Housewife Horror: Reconciling Contrasting Depictions of the Domestic in the Works of Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson is most known for her haunting fiction, but her memoir works, which brought her the most success in her lifetime, are often overlooked due to their status as “housewife humour” books. Readers often find it difficult to reconcile these lighthearted family memoirs with the uncanny fiction that Jackson’s name has been associated with in the years since her death. I argue, however, that these memoir works portray a more sinister home beneath their surface, and that Jackson’s fiction and memoir works are much more similar than they first appear. My study analyses Jackson’s two memoirs, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, along with her final three fiction novels, The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, in order to reconcile the two seemingly contrasting depictions of the home and argue that the home in her warm memoirs and the home in her haunting fiction is, in fact, one and the same. In order to do this, I read Jackson’s work against their genre –– reading her memoirs for horror, and her fiction for the warm, affectionate sentiment expressed towards the domestic in her memoirs. I conclude that Jackson’s refusal to adhere to categorization of any kind allows her to create an honest depiction of the home as a place of simultaneous comfort and terror.