Queer “Paranoia”: Post-war Masculinities and Queer Panic ¹

By Janice Lynne Deitner

Janice Lynne Deitner completed her PhD on bodies of knowledge in Shirley Jackson’s American contexts in early 2024. She is Assistant Editor of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies and a co-organizer of “Reading Shirley Jackson in the Twenty-First Century,” an online resource investigating the past and future landscapes of Shirley Jackson studies.

“Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white.”

–Kinsey et al, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948)

In the words of Shirley Jackson’s son Laurence Jackson Hyman, her posthumously published story “Paranoia” (2013) “explores one of her common themes, the gradual realization of no escape, where the horror is that there is no help coming” (Leyshon, n.p.). Jackson regularly employs such scenarios of entrapment in her work, the dark side of a domestic ideology that revered the home and the nuclear family after 1945. In post-war America, “the values of the white middle class … shaped the dominant political and economic institutions that affected all Americans.” The “norms” created from these values “represented the ideal” of American identity and “reflected the standard against which nonconforming individuals were judged” (May 15). Jackson’s work regularly explores how these norms impact women, but “Paranoia” instead examines post-war America’s anxieties about masculinity. The story follows a businessman named Beresford as an unnamed man in a light hat and a growing number of seeming collaborators follow him through the city for no apparent reason, evoking anxieties about identity, masculinity, American Individualism, and homosexuality that were rampant after World War Two.  This article discusses these various, interlocking anxieties while introducing Jackson’s tendency towards male characters with non-normative masculinity. Finally, it explores themes of imperiled masculinity, homosexuality, and queer panic in “Paranoia” and how the story comments on hegemonic post-war gender roles, particularly the impact of a normalizing “crowd” that dictates and controls masculine performance and behavior. By reading “Paranoia” through the lens of post-war anxieties about queerness and masculinity, we can see that Jackson’s embrace of ambiguity in storytelling is itself a subversive act in an era of narrowly defined norms.

These norms were a result of an America that was struggling with the aftermath of decades of cultural trauma, including both World Wars and the Great Depression. In response, “there was an artificial straining and striving for social cohesion and national unity” (Caute 21). Though it is impossible to say when this drive toward unity began, there is evidence of a cultural shift toward nationalism as the US entered WWII in late 1941, which may be around the time Jackson wrote “Paranoia” (see Leyshon). As mentioned, this push toward stability and conformity resulted in an enshrinement of behavioral norms; “there were no groups in the United States for whom these norms were irrelevant” (May 15). These norms, and the anxieties behind them, also prompted attention to homosexuality. Amanda Littauer delineates causes for the attention to homosexuality in girls, including “anxiety about wartime disruptions of sexual norms, Cold War fears about hidden threats to American family life, the influence of Freudian psychology, women’s growing social and economic mobility and Kinsey’s studies of 1948 and 1953” (61). These same forces shaped anxieties regarding men, including “anxious debate about sex roles and a particular concern about American masculinity” (Baldwin 3), which also centered debates about queerness. The worry was that if masculinity were on the wane, this would have repercussions in other areas of public and private life. 

Jackson engages with these debates, creating male characters who often seemingly enforce these norms while gently undermining them. Her male characters appear to wield complete control over the women in their lives (see Murphy). However, Jackson uses methods to diminish their power. In the case of such overbearing or all-knowing god-like figures as Arnold Waite in Hangsaman (1951) and Dr Montague in The Haunting of Hill House (1959), through their increasing unimportance their influence wanes as the text goes on. The first Mr. Halloran in The Sundial (1958), Hugh Crain in Hill House, and John Blackwood in We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) are all masculine figures that are dead before the books start, patriarchal ghosts haunting texts that increasingly center women. The male figures who take their place in the texts, the second Mr. Halloran in Sundial and Julian in Castle, are often infantilized or dependent. As we will see, Jackson also employed gendered expectations and cultural norms to comment on masculinity in other ways. In “Paranoia,” intentionally or not, she reflects and critiques contemporary anxieties about American Individualism, homosexuality, economic anxiety, and what these anxieties reflected about post-war masculinity.

American Individualism is an ideology that former president Herbert Hoover codified in the 1920s, a time in which much post-war ideology came into being (see, for example, Berrett, Cowan). Generally, the construction of American Individualism is coded as uniquely masculine, and “the ‘individual’ was predominantly assumed to be a white, middle-class male.” Thus, a tendency towards “becoming conformist and homogenised,” a side effect of the post-war push toward stability, was “seen as threatening to American masculinity, including “a fear that America was becoming feminised” (Baldwin 7). A key figure in this discourse was intellectual and historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who asked in 1958, “What has happened to the American male?” or rather “What has unmanned the American man?” (237, 240). He directly connects the upheaval in American ideology and the resultant loss of certainty after WWII to masculinity, arguing that “[t]he ways by which American men affirm their masculinity are uncertain and obscure” (237). He also connects these anxieties to American Individualism. Referring to “the cult of the group” (243), Schlesinger, Jr. writes that “mass democracy … offers new moral authority to the group and thereby sets off a new assault on individual identity” (242). His ideas reflect a wider struggle between desires for safety and certainty, and fears that such desires endanger masculinist Individualism.

Schlesinger, Jr., however, writes back against the more extreme views of some of his contemporaries, such as those presented in the 1958 book The Decline of the American Male. Published by the editors of Look magazine, Decline includes a section on the deterioration of Individualism entitled “Why Is He Afraid To Be Different?” The chapter centers a fictional American male, aptly named “Gary Gray,” as gray is an important color in postwar discussions of conformity, which I discuss below. Gary Gray suddenly “realize[s] he had forgotten how to say the word ‘I’”; even when he can say it, “its force and meaning [are] gone” (Leonard, Jr. 25). A crucial scene shows Gary waiting to cross the street and hearing a voice command the “‘Man in the blue suit’” to “‘step back on the curb until the light has changed.’ Automatically, as if by reflex action, Gary” complies before “realiz[ing] that he was not wearing a blue suit, nor was he standing off the curb.” The author bemoans that this “‘safety education,’ designed to encourage lawful behavior by publicly shaming erring individuals … would also accustom individuals to faceless authority” (28). It is important to note that the author seems to be comfortable with the idea of shaming those who step outside of accepted behavioral norms. His concerns lie with the impact of a “faceless authority,” echoing Cold War fears of Communism, not with the normalizing pressure of the crowd. 

Jackson engages with such anxieties and seeming paradoxes in “Paranoia.” Up front, she clearly states that her businessman protagonist, Mr. Beresford, is not an individual: “There were twenty small-size gray suits like Mr. Beresford’s on every New York block, fifty men still clean-shaven and pressed after a day in an air-cooled office, a hundred small men, perhaps, pleased with themselves for remembering their wives’ birthdays” (3). Any uniqueness he may have disappears in the exponential increase of men just like him, from “twenty” to “fifty” to “one hundred.” Importantly the description foregrounds his suit, replacing a description of his body with one of many “small-size gray suits.” In fact, the men are described as “still […] pressed” after the workday (3), as if their suits commandeer or replace their physicality.  The reference to gray suits evokes the 1955 novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson. Though probably written after this story, the novel is a reaction to the same cultural pressures that Jackson comments on with Beresford. One contemporary reviewer of Wilson’s novel noted that “[a]s calm and serene a garb as a man can wear is the standard gray flannel suit of commerce, a habiliment supposed to betoken solidity of character tastefully touched with quiet nonchalance” (McNulty BR18). Wilson’s protagonist Tom Rath pokes fun at this clothing trend when meeting a prospective new boss. He notes that both are “dressed in a gray flannel suit. The uniform of the day … Somebody must have put out an order” (8). It is fitting that in Look magazine’s anecdote, the endangered individual has the surname “Gray,” while the individual who breaks the rules by stepping off of the curb wears a more noticeable blue suit. The man in “Paranoia” who follows Beresford wears “a light hat” (4), another anomaly from the standard gray. By contrast, Beresford and those like him are an undifferentiated mass of conforming gray, far from the ideal of American Individualism.

Concerns about conformity sapping masculine agency and vitality were ubiquitous, but because of the need for stability, reactions against conformity were also concerning. As Barbara Ehrenreich writes, post-war “‘conformity’ became the code word for male discontent” (30), a discontent that had to be contained. In fact, “the charge of homosexuality” in the post-war era was “the ultimate sanction against male rebellion” (50). Estelle B. Freedman notes that starting in the 1930s, Americans began “measuring normality and defining deviance” (90), with homosexuality often included with the “sexual psychopath” (91). Robert J. Corber argues that society equated homosexuality with “a form of psychopathology that undermined the nation’s defenses against Communist infiltration,” a necessary boundary in  “the consolidation of the Cold War consensus” (3; see also Whitfield 43).²  Men were expected to embrace rugged, masculine Individualism without stepping too far outside of expected values, behaviors, and norms, creating the appearance of difference while staying in line with the accepted crowd. 

Yet, as briefly mentioned, Alfred Kinsey’s work, beginning with Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948, found that “millions of Americans were unwilling to follow conventional ethical codes” when it came to sex, a truth that was “earthshaking to the American public … highly troublesome and possibly subversive” (Bodnar 21; see also Showalter 394). In fact, Kinsey and his co-authors concluded that “it is difficult to maintain the view” that homosexuality is “rare and therefore abnormal or unnatural, or … evidence of neuroses or even psychoses” (Kinsey et al. 659). Kinsey’s work also pushed back against stereotypes that, to use his now-outdated term, “preference” has any connection “with various physical and mental qualities” that would “make a homosexual person obvious and recognizable.”³ Such supposed physical qualities included being “rarely robust physically” or “uncoordinated or delicate,” with “high-pitched voices” and “a feminine carriage of the hips” (637). In a study of homosexuality begun in 1935, published in 1941, and republished and reprinted throughout the 1950s, George Henry “attempted to arrange” forty case studies “according to the extent to which they deviate from heterosexual adjustment” (xiv). Henry used “the M-F test” (xiii), or the Terman-Miles scale of a subject’s masculinity or femininity. Henry labels many of his subjects as “effeminate” or, with more detail, as “[p]assive, effeminate homosexual[s]” (3-14), stressing the conflation of feminine behaviors with homosexuality. Kinsey instead refutes this scale, its supposed connection to homosexuality, and other attempts to measure masculinity (638). Discourse of gender and sexuality in the post-war years is marked by this tension between attempts at strict classification and ideas like Kinsey’s, which recognized that things are not so clearly delineated.

Though Jackson’s story may have been written before Kinsey published his work, she engages with well-entrenched stereotypes evident in studies such as Henry’s. Jackson codes Beresford as stereotypically effeminate to comment on his inability to fit a strictly defined gender role, despite his place within the gray-suited, uniform crowd. Early on, Jackson tells the reader that the “violent exercise necessary to catch a taxi” is “usually more than he [is] equal to” (“Paranoia” 3–4), using two words, “violent” and “exercise,” that would not normally apply to hailing a taxi. It is in Beresford’s repeated interactions with a “[f]unny-looking” man with “a small mustache” (4), however, that Jackson allows space for the story to comment on these stereotypes and their connection to post-war queer panic, which I discuss further below. Of course, Beresford’s increasing paranoia and resultant emotional outbursts support his queer coding, as homosexual men were also believed to be “emotionally unbalanced” and “temperamental to the point of being unpredictable,” supposedly the “converse of … the typical heterosexual male” (Kinsey 637). As we will see, however, Jackson is not engaging with these stereotypes to support them, but rather, instead, to allow space for their interaction with hegemonic masculinity and the impact of the normalizing crowd as part of her critique of post-war masculine gender norms.

Another area of post-war anxiety that was also tied to perceptions of homosexuality is economic instability. In addition to keeping men in line, post-war fears of queerness were linked to domestic failure. Ehrenreich references a 1966 case study in the American Journal of Psychiatry which argues that pressures to provide for the family can cause “psychoneurotic illness, with latent homosexual features” (21). Economic instability, or being an ineffectual provider, plagues many of Jackson’s male characters. For example, Castle’s Uncle Julian is completely dependent on his niece Constance at the start of the book. Fixated on the past, Julian regularly revisits his economic dependence on his wealthy brother John, whom he describes as “overly fond of the world’s goods” (92). Julian’s memories often focus on consumption, “My brother sometimes remarked upon what we ate, my wife and I,” while by contrast, his nephew Thomas, John’s heir, “ate hugely” (48). As a male, Julian exists within the hegemonic power structure, but his economic dependence and inability to provide for his wife feminizes him. In fact, he is equal to his wife in his brother’s patriarchal system. Jackson featured such ideas as early as the 1940 story “Had We But World Enough,” published in her college literary journal. In the story, young lovers dream of possible domestic bliss. In response to the girl’s argument that, “All you have to do is get a job,” the boy responds, “I guess I’m a pretty lousy specimen” (28), his scientific language here evoking ideas of incorrect classification.  Jackson also revisits such a conversation in “The Root of Evil” (1953), where a man’s financial instability becomes a comment on his masculinity (126-27). One post-war psychoanalyst invented the term “pseudohomosexuality” to describe an “‘adaptive failure’ to meet the standards of masculine conformity,” which results in “a subconscious slide toward a homosexual identity,” eventually leading to full homosexuality (Ehrenreich 24-25). 

Jackson often plays with masculinity and this sense of “sliding toward” queerness and was aware of her own tendency towards feminized male characters. In a 1960s journal entry, she wrote about a very masculine man who appeared in a dream: “(he was a very big man, and perhaps superhuman) … i wonder if i could put him in a book; how effeminate luke and essex are,” referring to male characters in Hill House and Sundial, respectively (SJP Box 1). Jackson here comments on her own tendency to avoid a certain type of masculine characterization; her male characters are often ineffectual, or they generally undermine ideological norms. In certain cases, they are more directly effeminate or coded as queer. In “Like Mother Used to Make” (1949) Jackson’s protagonist David Turner moves “in small quick movements” (29), which illustrate his fussy, feminized domesticity, reinforced by his knowledge of goods in the supermarket and his love for the domestic details of his home. In “My Uncle in the Garden” (1996), an unnamed narrator visits her two uncles, queer-coded domesticated bachelors who live in a flower-laden cottage. One uncle goes into “a hysterical temper” from “the strain of baking a chicken pie” (188), conforming to post-war stereotypes of fragile domesticated femininity. 

Mr. Beresford, in “Paranoia,” is another such effeminate, queer-coded character, not only because of his physical diminishment as one of many “small-size gray suits,” as discussed above. The story takes place on Beresford’s wife’s birthday, and he is “pleased with himself particularly for remembering” to buy her chocolates (3). He only reveals later, in the midst of his ordeal, that “[h]e had left his office with a group of people, … all reminding [him] that it was his wife’s birthday” (8). Beresford needs the normalizing crowd to remind him of his own obligations as husband. In fact, “his gray suit,” not him, is “almost unaffected by the crush on the corner” (5), demonstrating both the suit’s signifying dominance and his comfort within the crowd. When pushed beyond masculine norms, “Mr. Beresford decide[s] to … remember that it was his wife’s birthday” (5), recalling his heteronormative responsibilities. Jackson makes sure to reference the candy box throughout, a symbol of those responsibilities, yet “his wife’s favorite chocolates” (4), as he first calls them, become “his candy box” or “his box of candy” (5, 7, 8, 12; emphasis added). Also, obtaining the candy has taken up so much time that he cannot afford the leisurely bus ride home, which brings him into contact with the man with the light hat. 

As mentioned, Beresford does not like to hail taxis, and when he attempts to do so, his voice goes “helplessly into a falsetto,” after which he retreats in failure “while the taxi [goes] by uncomprehending.” The sense of the “uncomprehending” taxi gestures towards currents of hidden meanings throughout the story. Immediately after his emasculating failure with the taxi, a man “in a light hat” with “a small mustache stop[s] next to Beresford … and … stare[s] at” him. The man does not speak, but instead seems to recognize something in Beresford and communicates this recognition physically. However, “Mr. Beresford stare[s]” back at the man “as people sometimes do without caring particularly what they see” (4), wording that implies Beresford does not share this recognition. Additionally, the attempt at unspoken communication evokes what William L. Leap calls “Gay English,” or “oral, written, and signed text making” (xii), which includes gestures, looks, and “code words that confirm gay identity during informal conversations between strangers in public places” (xi). The sense of “public places” is a regular feature of such communication. In a 2003 article on the British gay slang known as polari which was popular after WWII, Liz Gill quotes one polari speaker: “‘If you liked the look of someone,” you would use polari. “‘If they were straight they wouldn’t pick up on it but if they were gay there might be a shriek of recognition,’” as connection was made through a knowable language system. Yet Kinsey argues that the “considerable taboo” on homosexuality means “even among males who desire homosexual relations,” there is “ignorance” of such systems of communication (632).⁴ Beresford’s first interaction with the man appears to be an attempt at just such a connection, one that Beresford cannot decode. It is telling that this interaction happens “in the middle of the crowd” (4), as Beresford starts the story in a crowd of gray suits, the normalized, conforming crowd, and ends it isolated from everyone. This is literalized when he again tries to hail a cab, after being forced from a “packed crowd” on the bus by the man in the hat. Because he is “under the influence of his annoyance” at the man, and thus “not trusting his voice” to retain a masculine register, he runs into the road and is “almost run down by a delivery truck.” In response, “the truck driver … yell[s] something unrecognizable,” after which “Mr. Beresford s[ees] the people around him on the corner laughing” (4). Beresford cannot understand the truck driver’s language, and can’t recognize what the crowd is laughing at, which literalizes and cements his outsider status. The recognition by the man in the hat, the attempt at communication, has forced Beresford outside of the understanding of the normalizing crowd and has “queered” his connection to hegemonic masculinity. 

In fact, Beresford’s initial response to the man entails an “almost unconscious gesture” of mimicry in response to the man’s mustache, “lightly touching his own clean-shaven lip.” In his gesture, Beresford communicates something which he fears is “offensive” because the man “frown[s] and look[s] Mr. Beresford up and down” and “turn[s] away” (4). Beresford’s response does not fit whatever language the man is using. The man’s mustache is also a physical signifier of a certain type of masculinity, giving meaning to Beresford’s gesture. According to the “masculine code” of the post-war era “a clean-shaven man was sociable and reliable. A mustached man … demonstrated a willful independence” (Oldstone-Moore 47).  Perhaps this is why Beresford internally calls him “[f]unny-looking” and an “[u]gly customer” as he touches his own lip (“Paranoia” 4), as if his own desire for rebellion, sexual or otherwise, instigates an automatic Othering of the man he wants, or wants to be. A 1958 article in The Saturday Evening Post entitled “Beards Stage a Comeback” defends facial hair, arguing that “a bearded man is more of a man among men—and among women too” (Gehman 40). After detailing previous social opprobrium in reaction to facial hair, the author claims that “times are changing” and “conventional, proper and respectable men” are growing beards (41). Yet, again, conformity is central to his argument, because a “beard provides a man with a small opportunity for a personal revolt against sameness” (106). A mustache similarly symbolized a “free agent who was able to play by his own rules” (Oldstone-Moore 48).  Still, the author of the Post article excessively defends his own decision throughout, worrying about the reaction of strangers and friends alike, striving against conformist norms but worried about straying too far from them.

Beresford is not similarly paradoxically torn between the competing desires of conformity and Individualism. Instead, his initial interaction with the man has forced him completely out of the conforming crowd. Beresford’s initial response to the man is to “watc[h] the people” around him, “his perspective sharpened” (5). However, this increased perception serves merely to note the man in the hat’s ubiquity. Somehow, having left on a bus a moment before, he is at Beresford’s elbow right after, then ahead on the corner, and later on another bus. This constant, recurring presence signifies either a real threat, something fantastical, or a figment caused by Beresford’s queer panic. The threat remains unexplained as Beresford escapes over and over from the man and his growing number of supposed accomplices. 

At one point, he hides in a souvenir shop, the souvenirs graced with images of “the Trylon and the Perisphere” (6). These structures were part of the 1939 World’s Fair, and to a contemporary audience were symbols of futurity and hope in the shadow of World War Two’s imminence (Spence 68-69). In Jackson’s hands, these symbols become a joke as their image adorns a souvenir “match holder made in the form of a toilet” (“Paranoia” 6), which two tourists laugh over. Just as Beresford’s businessman masculinity is belied by his anxious inabilities, his effeminacy, and his lack of individuality, the symbol of American futurity gracing a toilet undermines the lie of post-war American prosperity and patriarchal stability. The crude figure of a toilet also makes public something that should be private, a concern of Beresford’s. In fact, one of the reasons he does not like hailing taxis is “the public display” of the act (3). Concerns about what is public increasingly worry him. For example, when he later sees the man “on the corner ahead, waiting,” Beresford thinks, “It’s preposterous, all these people watching” (7), as if the man or himself were behaving indecently in public. Later, when he finally confronts the man in the hat, again reasserting that he “’do[es]n’t understand any of it,’” and threatening to go to the authorities, the man says nothing and gestures toward a policeman. Beresford realizes that making his private issues public is not possible: “What did he have to report? … and why? … there was nothing he could tell the policeman” (11). He is implicated in the situation, either possibly mad or possibly queer, and outside of the structures of power that would previously have come to his aid. It is with the breaching of public/private boundaries in the shape of the toilet that the man follows Beresford into the store. In response, Beresford attempts to understand the situation, thinking it through: “[t]he question of what the man in the light hat wanted was immediately subordinate to the question of whom he wanted” (6; original emphasis). The multiple meanings of wanting someone provide a variety of readings here, including sexual. Beresford decides that “if his light-hatted designs were against Mr. Beresford, they must be nefarious, else why had he not announced them before now?” (6). Beresford assumes everything public is decent and sanctioned by the crowd, everything reputable and good spoken aloud, a mindset belied by the toilet-shaped souvenir. In fact, from the 1940s on a “public homosexual world” was being established “in the United States” (Freedman 103; emphasis added). There is now a confusion of boundaries, at least for Beresford, as what he thinks should be private is made public and what is public now seems to him obscene.

With no clear understanding available according to his worldview, Beresford ponders taking stereotypically masculine action, “of accosting the man and demanding his purpose,” thoughts upended by his “vivid recollection of his own small size and innate cautiousness” (“Paranoia” 6). In his work on masculinity and anxiety in mid-twentieth century fiction, Clive Baldwin discusses physicality and “a need for the performative” of gender expectations: “Any ambiguity of bodily performance undermines the necessary distinctions between men and women,” which “contributed to the pressure to conform” (12).  Beresford’s diminutive stature invites unwanted ambiguity. In discussing Kinsey’s intervention into homosexual stereotypes, Baldwin remarks that “these defining signifiers … are inscribed on the body,” thereby “construct[ing] and mak[ing] visible the ‘other’ male” while “also defining and constituting the supposed ‘real’ man” (133). Beresford’s body is not that of a “real” man, he therefore cannot solve this problem with masculine violence, though “strength, aggression (and the willingness to commit violence) … were central to American notions of masculinity in this period” (3). Beresford instead refuses hegemonic masculine violence and thereby makes himself Other. Later in the story, when a driver refuses to let him off a bus, he threatens to “smash the glass in the door and shout for help” (“Paranoia” 11). Though he ponders violence, he ultimately refuses stereotypical masculine agency, instead threatening to call for someone else to act. Additionally, the driver makes fun of him, asking if he intends to smash the glass with his box of candy, the present for his wife that has instead become a signifier of his increasing feminization.

This bus driver is part of a growing mass of possible accomplices that appear to be conspiring with the man, eventually becoming the controlling, normalizing crowd, dictating Beresford’s movements and pushing him towards revealing his proclivities, starting with the souvenir shop clerk who suggestively asks, “See anything you like, mister?” Beresford’s response, “[n]ot tonight” is equally suggestive. The clerk surpasses this provocative phrase by adding, “Got some nice things you didn’t look at,” his manner “unusually persistent” (6). Whether the clerk is actually soliciting Beresford or not, Beresford avoids him while “trying to make his tenor voice firm,” another masculine performance belied by his high voice. However, the clerk and the man corral him; Beresford is “forced to step backward as the two men advanc[e] on him” (7). In response, he demonstrates “the ineffectuality of the ordinary man caught in such a crisis” while “still clutch[ing] his box of candy under his arm,” and thinking, “I’m safe on the street … as long as there are lots of people, they can’t do anything to me” (7). He wishes for the anonymity of the normalizing crowd with which he started the story and continues to believe that the activities he imagines could not take place in public. This is also the first time he uses “they” to delineate the threat: “Perfectly silly. It’s still broad daylight. How they ever hoped to get away with it” (7; emphasis added), the “it” unspoken or undefined and therefore, in Beresford’s mind, inappropriate. After he escapes from the shop, he sees the shop clerk “looking after him” but “the man in the light hat [is] not in sight” (7). This implies that the continued presence of the man in the hat is a figment, embodying Beresford’s own queerness or fear of such, and that the ever-growing crowd of accomplices is Beresford’s perception of being outed, or Othered from the norms by which he has always lived.

It is just after this scene of escalating danger that Beresford does have a moment of masculine assertion, shouting for a taxi “boisterously … in a great voice he had never suspected he possessed until now. A taxi stop[s] as though not daring to disregard that great shout” (8). However, this masculine display, a surprise even to himself, is immediately undermined by an unidentified hand “clos[ing] over his” on the taxi door as Beresford becomes “aware of the light hat brushing his cheek” (8; emphasis added). These intimate touches break the boundaries of physical distance and unspoken communication, even if not recognized nor understood, that have existed up to this point. The man touches him with a hand and the hat, a symbol of nonconformity in its non-gray coloring. That this touch comes in response to Beresford’s assertion of masculinity is key, as it reveals the assertion to be a failed performance of expected gender norms. Again, Beresford’s heightened perception only adds to his awareness of the man. At the same time, the taxi driver says, “[c]ome on if you’re coming” (8), the word “come” having sexual connotations as early as the seventeenth century (“Come”). Beresford “resist[s] the push that urge[s] him into the taxi” (“Paranoia” 8), though it is unclear if this push is internal or external. This is the moment of choice, when entering the taxi, accepting the man’s touch, means assuming or accepting a queerness that he has so far evaded.

In fact, from this point in the story, Beresford begins to worry about being contained within spaces, evoking ideas of containment of post-war women, discussed above. He boards another bus and, with “his box of candy on his lap,” again attempts to understand. “Obviously,” he decides, the man does not hold “a grudge … about Mr. Beresford’s almost unconscious gesture toward his mustache, unless he was peculiarly sensitive” (8; emphasis added), the last words undefined but again carrying queer connotations. In his rationale, and to avoid other possibilities, he rewrites the past. He decides that “the man in the light hat had been trying to push him onto the bus and into the crowd, instead of” isolating him outside (8). This restructuring allows Beresford to cast himself as an Individual, one who is not isolated but chooses to forge his own path. Like with the taxi, being pushed into an enclosed space is a trap that contains him within a feminized domestic or queer identity. Of course, he has this thought while trapped on another bus with the man in the light hat. When he attempts to deboard, an old woman’s shopping “somehow … g[ets] in his way and spill[s].” The shopping leaves “[a] coil of pink ribbon … caught around [his] shoe” (9), as if visibly tethering him to a feminized identity. He is similarly tethered by behavioral norms to be chivalrous and help the woman pick up her items while, “[o]ver his shoulder,” he watches “the man in the light hat sitting comfortably” and “smoking,” with “his head … thrown back and his eyes … shut” (10), an image of contentment or physical ecstasy. It is at this point that Beresford threatens to smash his way off of the bus, as already discussed, in an attempt to again reclaim masculine agency, and is ridiculed by the bus driver.

Beresford finally escapes the bus and enters a large department store, again seeking anonymity in the crowd. However, within the store, he “move[s] slowly” through “stockings first, … and then … handbags,” forced through feminine-defined space. Then he encounters “medical supplies, with huge almost-human figures wearing obscene trusses, standing right there on the counter, and people coming embarrassedly to buy” (13). Of course, the only medical supply mentioned is one typically worn around the groin, the use of the word “obscene” revealing Beresford’s internal connection of any private garb to his repressed desires. Again, the private and secretive has been put on display, “almost-human” physicality shaming Beresford, even if there should be no shame in medical needs. Though he seeks to escape the man through crowds, it is telling that he chooses a shopping center, a space of post-war plenty but also one associated with the supposedly feminine pastime of shopping. 

Still, it is only after passing through this space that he is able to get away and head home, to the domestic space and ostensible safety. There is “no light hat, no odd person watching for” him; “[i]n the elevator, alone, with no one to see which floor button he pressed,” he can finally relax (13). Alone, he is removed from all external pressures, though they return in the figure of his wife, and domestic space poses just as many dangers as the outside world.  In fact, he has to ring the doorbell to be allowed access to his own home, demarcating the space as not his. His wife is “wearing her blue dress, and that meant she knew it was her birthday and expected him to take her out” (13). Though Beresford was unable to read the man’s unspoken communication, he understands the language of heteronormative demands and husbandly expectations. He responds by embracing a supposedly queer physicality as he “hand[s] her the box of candy limply” (14; emphasis added). He also plays up his fatigue, “seem[ing] more tired than he really was, and … glorying in all [the] attention,” embracing his own infantilization. We are not privy to this couple’s usual interactions, so we do not know if these are their usual roles, but the fact that he is acting out a role here implies that he has changed through his ordeal or, more telling, that he is always performing a role in their marriage. 

There is no comfort nor safety at home, however, as his wife locks him in the living room. Importantly, Beresford had previously been unaware of the traps of the domestic space, as he “[n]ever knew that door had a key” (14). He learns too late and is literarily contained within the home. The last line of the story is his wife on the phone, telling an unidentified person, “‘I’ve got him.’” In a discussion of Demon Lover figures in Jackson’s work, Erika Kvistad argues that this story “has hints of a gender-swapped Demon Lover pattern, with a female aggressor and a male victim” (53). However, Beresford’s wife is not so much an individual aggressor as part of that normalizing crowd, controlling and containing a man who has transgressed, or who believes he has. There is no safety in heterosexual relationships. If Beresford’s ordeal was queer in intent, he has been changed by it and no longer conforms to the prevailing norms; by post-war standards, he must be contained. If it was a figment of his mind, his new awareness means that he can no longer live within the crowd. Either way, a rift has opened that cannot be closed.

To conclude, I return to Schlesinger, Jr.’s investigation of the decline of American masculinity. When he asks, “Why is the American man so unsure today about his masculine identity?” his answer is that “he is so unsure about his identity in general” (242).  He argues that “a man must visualize himself as an individual apart from the group” to clarify his identity (244). However, for the post-war man, even the ideology of American Individuality fell within strictly demarcated, uniform lines, the individual only defined as part of a group, in opposition to an outsider. Interestingly, as Corber points out, “[m]any gay male writers” of the post-war era “treated homosexuality as a subversive form of identity that had the potential to disrupt the system of representation underpinning the Cold War consensus” (3). Reading “Paranoia” through this lens, Beresford’s encounter with the light-hatted man allows him to visualize himself outside of the normalizing crowd, but he rejects the freedom of self-creation that can be found there. Instead, he increasingly sees the crowd as a threat because it insists that he accept an identity outside of the masculine norm. Jackson uses queer coding to reveal the paradoxes and cracks inherent in hegemonic masculine identities, thereby challenging both the normalizing crowd that upholds such narrow post-war gender identities and the middle-class white values that the crowd holds dear. Jackson’s refusal to define the threat as real or imagined, to clearly explain the man’s motives or the wife’s involvement, further undermines any comforting certainty to readers of her time, or ours. The open ending allows for any number of possible readings, but, unlike Beresford, Jackson’s meaning cannot be contained. Her very refusal to clearly state what happens pushes back against post-war America’s desire for clarity, certainty, and classification. In the end, Beresford is truly an individual because he is now outside of the crowd, though trapped in the domestic space and cast out of the society that he has known; but he will not embrace his freedom. By writing back against the constraints of her time, Jackson embraces a freedom of her own.

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