“Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic” by Darryl Hattenhauer says “Jackson’s reputation should be restored to the lofty position it occupied during her life”

“In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Shirley Jackson was ranked among America’s most highly regarded fiction writers…an article in 1955 on the strength of contemporary American fiction listed her with J. D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, Saul Bellow, William Styron, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty…In 1968, Macmillan’s Literary Heritage series included her with Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, Welty, and Ellison in its canonical anthology The American Experience: Fiction…When Joyce Carol Oates’s first novel appeared, her publisher advertised her as ‘already compared to William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter and Shirley Jackson’…This study argues that Jackson’s reputation should be restored to the lofty position it occupied during her life” (1, pp. 1-2).

“Jackson was…almost, at least at times, a multiple personality. As is well-known, multiple personalities often arise from sexual abuse, and it seems that Jackson might have been so victimized [by her] maternal uncle…”

“More precisely…She was a bit like the multiple personality described in a book by [Morton] Prince…that she used to develop Elizabeth, the protagonist with a multiple personality in The Bird’s Nest…

“Sometimes when Jackson awoke, she found disturbing notes that she had written to herself while sleepwalking” (1, pp. 25-26).

“As Jackson did in her letters…Betsy [one of the alternate personalities in The Bird’s Nest] refers to herself with a lowercase i ” (1, p. 134).

“In her diary as an adolescent, [Jackson] wrote of her writing as something that came not from her but from her pen or her typewriter” (1, p. 22).

“The most important nonfictional work enabling this novel [The Bird’s Nest] is the definitive work of the time on multiples, The Dissociation of a Personality by a doctor named Morton Prince. Jackson studied it assiduously before writing this novel…Prince appears to have helped Jackson understand her own life” (1, pp. 130-131).

1. Darryl Hattenhauer. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. Albany, State University of New York Press, 2003.