Monster, She Wrote

by Lisa Kröger

  Macardle once wrote a feminist response to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Her version, “The Portrait of Roisin Dhu,” was published in Earth-Bound (Swan River Press, 1924; reprint, 2016), a collection of her short stories, most of which Macardle wrote while in prison. In that tale, a male artist inadvertently steals his female subject’s vitality. But in Uneasy Freehold, Meredith intentionally uses the women’s beauty for his art and then paints portraits that emphasize what they perceive as their faults, in order to manipulate and, ultimately, break them.

  The Unforeseen is not as well-known as Uneasy Freehold but is enjoying a bit of a resurgence. In November 2017, the journalist Arminta Wallace called it a “page-turner” in an Irish Times article. Like Macardle’s other novel, the story presents a mother–daughter relationship and has a twist ending. But, Wallace writes, its real strength is its uncertainty. The main character, Virginia Wilde, experiences visions that she thinks might be a sign that she’s going insane. The novel alternates between supernatural and rational explanations for the visions as they grow more disturbing. Like The Uninvited, this is a story that takes the romance of the Gothic and mixes it with a little Victorian ambiguity, modern psychology, and a dash of Ireland.

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: Both of Dorothy Macardle’s novels are easy to find and make for rewarding reading. Uneasy Freehold is one of our favorites.

  Also try: Along with the 1944 film The Uninvited, Macardle’s work has benefited from a number of worthy adaptations for the small screen. Two of her stories were adapted for the Canadian anthology television series General Motors Presents (called Encounter in the United States): “The Unforeseen,” which aired in November 1956, and “The Watchers,” which aired in 1960. A made-for-television movie called Fantastic Summer, based on one of Macardle’s novels, debuted in 1955 and starred the actress Fay Compton, who played Mrs. Sanderson in The Haunting, Robert Wise’s 1963 film adaptation of the Shirley Jackson novel.

  Related work: Some readers and critics have drawn similarities between Uneasy Freehold and Elizabeth Bowen’s 1945 story “The Demon Lover,” which plays with the kind of psychological horror that Macardle renders so well.

  “Someone out of the world of the dead was moving about the house.”

  —The Uninvited

  The Queen of Horror

  Shirley Jackson

  1916–1965

  In 1948, the New Yorker published a short story by a then-unknown writer. The tale, about an ordinary town with a sinister secret, so outraged readers that the magazine reported receiving more negative mail than ever before, including many subscription cancellations.

  That story was “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, which went on to become one of the most famous short stories in American literature.

  Though Jackson had been an obsessive writer since her youth and began publishing her writing during college, “The Lottery” made her a household name. For decades she received letters about it, which typically fell into one of three categories: bewilderment, speculation, and “plain old-fashioned abuse.”

  The New England setting of the story was an integral part of Jackson’s writing, which often features main characters who are outsiders and find themselves persecuted in a hostile small-town environment. This was an experience familiar to Jackson.

  Born in 1916, Jackson spent her childhood in California. She met her husband, the literary critic and professor Stanley Edgar Hyman, at Syracuse University, where they were students. The couple married in 1940 and moved several times before settling in 1945 in North Bennington, Vermont, where Hyman took a faculty position at Bennington College. She wrote, in what has become a famous anecdote from her life, that when checking into a hospital for the birth of her third child, the nurse asked Jackson what her occupation was. Jackson replied that she was a writer, to which the nurse said, “I’ll just put down housewife.”

  The truth was that Jackson always struggled against her roles as wife and mother—or, to be more accurate, the roles that others cast her in. Professionally she was a successful author, but at home in North Bennington, she was Hyman’s wife and the mother of four children. Her husband expected her to play the part of faculty wife: to maintain the household, to rear the children, to cook, to clean, and to entertain people he brought into their home. The residents of the college town never quite accepted her as one of their own, which likely informed how she wrote about various groups’ intolerance of outsiders (see: the stone-wielding townsfolk in “The Lottery”).

  Hyman controlled the family’s finances, but often it was Jackson’s income that kept them afloat. Jackson’s posthumously published collection Come Along with Me (Viking, 1968; Penguin, 1995 reprint) contains an anecdote about a time the family needed a new refrigerator. So she wrote a story, was paid, and bought the fridge. In this way, writing was, for Jackson, a real kind of magic. Hyman encouraged his wife’s work, especially because it supplemented his income. But when eventually her career eclipsed his, Hyman no longer tolerated her success and belittled her in front of his university colleagues. What’s more, he was frequently unfaithful, being particularly fond of his former students.

  It’s no wonder that Jackson wrote about women who were lonely and ostracized. Her characters are haunted, sometimes literally and sometimes figuratively, by pasts they can’t escape. Jackson became a master of both types of hauntings, the supernatural and the psychological, the interior and the exterior.

  Haunted Housekeeping

  Haunted house stories are a staple in horror literature; nearly every writer of the genre has told one or two. None have come as close to perfection as Jackson in creating houses that loom larger than their actual size, describing a past that haunts the present. What also sets her domestic stories apart is how quickly and effectively the mundane scenarios she depicts turn violent. Even a setting as seemingly humdrum as a grocery store transforms into a downright bloodbath in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, her 1962 novel about two sisters living in a family home following an infamous multiple murder.

  “The Lottery” established Jackson as reigning queen of the horror genre, though she wrote everything from campus novels to darkly comic domestic sketches about family life. These sketches were first published in magazines like Good Housekeeping and Woman’s Day and, later, in the books Raising Demons (Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1957; Penguin Books, 2015) and Life among the Savages (Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1953; Penguin Books, 2015). She cemented her status as a titan of terror with the 1959 publication of The Haunting of Hill House (Viking), which was adapted in 1963 into the film The Haunting, which then developed a cult following of its own. Director Jan de Bont brought a less popular adaptation to the screen in 1999. And in 2018, the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House took the bare bones of Jackson’s story into new territory.

  Hill House is a lovely work of ambiguity. Four characters from different walks of life converge on the titular property, which has a bad past and a bad reputation. Eleanor Vance, the protagonist, has answered an advertisement posted by Dr. Montague seeking assistants for a haunted house investigation. She sees it as the first adventure of her life, which until that point she has spent taking care of her invalid mother. Once the action begins, it’s hard to tell if the four people are cracking under the strain of their isolation in the bizarre mansion, or if the house truly is haunted. It doesn’t help that every angle in the building is off by a few degrees, and the decorations are…well, let’s just say, strange. In addition to the usual cold spots, bangs and knocks, and even a séance of sorts, Jackson adds Eleanor’s internal monologues in which she struggles to understand her morbid attraction to Hill House.

  With this book and others, Jackson drafted a blueprint for the modern haunted house in both literature and film. Stephen King modeled his Overlook Hotel in The Shining after another of Jackson’s creepy settings, the Halloran house in The Sundial (Farrar, Straus & Cuddahy
, 1958). Moreover, King wrote at length about his debt to Jackson in his nonfiction ode to the horror genre, Danse Macabre (Gallery Books reprint, 2010), and in On Writing (Scribner reprint, 2010), his memoir on his chosen craft. Other authors who have cited Jackson as an influence include Neil Gaiman, Richard Matheson, and Sarah Waters.

  If The Haunting of Hill House was the definitive haunted house novel, then Jackson’s final completed novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Viking, 1962), cemented her in the Gothic and horror traditions. Time magazine named it one of the ten best novels of 1962. The story focuses on the Blackwood sisters, Constance and Mary Katherine (nicknamed Merricat), who live with their infirm Uncle Julian in their fenced-in family estate outside of a New England town. Uncle Julian’s poor health and the scorn the townspeople feel for the surviving Blackwoods are the result of a tragedy that occurred six years earlier. One night at supper, four members of the Blackwood family—the girls’ parents, brother, and aunt—were poisoned and died. Constance, who hadn’t used the arsenic-laced sugar on the dinner table, was arrested for the crime but not indicted. The townspeople believe she got away with murder. Her younger sister Merricat had been sent to her room without dinner on that fateful night and now is the only member of the household who ventures outside; she also practices magic rituals in order to keep Constance safe. Out of the blue, their cousin Charles swoops in, believing he is the rightful inheritor of the estate, and establishes himself as patriarch.

  Castle is often praised, especially for its protagonist. Merricat Blackwood is an outsider, like many of Jackson’s women, but she maintains an imaginative spirit and a fierce devotion to defending her sister and her home. Fans of the horror writer Paul Tremblay will recognize similarities in his protagonist Merry in A Head Full of Ghosts (William Morrow, 2015).

  The Blackwood sisters’ existence at the margins of their community reflects Jackson’s own experience. She didn’t quite fit in with the other wives of her small university town; she spent her days writing and tending children, but her nights were filled with more exotic fare. A lover of the occult, Jackson gave tarot readings to friends and family. She claimed not to believe in ghosts but she owned a crystal ball and a Ouija board and seemed to relish her reputation as a “witch.” Whether or not she practiced witchcraft is debatable.

  Shirley Jackson may not have been understood by the people who knew her, but her literary legacy is indisputable. As an example, consider the Shirley Jackson Awards, a juried accolade that has been given annually since 2007 for excellence in horror, thriller, and dark fantasy fiction.

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: Need some Shirley Jackson in your life? Honestly, who doesn’t? Jackson is best known for her novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, both available from Penguin Classics. “The Lottery” can be found in The Lottery and Other Stories, a 2009 Penguin reprint, among other editions. But Jackson’s other novels are criminally underread. The Sundial is an apocalyptic tale with all the Gothic trappings: a family with a sordid past, a manor house with secrets, and a storm blowing in. Yet it avoids cliché thanks to a unique exploration of family relationships. The narrative quickly turns into psychological suspense, and readers must question whether the end of the world is, in fact, near. It is available in a 2014 Penguin edition, with a foreword by Victor LaValle.

  Also try: As mentioned, the 1963 film adaptation of Hill House has gained a fandom of its own. The ten-part 2018 Netflix series provides a fantastic reimagining (not a straight adaptation) of the novel that is well done and worth viewing.

  Judy Oppenheimer’s Private Demons (Ballantine Books, 1989) was the first full-length biography of Shirley Jackson. Oppenheimer interviewed Jackson’s family and friends for a more complete portrait than a mere blurb on a book jacket could offer. In it she focuses on Jackson’s supposed witchcraft and occult leanings…maybe a little too much. Ruth Franklin’s more recent and thoroughly engaging Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (Liveright, 2016) dives deep into Jackson’s personal papers and notes from the Library of Congress archive and interweaves insightful readings of her works into a sharp yet sympathetic biographical portrait. If you read only one biography of Jackson, make it Franklin’s.

  Related work: In a testament to Jackson’s enduring allure, Susan Scarf Merrell’s murder mystery Shirley (Blue Rider Press, 2014) features Jackson as a character. Like so many of Jackson’s novels, this is a psychological thriller, with a young girl at the center. When the girl disappears, Jackson is a suspect. The director Josephine Decker began adapting the novel to film in 2018, with actress Elisabeth Moss playing Shirley Jackson.

  The Dame of Dread

  Daphne du Maurier

  1907–1989

  Unusually independent women. Dangerous obsessions. A flock of seagulls. Sexual intimacy with a male robot. Many women named Rebecca. Welcome to the mind of Daphne du Maurier.

  Du Maurier was primed for a literary career from birth. Born in 1907 in London to a wealthy couple with a bohemian lifestyle, du Maurier grew up surrounded by riches and art. Her grandfather was the famed cartoonist and author George du Maurier, known for his work in the British satire publication Punch and his novel Trilby (Osgood, McIlvaine, 1895), which introduced the world to the character of Svengali. Her father, Gerald du Maurier, was a theater critic and an actor. Her mother, Muriel Beaumont, was an actress who often brought the dramatic arts home; Daphne and her two sisters grew up to write or to paint. Maybe the most intriguing detail is a connection to another literary legacy: Daphne’s cousins were the Llewelyn Davies boys, who famously inspired J. M. Barrie while he was creating the character Peter Pan. Barrie and other writers were often visitors to the du Maurier family home in London during Daphne’s childhood.

  She was an unusual child. Though often called a tomboy, she mused that she may have been a boy soul placed in the wrong body (calling herself a “disembodied spirit”). As an adult, du Maurier often said that she had two personas: the female energy that she presented to the world, and a male energy, which she called “lover,” that controlled her writing. Many critics have pointed to her tendency to use male narrators, even in stories with a female protagonist. She had early crushes on women and same-sex relationships (though she despised the term “lesbian”) prior to her marriage to Frederick “Boy” Browning, a military man from a middle-class background. Rumors abound of same-sex flirtations even after her marriage, including an unrequited crush on her publisher’s wife, Ellen Doubleday, and a relationship with the actress Gertrude Lawrence.

  Though she kept her maiden name for her writing career, du Maurier became Lady Browning in 1946, when her husband was bestowed the title of Sir Browning and made a Knight Commander of the British Empire for his service in the South East Asia Command during World War II. In 1969, she was elevated to Dame Daphne du Maurier DBE, Fellow to the Royal Society of Literature.

  The couple had three children, and du Maurier was the breadwinner, supporting the family with her writing. Her success eventually allowed for the purchase of Menabilly, a manor house in Cornwall, which provided the inspiration for Manderley, the setting of her most famous novel, Rebecca (Gollancz, 1938). Du Maurier’s marriage may also have inspired the plot. According to their youngest child, the union was far from ideal, and du Maurier worried that Boy was still in love with a former flame. Perhaps her real experience being haunted by her husband’s old love was transformed into the literal haunting of her fiction.

  Birds and Dolls

  Rebecca is a Gothic tale with domestic horror at its heart. The plot centers on a young wife—a shy, naive waif of a woman—who moves into a cold and vast mansion with her new husband. At first glance, the narrative appears to be typical ghost story fare, though deliciously steeped in Gothic elements: there’s a vicious servant who refuses to accept the new wife, a husband with a murky, and perhaps dangerous, past, and a haunted house with entire wings that are off limits to
the protagonist (and the reader by proxy). But beneath the ghostly trappings await the complicated identities of the two Mrs. de Winters: the deceased, who was vivacious and outgoing but cruel and manipulative, and the living, who is shy and submissive but dangerously obsessed with the woman who came before her.

  In Rebecca, the tension is not in what the husband might be hiding, but in whether the two female forces can learn to inhabit the same space. The struggle to belong is a common thread in du Maurier’s work; her female characters never quite fit into the roles they’ve been given, and often, as a result, pay the ultimate price. Though the novel was poorly received by critics, Rebecca earned du Maurier a National Book Award. The tale has become so popular that, some eighty years after its publication, it still sells around 4,000 copies a month.

  Beyond du Maurier’s most enduring work, readers would be remiss to ignore her other writing, which pushed the boundaries of what female characters could do. Her short story “The Doll” (written when du Maurier was twenty-one and then buried in a sheaf of work rejected by editors, lost for nearly seventy years) tells the story of a woman—curiously also named Rebecca—who enjoys a life of luxury and independence, a life that she happens to share with a mechanical doll named Julio. Like the novel Rebecca, much of the story’s plot revolves around secrecy and the strangely cloistered life of the strong-willed and self-sufficient main character. The story is narrated not by Rebecca, but by one of her suitors, who is driven mad with jealousy and anger over her relationship with Julio. The unnamed narrator, who flies into a murderous rage when confronted with a love interest who rejects him, is the story’s most fascinating element. That a woman would not need him—that she doesn’t need any man for financial stability or sexual pleasure—confounds him. The story was republished in 2011 in an anthology of the same name by William Morrow Paperbacks.