The 1950s: Domestic Ghouls and the Denial Female Self-Actualization
By: Melanie Moyer
Tags: Womens History, Horror, Shirley Jackson, History, 1950s

History Through Horror’s look at what went bump in the night during the 1950s through the lens of Shirly Jackon’s The Haunting of Hill House

“Any change in the nature of and female roles thus automatically affects the home, the economy, the school, and perhaps, above all, the definition of who we are as human beings.” — William Chafe, A History of Our Time: Readings on Postwar America, 2007

Shirley Jackson is, without a doubt, the writer who best encapsulates the secret anxieties of mid-century American women. Thee disturbing and jarring short story “The Lottery” has been required reading for high schoolers for decades. Her most famous novel, The Haunting of Hill House has been safely etched into the annals of literary history as one of the great ghost stories ever written. The novel, a rather scant 246 pages (give or take for edition), follows Eleanor “Nell” Vance, a young woman who, in an effort to escape her life as an oppressed recluse and caretaker under the thumb of her married sister’s family, joins a group of amateur paranormal investigators at a local mansion with a mysterious but undeniably dark history. What follows is a series of hard to explain and unsettling events in the home leading to an ambiguous but undeniably tragic climax.

So, what can Shirley Jackson’s work teach us about the delicate world of 1950s America, and what scared them? Let’s find out.

From here on out, are spoilers…

A Haunted Life

“Virginia Werewoolf” was one such name a Shirley Jackson was slapped with by a critic. She had a reputation for casting hexes on publishers and described herself as an “amateur practicing witch”. As Jackson wrote of her own beliefs and practices in witchcraft and magic: “a way of embracing and channeling female power at a time when women in America often had little control over their lives.”

“I wrote of neuroses and fear and I think all my books laid end to end would be one long documentation of anxiety.”

Jackson was born in 1916 in San Francisco where her family had resided for several generations in an affluent suburb. Her great-great-grandfather, Samuel Bugbee, had made the family’s fortune by tackling the real estate frontier of the city as an architect in the 19th century. During her senior year of high school, her family relocated to the East Coast where she would graduate from Syracuse University with a degree in journalism and her first writing credit, a short story called “Janice”, about a teen suicide.

This focus on mental health and the darker parts of the inner world would be common in Jackson’s writing throughout her life — her first novel, The Bird’s Nest, explored a woman’s relationships with her psychiatrist as she is treated for multiple personality disorder, her final work We Have Always Lived in the Castle centers on female agoraphobia and societal otherness. She spent much of her childhood lamenting her mother’s favoritism of her younger brother — “a failed abortion” is what Geraldine Jackson often called her daughter, resentful both of Jackson’s unexpected arrival and her peculiarities. Her country club parents were perplexed by their daughter’s “abnormalities” in interests and behavior and alarmed at her constant weight fluctuations.

Jackon met her future husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, while at Syracuse after he read “Janice” and was determined to hunt down the author on campus. They married quickly after school and settled in Vermont where Hyman worked as a professor and burgeoning literary critic for the New Yorker and Jackson wrote fiction. Despite the veneer of perfection in a New England marriage that ultimately produced 4 children, Hyman’s frequent infidelities with his students and resentment of Jackson’s financial success as a writer made the marriage an unhappy one. Despite Hyman’s admiration for his wife’s intellectual talent, the norms of post-war America seeped into their home: Jackson did the housework and child-rearing while Hyman worked in his study and controlled Jackson’s earnings, which far eclipsed Hyman’s own. On top of this, she suffered physically from heavy smoking and lifelong weight fluctuations as well as from anxiety and agoraphobia for which she was prescribed barbiturates, believed harmless at the time, and often sought alcohol as a crutch before she would ultimately pass away in 1965 of heart failure.

A doodle by Jackson, making fun of Hyman: “I thought I’d rest a while, dear, I did three paragraphs all at once and it tired me out.”

She burgeoned Hill House after reading an article on a group of researchers who published findings on the supernatural. What Jackson was drawn to in the report was the personalities of those involved and the mental gymnastics they employed to explain their experiences. From this brainstorming was born Dr. Montague, the staunch academic researcher, Luke, the narcissistic and entitled heir to Hill Houe, Theo, the bohemian artist and modern woman, and Nell, a meek woman desperate to grab hold of her own agency.

Tales of escape by women from an oppressive status quo and into a false safe harbor are common motifs in Jackson’s writing. As Hill House and many of her other works make clear: women in mid-century America had nowhere to run when it was the home itself — and all it represented — that was swallowing them whole. “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality” is the novel’s thundering and famous opening line, it is this reality of post-war America that Nell, Jackson, and women of their time were desperate to escape.

From Riveters to Housewives in the Blink of an Atom Bomb

The actual specters abiding in these fictional halls and keeping characters up at night are, classically, not what one expects. Despite its consideration as the greatest American ghost story ever put to paper, there are few actual ghosts in Hill House. We’re left to wonder whether the energy of the malevolent home truly had a grip on Nell or whether an erratic and mentally ill woman was suffering a psychotic break. It’s a more murky but comparable conundrum to the one faced by the protagonist of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, a terrifying story likewise about the stripping of identity that comes with traditional roles contained in womanhood. The largest difference is that the protagonist of Gillman’s story lives in a time where she is at the complete physical and medical mercy of her husband, Jackson and Nell’s world is one where women have new feet to stand on, even if they were constantly being sawed at by a patriarchal America fighting to return to a tradition that died thanks to the upheavals of the 30s and 40s.

A circa 1952 advertisement for Schlitz beer

In the 1950s the United States was experiencing a form of cultural and societal shift where the desire to return to pre-Great Depression and World War II normalcy and economic fruition called for women, who had taken over the vast majority of professional roles left behind by men who went off to Europe in uniform, to give up their professional careers and return to tending to the home. An estimated 27% of the total labor force during the war was made up of women who worked clerical positions, assembly jobs, and even managerial positions in rare cases. Jackson was Rosy the Riveter of the writing desk, she too had talents she refused to surrender to make room for a husband.

A proto Amazon wishlist ad

The veneer of prosperity that the US was aiming to achieve to itself and to the world was best served by way of large families — which averaged 3.2 children before a couple hit their late 20s. “Disney Princess” film genre, beginning in full with Cinderella (1950) and Sleeping Beauty (1959) was born out of a need to force women who did not want to leave their professional positions back into the home, citing patriotic duties, convincing them this fairy tale was their own American Dream.

A complicating wrinkle in the push for female autonomy is also the rising tide of communist paranoia and the belief that the only countermeasure against the United State’s moral opposite was the shoring up of such traditions on the home front:

“If the fear of losing whatever was stable in America shaped many attitudes, much may be said for the concern for values that accompanied that fear. Few decades have produced a more interesting array of self-analytical social thought.” — Eugenia Kaledin, American Women in the 1950s: Mothers and More, 1984

Communist women worked, American women didn’t have to and shouldn’t want to. Kaledin notes further that women, found ways around this yoke, putting creative efforts towards anti-segregation movements and literacy initiatives at local libraries to reach for an intellectual escape and feeling of participation in their world, even if it was not through labor.

Enter Nell, a barely disguised stand-in for Jackson. When we meet her she is a caretaker and shut-in, begging for use of her sister and brother-in-law’s car in order to fill her wish to participate in Dr. Montague’s study. Hyman is preset in these early scenes as the husband of Nell’s sister who refuses her use of the car, despite Nell being the one who paid for half of it. So desperate is she to escape the prison of her own home that she steals a car under cover of darkness to drive to Hill House. It seems only fitting then that the ghost she finds is a domineering, dangerous home that slowly begins to possess Nell, insists that she never leave, sapping her of her talents and energy.

The Rise of Mental Health Awareness…Kinda

“Don’t do it, Eleanor told the girl; insist on your cup of stars; once they have trapped you into being like everyone else you will never see your cup of stars again.” — Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House, 1959

Jackson once spoke of her work as a way to probe the “psychic damage to which women are especially prone.” According to Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin, Jackson’s writing reflected the “virtual schizophrenic” women the 1950s would produce. Betty Friedan likewise wrote of 1950s women forced to balance intellectual and academic desires with the absorption and assassination of their personalities in the world and needs of their husbands — two identities emerged in the internal world of women. By the mid-1950s a prevent phenomenon that starts to come to a head: multiple personality disorder. It was Jackson’s own 1954 novel that popularized this concept along with the competing novel and the accompanying 1957 film The Three Faces of Eve based on the life of Chris Costner Sizemore. Multiple personality disorder became a way to explain unsavory behaviors in women. In the movie Eve White is a quiet and respectable housewife, Eve Black is fun-loving and impulsive.

The only other female of substance in the story is Theo, a bohemian artist and perfect foil to Nell’s hesitance and repressed desires and perhaps the Eve Black to her Eve White. Theo is introduced as another woman on the run, in her case from an “argument with a roommate”, most often taken by readers to imply a fight with her live-in girlfriend. Several moments throughout show Nell’s instant attachment to Theo, the desire to capture and absorb some of Theo’s freedoms from the psychological and emotional horrors of her own daily life. Theo is the unlocked, wilder half of her personality she is desperate to integrate. “I would very much like to get this roof off from over my head” Theo says upon her first few moments in Hill House. But she already has, in many ways. Her adjacent life, while not necessarily freeing from her time, grants her the luxury of lovers’ quarrels rather than the erosion of her soul in her own home. And, ultimately, she kindly rebuffs Nell’s suggestion that they flee and live together when they are done with Hill House.

In the more immediate future of Jackson’s time, America found a balm for women’s “hysteria” over their loss of control. Literature around pharmaceuticals and their benefits for women began appearing in publications like Newsweek, Time, Cosmopolitan, and Science Digest. “Thanks to psychopharmacology, ‘emotional’ problems could be cured simply by visiting a doctor, obtaining a prescription, and taking a pill. Invariably these problems ranged from woman’s frigidity, to a bride’s uncertainty, to a wife’s infidelity” writes Jonathon Metzl. When women found themselves dissatisfied at best with domestic life and suffering inhibiting depression at worst, the rise of psychopharmaceuticals took off, popularly branded as “Mother’s Little Helper”. America’s first tranquilizer drug, Miltown (meprobamate) in 1955, soon became the most in-demand medication ever on the United States pharmaceutical market and was quickly copycatted into the now more famous Valium during the 1960s.

It’s a complicated turning point, as this presented the moment when psychiatry began to turn away from psychoanalysis’s reliance on internalization and repression to a biological understanding for behaviors and feelings which would ultimately become extremely important for mental health. It came, however, at the expense of women as direct-to-consumer advertising pushed the drugs onto women feeling overworked, stressed or dissatisfied with their domestic duties. Jackson was one of many women prescribed tranquilizers and antidepressants rather than offered real, therapeutic help, and the combination of Jackson’s medications for weight loss, psychiatric help, and use of alcohol likely lead to her premature death at 48.

First edition cover circa 1972

The turning of housewives into America’s most “well-dressed junkie” would ultimately lead to author Ira Levin’s thriller novel The Stepford Wives which took a literal approach to criticize the pharmaceutical industries targeting women, by portraying an idyllic New England community that killed their women and replaced them with personality-less domestically-inclined robots. Like Jackson, the protagonist of that novel, Joanna, is a creatively talented person suddenly roadblocked by a formally supportive husband attempting to force her into a housewife role. While Joanna ultimately loses her battle against a community bent on (literally) engineering the aesthetic of the nuclear family, Jackson perhaps was on the verge of some freedom, writing 6 months before her passing: “I am the captain of my fate. Laughter is possible, laughter is possible, laughter is possible.”

Women’s Terror vs. Men’s Horror

One of the more interesting aspects of Hill House is how it is often miscategorized as a horror novel when Jackson herself insisted upon its definition as a piece of terror fiction. The two genres often overlap and maintain each other’s elements throughout the story to reach the desired effect but the distinction is important, especially here. Ann Radcliffe was the first to fully define them as respective entities in 1826: “Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them.”

Terror is a yawning emotional and mental awakening while horror is the stagnation of all self and analytical engagement. In functional terms: terror is the dread of what might happen and horror is the response to what already has happened. Terror is ambiguity and possibility, confusion and awe, the necessary distance to feel and understand your emotions. This form of storytelling is a warning, a necessary way to talk about the experience of mid-century American women that allows them the breathing room to know they are not crazy, that their fears of what may become of their futures and their daughter’s futures are real. It’s a slumbering, slow-growing tide that refused to climax. Even today, as Amy Coney Barrett is set to become a Supreme Court judge, has the oppression of women ever truly climaxed? Have he ever left the terrors of Hill House?

Terror as an element strikes a particular chord when it comes to women. Not only are they the only ones suffering from anxiety, according to popular medicine, they also are among those who have the most to fear from the unknowns of tomorrow. White, male horror writers like Stephen King write of white, middle-class men reckoning with slights of ego or reputation and lamenting at the horror of their own situations and how this terrible thing could possibly befall them. Women have experienced far great traumas. What scares them is not what has already happened but what could possibly be next, and worse.

We as readers are doing Nell, Jackson, and women of mid-century America a great disservice by summing Hill House as a story of a woman suffering a mental breakdown in a haunted home without examining the cause and how the world around her insisted upon, and ultimately, failed her. Like many of the pharmacological advertisements of the time, we correctly identify the problem without acknowledging its source. Nell, and women of her time, were once making the country churn by pushing the limping economy and getting food and goods into their own homes. For the first time in history, women in America were becoming truly human and free to explore their talents and gifts, and then reduced to functional laborers in their own homes, denied self-actualization in favor of maintaining the status quo, and gaslit into anxiety and depression when they dared to ask for more.

Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves? Who knows what women’s intelligence will contributes when it can be nourished without denying love? — Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 1997

Resources:

The 1950s and the 1960s and the American Woman: the transition from housewife to feminist by Vanessa Martins Lamb

The Bird’s Nest by Shirley Jackson

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

The Lasting Importance of Haunting of Hill House’s Theodora by Sara Century

Mothers and More: American Women in the 1950s by Eugenia Kaledin

‘Mother’s Little Helper’: The Crisis of Psychoanalysis and the Miltown Resolution by Jonathan Metzl

On the Supernatural in Poetry by Ann Radcliffe

Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin

The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin

Take Some Pills for Your Hysteria, Lady: America’s Long History of Drugging Women Up by Taylor Prewitt

The Three Faces of Eve, dir Nunnally Johnson

U.S. Census, 1940–2010

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman