ABSTRACT

Shirley Jackson was a master storyteller, one who crafted such beautiful tales of unsettling horror that her work has influenced writers from Stephen King to Allison Bechdel. But Jackson’s writing also manages to encapsulate the fears and anxieties of mid-century America, a fact that is often overlooked, like Jackson herself, by both popular audiences and scholars of American literature. As her husband Stanley Edgar Hyman wrote after her death in 1965, Jackson’s fictions were “fitting symbols of our distressing world of the concentration camp and The Bomb” (1966, xiii). But her writing also reveals the complexity of domestic life for many mid-century American women, for whom cooking was thought to be a moral and even patriotic duty. What makes Jackson significant, and what people often deny about mid-century women, is that she negotiates the global and political through the domestic, with each sphere equally configured as a space of terror. In her later novels, Jackson’s focus on food voices the fears of women whose own lives were often constrained by the endless planning and preparation of meals, as she links food and foodways with the terror often wrought by the home in a world saturated with unspoken fears of the worldly and the otherworldly.