Despite the dominant scholarship on Shirley Jackson that positions her work within specific mid-century American discourses of the home, I have always been interested in the few, but notable, appearances of automobiles and public transportation in her work. In this article, I look specifically at the appearance of driving and the private automobile in Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and The Sundial. A close look at Eleanor’s drive out to Hill House and Julia’s attempts to escape the Halloran estate reveals moments of female self-love that I’ve deemed “autoerotic.” In joining the abbreviated term “auto” with “erotic,” I want to draw attention to the heavy cultural baggage of automotive technology within the post-war American landscape, which is tightly bound to mid-century narratives of gender, sexuality, and subjectivity. As Cotton Seiler explains in his cultural history of American automobility, “As a problematic modern practice and discourse, automobility resembled nothing so much as sexuality” (61-62). I aim to use the concept of “autoerotic” to tease out multiple lines of thought and hopefully provide some new and interesting contours to scholarship on Jackson’s use of space, time, and female desire.
Scholarship on Jackson is rich with the many ways that her narratives and characters disrupt patriarchal and heteronormative ways of being through uncanny domestic spaces. Yet, within the same time and place of Jackson’s writing—a Cold War, midcentury America—the automobile was also beginning to serve a similar purpose as the home of focalizing cultural shifts and anxieties related to gender and sexuality. Cotton Seiler argues that automobility and the activity of driving operate to constitute American citizenship and “[organize] a compelling mode of self-government anchored in liberal notions of freedom” that were threatened by global politics and rising corporate culture (14, 18). As much as Jackson’s work grapples with female subjectivity through the home, to leave automobiles unaccounted for in her scholarship limits the understanding of Jackson’s participation in the larger drama of midcentury America
I take as my starting point Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic, which sets up a framework for understanding one’s desires from a deeply creative place within the self. According to Lorde, the erotic is a particular use of the sexual (55) that requires spiritual intention and “true feeling” (54) rather than a mere emphasis on sensation, which she identifies as the pornographic. My reading of Lorde understands the erotic to be an experience of joy and power within both one’s body and spirit, which includes sexual desire and sensation. In this way, one’s sexuality can be an expression of the erotic and can inform one’s non-sexual experience of joy and power. To Lorde, I add Ellie Anderson’s definition of the autoerotic as “a genuine form of Eros […that …] involves an irreducible alterity, rather than being enclosed within the independent self-absorption of a sovereign subject figured by traditional views of masturbation” (53). Discourses of the erotic speak to twentieth century American narratives of what it means to be a sexual subject and how one’s sexual subjectivity should encounter another’s sexual subjectivity, both issues which animate midcentury discourses on automobility and Jackson’s fiction.
As many historians and cultural critics of the United States have explored, the Cold War or post-war era can be understood as both a crisis of masculinity as well as a crisis of the individual, since the legitimate American citizen was the (white and heterosexual) autonomous male. K.A. Cuordileone notes that the political culture of the Cold War “put a new premium on hard masculine toughness and rendered anything less than that soft and feminine and, as such, a real or potential threat to the security of the nation” (516). Indeed, the Lavender Scare, during which supposed homosexuals were fired from government, serves as the most explicit narration of the overlap between queerness and national security (Johnson 2). Post-war economic and social abundance also inspired fears of conformity and a “crisis of the individual,” as a blossoming consumerist culture was thought to make Americans (men) passive and pliant (Seiler 76-77), and therefore susceptible to the enemy Other. Autoeroticism within this framework can be understood as especially dangerous in that it joins “the desire, inclination or pull towards something irreducibly other” (E. Anderson 56) with a sense of the self as other. Ellie Anderson explains that the autoerotic “require[s] a troubling of any easy distinction between self and other or sameness and otherness” (56), a description which aptly characterizes the fears of midcentury America.
The danger posed by a self-othering-desiring practice such as the autoerotic can also be understood through Halberstam’s concepts of queer time and space. Halberstam argues that queer time challenges a reproductive temporality that upholds hetero- and other-normative structures and queer space challenges a “body-centered identity” to locate “sexual subjectivities within and between embodiment, place, and practice” (19). Although Halberstam’s theory is linked specifically to the late twentieth century postmodern paradigm, the politics to which queer time and space respond come directly out of those anxieties of Cold War America. The narrowly conceived masculine individualism that was understood as a strategy of national security may be exercised through the act of driving, but it is also manifest in the heterosexual family, in that the heterosexual family offers evidence of the masculine individual’s potency. The autoerotic not only resists the timeline of heterosexual procreation, but it also disrupts the post-war spatial politics of public and private so important to the social coherence and legibility of the masculine individual, which “required that some people be denied the elemental self-possession of the autonomous individual” (Seiler 19, emphasis original). That “Woman ‘touches herself’ all the time, and moreover no one can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact” (Irigaray qtd. in Njeng 5), regardless of where she might be, is an assertion of self-possession that queers both time and space and makes desire legible outside of patriarchal subordination or objectification.
The automobile, too, enabled conceptions of desire outside of the patriarchal heterosexual norm, even as, according to Seiler, it facilitated a reclaiming of masculine republican citizenship in the midcentury. Throughout its history, the car has functioned as signs of feminine objectivity, masculine virility, and even maternity, giving automobility an unstable gendered meaning and implicit queer character. The automobile also radically fractured the boundaries of public and private that had historically fostered the heterosexual family. For example, with the increasing availability and affordability of cars, the U.S. shifted from a culture of courting—interactions between young men and women supervised by parents—to a culture of dating, which gave young people independence in pursing romantic and sexual desires. The automobile was also just the most recent mobility technology to inspire anxieties over feminine modesty. From the horse to the bicycle, women’s automobility has been subject to salacious speculation, whether regarding the physical impact on women riding astride or the mere increasing presence of women in public spaces. In providing a space unregulated by expectations for marriage and family, the automobile also helped to conceive a new developmental age between childhood and adulthood, the teenager, an identity that was anchored in exploring desire outside the institution of the home. Thus, the automobile inspired a link between sexuality and discourses of maturity that sought to police desire, especially in women.
Jackson’s fiction dramatizes the tangled midcentury web of gender, sexuality, and age with her “queer girls” who operate “between adolescence and maturity” (de la Parra Fernández 29), and her work is abundant with characters navigating the fuzzy distinctions between self and other, especially as those experiences animate feelings of desire. Much scholarship has already examined the queerness of Jackson’s women in their implied and euphemistic lesbianism, but these characters are also solitary, and their experiences of desire at all can also be read as queer. I aim to supplement queer readings of Jackson with a focus on young women’s experiences of desire, whether or not the—if any—objects of desire can be read as lesbian. I am interested in the ways that automobiles offer Jackson’s characters a productive “self-othering” (E. Anderson 53) time and space that works towards repairing the woman’s sense of self as Other within the patriarchal and heteronormative postwar American landscape, even if such experience is limited to the queerness of the car.
Eleanor’s Highway Fantasies
The Haunting of Hill House, not only Shirley Jackson’s most famous novel, but also the text that cemented Jackson as a primary architect of the American haunted house, is bookended by road trips. In framing the notorious Hill House with Eleanor’s solo journey away from her family of origin and her eventual death by suicide, Jackson’s novel reflects the way in which automobility, car culture, and women drivers exist on the peripheries of a Cold War era obsessed with home security. Certainly, Hill House in its remote location as well as ambiguous ownership speak to national anxieties over identity and power and “features [Jackson’s] fullest development of the house as a metaphor for the disunified subject” (Hattenhauer 155). Yet, as important and significant as Hill House is for criticism of both Jackson and American literature more generally, Jackson presents this monument of the ghostly to us by car. Indeed, the toxicity of Hill House and Eleanor’s mental breakdown are better understood when examined through the joy ride Eleanor takes to get to the house. Eleanor’s drive to Hill House allows her to experience self-desire that evaporates within the demands of the domestic that require desire to have an object other than the self.
The fight between Eleanor and her sister over rights to the car distills the larger national anxieties over mobility and gender. Although Eleanor and her sister, Carrie, own the car equally—Eleanor having paid for half of it—Carrie refuses to let Eleanor take the car for the summer so she can participate in Dr. Montague’s research. Carrie’s justification for her sole right to the car is her position as a wife and mother. Even though Eleanor insists that Carrie will not need the car while she and her family are in the mountains, Carrie posits the hypothetical scenario of her child getting sick as reason enough to deny Eleanor use of the car. Carrie represents the paradigm by which the automobile and the freedom it offered women drivers were narrated to serve the only appropriate subjectivities for women: daughter, wife, mother. Further, Carrie speculates that Eleanor’s desire to use the car is prurient when she says, “even if Eleanor is prepared to run off to the ends of the earth at the invitation of any man, there is still no reason why she should be permitted to take my car with her” (Hill House 7, emphasis original). Notably, Carrie expresses her sentiment “delicately, addressing her teacup,” which indicates the taboo nature of Eleanor’s sexuality that remains unnamed, but ever present within the argument. Indeed, despite Eleanor’s clear plans to use the car to travel to Hill House for the purposes of participating in a psychological study, Carrie depicts Eleanor’s desires as incomprehensible as she complains “We don’t know where you’re going, do we?”, “I’d never forgive myself, Eleanor, if I lent you the car and something happened,” and “Mother…would certainly never have approved my letting you run wild, going off heaven knows where, in my car” (Hill House 7, my emphasis). Carrie can only use abstractions to refer to Eleanor’s intentions for the car, even as Eleanor’s need for it is more real than Carrie’s hypothetical need. Because Carrie’s imagined use of the car holds the need of the family as the object of intention, her desires are legible in comparison to Eleanor’s use of the car that seems unanchored from a legitimate object, or any object at all.
Despite her sister’s refusal, Eleanor takes the car anyway, signaling an exercise of autonomy she did not have when their mother was still alive. The death of the mother leaves Eleanor without a legible subjectivity—she doesn’t have children, nor is she married, so without a mother, her daughter-identity loses its stability. Eleanor herself senses this instability as she secretly escapes from her sister’s home to take the car from its garage without permission. She “trembles” with excitement and fear, knowing that she might not only be caught but would be criminalized: “There she is…there’s the thief…” she imagines her sister and brother-in-law saying if they caught on to her (Hill House 8). Although “thief” is a criminalized identity, it is also the first sense Eleanor has of herself outside of a family, and even outside of her gender, which the automobile facilitates. With the car, and explicitly through driving the car, Eleanor has come into the subjectivity promised by the car, one of individuality and freedom. Eleanor’s taking of and driving of the car lives up to the cultural narrative promised by automobile. That Eleanor is a woman claiming “rights” to the car, and therefore all its promises, queers the traditionally masculine narrative of driving of the era.
Once Eleanor takes to the road, her desires take on a legibility that often signals her queerness. When she stops to explore a gateway protected by rows of oleanders, she fantasizes that she walks beyond the flowers into a garden that “lies under a spell” and where “the queen waits, weeping for the princess to return” (Hill House 13). As Lynne Evans explains, “The central object of desire within Eleanor’s fantasy world is not a prince, but a waiting queen," and she in fact positions herself in the role of the prince who will lift the spell (105). Similarly, Eleanor’s cheering on of a little girl at a rest stop who refuses to do as her mother asks is read as Eleanor’s objection to compulsory heterosexuality that would “coerce girls into growing into a pre-defined identity that consists of caring for and fulfilling the demands of others” (de la Parra Fernández 39). But these readings are focused on Eleanor’s desire outward, which fail to see how Eleanor’s driving facilitates a particular orientation towards giving herself pleasure. To the extent that Eleanor’s daydreams about the landscape and her identification with the obstinate little girl are read as self-oriented, they are interpreted as markers of childishness rather than autoeroticism. Richard Pascal argues that Eleanor is “very immature” and that “Eleanor’s gradual descent into childishness marks The Haunting of Hill House as a sort of bildungsroman in reverse: she doesn’t grow into adulthood, but rather develops her hitherto latent capacity for immaturity” (479, 480). And, in describing Eleanor’s fantasies, Darryl Hattenhauer claims that “Eleanor lives in her childhood world of fairy tales, imagining enchanted gardens as she drives through the country. She also lives in adolescent romances…” (157). Something about Eleanor’s expressions of desire either demand a love plot with an object—the lost maternal, Theodora, even Hill House itself—or demand a dismissal through signaling an incomplete sexual subject.
When read as an autoerotic journey, however, Eleanor’s travel to Hill House can be read as a repair of her sexual autonomy and subjectivity which were denied within her biological family and will be doomed within the walls of Hill House. Eleanor describes her initial moments on the road in seductive, even masturbatory language: “She meant to savor each turn of her traveling, loving the road and the trees and the houses…teasing herself” (11, my emphasis) and “The road, her intimate friend now, turned and dipped, going around turns where surprises waited…” (12, my emphasis). Eleanor’s automobility allows her an erotic pleasure in which she develops a sense of power and even joy in her solitude. In one of her first fantasies, Eleanor imagines herself living alone in a village house and she narrates the fantasy by repeating “I” followed by different action verbs: “I swept,” “I patted,” “I washed,” “I took,” “I dined,” etc. (Hill House 12). Not only does she give herself agency through these fantasized actions that she does solely for herself (and not her mother), but she also breaks with linear time in creating a new past for herself with verbs in the simple past tense. As she drives, she thinks, “in these few seconds I have lived a lifetime…” (Hill House 12), challenging the reproductive futurity that would designate the length and experiences, such as marriage and childbirth, that would characterize “lifetime.” The meditative setting created by the car’s enclosed space as it moves through the landscape fosters experiences outside the social order, and Jackson gives Eleanor’s imagination just as much legibility as any “real” experience she might have. Eleanor’s desire to participate in the marriage plot may be suggested by her recitation of lines from Twelfth Night—“journeys end in lovers’ meeting”; “in delay there lies no plenty”—but Eleanor’s purposeful prolonging of her journey offers her an abundance of pleasure and implies that she has already met her lover, herself, within the journey’s continuation.
Even when another character arrives within her fantasies, be it a queen or a little girl, Eleanor’s desire and arousal is still self-directed. Eleanor identifies with both the queen and princess of one fantasy, and Eleanor’s identification with the little girl who refuses to drink her milk from a cup that is not her “cup of stars” need not be read as her desire to act out in a childish way, but rather a desire to care for herself as a child. The fantasy queen and the little girl function more like doubles than objects of Eleanor’s outward-focused desire. In Freudian terms, the double becomes “the ghastly harbinger of death,” but that is only after an individual has left the “mind of the child” (601). Given that Eleanor seems to exist in a state of “immaturity,” for her, the act of doubling remains, as Freud says, an original “insurance against destruction to the ego” or “a preservation against extinction” (601). Rather than this extension of the ego being an immature or narcissistic act (in that it works against reproductive futurity), this doubling can be better read in line with the doubling found in Luce Irigaray’s schema of autoeroticism. As Ellie Anderson summarizes, “Irigaray imaginatively plays off the feminine ‘lips’ in order to demonstrate the autoerotic nature of selfhood as figured by the feminine. As opposed to the independent, autonomous individual of the phallic imagination…the lips are autoerotic inasmuch as they indicate a body that is doubled and self-touching, selfsame only in its self-differing” (64). Here, in the imagery of the lips, the distinction between each lip can only be understood within the context that they are also not separable—autonomy actually comes from the ability to “self-other.” Eleanor’s doubles are evidence of her ability to love herself and experience desire, not only outside the traditional family, but also outside of a coupling.
Within the space of the car and its disruption of socially ordered time and space, Eleanor can double herself many times, but once she leaves the automobile and reenters the patriarchal structure of the home, her autoerotic journey does come to an end. Much of Eleanor’s experience within Hill House concerns her drive to direct her desire onto an object—most notably Theo, but also Luke. If any of Eleanor’s autoeroticism appears, it seems to manifest in the haunting of the house, specifically the messages written on the walls to Eleanor that the group suspects that she wrote herself. Thus, self-directed desire becomes terrifying and dangerous within the house and ultimately unsustainable: the group demands that she leave Hill House. Eleanor protests to stay, but to no avail; she has returned to her life as a submissive girl who must follow the orders of others. She has lost her agency in “othering” herself as she submits to the group’s will and designation of her as an “other” to be rejected. She carries this loss with her as she “slid into the car; it felt unfamiliar and awkward” (181). In becoming “too used already to the comforts of Hill House” (181), Eleanor has lost her ability to imagine herself outside the domestic space.
Her final attempt to regain her power and pleasure is an aggressive, but ambivalent act. Eleanor slams on the gas pedal and speeds directly into the great tree next to the house, dying by suicide. In the few moments that Eleanor has before she dies, she repeats, “I’m really doing it…I am doing this all by myself…” (181-182), which parallels the beginning of the novel when she takes the car and repeats “I am going…I have finally taken a step” (10). In this way, Eleanor’s “death drive” is positioned as a final effort to relive her autoerotic subjectivity, but one that is ultimately illegible to the rest of the world. Her subjectivity, in the end, becomes illegible even to herself as she shifts from her ecstatic self-talk of “doing it” by herself to a pitiful query of “Why am I doing this? Why don’t they stop me?” (182). Hill House and the group’s ultimate adherence to rational social norms has disrupted the possibilities of the car for pleasurable self-othering and reasserts a linear temporality that requires an “end” to the journey, a destination. The agency and subjectivity made possible by automobility are shown to be always liminal within a social order dominated by the home and family. Eleanor’s car crash is a (sexual) climax that makes a spectacle of female desire’s illegibility outside the queerness of automobility.
Julia’s Road Rage
The Sundial in its “bunker mentality” (J. Anderson 114) and disruption of traditional family leadership and inheritance logistics is ripe for queer readings. Emily Banks argues that the novel “comically combines common midcentury household anxieties with fears of nuclear annihilation to imaging how catastrophic destruction might make way for new forms of kinship and domesticity” (882). Such new forms are no doubt attributed to the dual main characters of the novel, the widow Mrs. Orianna Halloran and her spinster sister-in-law Aunt Fanny, who in each her own way set about reorganizing and consolidating power in the aftermath of the death of the patriarch and the prophecy of the coming apocalypse. Yet, Julia Willow’s excursions in cars illustrate the importance of mobility to queer space. In this specific case, Julia’s autoerotic desires are devalued and even exploited by those set on achieving domestic dominance.
Initially, Julia Willow—the daughter of Orianna’s cash-strapped friend Augusta—seems to be just one of the motley crew who have found themselves at the Halloran residence awaiting the end of the world. In many ways, Julia is not a very interesting character. She lacks the absurd theatricality of Orianna and Aunt Fanny, she isn’t made a tool of social cohesion as Gloria is, and her cynicism of the apocalyptic scenario is not nearly as funny as the young Fancy’s. Yet, in her ordinariness, Julia operates as a foil to the spectacular plot in which a group of people come to quickly and easily believe that the end of the world is coming, and that survival depends on staying in the Halloran house. Julia provides readers with a small point of doubt in the apocalyptic logic, and it matters that her character’s most notable scenes are also the only scenes that take place inside a car. Despite the very real power that Orianna and Aunt Fanny have in queering the patriarchal family structure, they manipulate Julia’s use of the car to render her submissive to whatever social structures await the post-apocalypse. Both women are complicit in, if not directly responsible for, censoring Julia’s autoeroticism, which threatens to disrupt the distinction between self and other—an untenable subjectivity within the “bunker” culture of the Halloran house. Not only is Julia’s pursuit of self-love and erotic pleasure fleeting, as in the case of Eleanor, it is carjacked by those who desire to maintain the complete separateness of self and Other.
Julia’s character, in its notable ordinariness, points to an entity that has yet to become a self. When the Willows are introduced to the Halloran home, Julia is not given a memorable description, especially in comparison to her sister Arabella. Julia and Arabella are primarily known as Mrs. Willow’s “gels” who she is trying desperately to marry off. Mrs. Willow is particularly concerned for Julia’s fate as she is not the pretty one. There is very little about Julia that distinguishes her from others and readers could easily lose track of her among the other young women of the home—Arabella, Miss Ogilvie, Maryjane, and Gloria—who are similarly overshadowed by the personalities of the older women. Julia does not initially seem to pose any threat to the competing powers of the house because she doesn’t even seem to have a self. Julia only begins to distinguish herself and to build her subjectivity with her first opportunity to drive a car. In driving the car, Julia finds a pleasure in the simple experience of mobility, which resists the containment logic necessary to the Halloran clan’s ethic. The self and Other must remain distinct per the post-war American narration of the legitimate independent subject. But according to Derrida, “self-othering is in fact what constitutes the self” (E. Anderson 61) and Julia’s continued assertion of herself as different from the rest of the group and her refusal to venerate an impenetrable barrier between public and private establishes her as a character with clear subjectivity. Throughout the novel, Julia looks to herself as the source of truth, power, and even pleasure, amidst the sensationalized space of the Halloran estate. Julia comes to model how “the structure necessary…for having a self at all” (E. Anderson 61) is autoerotic, and “finds pleasure almost anywhere” (Irigaray 28), which threatens the power of the Hallorans as they continue to use space to exercise control over everyone’s identities.
Like Eleanor, Julia initiates her autoerotic subjectivity by stealing a car and claiming the right to its promises of freedom. And, like Eleanor, the taking of the car generates “an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once [one has experienced it, [one knows one] can aspire” (Lorde 54). For readers, Julia’s stealing of the car is a moment of hope that the containment logic will have a successful detractor. Yet, Miss Ogilvie and Aunt Fanny are soon discovered to be passengers in the car on the way to the village for some survival shopping. Still, Julia’s personality is suddenly imbued with a great deal of energy and action, as she is depicted as a reckless driver. The vignette that introduces readers to Julia’s subjectivity begins with her defiant expression as she races to get off the property: “‘Well, I don’t care what the old biddy says,’ Julia said, taking the turn by the gates in a wide sweep of the steering wheel, and barely slowing the car, ‘I’d go anywhere I pleased’” (Sundial 70, emphasi original). While Julia had been quick to defer to the interests of her mother and Mrs. Halloran earlier in the text, this moment marks a clear shift in tone. Julia explicitly claims her right to please herself. When Miss Ogilvie comments that they are all dependent on Mrs. Halloran, Julia exclaims, “Not me…You saw the way I take care of things; I just told him it was all right with the old lady, and maybe he thought I was taking you two to church or something, because he wouldn’t dare to keep me inside” (70, emphasis original). As a driver, Julia is suddenly able to define the boundaries of her subjectivity and prioritizes herself through her emphasis of personal pronouns. Julia’s self-emphasis is paralleled in her driving that is clearly a pleasurable act for her as she expresses the rage she has been suppressing while in the house. Her subjectivity is fostered by her mobility and her navigation of “embodiment, place, and practice” (Halberstam 19), and it absolutely threatens Aunt Fanny.
Julia’s reckless driving is linked to the sexual anxieties of the time that saw the car as something of a Pandora’s box. Aunt Fanny remarks, “Your modern automobiles…particularly this one; Julia, do you mind moving just a little more slowly? Automobiles, and noise and dust and strange people…I prefer a somewhat less feverish life, thank you” (70, emphasis original). Aunt Fanny is not only uncomfortable by Julia’s recklessness, but also the association of the car with the public sphere that makes life “feverish.” When Julia snipes back at Aunt Fanny that she, too, is “gallivanting around,” Aunt Fanny rejects this depiction and says, “I do not gallivant around” (70). Like “feverish,” gallivanting carries a sexually suggestive connotation in its definition as traveling purely for pleasure, especially when paired with automobility and the culture’s saturated connection between cars and sexual adventure. While Aunt Fanny may be queer in her own way, she still finds Julia’s excitability distasteful. There is something in Julia’s enjoyment of driving that even Aunt Fanny can’t stand as it pushes the boundaries of femininity and decorum and characterizes Julia as self-serving in an erotic way.
Indeed, once the group reaches the village, Julia lets Aunt Fanny and Miss Ogilvie out of the car and drives off on her own to wait until the other women are ready to return from shopping. When Aunt Fanny inquires what Julia will do on her own, cautioning her away from seeking company with the Watkins brothers, Julia replies, “I wouldn’t dream of going near them” (76). Despite Julia’s increasing depiction as a sexual subject, she is far more interested in being alone and “just getting out of that house is enough” (76). Julia proceeds to drive off and readers don’t see her again until she picks up the shoppers. Here, the car takes on a queer quality as it disappears out of the narrative time and setting. Jackson never represents these moments with Julia and there is no way to tell exactly where she went, nor how long she was gone. Just as Julia becomes a notable character, she fades out of the surveillance of the Hallorans, and even of the reader. Although Julia remains in the public space of the village, she is finally able to enjoy the privacy she’s desired since the beginning as the narrative shifts back to the focus on the apocalyptic domestic narrative.
Even as Julia’s automotive excursion takes a back seat, so to speak, to the larger story, her exercise of self-gratification also threatens Orianna. She seeks to not simply quash Julia’s mobility but aims to corrupt Julia’s experience of mobility completely. Upon the shoppers’ return to the house, Orianna admonishes Julia and threatens to kick her out of the house if she “ever again touch[es] anything belonging to me” (89). Despite this threat, Orianna goes through a great deal of trouble to keep Julia confined to the house. She does not simply hold Julia hostage in the house, but rather makes a humiliating spectacle of her autonomy. First, Orianna grants Julia “permission” to leave with another “convert,” the captain, but then she manipulates the captain into not leaving the house. Then, she hires a corrupt driver to take Julia to the city. Although Julia is frightened by her sudden solitary travel and the disagreeable driver, she was determined “to hide from this creature, and so from Mrs. Halloran, that she was frightened, and bewildered, and lonely” (128). Orianna’s efforts to put Julia in danger as she tries to exercise her individuality and freedom seems excessive for how minor Julia’s character seems to be in the text as a whole. But the extravagant drama Orianna directs points to the power Julia has to disrupt the exclusivity of the home by simply finding pleasure in exercising movement. When the object of desire is the self, the object cannot simply be removed or replaced to control a person’s erotic power; rather the whole sense of self must be damaged.
In the case of Julia, Orianna contrives to sexually humiliate her to force a suppression of her autonomy. The driver Orianna hires is an aggressive, disgusting, rapacious man, and his car is barely functional. But, even when “There was only one place in the car for Julia to sit, and that was in front next to the driver” (129), Julia remains steadfast in her decision to use the car for the purposes of taking care of herself. Indeed, Julia does her best to ignore the driver and caresses herself: Julia “told herself joyfully that beyond them lay the city; ‘Tonight I will be there myself,’ she had thought, hugging herself ecstatically” (130, my emphasis). Yet the car ride eventually takes on the claustrophobic feeling like the Halloran house as the driver raises the cost of the drive and threatens to rape her. Eventually, the driver kicks Julia out of the car for her refusals and leaves her to walk in the dark and fog on her own. But even in this more vulnerable form of automobility of walking, Julia pursues her desire to keep going. Throughout her blinded walk, she reminds herself several times to “wait” for the climatic pleasure of revenge: “wait, she said over and over again through her teeth, wait till I can get even with all of them” (134). She also speaks to herself as a loved one after she trips and falls, saying to herself “Now, my girl, now, Julia my fine creature…my sweet baby” (136). Julia maintains her autoerotic orientation even when the car is taken over by literal “compulsory heterosexuality” and tries to keep moving. Unfortunately, Julia is unable to make her way out of the fog to the city and ends up back at the Halloran house where Orianna coyly tells Julia she must behave, otherwise, “I shall not let you go to the city again” (137). Julia spends the rest of the novel drunk. Orianna could have simply refused to provide Julia any mode of transport to the city, but instead, she co-opts the space of the car where Julia had previously found erotic power. Unlike Eleanor who seems to eventually buy back into the heterosexual social order, Julia decides to numb herself with alcohol, making her unable to safely or consciously exercise automobility. Julia may be trapped in the Halloran house, but she makes herself unable to properly participate in any social order at all.
Both Eleanor and Julia illustrate the power to be found behind the wheel as driving allows the women to enjoy their otherness to the social order—a pleasure that they give to themselves. And as much as Jackson’s fiction offers queer depictions of women’s relationships to others, the automobile allows for women to develop a specifically erotic relationship with themselves. Queerness here is not merely resisting heteronormative time by desiring objects that would disallow reproductive futurity, but it is also following the logic of self-government—autonomy—to erotic ends. The automobile and the autoerotic both collapse and expand time in ways that blur public and private and therefore enable new conceptions of the self, which are especially gratifying for women who find all that they need, they already have.
As the stories of Eleanor and Julia’s automobility are peripheral to the primary plots of their respective novels, they each offer a lens through which to view the other to see a more complex narrative of women’s midcentury automobility. The “lifetime” that Eleanor lives in her highway fantasies offers readers an example of the kind of pleasure that Julia must have experienced when she drives off in the car alone and temporarily out of the narrative. But Julia’s tragedy of not failed, but exploited, subjectivity provides a new perspective on the Hill House group’s role in Eleanor’s fate. Just as Seiler concludes that the freedom offered by the automobile during the post-war corporate era was contrived and easily manipulated by national and economic narratives, Jackson shows that the queer erotic power made possible by the car cannot ultimately withstand the national domestic logic of gender and sexuality. Yet, the space that the car opens up for women, even temporarily, offers a view and an experience of the feminine self that holds real and dangerous power.
Works Cited
Anderson, Ellie. “Autoeroticism: Rethinking Self-Love with Derrida and Irigaray.” PhænEx, vol. 12, no. 1, 2017, pp. 53-70.
Anderson, Jill E. “Homemaking for the Apocalypse: Queer Failures and Bunker Mentality in The Sundial.” Shirley Jackson and Domesticity: Beyond the Haunted House. Eds. Jill E. Anderson and Melanie R. Anderson, New York, Routledge, 2020, 113-131.
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