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3 JUNE CLEAVER IN TIlE HOUSE OF HORRORS: SHIRLEY JACKSON'S THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE 1. In terms of development, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House stands halfway between the haunted house tales of Poe and Hawthorne and the psychological ghost story as practiced by James and Wharton. In many of its particulars-its depiction of a tortured family (albeit a symbolic one), its presentation of a sentient house, its thematic focus on a central social issue of the twentieth century-The Haunting of Hill House clearly anticipates the mature formula of the 1970s and later. However, it avoids the visceral supernatural imagery we associate with such novels, instead emphasizing the interplay of personality and subtle shadings of motivation common in the psychological ghost story of the late nineteenth centuryI-a conclusion in accord with the sentiments of critic Edmund Fuller, who emphasized the enigmatic nature of Jackson's fiction in a 1959 essay for the New York TImes Book Review. The Haunting of Hill House, he notes, "proves again that [Shirley Jackson] is the finest master currently practicing in the genre of the cryptic, haunted tale" (4). Those readers familiar with "The Lottery" (and what college freshman is not?), Jackson's infamous tale of human sacrifice in a proper New England village, would be likely to assent. The less numerous (but fortunate) readers who know the six enigmatic novels Jackson published between 1948 and 1962,2 almost certainly would. And yet, the devoted reader of Good Housekeeping and Woman sHome Companion in those days-June Cleaver, doting wife and mother of the 1950s-era sitcom, Leave It To Beaver; springs to mind-might have known an entirely different Shirley Jackson, the author of a number of autobiographical family chronicles later collected as Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957). This is the Shirley Jackson Michael L. Nardacci has described as "warm, outgoing, and motherly," labeling as "inexplicable " the "brooding" persona responsible for the gothic novels and short stories (12); in fact, however, that persona is neither inexplicable nor insignificant. As S. T. Joshi points out, 25 26 American Nightmares It is entirely possible ... that a proper starting point for the study of Jackson's fiction from a weird perspective may not be her actual weird work but those tales for which she gained an entirely different following: her family chronicles. (14) Joshi argues that many of the incidents described in Jackson's domestic tales reappear, subtly transformed, as weird parables that touch upon universal themes of loneliness and misanthropy, and yet a close analysis of The Haunting of Hill House, in the context of the domestic tales, reveals a still more profound and particular alienation-the alienation of an ambitious woman torn between her loyalties to family and her personal dreams and imperatives in the circumscribed upper middleclass world of the 1940s and 1950s. For Jackson, this was a painfully real conflict. Judy Oppenheimer's 1988 biography, Private Demons: The Life ofShirley Jackson, depicts a woman intensely devoted to her husband, literary critic and teacher Stanley Edgar Hyman, and four children; at the same time, she faithfully produced a thousand words of fiction a day from college onward. In a 1949 interview with Harvey Breit for the New York Times Book Review, Jackson herself said, I can't persuade myself ... that writing is honest work. It is a very personal reaction, but 50 percent of my life is spent washing and dressing the children, cooking, washing dishes and clothes and mending. After I get it all to bed, I tum around to my typewriter and try to-well, to create concrete things again. It's great fun, and I love it. But it doesn't tie any shoes. (15) Significantly, it was as a wife and mother-a homemaker, a shoe tierand not as a writer of "haunted, cryptic" tales that Jackson's community knew her. As her former neighbor Murry Karmiller later reported to scholar Lenemaja Friedman, Jackson was more than dedicated, rose at 5:30 or 6:30 A.M. to fix breakfast for the family, taxied them to school until they were old enough to walk to school alone, saw them as part of the community, baked mountains of brownies for them, for volunteer fire department bake sales (often enough, we would come into our own kitchen around 8 in the morning to find Shirley waiting for us with a fresh batch of cookies or brownies-almost to the day she...

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