’t churn the stomach. Mrs. Nash, Mrs. Walpole’s next-door neighbour, suggests
tying her up with a stout chain and offers Mrs. Walpole some fresh doughnuts. But
in spite of her seeming kindliness, Mrs. Nash is yet another source of alienation for
Mrs. Walpole. She is the housewife who is getting everything right. She, unlike Mrs. Walpole,
consumed by thoughts of her dog, “can’t leave the stove”. She’s frying donuts for “the men”, and
Mrs. Walpole can’t help but compare their lives: 'The bright sunlight across Mrs. Nash’s kitchen
doorway, the solid table bearing its plates of doughnuts, the pleasant smell of the frying,
were all symbols somehow of Mrs. Nash’s safety, her confidence in a way of life and a security
that had no traffic with chicken-killing, no city fears, an assurance and cleanliness
so great that she was willing to bestow its overflow on the Walpoles, bring them doughnuts
and overlook Mrs. Walpole’s dirty kitchen.' Mrs. Walpole feels utterly inadequate
next to this model housewife, who despite complaining that she can never
keep up with the demand for doughnuts, manages to do so with enough left over
to donate to her neighbours. Not only is Mrs. Walpole alienated by the men in her
community, each more viscous than the next, her insecurities and inadequacies are
thrown into stark contrast by Mrs. Nash, whose kitchen, whose domain - the home - is so
much brighter, so much more together, than hers. If all this wasn’t bad enough, we’re yet to
reach the most disturbing part of this story, the alarming, gruesome climax; the worst and most
sinister suggested punishment for Lady: tie a spiked collar round Lady’s neck, pull on it when
she runs for the chickens, and chop her head clean off. And this horrendous idea is put forward by
none other than Mrs. Walpole’s two young children. As Rosales writes, ‘children [in Jackson’s
stories] are cast as uncanny aliens who reconfigure the familiar landscape of the home
as a gothic setting, threatening its reliability and comfort’. Think of the young boy in ‘The
Witch’, another story that features a child reveling in the idea of decapitation, and which
you can learn more about by watching my analysis, link in the description. Judy and Jack are the
ultimate figures of menace. They are uncanny; the way they talk is familiar, laughing and
interrupting each other with excitement, as children do, it’s endearing; but what
they’re talking about is using a spiked collar to chop their dog’s head off. Look
at how Jackson emphasises this contrast, how she really hammers home the frightening
familiarity of the childrens’ dialogue: ‘“And then, and then, when [Lady] gets right up
close to the chickens, we puuuuuuull on the rope—” “And—” Judy made her strangling noise again. “The spikes cut her head off,”
Jack finished dramatically. They both began to laugh and Lady,
looking from one to the other, panted as though she were laughing too’ Italics and repetition leave us in no doubt
about Jack’s excitement over what comes next. The dashes show us how they’re interrupting
each other, tripping over themselves with glee, racing to share their idea. That elongated
‘puuuuuuull’ is playful and childlike, reminding us that these aren’t creepy old men
but young children suggesting such a brutal punishment. This is the uncanny, the fear of
the familiar, perfectly exemplified and used to create a supremely nauseating crescendo. And even
Lady, the dog, the proposed victim of the scheme, seems to join in on the joke, panting as
though she’s laughing: this reinforces her innocence (shows that she doesn’t really know
what’s going on), but by grouping her with the bloodthirsty children, serves to isolate
Mrs. Walpole even further. In this backwards, brutal, and cold community, even the dog,
sentenced to death, is somehow against her. 'Mrs. Walpole looked at them, at her two children
with their hard hands and their sunburned faces laughing together, their dog with blood
still on her legs laughing with them.' She leaves the room, tries to compose herself; but
feels the ‘sharp points closing in on her throat'. As Rosales writes, ‘Though Mrs. Walpole tries
to persuade herself, “Children don’t realize … death is never real to them,” her sensible
thought is overpowered by the threatening unruliness of the children’. There is real
terror here. Imagine being this frightened and disturbed by your own children; imagine
looking out on the beautiful countryside and being overwhelmed by the prospect of
your own metaphorical execution. Inside, her unkempt kitchen has become a literal
and figurative bloodbath; her children and her dog are detached and maniacal. In this
story, the normalcy, the security of the home, the domestic comfort and the fulfilled,
happy housewife, are supplanted by a reality that is nothing short of Gothic horror.
Do you agree with this Gothic estimation of ‘The Renegade’? Let me know your
interpretations in the comments below. Consider the Gothic, and you’ll likely think
of young heroines, cruel villains, foreboding castles, and dark mountainous settings. Jackson’s
Gothic is not that. This is the ‘domestic gothic’: rather than frightened heroines fleeing
their captors, Jackson gives us ‘characters for whom escape is impossible because the
horror is in that which makes up the home’. The women in so many of Jackson’s stories
are alone, depressed, and frightened; and their husbands are absent. But what
if your husband isn’t simply absent, but worryingly malicious? Or what if somehow
he manages to be both these things? In ‘The Renegade’, Mr. Walpole is detached and
mostly absent; but in our second story, ‘Of Course’, we’re introduced to Mr. Harris,
who, even though entirely physically absent, nonetheless manages to threaten,
control, and dominate proceedings. Neighbours, eh? The friendly ones who
bring in your newspaper move away, and you panic - who will be living next door
now? Will they be nice? Play loud music? Have giant dogs that will eat my chickens? You see
the moving van pull up to the curb and your new neighbours step on to the pavement
- do you turn into a curtain-twitcher, passing judgment on how they present
themselves, make strange assumptions based on what they’re wearing? If so, you’re not
alone. You’re in good company with Mrs. Tylor, who watches intently the arrival of her new
neighbour, Mrs. Harris, and her son, James: She turned her attention to the woman
who was getting out of the taxi, and was further reassured.
A nice-looking tan suit, a little worn and perhaps a little too
light for moving day, but nicely cut, and Mrs. Tylor nodded appreciatively over the
carrots she was scraping. Nice people, obviously. Again, I’m a bit obsessed with Jackson’s use
of italics, here used for comic effect. Jackson was master of horror, but she nails comedy,
too. You can tell a lot about a person from the shade of their moving-day suit. Again, we’ve
got those small-town mentality vibes - similar to the creepy close-knit kind of thing we find in
‘The Renegade’, although this time we’re looking from the perspective of a woman who is already
established in the community, judging the newbie. Now, by comparison, this story is much more
quiet; there’s no blood, no animal abuse, no decapitation. Mrs. Harris and Mrs.
Tylor meet and make polite conversation, and that’s essentially it in terms
of plot and action. But this story is all about subtext and suggestion;
and it’s this that really works to unnerve me as I read it. I interpret ‘Of
Course’ as a story about domestic abuse. Mr. Harris doesn’t make a literal appearance in
the story. He’s staying with his parents while his wife and child take care of the house move.
But it’s his absence that makes him all the more sinister. Mr. Harris commands the situation from
afar and, it would appear, rules his family with an iron fist. When Mrs. Tylor invites little James
to join her daughter at the movies, Mrs. Harris informs her that ‘James does not go to movies’
because Mr. Harris feels they ‘are intellectually retarding’. ‘We do not go to movies, any of
us’, she feels compelled to reiterate. As the conversation progresses, Mrs. Tylor learns
that Mr. Harris disapproves of the radio, and he doesn’t allow newspapers in the house. When
he stays at his parents - something he always does when they move house - “They don’t turn the
radio on while he’s there”. He’s a scholar, he reads plays, “Pre-Elizabethan, of
course”. Oh, “of course”. Now hang on, maybe Mr. Harris isn’t abusive; maybe he’s just
a bit old-fashioned? Maybe he’s just not a fan of all this new fangled technology and print media?
A quirky, slightly moody eccentric, perhaps. I think not. This is a man who bans his
family from interacting with the wider world, and his word is law. Throughout the conversation,
Mrs. Harris works as a mouthpiece for her husband: we don’t ever get a sense of what she
thinks or feels. She’s also visibly nervous. She laughs ‘uncomfortably’ when she
says “You’ll be thinking my husband is crazy”, prompting Mrs. Tylor to reassure her with
“Of course not”. She explains her husband’s dislike of the newspaper while ‘looking round
anxiously at Mrs. Tylor’. She wants to connect, encourages Mrs. Tylor to come over
and borrow sugar and the like; invites normal, neighbourly interaction.
But she seems guarded, tense, fearful. There’s something that feels very sad about
this. By vocalising her husband’s views, Mrs. Harris alienates Mrs. Tylor, pushing her into
a state of discomfort. Mrs. Tylor, in turn, can’t seem to respond to all this weirdness without
the polite but ultimately meaningless platitude, ‘of course’ or ‘of course not’. Any sense of
real intimacy or conversation diminishes quickly. Mrs. Tylor becomes increasingly unnerved as
the conversation progresses. 'Mrs Tylor recognised finally the faint
nervous feeling that was tagging her; it was the way she felt when she was irrevocably
connected with something dangerously out of control’ This is such a telling line that exposes the coercive
control at the heart of the Harris family dynamic. Mrs. Tylor’s is a hairs-standing-on-end gut reaction,
a fear response - something I’m sure we’ve all felt at one time or another when we can’t
quite put our finger on the exact issue, but we know something isn’t right. This is
very much the uncanny; familiar but not right, a pleasant conversation threaded through with
fear, anxiety, and uncertainty. Speaking with Mrs. Harris brings Mrs. Tylor into contact
with the threat of utter powerlessness. Her new neighbour seems dangerously out of control of
her own life, and that fear begins to transfer. Mrs. Harris’s want of connection persists to the
story’s end. She’s so grateful to Mrs. Tylor; is very keen to grow their friendship. In
one final awkward encounter, Mrs. Tylor invites her new neighbours
over for a game of bridge. ‘She saw Mrs. Harris’s face and said, “No. Well, anyway, we must all get together some
evening soon.” They both laughed’. Wordless, reduced to a look that communicates her
husband’s unexplained distaste for bridge, Mrs. Harris can only laugh in that polite,
uncomfortable way that attempts to lighten the situation but rather belies the
desperation and discomfort she feels. This story, like so many of Jackson’s, is
left in the lurch. We have yet another woman, Mrs. Harris, isolated by her domestic
circumstances. We have Mrs. Tylor, left fearful and uncertain, and with no means
of resolving this uncomfortable feeling that has settled on her shoulders. Contrary to the
neighbourly niceties Mrs. Tylor had hoped for, Mrs. Harris brings something else to the table,
something other than pleasant conversation and the wholesome borrowing of sugar over the picket
fence. Something, someone malignant is moving in next door, and there’s nothing either
woman can do about it. And here, once more, the uncanny takes hold. This picture of pleasant
interaction, of hospitality and friendship, is undercut by the troublesome presence of
Mr. Harris, who haunts from the sidelines. The homely is made distinctly unhomely by
the threat and the uncertainty he represents. But what do you think? Do you have a
totally different interpretation of ‘Of Course’? Please let me know
in the comments below. Women, powerless at the hands
of their community, husbands, and children, screaming silently. Isolated,
dismissed or dominated by their husbands, who are largely absent. This dynamic
crops up time and again in Jackson, not least in her story, ‘Got a Letter from Jimmy’
- but this time, rather than left to flounder, our female protagonist sets course to
retrieve power, no matter the bloody cost. This story is kind of hard to unpick in terms of
what is actually going on. Unlike ‘The Renegade’ and ‘Of Course’, the narrative is abstracted by
the unnamed protagonist’s scattered, agitated, and violent internal monologue. There are lots
of plot holes deliberately left unfilled. So, what do we know? The story features a man and a
woman, who we might assume are husband and wife. The husband, also unnamed, receives a letter
from Jimmy, which distresses and distracts the wife. We get the impression that Jimmy has
wronged them somehow: the husband says he’ll send the letter back to Jimmy unopened. The wife
doesn’t share this seemingly moderate response, instead fantasising about ‘tearing it up and
sending it back in little pieces’. We never find out what Jimmy has done, or how he is related
to the husband or wife; what we do discover is how getting a letter from Jimmy exposes the
fraught and fearsome dynamic between them. I think this story can be read in a lot of
different ways - and please do let me know what you make of it in the comments below
- but to me it offers us a sliver of this woman’s psyche, a brief glimpse into the
frustration and fear she keeps to herself, that she is afraid to show to her husband, the
repression of which leads her close to madness. The story kind of sets this
up from the very beginning: 'Sometimes, she thought, stacking the dishes in the
kitchen, sometimes I wonder if men are quite sane, any of them. Maybe they’re all just crazy,
and every other woman knows it but me, and my mother never told me and my roommate just didn’t
mention it and all the other wives think I know….' Her internal ruminating is interrupted by her
husband telling her that he’s received the letter from Jimmy. What Jackson establishes here, through
the unnamed protagonist’s internal monologue, is that she is incredibly frustrated, that she’s
performing the duties of a housewife - diligently doing those dishes - that she’s isolated from
the men she knows, and from the women, who she suspects of keeping her in the dark. Once more,
we have a woman trapped, alone, and unsatisfied. The story parallels the two characters,
the husband and the wife: he routinely brushes off the letter, doesn’t seem fazed
by it; she cannot stop thinking about it: '“Had lunch with Tom today,” he said, as though
the subject were closed [the subject being the letter from Jimmy], just exactly as though
the subject were closed, she thought, just exactly as though he never expected to think of
it again. Maybe he doesn’t, she thought, my God.' The protagonist’s frustration is really hammered
home by the repetition here that emphasises her obsession with the letter, with Jimmy; it’s all
she can think about, and she can’t believe he’s moved on from the subject without batting an
eyelid. This is a feeling I recognise. Being so affected by something while the person I’m with
is completely unbothered, and their unbotheredness in turn inflames my feelings and makes me want
to scream ‘how can you be so blasé about this?!’ I think it’s this stark contrast that Jackson
wants to emphasise here: the privilege, perhaps, of being able to be so seemingly
unbothered, and to be in control of a situation, vs. the internal howling that comes from being
extremely bothered but not having any agency. Our protagonist is scared
to show her true feelings, chastises herself when she almost
slips up and reveals too much of what she actually thinks. She even hints
at possible domestic abuse. ‘“Open it”’, her husband says when she expresses a restrained
curiosity about the contents of the letter.
'Oh God, she thought, oh God oh God,
I’ll steal it out of his brief case, I’ll scramble it up with his eggs tomorrow, but
I won’t take a dare like that, he’d break my arm.' She’d rather feed the letter to her husband than
open it in front of him. Again, the repetition sticks out here, this time it’s the exclamatory
‘oh God’ that emphasises her fear, her disbelief, and the intensity of her feelings - she’s reaching
a limit, there are no more words. And she's risking her physical safety if she goes ahead and does
the thing she wants to do - open the letter. And the fact that her husband invites her to do so
seems doubly sadistic. Go on, I dare you, I’ll get you. The only way she can remove herself from
this reality is by fantasising about an alternative. Her internal monologue is peppered
with different means of escape. ‘maybe he’ll go home and live with his mother for a while’
she thinks at one point, and at another, ‘maybe he could kill himself’. She fantasises that
her husband might actually feel similarly to her, might ‘drive himself into a hysterical
state trying to read through the envelope, locked in the bathroom’. What she
absolutely cannot abide is his indifference: 'or maybe he just got it and said, Oh, from
Jimmy, and threw it in his brief case and forgot it. I’ll murder him if he did,
she thought, I’ll bury him in the cellar.' And, by the story’s close, there’s a hint that
this fantasy might be leaking out into reality. Her husband’s indifference towards the letter
is finally confirmed - he forgot to send it back to Jimmy unopened, like he said he would - and
this seems to sharpen the protagonist’s focus. 'It slipped his mind completely,
he never gave it a second thought, if it was a snake it would have bit him. Under
the cellar steps, she thought, with his head bashed in and his goddam letter under his folded
hands, and it’s worth it, oh it’s worth it.'
The deliciousness of that ‘oh’, the pleasure
she takes in it, the surety of it as the idea crystalises. And the violence of it -
I’m not sure if this is true or not, but I’ve always been aware of this idea
that women tend to murder in quiet ways, they use poison, for example; but this is
full-on, unapologetic gore, this is a bloody, visceral murder. There’s a sense of catharsis
here: she’s spent all this time being outwardly quiet and proper, and now she’s at boiling
point, and her rage is going to bubble over in the most dramatic and deafening fashion.
Now, all this is still internal, of course; the story doesn’t end with her carrying any of
this out. But, unlike ‘The Renegade’ and ‘Of Course’, both of which end with their female
protagonists in stasis, in limbo, unsure, trapped, here, in ‘Got a Letter from Jimmy’, our
protagonist seems to have discovered a way out. Each of these short stories showcases the
deeply disturbing potential of the domestic. The unique horror felt by the housewife
- the isolation, the lack of control and agency, the absent or violent husband, the
menacing children, the ghoulish neighbours, and the inability to live up to that standard
of wifely perfection - is central to each. Now, this isn’t to suggest that Jackson hated
being a homemaker, having a family, or a husband. Jackson’s ‘memoirs show
a genuine love for her home life, and she clearly takes pride in her role as both a
housewife and mother’. What’s most interesting to me is that Jackson treads a fine line between the
homely and the unhomely, between what is familiar and comforting and what is uncanny - and this, to
me, makes her writing all the more frightening, the uncertainty and the quiet merging of
the domestic with the truly horrifying. Mrs. Walpole, Mrs. Tylor, Mrs. Harris, and the
unnamed female protagonist reveal the potential hellishness of homemaking in 1950s America.
These stories are so discomfiting, so disturbing, and genuinely leave me with a pit of fear in
my stomach, like something has been violated, a line has been crossed. Horror, in Shirley
Jackson, isn’t the stuff of ghosties and demons; it’s the horror that whispers in your
home, lurks in your nearest and dearest, and creeps in yourself, that Jackson
so brilliantly, uncannily, exploits. I would love to know what you think
of all this - please let me know below. Do you have a totally different
reading of these stories? Tell me in the comments or join us on the Discord
for more in-depth bookish chit-chat. Enjoyed this analysis but want even
more Shirley Jackson? Check out our video on her most famous short story,
‘The Lottery’, by clicking here next.
