The connection between magic and words is not a new concept, especially when it comes to witchcraft. “The tongue is a witch,” professed Anglican minister George Webbe in 1619 (Kamensky 25). Much like Puritan clergyman and author Cotton Mather, who often reminded the women of his New England congregation of the sacredness of a “silver tongue” (that is, speak rarely and don’t raise your voice), Webbe believed in the proneness of women’s speech to do evil, and admonished against female speech as one of the major sources of witchcraft (Kamensky 26). When the Salem Witch Trials shook Massachusetts in the late 1600s, the charage of witchcraft gave people the chance to keep in check and, if needed, ruthlessly prosecute especially the more disruptive undertones of female discourse (Kamensky 26-7), although a few men were also among the executed victims (Alessandroni 19-20).

Nowadays, as Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett wrote in a 2019 article, “Things haven’t felt so witchy since the 1990s.” Indeed, the resurgence of so-called “witcherature”–that is, fantasy literature and, more generally, any type of media employing the witch trope as its main theme–in recent years is paving the way for a newfound conception of witch-like figures: “In a #MeToo world, […] it is really no surprise that female writers are examining the role of the witch in new ways,” Cosslett argues, thus reinforcing Diane Purkiss’ assumption that the figure of the witch has actually always been a mirror for the many images and self-representations of feminism itself (10).

Bearing all this in mind, Shirley Jackson’s appropriation of the W-word in 1950s middle-class America is even more significant: as people were starting to recover from the horrors of World War II, American families were encouraged by ubiquitous advertising campaigns to move to the suburbs and become consumers by purchasing the latest home appliance. Housewives, in particular, had given up their jobs as their husbands came back from the war and were pushed more and more into the house, constrained into the roles of chauffeurs, cooks, and nannies while the men were working downtown. The so-called “nuclear family” was born. Magazines and commercials portrayed the American family as the ultimate goal to aspire to, whereas the women who actually sustained those families often suffered from anxiety and depression and craved the numbness provided by alcohol and prescription drugs (Pallejá-Lopez 77). In the political realm, the rise of McCarthyism, a series of investigations carried out in order to expose supposed communist activity within various areas of the U.S. government and society (Oakley 56-75), paved the way for a new type of “witch hunts” (as the accusations toward different public figures of the time, deemed as more or less representatives of leftist views, came to be known). In this socio-political context, no one would have expected a motherly, comforting homemaker such as Jackson to look for self-validation in witchcraft and black magic, way before the occult revival of the 1960s when these themes became widespread and fashionable (Kyle 91). After centuries of oppression of the subversive female speech, Shirley Jackson was able to claim the witch identity as her own.

Praised by Stephen King as one of the masters of supernatural American fiction in his 1981 book Danse Macabre, Jackson is today mostly renowned for her Gothic works, many of which are centered on troubled female characters who move within (and, at times, succumb to) a patriarchal world. One of the few Jackson’s novels presenting a sort of happy ending is We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), whose narrator Merricat relies on magic and talismans in order to get what she wants. Her older sister, Constance, always cooking and gardening, is also a witch-like figure, albeit of a more domestic sort; indeed, the act of cooking itself is one of the epitomes of witchcraft (think, for instance, of the folktale Hänsel und Gretel’s evil witch): “I wonder if I could eat a child if I had the chance,” says Merricat at the end of the novel, to which her sister answers: “I doubt if I could cook one” (Jackson, Castle 146). After their house is torn down by the villagers, who resent them for the alleged murder of their own family and also for their substantial inheritance, the sisters resume living peacefully within the ruins of their house, “haunting” them, and living off food offerings from the scared women who inhabit the village, thus embracing their newfound status as “witches.”

One can only agree, then, with Ruth Franklin’s observation that Jackson’s lifelong fascination with witchcraft was “a way of embracing and channeling female power at a time when women in America often had little control over their lives” (Shirley Jackson 13). According to Judy Oppenheimer, Jackson started exploring her interest in witchcraft in high school: “reading everything she could find on the subject. It was never a superficial or frivolous pursuit […] Nothing in the outside world held the same fascination for her that her own mind did; studying witchcraft was a route to studying herself, and it became a lifelong endeavor” (36). By the time she transferred from the University of Rochester to Syracuse, she “was already familiar with a good bit of literature in the field of demonology and was particularly interested in the history of the black mass” (Friedman 33). She also owned a Tarot pack and a Ouija board. College fairs at Bennington often saw her telling fortunes (Friedman 33). Therefore, it appears clear that Jackson’s interest in magic was not something simply invented by promotional materials, as some critics suggested; on the contrary, as Oppenheimer argues (36), it was a way for her to understand herself and position herself within the world, as the heroines of her novels did.

From a paratextual point of view, the author’s feelings towards magic and occultism were made known to the public early on, by means of a biographical note on the inside flap of her debut novel The Road Through the Wall (1948), which defined her as “perhaps the only contemporary writer who is a practicing amateur witch” (Temple). Her interest in witchcraft was readily employed by her publisher Farrar, Straus as a promotional strategy, and frequently used in the paratextual presentations of her subsequent works. Despite her initial discomfort–according to Franklin, she believed it trivialized her work (Shirley Jackson 257-8)–Jackson finally seemed to surrender to this tailor-made authorial persona and began to help in crafting it herself with anecdotes and subtle jokes.

In this article, I explore the presence of witchcraft in the editorial paratexts of Jackson’s works, drawing on textual evidence of her (self-)representation as a witch (interviews, autobiographical notes, etc.). These materials will be compared to Jackson’s intimate reflections as expressed in her personal correspondence to friends and family, highlighting how she negotiated with her publishers and readers in order to construct an incredibly effective authorial persona. The focus on paratexts, rather than authorial texts, will be useful in demonstrating how witchcraft and its public display, far from being a mere promotional strategy passively accepted by Jackson, were actually often employed playfully by the writer herself not only “to undermine the traditional connotations of ‘housewife’” and woman (Anderson and Kröger 36), as scholars such as Alissa Burger and Ruth Franklin have noticed, but also to embrace them in her own unique way (by exploring, for instance, the countless connections between housework and stereotyped witches’ occupations such as cooking and gardening); thus proving how, for Jackson, the lines between witchcraft and homemaking were indeed extremely blurred.

Paratext studies draw majorly on the theories presented by Gérard Genette in his 1987 essay Seuils, in which the scholar defines paratext as “a certain number of verbal or other productions, such as an author’s name, a title, a preface, illustrations,” which “surround [the text] and extend it, precisely in order to present it, […] to ensure the text’s presence in the world, its ‘reception’ and consumption” (1). A work’s paratext thus inevitably influences the way it is going to be perceived by its readers. Examining the discourses associating Jackson and witchcraft from a paratextual point of view, the way publishers’ interpreted Jackson’s texts by means of those very associations and how comfortable she actually was with their editorial strategy, is important in order to understand and highlight her active and self-shaping role regarding the notion of witchcraft and its juxtaposition to domesticity; thus liberating her from a perception of her authorial persona as a frustrated writer hiding under layers of passive housewifery. After all, as Purkiss underlines, “Witches are not dutiful consumers of the truths of others, but makers of their own truths” (43). It is particularly important to stress the pragmatic component of paratexts as a tool to redirect readers’ reception (Elefante 30). As observed by Genette, paratext and its production methods change according to the time period, the culture, the genre, etc. for which they are ultimately conceived (Soglie 5): according to this perspective, studying paratexts means studying the diachronic context in which a certain text and/or author was presented and received. Therefore, Jackson’s (self-)portrayal in publishers’ paratexts might also be viewed as a mirror of the contemporary cultural climate concerning representations of witchcraft and their associations to femininity and the domestic space.

As mentioned in the introduction, one of the first textual representations of Jackson as a practicing witch comes from the paratextual information in The Road Through the Wall, her debut novel. Upon the publisher’s request to write her own biographical note, and after several unsatisfactory drafts, her husband Stanley Edgar Hyman, who seemed to control much of Jackson’s career (Oppenheimer 96), ended up writing it for her. This was his depiction of his wife concerning specifically her interest in magic:

She plays the guitar and sings five hundred folk songs […] as well as playing the piano and the zither. She also paints, draws, embroiders, makes things out of seashells, plays chess, and takes care of the house and children, cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc. She believes no artist was ever ruined by housework (or helped by it either). She is an authority on witchcraft and magic, has a remarkable private library of works in English on the subject, and is perhaps the only contemporary writer who is a practicing amateur witch, specializing in small-scale black magic and fortune-telling with a Tarot deck […] She is passionately addicted to cats, and at the moment has six, all coal black…

Interestingly, Hyman’s note seems to associate housework and magic by listing them one after another, as if housework too was a passion of hers. Based on a small autobiographical note written by Jackson for publicity purposes, this does not seem to have been the case: “i don’t like housework, but i do it because no one else will” (Franklin, Shirley Jackson 259). However, as many critics have observed (Franklin, Shirley Jackson 259; Oppenheimer 108; Burger 99), Jackson’s housewife persona was as significant as her witchy one within her self-definition. Growing up in the “Wasp homogeneity” (Oppenheimer 16) of Burlingame, California, under the influence of her conservative and oppressive mother Geraldine Bugby, Jackson was very much aware of what was expected of her in terms of gender roles in 1950s middle-class society. As noted by feminist critic Betty Friedan, the “feminine mystique” of those years prescribed women a lifetime of supposedly fulfilling homemaking and childrearing (11). In many respects, Jackson seemed compliant with the role assigned to her; yet, as some of her acquaintances observed, “She could be terribly conventional in many ways […] But then she would burst out of it. It was as if she could function along those lines, but periodically had to break out” (Oppenheimer 108). Indeed, this might provide an interpretative lens for her writing of disquieting stories all revolving around lonely women in search of domestic fulfilment. Hyman’s apparent dismissal of her more unconventional side (by defining her “a practicing amateur witch” and listing magic as just one of her many other hobbies) seems to discard the conflicting layers of her personality and is indicative of a failure to understand the complexity of the entirety of her persona. Finally, this is what made it on the inside flap of The Road Through the Wall’s first edition:

Jackson, we are reliably informed, is perhaps the only contemporary writer who is a practicing amateur witch, specializing in small-scale black magic and fortune telling with a tarot deck. Although the tarot deck has proved an inspiration for no less a figure than T. S. Eliot, a better index to Shirley Jackson’s work is that she is a successful short story writer (in The New Yorker, Mademoiselle, The American Mercury, The Yale Review, and others) and the mother of a boy and a girl, which may account for her penetrating pictures of children in The Road Through the Wall.

What is particularly striking about Farrar, Straus’ summarization of Hyman’s note is, to begin with, the added reference to T. S. Eliot having been inspired by the Tarot as well, as if attempting to confer upon Jackson more literary and intellectual authority than her husband’s patronizing comments conceded to her. Secondly, the observation that “a better index to Shirley Jackson’s work is that she is a successful short story writer” seems to compensate for Hyman’s eccentric portrayal by providing a more professional rendition of her authorial life. Nonetheless, the publisher decided to open the note with the description of her magical knowledge, sparking the collective imagination regarding Jackson’s lore.

The publication of “The Lottery” in The New Yorker’s June 1948 issue paved the way for Jackson’s immense popularity in the following years, prompting Farrar, Straus to make it the title story of her upcoming short fiction collection. Franklin’s description of one of the promotional ideas for the book might paint a significant picture of Jackson’s reception on the part of her publisher (or, at least, the reception they would have wanted for her): the campaign planned by publicity director Pyke Johnson would have involved inserting envelopes in the books, containing slips of paper with various prizes (from witches’ brooms to cauldrons) “awarded to readers whose slips bore a black dot” (Shirley Jackson 252). This initiative was apparently not well received by Jackson, who felt it trivialized her book’s literary merit. What is more, Farrar’s initial suggestion for the collection’s subtitle was Notes from a Modern Book of Witchcraft (Franklin, Shirley Jackson 252). Thus, it is clear that what the publisher had in mind for the framing of Jackson’s oeuvre concerned specifically the witchcraft theme. In a letter to her parents dated 11 April 1949, Jackson defines Farrar, Straus’ publicity plan as “acutely embarrassing” and continues:

you can imagine how i feel, in the middle of all this. sort of small, and scared, and desperately anxious to go up and tap j.h. jackson on the shoulder and say listen, mister, the book is terrible, honest. because it is, of course. i read it a few days ago and it’s flashy and sensational and all fixed up to sell.

What seemed to bother her the most was the story spread by Johnson about her breaking Alfred A. Knopf’s leg:

stanley and i made a joke about how it was obviously magic, and i did it, and we had to wait until alfred crossed over into vermont from new york because federal laws keep us from operating magic across a state line. it wasn’t a very good joke either. first thing we knew we started meeting our own joke everywhere we went, with all credit given me for breaking alfred’s leg. and the first thing the AP man said to me was that he understood i had broken the leg of a certain publisher who shall be nameless, and would i please tell him all about it. and later pyke slaps me on the back and says boy, that story sure is going to sell copies of the book. i feel about those things exactly as though i had a very bad hangover and everyone was telling me the screamingly funny things i had done the night before.

Although the tossing around of trivial references to black magic might have truly upset Jackson, it is important, in order to form a more accurate idea of her opinion, to consider her relationship with her parents too, who, as mentioned, were rather traditional (Oppenheimer 44). It is entirely possible she might have wanted to appear less enthusiastic than she was concerning these references to witchcraft. Indeed, her image as a somewhat homely sorceress does not seem to be something she wanted to abandon completely. As Chiho Nakagawa comments, “Shirley Jackson enjoyed the reputation as a witch from the early days of her career” (64). It is clear how witchcraft plays a great part in her own self-portrayal; in a letter to Mary Rand from Women’s Home Companion, dated 22 November 1948, this is the information she provides about herself:

I am twenty-nine, married, the mother of three children (Laurence, 6; Joanne, 3; Sarah, 3 weeks). […] We have a large house, six thousand books (including my fairly sizable witchcraft library), two black cats, temporarily no dog, and permanently no car. My husband is a folklorist and critic named Stanley Edgar Hyman, and my son sings folk songs to my guitar-playing.

The letter references once again her “black cats,” mentioned in Hyman’s biographical note as well. As Oppenheimer observes, “when her reputation as a witch was better known, she would refer to them as her familiars and often give them names out of black-magic lore” (116). Another recurring element is that of the “witchcraft library”, which seems to confirm once more the close relationship Jackson perceived between magic and writing. In her essay “Experience and Fiction”, she recalls:

One of my daughters made this abruptly clear to me when she came not long ago into the kitchen where I was trying to get the door of our terrible old refrigerator open; […]. My daughter watched me wrestling with it for a minute and then she said that I was foolish to bang on the refrigerator door like that; why not use magic to open it? I thought about this. I poured myself another cup of coffee and lighted a cigarette and sat down for a while and thought about it; and then decided that she was right. I left the refrigerator where it was and went in to my typewriter and wrote a story about not being able to open the refrigerator door and getting the children to open it with magic. When a magazine bought the story I bought a new refrigerator. That is what I would like to talk about now – the practical application of magic, or where do stories come from? (Hall 117)

As this little anecdote makes clear, the act of writing is magical as it provides money and the means to sustain a comfortable family lifestyle. Far from being superficial, Jackson’s association of writing and witchcraft is all the more groundbreaking since, as noted, housewives and, more generally, women of the time were not encouraged to earn their own money. It appears that domesticity was omnipresent in the equation, too. Indeed, Purkiss notes how early modern discourses around witchcraft often “enabled women to negotiate fears and anxieties of housekeeping” (93), and how the latter was invested with magic significance for housewives’ ability to transform items into something else (wool into clothes, milk into cream, etc.) (97). With the money earned from the story, Jackson does buy a new refrigerator: therefore, it is clear how homemaking (represented by the refrigerator, associated with food storage and preparation) is not conceived of by Jackson here as constraining, but as just another act of self-affirmation demonstrating the power of her own creativity. Once again, as noted by Dara Downey, “the figure of the witch becomes […] a means of navigating gender relations within domestic space” (65).

When The Lottery anthology was published, each of the five sections of the collection was introduced by excerpts from Saducismus Triumphatus, Joseph Glanvill’s 1681 treatise on the existence of witches; an editorial strategy which points once again at publishers’ portrayal of Jackson’s interest in witchcraft and black magic. The biographical note of this edition references Jackson as being “a practicing amateur witch,” adding that “Readers of The Lottery may find this not hard to believe.” In the paratexts of subsequent editions of her work, the reference to witchcraft persists. In the 1980 Robert Bentley edition of the collection, the biographical note describes Jackson as having a “quite normal” “personal life […], except for occasional dabbling in witchcraft”. The idea of “dabbling in magic,” first introduced by Hyman and his “practicing amateur witch” comment which, as noted, seemed to be attempting to minimize Jackson’s interest in witchcraft, is another recurring element of her paratextual presentation: the Popular Library 1962 edition of The Haunting of Hill House, for instance, reports Time Magazine’s definition of Jackson as “a self-confessed dabbler in magic.” It is possible that the notion of Jackson being a sort of goofy good witch was more appealing for publishers and readers alike, and less intimidating too; indeed, it could be easily argued this representation is pervaded by a clearly sexist undertone. Portraying Jackson as a “good witch” would have, in fact, assimilated her more to her housewife persona, positioning her in a sort of middle ground between ironic empowerment and comforting relatability at a time when the witch was starting to be more and more characterized as “the Other to the domestic housewife” (Downey 65). In fact, the less menacing trope of the “good witch” has been extensively used both in visual and literary representations of femininity: as noted by Meaghan Kirby, after the first representations of witches as evil, rebellious beings (Homer’s Circe and Shakespeare’s Three Witches of Macbeth are just two of the most prominent examples), the twentieth century brought forth the “first major rumblings” of good witches, starting with L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and its Good Witch of the North (Gibson 194-5), “in an uncritical reproduction of an ideological femininity of selflessness” (Purkiss 48). The 1940s and 50s continued this trend of curated, endearing witches (Kirby), with film productions such as René Clair’s romantic comedy I Married a Witch (1942) and Richard Quine’s Bell, Book, and Candle (1958). As Purkiss argues, the media’s repression of stereotypically unfeminine personality traits (such as anger or a desire for sex and money) in women characters offered the latter “no way to […] deal with situations other than pacifically, which often means passively” (48). Therefore, inserting Jackson into this trend thus conveyed a specific message: she is a witch, sure, but she is not really that dangerous, so there is no need to worry about her books being potentially subversive. Later on, in the latter half of the century, sitcoms such as Bewitched (1964-1972) and George Gladir and Dan DeCarlo’s comic book series Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1971-2009), adapted into the famous TV series of the same name (1996-2003), further cemented the characterization of magical female leads as absolutely non-threatening, as they try to live a domestic and domesticated life while hiding their secret, magic self, obviously making all sorts of laughable mistakes along the way.

When The Lottery collection came out, journalists and reviewers did not hesitate to focus on the element of witchcraft, too. As Jackson points out:

every advance review we’ve seen is favorable, although they keep referring to saki, and truman capote, and john collier, none of them writers i admire particularly, as people of whom the stories are reminiscent. and they’re all cashing in quite shamelessly on the press the devil has been getting recently, including half a dozen respectable books, mostly novels, which have come out in the last six months, and which use the devil as a character. also, there have been several odd witchcraft cases in the papers, and it all mounts up into a general interest in magic and such, which farrar and straus are exploiting, with me in the middle.

In that same letter to her parents, she also mentions having to give an interview for an Associated Press authorial profile:

[they] got me down to new york for one day last week to be interviewed by a very nice man from associated press, who said that he understood i was a specialist in black magic and would i please tell him all about it. fortunately he had just bought me two drinks, so i was able to tell him, very fluently indeed, about black magic and incantations and the practical application of witchcraft in everyday life, most of which i remembered out of various mystery stories.

Journalist W. G. Rogers’ remark that “Miss Jackson writes not with a pen but a broomstick” would be employed in many subsequent paratextual presentations of her works. Predictably, however, the interview (titled “Shirley Jackson Is ‘Sure ‘Nuff’ Witch”) seems to feature several comments on the striking contrast between her witchy side and her domestic one, such as the observation that “With attractive features and a pair of quite un-evil eyes behind glasses, she does not resemble a witch” (qtd. in Franklin, Shirley Jackson 258). This speaks to the aforementioned sexist undertones which often concerned Jackson’s representation on the part of journalists and reviewers, who tried to paint a less menacing picture of her complex personality: the “cozy housewife” persona was surely much more manageable to deal with. In fact, the interview with New York Times Book Review journalist Harvey Breit paints another a homely, curated picture of Jackson, who admits to believing in magic but that it is “a silly thing to talk about” (Hall 107). Breit portrays Jackson as “a wholesome, motherly” figure, who “radiates an atmosphere of coziness and comfort” (Hall 107). He concludes his opening paragraph upon commenting that “All in all, Miss Jackson looks like a mother” and that “She does indeed use a broomstick, but for household chores rather than as a means of transportation” (Hall 107).

As already observed, the duality of the housewife-witch identity was frequently toyed with by Jackson herself. As Franklin points out, “Jackson’s magic was a piece with her housewife persona: it had a thoroughly domestic cast” (Shirley Jackson 260). For instance, she often surprised dinner guests with blue steaks and red or green mashed potatoes, “depending on her mood” (Oppenheimer 108). Another anecdote sees her slamming open her kitchen drawers, only to find that the utensil she was looking for was always on top (Oppenheimer 189). In a sense, then, she turned to magic to make everyday life more appealing, to infuse it with her own creativity and freedom of thought. As Alissa Burger rightly argues:

Jackson’s use of witchcraft allowed her to be a housewife in her own unique way, as even the mundane annoyance of finding the right kitchen tool has, for Jackson, its elements of the magical […] Jackson’s understanding of and interaction within the space of her home was seemingly informed by discourses of magic and witchcraft, a perspective which highlights the ways in which Jackson claimed power within the traditional housewife role and exercised that power to enrich the lives of her family. (101)

However, apart from playing with the ‘good witch’ trope, I believe she also used magic to radically overturn the traditional wife-and-mother character the media seemed eager to associate her with and embrace it in her own way by juxtaposing it to her witch persona; a textual example of this is the ironic autobiographical note written for the 1957 edition of Raising Demons, later published in the 2015 collection Let Me Tell You with the title “The Real Me”:

I am tired of writing dainty little biographical things that pretend that I am a trim little housewife in a Mother Hubbard stirring up appetizing messes over a wood stove.
I live in a dank old place with a ghost that stomps around in the attic room we’ve never gone into (I think it’s walled up), and the first thing I did when we moved in was to make charms in black crayon on all the door sills and window ledges to keep out demons, and was successful in the main. There are mushrooms growing in the cellar, and a number of marble mantels that have an unexplained habit of falling down onto the heads of the neighbors’ children.
At the full of the moon I can be seen out in the backyard digging for mandrakes, of which we have a little patch, along with our rhubarb and blackberries. I do not usually care for those herbal or bat wing recipes, because you can never be sure how they will turn out. I rely almost entirely on image and number magic. My most interesting experience was with a young woman who offended me and who subsequently fell down an elevator shaft and broke all the bones in her body except one, and I didn’t know that one was there. (Jackson, Let Me Tell You 357)

The previous passage is one of the most poignant instances of how Jackson’s alleged magic was “inextricably intertwined with domesticity” (Burger 98) and often served as an outlet for her more disruptive impulses. Her own frustration with the role the media had assigned to her is made clear in the opening lines when she states that she is tired of pretending to be a “trim little housewife” (Jackson, Let Me Tell You 357); in fact, it is significant that the very first thing she does upon moving into her new place is “to make charms” (Jackson, Let Me Tell You 357), a liberatory act since it does not involve cooking or cleaning and turns homemaking into something dark and powerful. But the most interesting passage, in my opinion, is the one that sees her foraging in her backyard “At the full of the moon” (Jackson, Let Me Tell You 357), an activity which once again subverts traditional representations of home-cooked meals in 1950s America and is reminiscent of how the act of cooking is conceived of in We Have Always Lived in the Castle. It is not, therefore, a rejection on Jackson’s part of her housewife role (indeed, she continued to be a wife and a mother and to write cheerful stories about her family life): on the contrary, passages such as “The Real Me” and her other self-representations examined above emphasize her desire to turn the home into a space she can inhabit comfortably. The irony of “digging for mandrakes” right next to a more appropriate, and nourishing, patch of “rhubarb and blackberries” (Jackson, Let Me Tell You 357) is a clear example of the juxtaposition between magic and domesticity she sought for.

Jackson’s struggles with traditional gender roles are also reflected in the writing of The Witchcraft of Salem Village (1956), a non-fiction Landmark book for twelve-to-fourteen-year-old readers. Indeed, it is possible that, when drafting it, Jackson drew inspiration from her own interactions and feelings within the community of North Bennington, Vermont, where she resided with her family. It is known that the experience of being a newcomer in a small-town setting was not always a pleasant experience for the Hymans and especially for Jackson, who did not fit the gendered expectations of her fellow villagers (Franklin, Shirley Jackson 201-3). Therefore, it seems particularly significant that, when writing Witchcraft, Jackson decided to focus predominantly on the social conditions that prompted the prosecution of witches (who were often outsiders of some sort, as she must have felt herself while living in North Bennington). By doing so, she anticipates what several other literary treatments of the witch trials would focus on in later years (Franklin, Shirley Jackson 357); references to McCarthyism are also apparent in the book, “too obvious even to mention” (Franklin, Shirley Jackson 357). Moreover, Witchcraft is yet another confirmation of her very real (and not merely publicly construed, as some critics suggested) interest in the topic. A letter to Bernice Baumgarten, dated 31 March 1953 and concerning the drafting of the book, reads:

Salem witchcraft sounds like a fine topic, since I already have enough of a library on the subject to get the material easily, once our books are out of storage I can do preliminary work on the outline and generally drafting the book on the information I can find in the college library here. Would Random House object to a contract of, say, a year, allowing me enough time to get to my books?
If the witchcraft idea should prove too horrible for kids, would they let me switch to another subject?
But I’d enjoy doing it; I like the subject, and very much want, at present, something definite to work on.

In fact, despite many reviewers’ observations about the book’s “somewhat stilted tone” (Franklin, Shirley Jackson 356), The Witchcraft of Salem Village stands out for being the only non-fiction work by Jackson concerning specifically the topic of witchcraft, considered from an extremely accurate sociohistorical point of view.

In spite of her being acutely aware of her isolation in her North Bennington community, as she did not seem to properly fit neither the housewife role nor the witch one, another letter to Baumgarten (dated 2 January 1956), playfully describes a family situation and hints at her peaceful acceptance of her own duality, which seems to further demonstrate how she did not want to reject homemaking altogether:

Through a series of necromantic deals with a series of British sorcerers Stanley got me a magic ring which has inspired a good deal of speculation around this house; I have been through all my magic books and can identify it only as a talisman controlling the liberal sciences and probably a demon named Gamygyn, who appears in the form of a donkey and can converse with the spirits of the drowned. Sally, who regards herself as an authority, says I may make three wishes a day on the ring, but I was scared, so she and Barry borrowed the ring and wished for a color television set. I am curious to know how old liberal-science Gamygyn copes with color television.

If she had to be a social outcast after all, at least she got to have a little fun.
W. G. Rogers was surely right about one thing, when writing his authorial note for the Associated Press about Shirley Jackson: “She is hard to pin down” (Franklin, Shirley Jackson 258). As Oppenheimer points out, it is likely she only pretended to be a witch, playfully poking fun at this entire facet of her persona and at those who believed it (139). However, establishing whether she really was a practicing witch is not really the point, and it would be wrong to attempt to provide a definite answer to that question. What she wanted us to know, she told us herself: beyond that, lies her human mystery. Shirley Jackson did not like being confined to a single, straightforward personality: her witchy side rebelled against the rigid homemaking rules of her more domestic influences, and we are not entitled to decide which aspect of her persona was “The Real Me.” All facets of her character were probably true to her in different ways. What appears clear, from the material analyzed above, is her willingness to self-define and affirm her own empowerment through the means which were available to her. Witchcraft, domesticity and writing were three different facets of her personality which ultimately positioned her in the world. In Franklin’s words, then, the very significance of witchcraft resided merely in what it symbolized for her: “female strength and potency.”

Works Cited
Alessandroni, Michela. Le streghe della foresta di Pendle. flower-ed, 2023.

Anderson, Melanie R., and Lisa Kröger. Shirley Jackson, Influences and Confluences. Routledge, 2016.

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