(no subject)

[skygiants]

Okay, 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.

Comments

[movingfinger]

As The Rock Man in The Point said, "The thing is: you see what you wanna see, and you hear what you wanna hear."

[sovay]

Shirley 'Introducing Dreamy Gay Theodora' Jackson

That's where I spanged off the "personal horror of lesbianism."

[rydra_wong]

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.

This is the point where I tilt my head so far sideways I think it might fall off.

I mean, "This was a time when lesbianism was little discussed or understood, so Hypothetical Author would only have heard of of it as a pathology/perversion" works as an argument, structurally.

"This was a time when lesbianism was little discussed or understood, therefore Jackson would use this very loaded term to describe herself purely as a metaphor for something else, and she just meant that everyone else thought that she and her friend were social nonconformists!" -- this does not.

Also wow, Google Books just informed me that Franklin segues into explaining that Jackson used "lesbian" in this Totes Metaphorical way because she'd read The Well of Loneliness. What.

Also I'd like to confirm that Hangsaman also contains very non-metaphorical lesbianism.

(Again in the form of a secondary character who's very attractive and appealing to the lead in a way that's perceived as both seductive and threatening, IIRC.)

I mean, you can note that Jackson got particularly upset when a critic described it as such, but "she had a very fraught relationship to this word" does not lead logically to "therefore when she used it to describe herself, she DEFINITELY DIDN'T MEAN ANYTHING BY IT, SHE JUST MEANT IT METAPHORICALLY, METAPHORICALLY LIKE IN THE WELL OF LONELINESS YOU KNOW."

[sovay]

Also wow, Google Books just informed me that Franklin segues into explaining that Jackson used "lesbian" in this Totes Metaphorical way because she'd read The Well of Loneliness. What.

They're metaphors, Harold.

[skygiants]

RIGHT? Franklin, on The Well of Loneliness: "sexuality in the novel is expressed only obliquely. What is most palpable is Stephen's sense of herself as an outsider [...] Jackson -- a girl who often felt awkward in her own body, whose mother pressured her to dress in a way she found unappealing, who romanticized outlaw figures such as Villon -- must have deply sympathized." But for sure not in a queer way! Just in a hating your mom's taste in clothes kind of way! That's probably what the word 'lesbian' meant to Shirley, at this time!

(I really wanted to read Hangsaman before the biography, but alas the vagaries of the library did not allow.)

[skygiants]

Like, it seems clear that Shirley had a complicated relationship with the queer themes in her own work, and there's a lot of interesting things to potentially say about that, if you're a Shirley Jackson scholar; "personal horror of lesbianism" doesn't really seem to be doing a great job at mining that well ...

[skygiants]

Ceci n'est pas une lesbian!

[kore]

//dies

[kore]

Yeah, this is now apparently the new standard biography of Jackson, replacing Judy Oppenheimer's older Private Demons (1988), especially because Franklin did do a lot of research in Jackson's private papers and discovered a lot of new stuff. Private Demons depended a lot on interviews with Jackson's survivors (and Franklin reuses a lot of that material, although she's quiet about it). I didn't like it because in a way she didn't seem very.....simpatico? with Jackson?....and she leaned way too hard on Hyman as a villain, but also there was way too much about him in the text. I didn't need to know all about his books and his courses and his book reviews. And Franklin didn't seem interested in possible queerness in Jackson's life and work at all, like you point out (or even that Jackson was HORRIFIED &c &c) and seemed particularly tone-deaf to Jackson's near-obsession with liminality, the tension between real/unreal, obsession/love, madness/sanity, but writing about it in an absolutely precise, deliberate way.

IDK. I had a similar response to the Tiptree bio: that here was a very intelligent, talented, insightful writer, taking on a topic she is absolutely non-congruent with and just sort of not grokking the subject or their work on a fundamental level. It's not like the book is bad, a lot of it was just....baffling. (And that book had a similar problem with how Phillips wrote about Tiptree's sexuality, imhoe.)

[kore]

YEAH, and for another thing, Well of Loneliness is about the born-this-way theory of sexual 'inversion' which is noooot the same thing as the concept of lesbian sexuality in the 1950s.

[kore]

Hangsaman is an AMAZING book, I really love it. It's just amazing that it was her second novel, and that it came out in 1951, so much of her mature style and vision is already there.

But for sure not in a queer way! Just in a hating your mom's taste in clothes kind of way! That's probably what the word 'lesbian' meant to Shirley, at this time!

//facepalm

[rydra_wong]

Yes, because for sure nobody at the time ever suggested that The Well of Loneliness had anything to do with sexuality! That aspect of it was totally unknown! Jackson probably didn't notice it at all!

[rydra_wong]

Hangsaman is an AMAZING book, I really love it.

Fervently seconded; I need to reread it.

[kore]

It's got that "utterly realistic fever dream" feeling of so much of the best of her stuff.

[kore]

(Also, glory forever to the name of Mr Stephen Dilge, my eighth-grade English teacher, who let me borrow his copy of "The Lottery" when I saw it on his desk, and never, ever asked me to return it. I still have it.)

[rydra_wong]

*dies and is dead*

[skygiants]

Yeah, exactly -- it felt like Franklin was so wedded to her thesis that Jackson's fiction was all her way of battering her fists against Hyman swallowing up her life that, unfortunately, she went ahead and let Hyman swallow up the biography. All of the eerie tensions in Jackson's work become "well, it's another way to show that Jackson was unhappy in her marriage" -- and it's especially frustrating because she gives you enough of the evidence to show you that there are twelve other ways of reading everything she wrote, and Franklin's just not particularly interested in talking about them.

[julian]

ILU.

[julian]

Biographer Doris Faber once wrote, of Eleanor Roosevelt wanting to kiss "the upper northwest corner" of reporter Lorena Hickock's mouth, and also about "wanting to take you in my arms," that "...there can be little doubt that the final sentence of the above letter does not mean what it appears to mean."

Mmm. Of course not.

So "i was a lesbian and my friend was away and i was all alone" turning into "she seems to be using the idea of it as a metaphor for social nonconformity" is definitely in this (infuriatingly clear) Doris Faber vein.

[skygiants]

yeah, it's ... look, I mean, I appreciate nuance! people in the past did not necessarily understand queerness the same way we do today! but this is not, um, a particularly nuanced reading, imo.

[kore]

it felt like Franklin was so wedded to her thesis that Jackson's fiction was all her way of battering her fists against Hyman swallowing up her life that, unfortunately, she went ahead and let Hyman swallow up the biography.

Yes, precisely! And not only did I NOT CARE about him, but her view of Hyman was so negative that made it even worse. I really don't think understanding his work is that terribly important for studying hers, apart from obvious correspondences -- her writing is sui generis, and his stuff is so dry and analytical and very typical of 50s LitCrit.

[julian]

That's ... amazingly depressing. Seeing the potential in something, and the ways they could have expanded their thinking and didn't, just makes me want to throw things -- both on behalf of the subject and the biographer.

Don't reach conclusions ahead of the actual research/thinking about the research, *people*.

[cyphomandra]

I did enjoy reading this bio while also being not entirely convinced that all the lesbians were metaphors (and wanting more of the fanwriting housewife!). I was particularly tickled to have Jay Williams, whom I know as a children's author, show up.

[evewithanapple]

RIGHT?? How does someone with a "personal horror of lesbianism" write a lesbian character as one of the most straightforwardly likeable and sympathetic in the whole book?

[osprey_archer]

I am crushed by the knowledge that we could have had a children's portal fantasy written by Shirley Jackson if only she had finished it. WE COULD HAVE HAD IT ALLLLLL.

[aamcnamara]

But for sure not in a queer way! Just in a hating your mom's taste in clothes kind of way! That's probably what the word 'lesbian' meant to Shirley, at this time!
I did not spit my tea out, but it was a near thing.

[aamcnamara]

Reading this post I was thinking of the Tiptree biography too--like, the point is RIGHT THERE, it's RIGHT in THAT BIT YOU QUOTED oh you missed it, okay. (And ditto the way Phillips wrote about Tiptree's gender, for me.)

[kore]

I know that bio won all kinds of awards and plaudits but I thought the author's lack of knowledge about sf REEEEEEALLY showed, and I dunno about her background in queer theory but that was not on display either. "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" is practically like a slangy cyberpunk thesis on the construction of gender! That gets one (1) paragraph in Double Life.

[rushthatspeaks]

This bio annoyed me so much, because the scholarship as far as primary sources and facts and dates and digging up correspondence is great, and everything on an interpretation level is NOT EVEN WRONG.

Like, did you notice the part where Franklin is talking about that chunk of Life Among the Savages/famous short story where Jackson's older son goes to school and comes home talking about this kid Charles who is a real troublemaker, and the whole family is astonished by Charles, and then Jackson goes in for a parent-teacher conference and the teacher is all oh we have ALL WANTED to meet your kid's mother, and Jackson says but Charles? and there isn't any Charles in the grade?

Franklin somehow thinks that THERE IS A GHOST OR IMAGINARY FIGMENT called Charles, and I sincerely hope she is the only person who has ever misread this story to this extent, because when I got to that bit I had to put the bio down and foam at the mouth for a while. (HINT, MS FRANKLIN: JACKSON'S SON WAS CHARLES HOW DID THAT NOT CROSS YOUR MIND.)

After that I refused to trust Franklin on factual descriptions of the plots of Jackson's works, which is an antagonistic position from which to be reading a biography.

Despite that, it's an incredibly useful book, caused me to formulate several new and interesting theories about Jackson for myself, and will probably be the standard for a long while to come, fuck everything.

[skygiants]

There were a lot of delightful cameos! Franklin was also clearly charmed by Ralph Ellison hanging out and complaining with Shirley about transitions, and, to be fair, so was I.

[skygiants]

RIGHT? Imagine the genre of portal fantasy, as we have it today, completely reshaped by Shirley Jackson sauntering in cira 1960 and setting her beautifully weird stamp on all subsequent genre tropes.

[skygiants]

omg, I noticed it and I was so confused by it -- I kept wondering if I'd somehow missed the part where she talks about how Jackson's son was Charles and displacement and doubling, which is a fairly significant and consistent theme in Jackson's fiction, but nope, never mentioned again! I sincerely think she just does not care about any thematic elements in Jackson's work that don't make a nice straight line back to her thesis about The Shackles of Matrimony. And, like, I do want to read more Jackson but I don't have time to read all of Jackson to find out how much else I profoundly disagree with! It's quite frustrating!

[rushthatspeaks]

Exactly! (Plus, I am pretty sure that if I read all of Jackson in anything resembling one go, no matter how spaced out, it would probably not be great for not having a vague cloud of gloom hovering a few inches above my head at all times.)

And it's like, biographers don't have to be literary critics, and in fact I'd rather they not try because they are usually bad at it, but they do need to report the contents of their subject's works accurately on a simple summary level, and getting that wrong makes me side-eye Franklin so hard that I am basically facing in the opposite direction.