Shirley Jackson’s image as an author thrives on ambiguity, instability, and playfulness, a theater of identity she willingly and enthusiastically staged through her writing and interactions with the media. Of all the classifications (both generic and authorial) given to her over the course of her career and her later critical reception, perhaps none has been more complex, evocative, and determinative than her designation as a “Housewife Writer.” This designation was largely the result of her short fiction and semi-autobiographical writing she contributed to women’s magazines in the 1950s and 60s, where many of her humorous stories of mothers and families at home in the suburbs were sold alongside advertisements and editorial columns that fortified the growing suburban imagination in a post-WWII America, an imagination which distinctly gendered domestic space. Yet much of Jackson’s short fiction in these magazines existed in subtle tension with the same advertisements and columns that surrounded them on the magazine’s pages. Reading these stories in tandem with advertisements and a magazine’s editorial voice can help to elucidate some of the subversive tactics that are so critical to Jackson’s mastery of short fiction, a mastery made all the more luminous by looking at how Jackson leveraged the vehicle of the women’s magazine to critique suburban culture from within the culture itself.
In Betty Friedan’s influential The Feminine Mystique (1963), writers like Jackson are treated with scathing criticism for their contribution to the oppressive and suppressive gendered power structures of housewife culture in the mid-twentieth century:
“Laugh,” the Housewife Writers tell the real housewife, “if you are feeling desperate, empty, bored, trapped in the bedmaking, chauffeuring and dishwashing details. Isn’t it funny? We’re all in the same trap.” Do real housewives then dissipate in laughter their dreams and their sense of desperation? Do they think their frustrated abilities and their limited lives are a joke? Shirley Jackson makes the beds, loves and laughs at her son— and writes another book…The joke is not on them. (Friedan 108-09)
Indeed, by 1963 Jackson had an established reputation as a “Housewife Writer” through the success of her “domestic” fiction published in magazines like Charm, Mademoiselle, Playboy, Good Housekeeping, Woman’s Day, Woman’s Home Companion, Harper’s, and Ladies’ Home Journal. Magazines like these proved critical to Jackson’s success as an author. She rose to national notoriety when, on June 26, 1948, The New Yorker published her now famous and widely anthologized “The Lottery,” which “caused such a stir” that Jackson “became the unwitting recipient of hundreds of (mainly hostile) letters from disgruntled readers who objected to the tale’s brutal climax and air of studied ambiguity” (Murphy, “Shirley Jackson’s New England Gothic” 104). Yet elsewhere in Jackson’s readership, hostility is tempered with admiration for her success as both a writer and a housewife (a combination that led many critics, including Friedan, to condemn Jackson’s work). Jessamyn Neuhaus observes:
Jackson’s work, with its dark undercurrent of both gothic mystery and modern alienation, may have been particularly provocative in inspiring her readers to imagine the possibility of somehow challenging the limits of domesticity, but she also received many fan letters that simply described their appreciation of good writing. (118)
Neuhaus’s acknowledgement helps to demonstrate why Jackson’s magazine writing is so important: it not only challenges the gendered constructs of domestic space, but simultaneously builds an audience of dedicated readers that creates connection, and thus community, through writing.
What is clear from the famous reception of “The Lottery” and from the reception of her “domestic” writing in these magazines is that they had an impact on those readership circles who consumed her work. These reactions proved strong enough for her readers to engage in a dialogic relationship with Jackson’s texts by responding to both the works and the author herself through their own writing. Indeed, these forged relationships are visible in correspondences like those found between Jackson and a fan-turned-friend named Jeanne Beatty; in a letter from the early60s, Jackson describes her interactions with fans who “write to a professional writer a lovely long letter” as similar to “sitting down to talk for an hour, and far more agreeable than most conversations,” a remark that emphasizes just how profound and seemingly preferable these textually-mediated relationships were to Jackson (“To Jeanne Beatty, early 1960” 436). These kinds of “transdomestic networks” created by Jackson’s fiction, magazines, and readers provide an opportunity for interrogating Jackson’s proximity to housewife culture and her complex occupation of this socio-cultural system.
The term “transdomestic” encapsulates two important functions that the magazine provides in a postwar suburban America—to connect and construct both physical and imagined communal space via the home. The transdomestic’s first function is that of connection through circulation. The magazine’s circulation transcends the physical separation of its readers; it links readers together, providing opportunities to engage in dialogic relationships with the magazine and each other through letters, editorials, and the like. It is this connectedness that provides the conditions for the second feature of the transdomestic: its ability to construct, both physically and imaginatively, the culture it circulates within. The magazine, and specifically “domestic” magazines focused on the home, creates a space that constructs the very concept of the home. Readers are invited into the imagined home of the magazine where they share their thoughts and opinions on how homes are decorated, run, and opened to critical and aesthetic thought. These magazines advertise the physical attributes of the home—from furniture to décor to house schematics—as well as encourage its cultural rendering through editorials, columns, and reader responses. In doing so, a communal home is created that becomes a shared space where readers convene in a periodical gathering that dissipates the spatial demarcations that separate them. This network forged from these connections engenders domestic magazines with immense constructive (and simultaneously deconstructive) possibilities for rendering the suburbs both physically and in the cultural imagination.
The magazine Ladies’ Home Journal (1883-2016) is a particularly apt example of the kinds of transdomestic networks that Jackson’s fiction operated within. As one of the highest-circulating magazines across American periodicals—not just women’s magazines—Ladies’ Home Journal provides a snapshot of the complex social, cultural, and at times political webs of the post-war period, a web that Jackson utilizes as the threads of her fiction. Through a collaboration between her short fiction, the advertisements and editorial voice of Ladies’ Home Journal, and the modality of the women’s magazine, her work illuminates the paradoxes that simultaneously construct and destabilize the cultural rendering of the suburban housewife. Topics of conformity, erasure, and transgressive women are explored through her characters’ encounters with clothes, cars, cities, and houses taken directly from the pages of the magazine, creating tensions that contradict the suburban culture the magazine promotes. In doing so, Jackson critiques housewife culture from within the culture, cleverly anticipating and manipulating the editorial and advertorial apparatuses to create instabilities in the proliferating suburban imagination mobilized by print culture. These instabilities are imbued with transgressive and subversive force through the circulation of the magazine, creating transdomestic networks among women readers whose access to the sociocultural landscape outside the home are mediated through modalities like the magazine. These networks thus link woman readers via a textual proximity that transgresses geographical proximity, creating a community that transcends the suburban spatial divisions and provide new opportunities to escape the loneliness that Friedan accused writers like Jackson of perpetuating.
Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman argue that the “magazines of [a] period…with their mixture of materials, offer us one of the best possible windows into that world”; indeed, the magazine is perhaps one of the most succinct artefacts that provide a multifaceted view of the cultural and social interests of various reading demographics during any given period (140). With its convergence of text and context, the magazine is perhaps more important to understanding Jackson’s work than any other form, with some 100 works appearing in a variety of magazines ranging from the academic to the mass-marketed commercial. Although most of Jackson’s writings first appeared in magazines—which were the predominant site for the creation of her authorial image for the reading public—they strangely remain at the periphery of her oeuvre. Benjamin Mangrum posits, “Critics praise the subtleties of Jackson’s literary art, while the supposedly inferior, commercially tainted work of her magazine writing has been neglected, apparently for associating with the disreputable circle of masscult” (59). Bernice Murphy likewise highlights the magazine’s role in the diminishment of Jackson’s historical literary reputation, writing that “critics have not quite known what to make of her, a problem caused by the fact that she operated in two popular yet frequently marginalized genres: those of horror and the gothic and the so-called domestic humor that appeared in women’s magazines during the 1950s” (“Reconsidering Shirley Jackson” 11). Jackson’s unmappability to generic or authorial conventions—and the implicated biases from critics that have historically viewed massmagazines as “low” cultural products—have undoubtedly contributed to the neglect of Jackson’s domestic fiction. This is compounded by her cultural marker as a “Housewife Writer” that garnered her critics. However, renewed appreciation of Jackson by contemporary scholars and the dismantling of previously held biases in scholarship towards commercial magazines have inspired a reassessment of this important writing.
According to Murphy, early reassessments of Jackson’s oeuvre attended primarily to her more well-known texts—notably “The Lottery,” The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle—while saying little of Jackson’s other four novels or autobiographical "family chronicles” (“Reconsidering Shirley Jackson” 6). Within the past decade, however, Jackson has been recipient of growing critical interest and renewed popular interest. Essay collections like Jill E. Anderson and Melanie R. Anderson’s Shirley Jackson and Domesticity: Beyond the Haunted House (2020) attend to Jackson’s short fiction and her novels to explore the conflation of the domestic and gothic, including in venues like The New Yorker where Jackson first obtained notoriety. Bernice Murphy’s The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture (2009) traces the Suburban Gothic, a sub-genre of the American Gothic, as it has appeared in film, television, and fiction from the mid-twentieth century to the present. She elucidates a “tradition that often dramatizes anxieties arising from the mass suburbanization of the United States,” and these anxieties manifest in the form of suburban horrors featuring evil children, alien invaders, serial killers, witches, and more, with many of these tropes appearing in Jackson’s novels and short stories (2). Jackson’s recently published letters in 2021, and the republication of new editions and anthologies of her work, have contributed to a growing archive of primary materials easily accessible to scholars. These critical energies align with a reinvigorated popular interest in Jackson’s writing. Her work and life have been recently adapted into television miniseries, a fictional biopic film, and even a themed haunted house experience during Universal Studio’s Halloween Horror Nights event in the Fall of 2021, where patrons could physically move through Netflix’s adaption of The Haunting of Hill House.
Among this growing body of critical and popular interest, there is still little scholarship on Jackson’s “domestic” writings that takes into consideration the importance of the magazine as both a medium and a generic influence on Jackson’s work. These original contexts are mistakenly treated as unimportant. Some scholars, such as Angela Hague and S.T. Joshi, have argued for the subversive textures of Jackson’s fiction for women readers in the 1950s which include some of these magazine publications (Hague 2005; Joshi 2005). Others have incorporated the contexts of twentieth century print culture and readership into their studies of Jackson’s magazine writings. Mangrum contextualizes and historicizes Jackson’s magazine writing alongside the changes in print culture during the 40s and 50s related to models of segmented readerships that move away from an aggregated consumer body, illuminating how Jackson capitalized on these changes (Mangrum 2021). Neuhaus studied the myriad letters Jackson received from fans who “turned to Jackson…for advice; these women wanted to know how Jackson succeeded as a writer while at the same time maintaining a home and raising children” (120). She demonstrates that Jackson was not simply writing to maintain a hegemonic order of gendered public/private spaces.Instead, Jackson’s success as a writer and housewife provided a template for how one could operate within both public and private contexts through magazine writing. While this work has opened considerations of Jackson’s magazine publications, there is still a need to consider the specific role of the magazine as a constitutive element and not mere container of Jackson’s fiction.
Jackson spoke often of her magazine publications, relaying mixed feelings towards these stories, in her letters from the 1950s and 60s. In a letter to her parents Geraldine and Leslie on June 13, 1949, (just over a year after “The Lottery” appeared in The New Yorker), she indicated that “on the strength of lottery i sold three stories in a row to good housekeeping and we paid all our bills including the income tax” in addition to purchasing a home luxury, a new television set (“June 13, 1949” 128). In this same letter, Jackson priced these magazine pieces at “a thousand bucks a story for me” (129). While her novels did provide an income, when contracted by her publisher (in a July 1950 letter she stated she got “three thousand for my novel,” meaning Hangsaman [“July 1950” 161]), the myriad magazine venues provided her a steady stream of income and a platform to reach an audience of readers necessary to keep her popular momentum going.
A few months later, in another letter to her parents dated October 1949, she recognized that these stories, while lucrative for her and her family, came at the expense of what she deemed their inadequate quality:
i quite agree with you about the recent stories. they are written simply for money, and the reason they sound so bad is that those magazines won’t buy good ones, but deliberately seek out bad stuff because they say their audiences want it. i simply figure that at a thousand bucks a story, i can’t afford to try to change the state of popular fiction today, and since they will buy as much of it as i write, i do one story a month, and spend the rest of the time working on my new novel or on other stories. (“October 12, 1949” 139)
In this excerpt from Jackson’s intimate correspondence, she clearly devalues her magazine contributions as inferior to her novel writing and “other stories” but reconciles this as a necessary evil to pay the bills. Murphy’s “Introduction” to Jackson’s letters corroborates this, writing that Jackson “could downplay the significance of work which her parents (and perhaps even she herself) seemed to perceive as being motivated less by artistic inspiration and more by practical commercial imperative” (xxvii). Yet in this same October 1949 letter, Jackson also acknowledges that these stories have been “keeping a name for me, building up a following, opening new markets with plenty of money, and helping support us while i take my time with the novel” (140). In this letter, Jackson expresses mixed feelings about her magazine writing, recognizing that while this work isn’t on par—in her appraisal—with her novel writing, it provides the fame and notoriety that Jackson needs to continue making a name for herself as an author and to provide a foundation of readers that her novels will rely on.
Jackson’s early frustrations with her domestic fiction were likely compounded by a troubled relationship to the editor of one of the large magazines with which she had a running contract, Good Housekeeping. A competitor to Ladies’ Home Journal yet consistently below them in circulation numbers, this magazine—at the time edited by Herbert Mayes—had “an unwritten and unrecorded contract” with Jackson that she described as “the big headache” in a November 1950 letter to her mother (“late November 1950” 180). Jackson and Mayes were at odds with each other over Jackson submitting stories from 1950 to 1953 that, in Jackson’s words, Mayes didn’t find “satisfactory for [his] purposes” (“To Herbert Mayes” 236). This feud led her to much financial stress as she worked to figure out a way to navigate her debt to Good Housekeeping— the result of advance pay on contracts to contribute stories. Additionally, Jackson reflected in 1958 that Mayes attempted to “blacklist” her from the magazine publications she relied on for her income over the past six years (“december 15, 1958” 393). Jackson’s relationship with Mayes is one unfortunate example of the kinds of business hostilities that came with commercial publishing, especially in a world of closely connected and competitive publishers in the mid-twentieth century. These stressors likely only increased her admitted distaste with these early works of domestic fiction contributed to Good Housekeeping and others, including Ladies’ Home Journal who accepted her first story in 1950. Writing these stories became a stressful necessity rather than a literary passion for Jackson, and the environment conditioned by her relationships to these publication deadlines, debts, and at times troublesome editors like Mayes only exasperated these feelings so apparent in her letters to friends and family.
Yet later in her magazine-writing career—notably shortly after Mayes was replaced by Betty Pope at Good Housekeeping—Jackson reconsidered these domestic stories in light of an improved attitude toward them, likely because her direct feuding with Mayes had subsided. In a Fall 1954 letter to Pope, Jackson wrote that “there is just so much fun and satisfaction in day-today life in a family that maybe it’s time someone wrote about that” (“To Betty Pope” 268, emphasis in original). Murphy recognizes this provocation as standing in direct contrast to Jackson’s earlier attitude expressed towards this writing in letters to her parents, which demonstrates that on some level Jackson was comfortable in living in this paradoxical position between appreciating and devaluing her domestic fiction in the 1950s (“It Is a Wonderful Pleasure to Write to You…” xxvi). Even as she found further success with her novels, Jackson continued submitting to these women’s magazines well into 1960. Some of this work that Jackson first expressed to her parents as “bad stuff” would go on to be compiled in Life Among the Savages (1953), which featured work from between 1948-1953 that first appeared in Charm, Collier’s, Good Housekeeping, Harper’s, Mademoiselle, Woman’s Day, and Woman’s Home Companion. A follow-up book, Raising Demons, was published in 1957 which continued in the tradition of Jackson leveraging her magazine writing to refashion it into a memoir. Her decision to repurpose these stories into these two memoirs intimates a softening of her opinion on this work and an acceptance of their quality—enough so that she feels comfortable in using these stories in an officially-sanctioned representation of her and her family’s life. This new position aligns with the reevaluation that Jackson shows in her letter to Pope, sent the year after the publication of Life Among the Savages. It makes sense, then, that just as Jackson’s relationship to her magazine writings was at times contradictory over the course of her writing career, these same themes of contradiction would manifest in the fiction itself as it appeared in the magazine.
While Jackson only published three stories in Ladies’ Home Journal, this influential and highly circulated magazine certainly garnered her one of her largest audiences in a single venue. Furthermore, these three texts differ from some of her other “domestic” magazine publications in
that they seem to intersect Jackson’s “literary” interests in the gothic tradition with the “commercial” success of her domestic fiction. These stories, like her fiction in venues such as Good Housekeeping, are placed within the spaces of the family and the suburb but are simultaneously coded with her gothic aesthetics that are largely attributed to her novels. Indeed, two of the stories from this magazine—“Louisa, Please…” (renamed to “Louisa, Please Come Home”) and “Home”—were republished in the short story collection Dark Tales in 2017, implying that they are important examples of Jackson’s gothic development in addition to “The Lottery” and her novels. Due to this intersection of the gothic mode, domestic fiction, and the venue of the women’s magazine, these stories in Ladies’ Home Journal provide a productive case study for investigating the tensions inherent in this complicated relationship, a relationship that Jackson often wrote of in her letters. These same tensions are equally palpable in her stories as they first appeared in the 50s and 60s in this magazine.
Ladies’ Home Journal had been described in the early twentieth century as “the monthly Bible of the American home” that through a “winning but sometimes confounding formula of promoting both traditional values and social change” became the best-selling magazine in the first decade of the twentieth century in the United States (Scanlon 12). Myrna Blyth, the magazine’s editor from 1981 until 2002, described the three words that comprise the title of Ladies’ Home Journal as the three tenets of the magazine:
First of all, it has always been concerned with those particular interests a woman has, whether in current fashions or in understanding her most intimate feelings. The magazine has also focused on the reader’s home, helping her cope with family’s needs, helping her keep her domestic life efficient and satisfying. Finally, the magazine has been a true journal, bringing the reader news that most directly affects her, showing her how she can find her own place in an exciting and challenging world. (3)
The language of Blyth’s description of the magazine is immediately mappable to the language used when discussing the construction of gender norms in the spaces of suburbia, including highlighting the importance of family, the home, domesticity, and how a woman might “find her own place.” For many of the women who would have been consuming the magazine during Jackson’s time, this was framed as aspiring towards a life in the suburbs.
The rapidly expanding suburbs, both physical and imagined, provided the space where the image of the housewife could be rendered. There were several historical factors that contributed to the increase in suburban construction and migration from the urban center to these budding suburban neighborhoods. According to Rupa Huq, “US suburban development was fertile particularly under President Eisenhower with favourable local planning policy,” which increased home ownership “from 40 per cent of the population at the start of the Second World War to 60 per cent by 1960” (116). Margaret Marsh posits the increase in home ownership can be attributed to:
The advent of assembly-line construction, pioneered by the Levitt brothers, and the housing demands brought on by wartime shortages [which] were abetted by the federal mortgage subsidies—the Federal Housing Administration and the Veteran’s Administration had made financing suburban housing, for white Americans, easier than renting—and resulted in the late 1940s and early 1950s in massive residential construction on the outskirts of most American cities. (581)
As part of these new methods in assembly-line production, new home technologies brought the industrialization and efficiency of factory labor to domestic labor. The fortification of the housewife as this new labor force was a rhetorical strategy that dominated advertising (alongside health and beauty products) in women’s magazines. Shelley Nickles explicates how using the new wealth and purchasing power that facilitated their move to the suburbs, suburban residents “purchased refrigerators, automatic washing machines, and other household appliances for the first time” (584). These technologies—what were once “former luxuries that became mass consumer items”—became permanent residents both in the suburban home and the magazine (qtd. in Huq 20). With manufacturers now catering to the purchasing habits of largely middleclass suburban spenders, “Women acting as families’ chief consumers were targeted by advertisers, and they helped to construct a suburban culture with remarkable world-wide similarities” (Strong-Boag et al. 175). Ladies’ Home Journal became one of the leading periodicals championing this growing suburban culture and (given their audience of women readers) modeled their ideal reader as the housewife occupying this space.
The rise in suburban development coincided with Ladies’ Home Journal
seeing a steady increase and peak in circulation in the 1960s with a
circulation of over seven million (“Circulating American Magazines: Visualization Tools for U.S. Magazine History”). It was during this time of both suburban expansion and the mass popularity of Ladies’ Home Journal that Jackson was publishing in the magazine. Reading Jackson’s short fiction in tandem with the advertisements that largely dominate the pages of l provides a glimpse at how this popular magazine was contributing to the rise in suburban culture that engendered the housewife, and seemingly intimated Jackson’s conformity to this image. A closer reading of Jackson’s work and the contexts in which it is embedded will instead demonstrate that Jackson’s relationship to this image, and its wider cultural implications, are far more complex. Taken together, the arc of her three stories across 1951 to 1965 elucidate Jackson’s own contention with the housewife and suburban culture through a progressive hue of suburban horror that gradually shades her work in this magazine.
Jackson’s first contribution to Ladies’ Home Journal was her short story “About Two Nice People” published in July 1951. The humorous story is a strong example of the type of domestic fiction that was criticized by Friedan and others. It’s worth noting, however, that this short story leans less on the kind of autobiographical influences that are palpable in Jackson’s domestic fiction published in other magazines. The narrative follows Ellen Webster and Walter Nesmith, neighbors who live across the hall from each other in an apartment in an unnamed city. When Ellen is continuously harassed by phone calls intended for Walter, a confrontation between the two that “for some reason, perhaps chemical or sociological or environmental” causes them to “enter upon a mutual feeling of dislike so intense that only a very drastic means can bring them out of it” (Jackson, “About Two Nice People” 48). The story then follows them as they annoy each other with letters, loud radios, smelly cheese, and raw eggs in shoes. The “drastic means” that ends their feud is the intervention of Walter’s aunt, the owner of the apartment building, who forces them into a conversation that ends in a passage mirroring a marriage ceremony with the aunt as the minister and Ellen and Walter as the unwitting and unwilling bride and groom. The story concludes with the two in a compromise to end their bitter rivalry; that is, they get married, move to a house in the country, and have four children. The narrative arc of the apartment-dwelling bachelor/bachelorette turned home-owning husband/wife is the aspirational narrative that would, for Ladies’ Home Journal, have been the ideal conclusion to the story.
Ellen Webster stands in as a figure for the magazine’s ideal reader. She is described as a “sweet girl” with “pretty, soft hair and dark, soft eyes, and she dressed in soft colors” (48). Ellen “had a good job” that enabled her to purchase an apartment and “a fair number of soft-colored dressed and skirts and sweaters and coats and hats” (48). Her physical description speaks to the imagined target reader of the magazine if we consider the advertisements next to the text. After the introduction and description of Ellen Webster on an illustrated two-page title, the story is split— as often happens with longer works in magazines—and reappears 76 pages later. A rhetorical link extends across this expanse through the three advertisements that appear on the pages of the second section of the story which connect the target reader with Ellen Webster. One
advertisement for “Magic Touch” makeup foundation emphasizes that the tinted cream product “softens and adds glorious color” to the skin (124); the emphasis on “soft” and “color” is mirrored in the description of Ellen and her preference towards a “soft” appearance and “soft colors.” The second advertisement is for Tweedie’s shoes, which promotes their shoes as “the smooth way to pleasant summer living” which matches in tone the sweetness, softness, and pleasantness ascribed to Ellen’s character in the opening paragraphs of the narrative; purchasing this product is to purchase Ellen’s idealism (124). The third advertisement for “Palmolive Soap” again underscores the “[a]dded softness” your skin will feel from using the product, with the advertisement depicting an image of a woman with a man intimately leaning against her cheek (125). This image’s implication of the woman attracting the man through her “softness” in the advertisement appears in the opening paragraphs of “About Two Nice People.” While Ellen Webster is clearly a successful single woman, having the financial security to own her own apartment and purchase a variety of clothes, we are told that:
[S]he had a reasonable conviction that someday, perhaps soon, she would fall in love with a nice young man and they would be married and Ellen would devote herself wholeheartedly to children and baking cakes and mending socks. This not-very-unusual situation, with its perfectly ordinary state of mind, was a source of great happiness to Ellen. She was, in a word, not one of those who rail against their fate, who live in sullen hatred of the world. (Jackson 48, 124)
Ellen aspires to become a housewife, a life with a “perfectly ordinary state of mind” that is a matter of “fate” that she cannot resist; it is the same tone of irresistibility and romance that the Palmolive Soap advertisement exudes. Yet in Jackson’s signature deployment of irony, Ellen’s behavior in the story is one of resistance and sullen hatred towards the very premise she espouses to desire.
The story becomes one of bitter rivalry between Ellen and Walter. Jackson succinctly articulates her premise during the first tense interaction between Ellen and Walter after a series of wrong number phone calls and misdelivered packages: “How this situation disintegrated into the white-hot fury which rose between these two is a puzzle” (125). The puzzle that the narrator seems to pose is a simple one: why would two nice people who could give each other the suburban good life turn into such bitter enemies? The reader is encouraged to answer this rhetorical question from a full-page advertisement for “Sanforized” laundry detergent that appears on the next page, fittingly designed as a puzzle of a family in their house with a large missing piece and the copy “Anyone can solve this puzzle…” (“Sanforized Detergent Advertisement” 126). The collaboration between the advertisement copy and the story’s premise encourages the reader to solve the puzzle of why Ellen and Walter are feuding. The answer seemingly provided by the text is that they were unknowingly in love with each other, their antics a sign of flirting rather than “white-hot fury.” The puzzle is solved for the reader by Walter’s aunt, who states that they are “precisely the pair of silly fools I would have picked out for each other” and tricks them into talking and realizing that their rivalry was a series of misunderstandings (Jackson, “About Two Nice People” 127). The resolution of their tensions via their acknowledgement of these “misunderstandings” aligns with the editorial vision of Ladies’ Home Journal, which often emphasized the importance of communication between husband and wife to ensure a successful marriage in recurrent editorials such as “Making Marriage Work.” However, while the narrative tensions may be resolved by Ellen and Walter’s marriage, an unresolved subtextual tension that Jackson sets up in the opening paragraphs and threads throughout the story imbues it with a subversive critique of the dangers of the unwilling interpellation into suburban space and the role of the housewife.
Jackson states that Ellen’s transition from bachelorette to housewife was prophesized, an inescapable “fate” from a “not-very-unusual situation” and a “perfectly ordinary state of mind” of wanting to be married with a home and children (48). The story demonstrates that this is indeed an inescapable fate, that Ellen will be assimilated into the system willing or not. Ellen proves herself to be a fiercely determined and independent woman, acting boldly by retaliating against Walter through initiating confrontations, early morning phone calls, letters, and practical pranks. She maintains her resistance towards Walter even when Walter’s aunt performs a pseudo-marriage ritual:
She turned to Ellen. “Young woman,” she said, “do you deny that all this nonsense with eggs and telephone calls is an attempt to entangle my nephew into matrimony?”
“Certainly not,” Ellen said. “I mean, I do deny it.”
“Walter Nesmith,” said his aunt, “do you admit that all your finagling with cheeses and radios is an attempt to strike up an acquaintance with this young woman?” “Certainly,” said Walter. “I mean, I do not admit it.” (Jackson 127)
Even after this attempted resolution, Ellen remains resistant to Walter’s apologies: “‘I understand perfectly,’ Ellen said icily. ‘It is all perfectly clear. It only goes to show what I have always believed about young men who think that all they have to do is—’,” her sentence cut off by a ringing phone (127). Ellen’s resistance ultimately folds in the final paragraph when the reader learns she and Walter are married, and even then, Jackson describes the union as occurring from “confusing” circumstances and their marriage as one of compromise (127). Jackson hints at this interpellation that Ellen undergoes throughout by often referring to her actions as mechanical, subtly linking Ellen’s transformation from independent woman to compromising housewife as a symptom of a cultural and social system of power that is inescapable. To the attentive reader, the happy ending of Ellen and Walter’s marriage is the tragic ending of Ellen’s independence after her resistance is deteriorated by social pressures and inescapable fate; indeed, for Ellen and many of the magazine’s women readers, it is a “not-very-unusual situation” that they are ensnared by (48).
Although seemingly in support of the aspirational narrative of bachelorette to housewife, Jackson’s “About Two Nice People” is an example of the sharp nuance she can enact within a text. Her narrative cleverly tells a story of resistance-turned-union that provides the kind of narrative content that aligns with Ladies’ Home Journal’s editorial program, yet simultaneously offers a critique of this program by having Ellen act in contrast to her socially informed beliefs. While to one reader Ellen’s may be a story of victory, to another reader—one of the housewives reading the journal who is unhappy with their situation—Ellen’s is a story of defeat; it is with that reader that Jackson quietly aligns herself through subtle subversion in the story’s plot. “About Two Nice People” creates a paradox that becomes a disruptive force within Ladies’ Home Journal’s transdomestic network of women readers, covertly disseminating alternative programs that create new possibilities for how her readers might think about their own willing or unwilling relationship to the occupation of suburban housewife.
While Jackson’s first contribution to Ladies’ Home Journal dealt with the transition from independence to suburbanized housewife, her second contribution exposed the horror that suburban culture attempts to project on women who wish to escape this fate. In this second contribution, Jackson’s protagonist manages to escape a life of suburban domesticity by appropriating the suburban technologies and systems that cultivated the conditions for the suburbs (and consequently the ideal of the housewife) to emerge in the first place.
Jackson’s second contribution to Ladies’ Home Journal was “Louisa, Please…” in the May 1960 issue. This story follows Louisa Tether after she runs away from home to live in the city of Chandler and assume the identity of Lois Taylor; to achieve this, she calculates a plan that includes developing a fictitious backstory, travelling between several towns to disorient her seekers, changing clothes, and living in a rented room while working at a local stationary store. Throughout the narrative, Louisa is concerned with one thing: utilizing conformity to mask her identity. The story weaves in and out of suburban and urban spaces through a variety of transportation methods as Louisa closely watches others and uses material goods to strip and rebuild her identity. In many ways, Louisa is attempting to culturally suburbanize herself while moving towards the urban center. In this story, Jackson focuses on the systems that comprise the suburbs to imagine a story of a woman who escapes the fate that Ellen cannot, and the social consequences of such an action.
One of the major spatial motifs of the story is the movement in and out of suburban and urban spaces. Louisa’s hometown, while never explicitly described with the word suburb, is nonetheless associated with suburban culture as a peripheral location to the larger cities of Chandler and Crain; her hometown is described as outside these cities and a vehicle is required to move back and forth between the town and cities (Jackson, “Louisa, Please…” 138). Additionally, there are several architectural attributes that associate Louisa’s hometown and home with the new trends in suburban housing. For one, the actual house itself is described as a “handsome, luxurious home” with a garden and driveway to match (139). While this may seem like any normal description of a house, we can locate several important distinctions meant to highlight this as a suburban space. The inclusion of a driveway implies private car ownership and the garden where her sister’s wedding is hosted implies the ownership of land, both of which were popular reasons for suburban versus urban living. We can also compare Louisa’s description of her childhood home as handsome and luxurious against her description of Mrs. Peacock’s home (the women she is renting a room from in the city) as “old, and comfortable” (141). These emphases on aspects of the house are further illuminated by an advertisement elsewhere in the magazine of a schematic for a “Garden Spot House” (Ladies’ Home Journal May 1960, 146). This advertisement shows an architect’s drawing of a house layout with a garden and driveway, and in the schematic’s description the architect highlights the adequate parking the house allows and the spacious garden. Advertisements of home schematics like this were a result of the increase in speculative building during suburban expansion in the mid-twentieth century, which Richard Harris states was the dominant mode of home construction by the 1950s (“The Making of American Suburbs” 105). According to Larry McCann, “a potential suburban homeowner of even moderate means was able to peruse house plans in any number of popular magazines or pattern books and then consult with a carpenter-builder” to build the house (121). The schematic for the garden house provides a visual representation to readers that associates Louisa’s own home with the luxury of suburban homeownership, which facilitates privacy, the ability to own a car, and access to land in the form of gardens that are all incompatible with city living.
The schematization of these living environments is one example of some of the fears related to social conformity that were brought on by proliferating suburbs. These fears are preyed upon by Jackson when Louisa’s attempt at conformity results in the complete erasure of her identity. The conformity Louisa pursues is facilitated by the products she buys and the idea that purchasing mass consumer goods provides personal privacy through a public conformity to mass culture. Clothing, and in particular a raincoat, becomes a symbol of conformity and mass consumerism in the story. When Louisa first gets the raincoat, she narrates:
I had to fight my way through the crowd until I found the counter where they were having a sale of raincoats, and then I had to push and elbow down the counter and finally grab the raincoat I wanted right out of the hands of some old monster who couldn’t have used it anyway because she was much too fat. (139)
The description of this shopping center and the suffocating crowds Louisa has to physically fight through to purchase the product alludes to mass consumerism, with hordes of people seeking the same products. But this raincoat also represents more than a product; it represents Louisa’s access to a hegemony of conformity. She states that “I had stopped being Louisa Tether the minute I got rid of that light coat my mother bought me” (139). By donning the new raincoat— which throughout the story she meticulously counts and points out in the narrative whenever she sees other girls wearing similar raincoats—Louisa can conform to the mass. With this raincoat, she “looked like a thousand other people when I walked down the street carrying my suitcase and my raincoat over my arm” (140-1). Louisa puts effort into choosing clothing that allows her to strip herself of the identifiable features that make her Louisa Tether, which connects her personal identity with the physical products she purchases. Through purchasing power and mass-produced goods, Louisa is able to un-Tether herself and assume the identity of Lois Taylor.
Through her purchasing power, “Before [she] had been away from home for twenty-four hours [she] was an entirely new person” (Jackson 141). The association of mass-produced goods with identity formation is amplified by the magazine in which the story is published. The pages of Ladies’ Home Journal are filled with advertisements of new fashions, cosmetics, and home appliances. These advertisements promoted the consumption of mass-produced goods as a way of improving the lives of the women reading the magazine, much like the goods Louisa purchased facilitated her own acquisition of a new life. In one instance in the story, Louisa talks about her pair of old shoes that are unattractive but comfortable; sharing this same page is a halfpage advertisement for new shoes, creating a rhetorical link between Louisa’s old comfortable shoes that look bad with new shoes that are stylish and comfortable (“U.S. Kedettes’ Shoe Advertisement” 140-41).
This ‘newness’ is also emphasized in another advertisement for long-distance calls in the magazine, where one of the listed benefits is to share “new things you’ve bought for the house” with friends and family (“Bell Telephone System Advertisement” 191). The magazine creates these links between fiction and advertising to serve a rhetorical function that strengthens the magazine and advertiser’s message that old comforts can be replaced by the new and improved versions being manufactured. The sheer volume of commercial goods is demonstrated by one full-page advertisement in the magazine for refrigerators, which reads, “Gambles bought 30 trainloads of Freezer-Refrigerators to bring you these sensational buys!” (“Gambles” 143). Lower on the ad, other household appliances like mixers, brooms, and trash cans are listed under a tagline of “100 Best Buys.” Jackson’s story is filled with shopping centers, clothing, and other products which reflect the volume of purchasing options catalogued in the magazine, all connected through the thread of purchasing these goods to be like everyone else. Advertisements like this, which boast the volume of products ready to be purchased, highlights the mass consumerism that led the critics of suburbs to claim that they curate conformity and stripped both people and spaces of their individuality.
As Jackson’s story moves towards its climax, an interesting dichotomy arises that helps illuminate the relationship between Jackson’s story with the function of the magazine that mobilizes a critique of suburban culture. Jackson’s story concludes with Louisa returning home after three years, only to find that her family no longer recognizes her as Louisa Tether but believes she is an imposter and sends her away:
It wasn’t going to be any good. I ought to have known it. Maybe they were so used to looking for me by now that they would rather keep on looking than have me home; maybe once my mother had looked in my face and seen there nothing of Louisa, but only the long, careful concentration I had put into being Lois Taylor, there was never any chance of my looking like Louisa again. (142)
Horrific twists are a staple of Jackson’s fiction, and this one makes clear her critique of conformity through mass consumption as destructive for individual identity. The title of the short story, “Louisa, Please…,” with the tagline added by Ladies’ Home Journal—“What kind of girl would do this?”—indicate a plea to readers to not fall victim to conformity and mass consumerism which will lead you to suffer the same fate as Louisa (49). Yet this message conflicts with the magazine’s myriad advertisements, which advocate for how much better your life can be if you purchase these products that fill nearly every page of the magazine. What Jackson frames as horror the magazine frames as something to strive for; this contradiction is what provides Jackson’s writing with its critical, subversive sharpness. Like “About Two Nice People,” the careful and nuanced treatment of these subversive themes is what enabled Jackson to publish in Ladies’ Home Journal without overtly transgressing the magazine’s editorial vision which likely would not have published these stories if they were more explicitly damning of suburban culture. Instead, Jackson uses major plot shifts—such as the climax of Louisa losing her identity—to draw attention away from the more subversive elements (like the critique of consumerism) which allows them to slyly exist and work in nuanced ways to critique some of the magazine’s positions made manifest on the pages surrounding her stories. This subversive subtlety showcases Jackson’s thorough understanding of the genre of domestic magazine writing and the ways that it can be manipulated through careful and calculated narrative techniques. This authorial ingenuity ensures her subtle criticisms can find their way to her readers without the magazine rejecting them.
Jackson’s final contribution to Ladies’ Home Journal was the fittingly titled “Home” in August 1965. Unlike “About Two Nice People” and “Louisa, Please…,” this story is relatively undistracted by surrounding advertisements, and those that do appear have no obvious rhetorical connection to the story itself. Of the three stories Jackson contributed, “Home” is perhaps the most explicit example of the horror genre with which she is most readily associated today. While “Louisa, Please…” imbued its horror in conformity and identity erasure propelled by the mass-consumerism Ladies’ Home Journal symptomizes, “Home” instead rests its terror in the more familiar figures and tropes of traditional horror. Ethel and Jim Sloane have recently purchased the Sanderson home, an old house in a country community. One rainy night, Ethel is driving home when she meets an old woman and child on the side of the road, ominously silent. She offers them a ride, but as she approaches the Sanderson house they both mysteriously disappear from the backseat. Jim tells Ethel the next day that a young boy had gone missing from the Sanderson home 60 years prior, believed by the town to have been kidnapped by an old woman and drowned during a rainstorm. Ethel accepts that she saw their ghosts, and on her next ride home the ghosts reappear in her car which nearly leads to a crash. Ethel learns her lesson about driving on the Sanderson road during a rainstorm, and resumes her new life in the countryside as a member of the community now aware of the ghostly presence.
While Jackson is less interested in exploring the suburbs and the image of the housewife in this narrative as compared to the previous stories, both remain foundational to the plot. Jackson’s protagonist is once again a housewife, but one who believes that she and her husband “wouldn’t belong in the suburbs or some kind of colony; we’re real people” (Jackson, “Home” 116). The notion of “real people” takes on an ironic hue as it foreshadows the ghosts in the narrative, but outside of this generic irony is Jackson’s satire that the housewives of the suburbs—at least the ones rendered via the cultural imagination as exemplified by the magazine—are not “real” people, but instead a fictitious rendering. This satire can be read at multiple levels. On one level, Ethel’s observation corroborates the stereotype of suburban uniformity or conformity: that the residents of the suburbs are automaton-like individuals stripped of their personality. On another level, Ethel’s observation is a dismissal of the very notion that the stereotypical roles of the husband and housewife in the suburbs do not exist—in essence, a mythology like that of ghost stories in the country town. Ethel’s statement of being a “real person” is staking claim to her individuality and her presence as existing not as a construct or cog in the conformist and communal machine of the suburb. Signature to Jackson’s work, however, is the irony in Ethel’s fate at the conclusion of the story. The narrative ends with a conversation between Ethel and the hardware store employee who first warned her of the haunted road. Her experience with the ghosts of the community becomes a lesson that pushes her into acceptance of the town’s codes of conduct. The horror she faced resulting from resistance to conforming to the town’s mythology is swapped for the same kind of mundane horror that often characterizes Jackson’s humor:
Ethel thought, and finally said, “Clothespins, I guess I must need clothespins. About the Sanderson road—”
“Yes?” said the clerk, his back to her.
“Nothing,” Ethel said.
“Clothespins,” the clerk said, putting a box on the counter. “By the way, will you and the mister be coming to the P.T.A. social tomorrow night?”
“We certainly will,” said Ethel Sloane. (Jackson 118)
Ethel’s silent acceptance of the community’s rules and her confirmation that she and her husband will attend the social is the mundane conclusion that signals Ethel’s acceptance of her role in the community. While Ethel was critical of the suburbs in that they signified “un-realness,” her “unreal” experiences with the ghosts led to the acknowledgment that the reality of these modes of living are in fact very real. Even though Ethel has seemingly escaped the “unreality” of the suburbs, she cannot escape the sweeping systems of conformity that for Jackson have an insidious underbelly in the mundanities of all community-based living.
Although “Home” takes place in a non-suburban setting, the systems of suburban stratification are still central to the narrative through an important infrastructural and technological development of suburban space: the automobile. The separation of private from public spheres is largely enabled by changes in transportation, and particularly the move to privately owned cars, which in turn facilitated commuter culture and the ability to live outside of the city. From 1948 to 1959, there was a 67% increase in car registrations in the United States (Huq 20). The move towards automobile-based transportation had a major impact on suburban infrastructure. Pierre Filion asserts that this new wave of car ownership led to a change from “central-city multi-storey to suburban single-storey manufacturing” of housing (5). He continues, noting that “the need to accommodate cars at every origin and destination, translated into an adaptation of buildings and the introduction of new architectural concepts: for example, single-family homes with garages and driveways, the shopping mall with its sea of parking, various forms of drive-in and drivethrough formats” (5). These spaces became embedded in the iconography of the suburbs, yet the proliferation of automobiles also helped shape the public/private binaries by both enabling and restricting movement in and out of the suburbs. Scholars have observed that “[c]hanges from a walking to a public transport and thence to a private car city occurred at similar times, in the process providing women with new opportunities and constraints,” and the simultaneous opportunities and constraints provided by car ownership appears in both the suburban cultural imagination and Jackson’s textual depiction of it (Strong-Boag et al. 170-171). The car is the central technology in Jackson’s “Home” that serves as the literal vehicle of the narrative’s action.
In “Home,” the car stands in as the symbol of Ethel’s resistance to conformity. Her ability to drive grants her mobility to choose how she wants to literally navigate the community. For Jackson’s readers, Ethel’s boldness in driving the car and her initial decision to ignore the town’s rules related to the haunted road is a sign of her independence and strength. The car enables her to purchase her own goods, go on ghostly adventures, and interact with the world outside the home. Her story provides her readers with a vehicle to imagine their own adventures, placing themselves in Ethel’s position as the driver of the car. Even after Ethel assimilates to the community’s order, Ethel continues to drive so that she can physically move in and out of the home. Jackson could easily have ended her story with Ethel in fear of driving after her near fatal run in with the ghosts which left her “[c]rying, breathless…weak and exhausted” (118); instead, Ethel retains her ability to drive and thus her ability to exercise her independence even within the social structures she now finds herself in. In other words, although Ethel’s experience resulted in her acceptance of the town’s social codes, her continuing use of her car even after the ordeal implies a sustained possibility of resistance. Even during the final moments of the story when Ethel is accepting the new mundanities of her life, she consistently expresses hesitation by starting and stopping to speak three different times while the clerk questions why she drove on the Sanderson Road, a sign that she still harbors a spirit of resistance:
Ethel Sloane opened her mouth, and shut it again.
…
Ethel started to speak, but stopped herself.
…
“…About the Sanderson road ——”
“Yes?” said the clerk, his back to her.
“Nothing,”’ Ethel said. (118)
Her expressed hesitations related to her experiences driving in the town subtly imply that as long as Ethel maintains the vehicles of her freedom—literal and metaphorical—she can at any time choose to exercise her agency and move away from the social systems she has temporarily aligned herself with. It is this propensity towards movement that leaves Ethel, and her readers, with the hope of further adventure outside of buying clothespins and attending P.T.A. meetings.
Jackson’s fiction over the course of her publications in Ladies’ Home Journal represents the complex relationship that Jackson had to the modes of the “domestic” and the “gothic”: from the first publication in 1951 to her final publication in this journal in 1965, there is a palpable turn towards the gothic. Yet the realms of domesticity and the figure of the housewife remain central to Jackson’s work, whether it tends in either generic direction. As a housewife herself, Jackson had an intimate relationship to the complexities of suburban culture in the post-war United States, and writing became the medium through which Jackson could question these systems for herself and her readers. Publications like Ladies’ Home Journal became a way of establishing textual community through the circulation of the magazine, transcending the spatialized isolation of woman in the home to link them into a transdomestic community of readers and, as Jessamyn Neuhaus observes in fan mail responses, writers. Jackson’s work demands a subtlety to understand her use of paradox, irony, satire, and contradiction, all tools that she uses to infiltrate the transdomestic networks facilitated by the commercial magazine industry. Through a clever literary camouflage in utilizing and capitalizing on her own designation as a “housewife,” Jackson was able to publish fiction that questioned the very culture Ladies’ Home Journal promoted. Her fiction not only provided a livelihood and escape from her own isolation but encouraged other women to challenge their places within the gendered cultural spheres of suburbia, imagining the possibilities of independence and expression that may be hidden beneath its repressive surface.
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