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Apr. 15th, 2019 11:21 amOkay, I'm going to start by ssaying that I'm glad to have read the new Shirley Jackson biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life -- it's extremely thorough, consistently interesting and has a great deal of respect for its subject -- but also, I have some bones to pick with it. I'm sorry, Ruth Franklin, you did a lot of work and I'm glad you're so fond of Shirley Jackson! I am too! I learned a great deal from your book, thanks for writing it!
...and now, the beef:
- Ruth Franklin really wants there to be two villains in Jackson's story, her mother Geraldine and her husband Stanley Hyman, and ... I'm absolutely not saying these two people were great people or treated Jackson wonderfully (Hyman especially not) but I feel like Jackson's relationship with Geraldine in particular seems more complicated than Franklin wants to make it, even from the snippets of letters that are included in the book
- and while Ruth Franklin is certainly dedicated to the Feminist Take and the Horror of Housewifery and, like, I sympathize, also it feels a little ... reductive? ... to imply that so much of Shirley Jackson's incomparably weird fiction can be boiled down to mother issues/husband issues
- on a related note, the biography spends a lot of time talking about Shirley Jackson's (and also her husband Stanley Hyman's) weight, and -- I mean, it's relevant, Shirley Jackson eventually had health problems of which she died, but it feels like we're getting updates on her size about once a chapter and I don't care that much and I kept getting slightly weirded out by the fact that Franklin cared that much
- meanwhile, Franklin teases in a very early chapter insights derived from Shirley's year-long correspondence with a kindred spirit housewife who wrote her a fan letter, and then when we finally get there spends a chapter discussing this VERY INTENSE letter-writing relationship which the housewife eventually dropped for Reasons Unknown, and doesn't even present a theory as to why or show us any text from the last letter that she read but never responded to? MORE TIME ON THIS, LESS TIME ON LOVING DESCRIPTIONS OF ALL THE HOUSES THAT SHIRLEY'S GRANDFATHER EVER BUILT
- ok so Franklin quotes this page from Jackson's college diary:
my friend was so strange that everyone, even the man i loved, thought we were lesbians and they used to talk about us, and i was afraid of them and i hated them, then i wanted to write stories about lesbians and how people misunderstood them, and finally this man sent me away because i was a lesbian and my friend was away and i was all alone
and Franklin's analysis:
although characters who may be lesbians appear more than once in her fiction, Jackson -- typically for her era and her class -- evinced a personal horror of lesbianism. It's possible that the relatively extreme way in which she would later disparage lesbians reflects some repression on her part, especially considering that she and Hyman had several close male friends who were homosexual. But that is conjecture only. Jackson never spoke of experiencing sexual desire for women. When she refers to herself and Jeanou as lesbians in that piece, at a time when lesbianism was little discussed or understood, she seems to be using the idea of it as a metaphor for social nonconformity.
Okay, look: I have not done extensive research into Jackson's life. I am not going to try to argue with Franklin about whether or not Shirley Jackson was queer. It's for sure possible to read the above as 'this man sent me away because [he thought] i was a lesbian'. But are you seriously really going to try to tell me that when Shirley 'Introducing Dreamy Gay Theodora' Jackson wrote 'everyone thought we were lesbians' she didn't know what the word meant? Because I DO NOT BELIEVE YOU, RUTH FRANKLIN.
(Also, she talks about how Jackson 'evinced a personal horror of lesbianism' but ... where's the citation? This doesn't come up again in-text until four hundred pages later in the biography, when Jackson is stressing about the first draft of Castle and whether she's accidentally writing the sisters as gay -- do they hide because they are somehow unnatural? am i never to be sure of any of my characters? if the alliance between [merricat] and constance is unholy then my book is unholy and i am writing something terrible, in my own terms, because my own identity is gone and the word is only something that means something else -- and again! it seems! that there is something significantly more complicated going on there than 'yikes, lesbians!' Also it seems hypothetically relevant that this was all being discussed in the correspondence with the housewife who eventually dropped her for Reasons Unknown! ANYWAY!)
...all that said, I appreciate Franklin for including these extensive quotes in the book to give me something to fight with her about; good scholarship even if I'm dubious about the analysis!
I also appreciate her description of Shirley Jackson's unfinished children's book: a portal fantasy about two kids who reluctantly go to the birthday party of a girl they don't much like, only to find out that she is a.) a portal fantasy princess and b.) now they have to go on a fantasy adventure to rescue her from peril. I'm so sad she never finished it, I would really love to read Shirley Jackson's Twelve Kingdoms.
...and now, the beef:
- Ruth Franklin really wants there to be two villains in Jackson's story, her mother Geraldine and her husband Stanley Hyman, and ... I'm absolutely not saying these two people were great people or treated Jackson wonderfully (Hyman especially not) but I feel like Jackson's relationship with Geraldine in particular seems more complicated than Franklin wants to make it, even from the snippets of letters that are included in the book
- and while Ruth Franklin is certainly dedicated to the Feminist Take and the Horror of Housewifery and, like, I sympathize, also it feels a little ... reductive? ... to imply that so much of Shirley Jackson's incomparably weird fiction can be boiled down to mother issues/husband issues
- on a related note, the biography spends a lot of time talking about Shirley Jackson's (and also her husband Stanley Hyman's) weight, and -- I mean, it's relevant, Shirley Jackson eventually had health problems of which she died, but it feels like we're getting updates on her size about once a chapter and I don't care that much and I kept getting slightly weirded out by the fact that Franklin cared that much
- meanwhile, Franklin teases in a very early chapter insights derived from Shirley's year-long correspondence with a kindred spirit housewife who wrote her a fan letter, and then when we finally get there spends a chapter discussing this VERY INTENSE letter-writing relationship which the housewife eventually dropped for Reasons Unknown, and doesn't even present a theory as to why or show us any text from the last letter that she read but never responded to? MORE TIME ON THIS, LESS TIME ON LOVING DESCRIPTIONS OF ALL THE HOUSES THAT SHIRLEY'S GRANDFATHER EVER BUILT
- ok so Franklin quotes this page from Jackson's college diary:
my friend was so strange that everyone, even the man i loved, thought we were lesbians and they used to talk about us, and i was afraid of them and i hated them, then i wanted to write stories about lesbians and how people misunderstood them, and finally this man sent me away because i was a lesbian and my friend was away and i was all alone
and Franklin's analysis:
although characters who may be lesbians appear more than once in her fiction, Jackson -- typically for her era and her class -- evinced a personal horror of lesbianism. It's possible that the relatively extreme way in which she would later disparage lesbians reflects some repression on her part, especially considering that she and Hyman had several close male friends who were homosexual. But that is conjecture only. Jackson never spoke of experiencing sexual desire for women. When she refers to herself and Jeanou as lesbians in that piece, at a time when lesbianism was little discussed or understood, she seems to be using the idea of it as a metaphor for social nonconformity.
Okay, look: I have not done extensive research into Jackson's life. I am not going to try to argue with Franklin about whether or not Shirley Jackson was queer. It's for sure possible to read the above as 'this man sent me away because [he thought] i was a lesbian'. But are you seriously really going to try to tell me that when Shirley 'Introducing Dreamy Gay Theodora' Jackson wrote 'everyone thought we were lesbians' she didn't know what the word meant? Because I DO NOT BELIEVE YOU, RUTH FRANKLIN.
(Also, she talks about how Jackson 'evinced a personal horror of lesbianism' but ... where's the citation? This doesn't come up again in-text until four hundred pages later in the biography, when Jackson is stressing about the first draft of Castle and whether she's accidentally writing the sisters as gay -- do they hide because they are somehow unnatural? am i never to be sure of any of my characters? if the alliance between [merricat] and constance is unholy then my book is unholy and i am writing something terrible, in my own terms, because my own identity is gone and the word is only something that means something else -- and again! it seems! that there is something significantly more complicated going on there than 'yikes, lesbians!' Also it seems hypothetically relevant that this was all being discussed in the correspondence with the housewife who eventually dropped her for Reasons Unknown! ANYWAY!)
...all that said, I appreciate Franklin for including these extensive quotes in the book to give me something to fight with her about; good scholarship even if I'm dubious about the analysis!
I also appreciate her description of Shirley Jackson's unfinished children's book: a portal fantasy about two kids who reluctantly go to the birthday party of a girl they don't much like, only to find out that she is a.) a portal fantasy princess and b.) now they have to go on a fantasy adventure to rescue her from peril. I'm so sad she never finished it, I would really love to read Shirley Jackson's Twelve Kingdoms.
