Between Privilege and Constraint: The White-Middle Class Adolescent as a “Set of Have-Nots” in Shirley Jackson’s The Road Through the Wall

By Paula Puigvert Crous

Paula Puigvert Crous holds a master’s degree in Construction and Representation of Cultural Identities from the University of Barcelona (2023), ​​and she is currently a PhD candidate in the Linguistic, Literary and Cultural Studies program at the same institution. Her research focuses on Shirley Jackson’s work through the scope of queer studies and structural violence, focusing on how these fields gesture at alternative temporalities that could resist
patriarchal control. A key aspect of her research examines interpersonal violence among female characters, delving into how women navigate such violence through practices of conformity that simultaneously uphold gendered norms and convey strategic forms of agency.

Shirley Jackson’s debut novel The Road Through the Wall (1948)—hereafter Road—is set in the seemingly tranquil Californian suburb of Pepper Street, where a predominantly white, middle-class community tries to uphold its sense of respectability through voyeurism, surveillance and exclusion. As one summer unfolds, the novel traces how the community’s fixation to maintain its respectability gradually escalates into collective violence, culminating in the murder of three-year-old Caroline Desmond and the communal alienation of the adolescent Tod Donald. 

Within this tightly controlled setting, other adolescents like Harriet Merriam—and her seemingly innocent acts, such as writing love letter to the local boys expose the mechanisms of containment that structure Pepper Street, and ultimately reveal female adolescence as a condition of lack, deprived of knowledge, desire, and agency. This article examines Harriet’s encounters with her Chinese neighbor and her friendship with Marilyn Perlman, a Jewish girl, as key moments to understand how ideals of purity rely on the exclusion of racial and social “others.” At the same time, it intends to show how Harriet’s class privilege places her adolescent subjecthood in an ambiguous position, granting constrained agency while depriving her of political awareness. 

Road’s Fragmented Narration and Suburban Moral Vacuum

In his account of the formation of the suburbs and its subsequent developments, John Keats (1956) recounts that after World War II, the GI Bill and prevailing ideology pressured veterans into owning a house, using “both private and government propaganda” (xiv) while masking economic limitations as a freedom opportunity. State housing policy, fed by private speculation, soon turned the rhetoric of mobility to a capitalistic logic focused on “how much house could be offered for how little money” (xiv). As a consequence, many families were misguided to buy mass-produced, low-cost homes because “[i]t was, simply, the one thing available” (xv). These material constraints clearly shaped the landscape and physical organization of the suburbs, but more importantly constituted a moral framework where residents’ virtue was measured by their conformity to financial imperatives; an ideal that stood in stark contrast to the traditional American myth of self-reliance and individual freedom.

Road mirrors post-war conformity and lack of individuality through its fragmented narrative, rapidly shifting between Pepper Street residents when describing their households. Homeowners like the Desmonds, who “were able to build [their] first home” (Jackson 1), lived in a “rambling modern-style house” (2), and the Merriams, who owned several properties “at various places in the country” (5) represent those possessing both financial means and upward mobility. In contrast, there are tenants such as the Donalds or the Martins, who “were not rich enough to live in the style they coveted and not proud enough to live in opposition to it” (3). Through the relationship with their houses, Jackson depicts a wide-range of social strata to underscore disparities in wealth and mobility, yet more importantly to reveal how all social classes are bound by the same logic of suburban conformity; either through performative adherence, as in the meticulous maintenance and display of one’s home, or through passive compliance, merely existing through “patterns set out by other more enterprising men” (3).

Significantly, in her depiction of Pepper Street’s residents, Jackson’s narrator intertwines the limits of physical spaces with descriptions of domestic life, quickly shifting from the exterior of the houses to the inner lives of its dwellers. Caroline Desmond’s unfolding, for instance, is narrated in parallel with the growth of the family’s hedge, which “required the services of a boy […] to keep it trimmed” (2), as though Caroline’s own development were measured through the same logic of domestic upkeep. Similarly, Mr. Donald’s house is defined by its ability to accommodate all his family —“ample enough for […] their three children” and “pretentious enough for Mr. Donald’s wife and daughter to feel at home” (3)—while the Martin’s yellow house, “defiantly on Cortez Road,” is immediately followed by the narrator’s assessment of their children, George and Hallie, as “regrettable” (5). As Ruth Franklin observes in her introduction of the novel, Jackson’s children are portrayed “with at least as much gravity as the adults and are well their equals in connivance and inhumanity” (viii). In Pepper Street, children’s subjecthood stems from the premature immersion in their surroundings, where spatial order and social discipline are simultaneously absorbed. Then, the narrator’s rapid shifts from façades and gardens to constant references to children’s attitude blur the line between setting and self. In doing so, Jackson reveals from the very opening of the novel that the physical and moral architecture of suburbia mutually reinforce one another, fashioning both adults and children into products of the same enclosed social order. 

As Michael Louis Nardacci (1979) sustains, this formal disjunction reproduces the suburb’s lack of interpersonal connection within the community, with residents that once “accustomed to the failure of old values, … run the risk of moving into a moral vacuum” (54). In the same vein, in “The Suburban Unhomely,” Patrycja Antoszek argues that the fragmented form of the novel mirrors the emotional and behavioral discipline embedded in the suburban order of the 1950s, which was governed by an “insistence on order and hygiene characteristic.” Beyond architectural design and domestic upkeep, this suburban logic shaped the affective life of its inhabitants, casting “an overt expression of feelings” as “socially awkward or embarrassing” (16). Jackson’s fragmented narrative thus mirrors the suburb’s own fractured emotional terrain, where genuine feeling must be restrained and both material and conduct anomaly carefully flattened to preserve the community’s pristine façade. 

Narrating Innocence: Epistemic Gaps and the Formation of Girlhood

The drive toward writing and self-expression among adolescent girls in Road ought to be understood as part of a larger cultural context shaped by wartime disarray and the expectations of conformity in its aftermath. As Helgren and Vasconcellos (2010) explain, wartime mobilization had drawn young girls into close contact with adult forms of labor, accelerating their impasse into maturation and positioning girlhood at “a conflicting and uneasy intersection between a presumed childhood innocence and eroticized femininity” (172).¹ This tension was deliberately reinforced by cultural narratives, in which popular media promoted figures of moral decline like the “Victory Girl” or the “uniform chaser”—that is, girls “with tight sweaters and bright lipstick” (172)—while military propaganda explicitly positioned “The Victory Girl” overtly as “Menace No. 1.” 

In the post-war period, media further fed anxieties about adolescent subjectivity through what Miranda Corcoran (2022) identifies as tropological strategies. The media portrayals of girls gossiping and speaking privately on the telephone with their friends ultimately represented a set of “associations with promiscuity, disobedience and consumerist avarice” (29), and thus placed girls as instruments for instilling caution against female independence. In this way, Corcoran notes that this ordinary image of the girl on the phone, more than a simple depiction, functioned as a “discursive formation” (29) that placed teenage girls not as a naturally occurring phenomenon, but a socially manufactured narrative which “mediate[d] a significant transition in how teenage girlhood was being conceptualized during this period” (29).

Within this cultural framework, Harriet Merriam’s letter writing in Road reflects the broader tension between adolescent self-expression and cultural attempts to contain it. The aforementioned letters, written “cautiously” to the boys of the community and “[in] the way love letters were written” (Jackson 12), represent a deliberated display of power and reveal the girls’ awareness of the performative nature of love letter writing. What unsettles the mothers, then, especially Mrs. Merriam, who label the letters as “indiscreet things” and as “childish [….] but improper” (15), is not so much the content itself, but the image of their daughters engaging in a form of communication that implies knowing how to articulate their thoughts “cautiously” and discern the “right” way to write them. This supposed cognitively emptiness that mothers attribute to their daughters functions as a symbolic screen onto which adults project fantasies of innocence and purity, echoing Kincaid’s notion of the child as a “set of have nots,” similar to a blank slate without notions such as agency, sexuality, or knowledge. As a result of this persistent infantilization “‘[the child’s] flatness signifies nothing’ and therefore ‘does not interfere with our projections,’ our interest ‘to discover the erotic […] in the blank page’” (qtd. in Stockton, 12). Harriet’s “saying,” then, becomes threatening not for its content, but for how it embodies visually and discursively a shift from silence to self-expression that ultimately destabilizes the sociocultural image of the innocent and unknowing child.

The fact that Mrs. Merriam refers to the letters in terms of indiscreetness and improperness does more than to convey a moral judgement; it cuts off Harriet’s access to alternative modes of desire and expression. As Butler notes in Bodies That Matter (1993), “the ‘subject’ is produced in language through an act of foreclosure” (190), and what is excluded persists as a “defining negativity” (190). Harriet’s growing awareness of the performative nature of her writing becomes fully clear once her mother discovers the letters. At that moment, she understands “without question, the eventual series of acts to be forced from her” (Jackson 11), revealing that her growing comprehension of suburban codes is inseparable from the obligation to perform them correctly. That is why when she asks herself how to proceed after her mother’s demand that she stops writing the letters, the question is not an exploration of agency but a rehearsal within the pre-scripted framework of propriety, simply “because ‘What-shall-I-do?’ seemed the formation of sounds most likely to apply to a situation like this” (11). With a subjectivity rooted in a negative rhetoric, her agency is built upon a framework of lack; then, rather than actively resisting this “series of acts” that she realizes lie ahead of her, she only wonders about finding the appropriate way to perform them gracefully and with dignity in the eyes of her mother. 

Her “freedom,” then, is not constrained by her naivety but by the absence of a cultural language to openly reject gender scripts. In fact, Harriet fully understands the tone and content a proper love letter should have, like those written by Helen Williams; it is the critique towards her friend’s sentimental rhetoric that allows her define what she does and does not want to express. Helen’s letters ended, “‘kiss you a thousand times’” (13), but Harriet admits that she “could not bring herself to write such a thing, at least partly because the thought of kissing George Martin’s dull face horrified her” (13). The danger, then, lies less in the content of the letters than in the circulation of narrative forms, which enables a trial-and-error process to articulate their subjectivities beyond fixed notions of innocence. 

However, even Harriet rejects Helen’s sentimental rhetoric, she still remains trapped between that rejection and the inability to replace it with her own verbal framework. According to Kathryn Bond Stockton (2007), cultural misconceptions of children as non-violent and politically inert render their resistance invisible, resulting in what she calls “sideways growth”: a hidden and oblique development where feelings and motives are not fully recognized, ultimately “mak[ing] for a model of surreptitious sideways growth (for motive and the child) that we, as a culture, otherwise deny” (303). Harriet recognizes the gendered and sentimental scripts she is expected to follow but cannot openly refuse them. Instead, she misplaces her frustration onto George’s “dull face,” reframing her resistance into the socially acceptable language of personal dislike rather than confronting the broader heteronormative rituals inherent to the adolescent experience. 

Protecting Innocence: The Role of Otherness in Shaping Girlhood

In Miranda Corcoran’s account (2022), adolescence, far from neutral, has always been a historical and cultural stage shaped both by the interplay of race and class. Prior to the 1930s, the term “adolescent” referred primarily to white children attending school, while working-class and non-white youth carried the label of “laborers.” Still, teenage population was brought in a broader cultural framework due to the expansion of schooling during the Great Depression, which started fostering an ideal of teenage innocence grounded on the contain of sexuality and labor threats. Postwar affluence further deepened these socioeconomic divisions: white, middle-class teenagers, supported by families able to provide “previously unimaginable luxuries” (120-121), could explore the unruliness of their identities. This freedom posed an ambivalence into the figure of the adolescent seen as “an adult in training” (121), making it oscillate between “fresh-faced innocence and threatening, precocious sexuality” (122). However, this space for ambiguity granted to white-middle class innocence did not shelter minority and working-class girls, whose sexuality was framed as inherently dangerous and deviant.² 

In Jackson’s novel, the focus on Helen Williams after the letter scandal confirms that suburban innocence is relationally constructed, dependent upon a particular socioeconomic system of privilege. Harriet, as a white, middle-class girl, moves within an ambivalent space where her transgressions are reframed according to the standards of her class; an indulgence that Helen, daughter of a working-class household, is denied since the beginning. Helen’s curiosity and emerging sexuality—seen in walking around at night with a gas station man or seeking to visit her father in the city (Jackson 21-22)—are deemed as inherently dangerous, leaving no possibility of redemption or reframing. The neighborhood mothers, especially Harriet’s, label Helen as “the source of it all” (15) and “a bad influence on all the children in the neighborhood” (55), diminishing her into a cautionary figure. Harriet’s playfulness with letter-writing is quickly neutralized through comparison with Helen, whose perceived precociousness —“a good deal too mature for their own good” (39; emphasis in the original)— constantly reinforces the purity Harriet must uphold. In the same vein, Mrs. Merriam insistence on her daughter that “we won’t see that Helen Williams any more […] there’s no need for my girl to run around with that sort of person” (30), emphasizes Harriet’s necessity of distancing herself from emerging sexuality and working-class traits. More importantly, Mrs. Merriam’s use of the pronoun “we” initially seems to create the illusion of mother-daughter boundness. Yet, voiced through the perspective of a stay-at-home mother, it also signals Harriet’s privilege familial situation which, unlike Helen’s, places her within a protective “we”; a social and economic buffer that safeguards her while simultaneously enforcing moral restraint within the domestic sphere. 

By enacting such behavior, Mrs. Merriam embodies the postwar domestic ideology tied to the housewife’s role, shaped by the expectation that “it was their patriotic duty to leave the workforce to become housewives, mothers and especially consumers, to get the economy rolling again” (Ewan and Bawandall 149). This position extended beyond domestic labor, granting the stay-at-home mother both institutional authority and moral guardianship within the domestic realm. The very oversight Mrs. Merriam exercises—enabled by her class position—allows Harriet to encounter difference and test boundaries within limited freedom, though always conditioned and restrained by white middle-class decorum. Then, when Harriet tells her mother that some neighborhood girls have visited Mr. Lee, the Chinese neighbor, Mrs. Merriam warns her against doing the same, yet she transmits the commandment through mixed cues—“drop[ping] her voice slightly,” “glanc[ing] sideways at her husband,” and “appear[ing] to enjoy it so much” (Jackson 56)—as if enforcing restraint and permitting transgression at once.  

Harriet and Virginia’s later encounter with Mr. Lee confirms how their apparent transgression is, in fact, enabled by the class constraints inherent to their status. The ease with which both girls move through the neighborhood, bringing them to visit Mr. Lee’s apartment, stands in stark contrast to his clear prohibition from renting there: “I couldn’t rent an apartment in this house […] Not in this neighborhood” (83). In this sense, Mr. Lee’s housing remark gestures the persistence of broader racial and legal inequalities underpinning post-war America, which were enforced through protective covenants, Federal Housing Association policies, and “[u]nofficially […] unwritten agreements and traditions of segregation” (Ewan and Bawandall 175). Beyond legal restrictions, these practices were reinforced socially through “interlocking friendships, mutual loyalties and existing social pressure” (174), ensuring the neighborhood remained “lily white” (175) even after the official abolishment of formal barriers. Examining the broader context surrounding Mr. Lee encounter with the girls clarifies how Harriet and Virginia’s privilege derives not from an inherent quality, but rather from institutional and housing policies, as well as communal loyalties, that allow their transgression to unfold within a deeply protective enclave.

Later, when Virginia realizes that Mr. Lee is only a servant in the apartment, she quickly urges them to leave, yet Harriet, guided by the moral framework instilled by her mother, instinctively placing propriety above ethical reflection. She thus falls back on “her conscious manners,” addressing Mr. Lee with deliberate politeness: “It very nice to ask us to come […] I hope you won’t get into trouble for having guests up here” (Jackson 84). Harriet’s insistence on performing innocence during a tense encounter enables her to enjoy privilege without real awareness, turning overt racial segregation into an anomaly she can manage effectively through decorum and civility. Consequently, both girls inhabit a subjectivity that, as Lauren Berlant (2011) puts it, is “virtually ahistorical, fleeting, phantasmatic, or a space of symptomatic pseudoactivity” (64), symptomatic of a structural privilege that allows them to engage with social “others” while insulating them from any political understanding of the systemic inequalities. In his analysis of the novel, Richard Pascal (2016) further extends this argument emphasizing how the girls’ prejudice mirrors the “ideological unobtrusiveness” (135) of suburban exclusion, embedded so deeply in voyeuristic social life that is disguised as morally neutral. For instance, just as Harriet and Virginia display apparent politeness, the exclusion of the Perlmans, the Jewish family, from community events like the neighborhood play reveals how social belonging is maintained through collective acts of moral policing, “both in behavior and gossipy innuendo” (Pascal 135).

The same containment that maintains racial boundaries permeate in the interactions with those children with a working-class background, such as the nine-year-old Hallie Martin. Similar to Hellen Williams, Hallie is being raised by a family who “were out, working at their respective jobs” (Jackson 135) and thus inhabits a social space largely ungoverned by decorum and maternal oversight. Consequently, her actions are condemned for the sole reason of Hallie performing them outside the structures of restraint that would otherwise lend them legitimacy. One afternoon, Hallie steps daintily into the street to flirt with the wall’s builders, but her audacity is not read as innocent play—unlike Harriet’s letter writing—but as premature impropriety, an indicative of the lack of supervision tied to her working-class status. Mrs. Perlman’s later speech in her visit to Mrs. Merriam, in which she reports that her husband found Hallie “[a]ll alone […] just standing there with her—with her thumb, you know, and she was all dressed up, and she was wearing lipstick” (138), draws attention to the visible emblems of unrestrained femininity. The act of dissecting Harriet’s feminine attire constructs her body as one of uninhibitedness, an embodied deviance resulting from a mother who “works until late at night” (138) and from one unable to provide the continuous moral and physical supervision that post-war ideology expected of the stay-at-home mother.

Kincaid argues that innocence, far from being an inherent trait in children, has evolved into “a consumer product, an article to possess, as a promise to the righteous and the reward to the dutiful” (15). In Road, the writing task that Mrs. Merriam assigns to Harriet, presented as an invitation to write together (Jackson 30), exemplifies a transaction of power where the girl is kindly invited by her mother to “prove” her moral worth under the guise of intimate bonding. Although Mrs. Merriam admits she writes “not very well” (30), she insists on supervising Harriet’s work, revealing that the exercise’s purpose lies not in expression but in the hierarchical mother-daughter transaction it enacts. In fact, after the letter incident, Harriet feels sorry for her to the extent of admitting that she loved her “as one should love a mother, tenderly and affectionately” (30). The transactional nature of the mother-daughter bond becomes evident as Harriet turns affection into duty, driven by the logic that genuine love must be expressed through a sentimentalized, morally acceptable language that reaffirms her blind obedience.

Mrs. Merriam’s regulation of Harriet’s writing production reflects the broader logic of children’s objectification in Jackson’s fiction that Anna Joanna Bartnicka (2023) addresses in her analysis of the novel. Bartnicka argues that children, as a result of “being in a disadvantageous position with respect to age,” are frequently compelled to embody the traits their parents wish to display to the community—strength, purity and refinement—with the risk of being reduced to the label of object and thus forced to face all “its ethical consequences.” When placed as symbolic objects, teenagers like Harriet can be shaped and disciplined in ways reminiscent of Pat Byrnes or Arti Roberts, whose seemingly trivial behaviors, from sitting to eating, are strictly policed by their families. That is, just as the physical rituals of other children transform the most trivial living actions into “a matter of following instruction,” Mrs. Merriam’s policing of Harriet’s writing converts complex affective experiences into exercises of structured and formal discipline.

Also, from her habit of reading, Harriet learns to adjust her emotions according to the sentimental scripts of nineteenth-century fiction. Her reading of romantic texts such as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women leads her not to interrogate her class status but to render her emotions legible through acceptable feminine tropes. As Hattenhauer points out (2003), Harriet’s engagement with literature reflects “the narratives that inserted her into the social text, or failed to” (88). Thus, when she fantasizes about the girls who might move into the house-for-rent, she envisions their friendship not through real affinity, but leveling it as a literary legend, as “they would be like in Little Women, and Harriet’s friend would be Jo (or just possibly Beth, and they could die together, patiently)” (Jackson 97). The friendship, then, becomes more of a kind of script resulting in a narrative and coherent resolution, which eventually denies the intimate and potentially disruptive dimension of any real bond.

Unlike Harriet, whose emotions are disciplined by an aesthetic narrative framing, Marilyn Perlman, a Jewish girl navigating the constant scrutiny of a white suburban neighborhood, embodies a more candid and unfiltered embodied response. So, when the mothers of both friends strike up a conversation delicately addressing the disappearance of the nine-year-old Hallie Martin, Marilyn “broke in eagerly” (138), speaking with blunt honesty: “Her grandmother said she was going to give Hallie the beating of her life, and I don’t blame Hallie for not wanting to go home because they were sure mad at her” (138). In explicitly addressing the violence that the adults only hint at, Marilyn reveals an approach to the situation through the legacy of communal solidarity inherent to her Jewish heritage, while gesturing to an alternative kinship that actually contemplates feelings such as anger and the awareness of vulnerability.

Although Harriet’s persona is bound by class and narrative convention, her friendship and secret ritual with Marilyn of “burying their writings” and vowing not to “share or look at each other’s writing for ten years” opens up a rare space for unconstrained emotional expression (112). According to Bartnicka, within the social children-adult hierarchy embedded in Jackson’s suburban setting, childhood occupies a marginal not-yet-defined zone where alternative ways of being can be conceived. Harriet and Marilyn’s deferred ritual momentarily frees the girls, especially Harriet, from the rigidness of the hierarchy, allowing them to experience in nature “the kind of calmness, equality, and future potentiality that is absent from the restricting subject-object hierarchy upheld by their parents in their homes.” Furthermore, the ten-year delay of their ritual subverts the social economy of girlhood, which, as Kincaid notes, ties a girl’s value to her romantic or sexual potential within a “save-and-squander economical model” (54). By removing their writings from immediate circulation, both girls postpone their engagement with adult scrutiny and thus craft a space for desire and affect that cannot be consumed or codified, at least immediately.

Therefore, when Harriet is compelled to end her friendship with Marilyn and relocate their bond into the socially sanctioned framework, following Mrs. Merriam’s demand to “set a standard” and “do what is expected of us” (Jackson 148), she again channels her uncomfortable feelings through the lens of sentimental narration. Drawing on Kristeva’s claim that abjection involves expelling what “disturbs identity, system, order” and “does not respect borders, positions, rules” (qtd. in Antoszek, 18), Harriet’s socialization pressures her to reject Marilyn for safeguarding her own status as a “good decent girl” (Jackson 29). Her mother’s instruction to “see her once more, in order to tell her exactly why you are not to be friends any longer” (149; emphasis in the original) converts what was an emotional and pre-symbolic bond into a socially coded act of separation, compelling Harriet to speak not in her own “filthy words” (149) but in the purified language her mother “had spread over so long a time” (158).

Then, just as in any sentimental text from the nineteenth century in which social decorum is required, Harriet is positioned as a dutiful protagonist who must “move on” by setting class standards under the guise of responsibility: “People of my class are always nice to everybody […] but we have to set standards” (158). The discourse of decorum obscures the underlying harshness of the act—the racial and class marginalization of a Jewish girl within a WASP neighborhood—, being articulated by a protagonist who, when the narrative requires inner complexity, is suddenly confronted with the fact that “she had no words to use to go any further, whatever she tried to say now would only be the same words over again” (158). Ultimately, Harriet’s privilege to be schooled in propriety strikes in contrast with Marilyn, who throughout the novel becomes less a friend than a cautionary figure. So, when Marilyn insults Harriet after ending the friendship, calling her a “big fat slob,” Harriet initial pain is quickly neutralized by adult authority: “I’ll tell my mother” (158). In Pepper Street, otherness is never absorbed into the moral order of whiteness; it functions only as a moral warning, reinforcing the boundaries the dutiful girl must respect to secure her place within proper suburban womanhood. 

Violence Turned Inwards: The Child as a Blank Slate 

Harriet’s ending of her friendship with Marilyn by setting class boundaries mirrors the symbolic role of the wall separating Pepper Street from a larger state; a structure less a physical barrier than as an apparatus for preserving the resident’s moral and social integrity. As Richard Pascal states, the wall represents “an effective end to Pepper Street life” (11), suggesting that the villagers envision threats—“small boys with stones” and “curious trespassers gathering flowers” (Jackson 134)—only in imagination, never as a tangible reality. What the residents truly fear, then, is not intrusion itself, but the lingering presence of difference. Within this logic, the wall safeguards what Pascal describes as the “sacred” inward gaze of suburban life, in which “[t]he ‘enclosed spaces’ of modern households and communities are ‘sacred’ primarily insofar as they look inward upon themselves” (Pascal 140). 

In the same vein, Harriet’s unease during her walk with Marilyn past the men dismantling the wall stems less from the workers’ presence than from the fear of being seen outside the familiar guidelines of propriety that protect her position within Pepper Street: “[m]aybe the men were laughing […] because she was so fat, and Marilyn looked so small beside her” (Jackson 157). Her discomfort with the men’s laughter is recast similarly to the earlier incident with Mr. Lee’s; it is not a critique of social issues such as anti-Semitism or class prejudice, but a performance of manners and fear of maternal judgment as “she was oppressed with the dreadful thought that perhaps her mother would hear the men laughing at her” (157). In this sense, Harriet’s anxiety about being misread gets translated into class propriety and maternal oversight, with an inward, moralized anxiety that sustains the repressiveness of suburban logic even after its physical boundaries have crumbled.

Harriet’s focus on polished performance mirrors the community’s neutralization of violence, especially Caroline Desmond’s murder. Just as Caroline’s life is narrated through clichés of feminine purity—“simply an angel” (37)—her death is reduced to vague tropes like “a great climactic festival” or an impersonal “tragedy, in which case they were all called upon to act together as human beings” (181). Under a universalizing rhetoric that points at a collective moral obligation as humans, not as specific members of a community, the focus shifts from a concrete material context to an abstract ideal of humankind. Similarly, the wondering among the villagers about the crime’s perpetrator, fixated on trivial details such as Tod Donald being “too small” (190) to “heft a rock that big” (190), seeks a logical resolution of the case, rather than a real understanding of the killer’s motive. Then, by posing the attention only on the identification of the scapegoat, the crime is narrated instead of processed: a consumable story that prioritizes closure and coherence over confrontation with systemic violence. As Pascal notes, the villagers’ handling of Tod’s alleged culpability through “its guilty pleasures” such as gossip and voyeurism operates less as an act of moral reckoning than as a ritual of collective self-definition that allows them to act “for a brief while, as an old-fashioned community, a village, rather than a mere agglomeration of autonomous and discrete individuals” (149). Yet this fleeting sense of togetherness ultimately reinforces the same mechanisms of containment once upheld by the wall: an ethic of individualism grounded in the constant surveillance of both self and neighbor.

Through this illusion of moral order, the community seeks to uphold what David W. Noble identifies as “the central myth of America as a new Eden: ‘timelessness’ (Eternal)” (96). Yet, according to Hattenhauer, Jackson’s proto-postmodern approach diverges from the usual model of sacrificial scapegoating, rendering this renewal “at best qualified” (96). The violence that emerges becomes ambiguous in its effect, folding inward and becoming self-defeating. Shaped by her middle-class upbringing, Harriet takes in external pressures as a form of self-repression, which ultimately turns the mythic “timelessness” of the American Eden into a state of emotional stasis. One of the villager’s remarks at the party celebrated near the novel’s end, when she tells Harriet that she does not have the “air of a pretty woman,” condemning her to “walk like you’re fat, whether you are or not” (Jackson 170; emphasis in the original), does more than disrespect Harriet’s appearance. Based on a temporary physical observation, it becomes an existential and permanent truth that positions Harriet within a social label; not only the one of the non-beautiful, but also of the dis-empowered. 

So, the morning after the tragedy, she wakes “with a recollection of disaster,” yet lacking the means to process grief or violence, she experiences it only as a “flat dead feeling inside her” (189). Even Mr. Desmond, Caroline’s grieving father, who should appear as an embodiment of paternal mourning, is flattened as “a part of it, […] standing laughing in the kitchen when she went by, following Miss Tyler into the house to hear … fat” (189). This emotional incongruence —laughter intertwined with a child’s murder— momentarily fractures Harriet’s perception. However, rather than recognizing it as the villager’s moral failure or as their voyeuristic tendencies, Harriet internalizes it through the language of self-discipline: “fat fat fat girl […] You’ll always be fat, she thought, never pretty, never charming, never dainty” (189). This repetition turns fleeting shame into an ontological truth; she is not just feeling fat but being fat, deprived of any possibility of change.

Unable to externally articulate her grief, Harriet turns pain inward, enacting Freud’s notion of melancholic as a process in which “the ego refuses to let go of the object, and preserves the object ‘inside itself’” (qtd. in Ahmed, 159). As a white middle-class adolescent shaped by privilege, Harriet becomes a collateral damage of the suburban logic of containment, caught between the desire to transgress social boundaries and the need for self-discipline that her class upbringing requires. Unlike adolescents such as Helen Williams, Hallie Martin, and Marilyn Perlman—socially unprotected by their lack of class privilege and racial difference—, Harriet’s unruly actions are contained by a socioeconomic structure that can reframe her innocence through negation of otherness. Yet this same privilege produces its own absences, because in internalizing maternal standards of propriety Harriet transforms her emotions into aesthetic objects and recasts systemic inequities as questions of personal behavior. In doing so, she embodies the figure of the child defined through absence; stripped of any political awareness, authentic desire, and the possibility of genuine adolescent experiences.

The community’s fixation on Tod Donald’s alleged guilt and its moralized account of Caroline Desmond’s death further reveal how Pepper Street sustains its illusion of order through voyeurism and internal surveillance, instead of the redemption promised by older sacrificial myths. These forms of watchful surveillance extend inward through Harriet’s shame and self-surveillance, ultimately leaving her in emotional stillness and preventing her from grieving Caroline’s death within a framework of understanding. In this sense, Harriet’s adolescence, shaped by privilege as much as the withholding of desire and self-awareness, becomes the blank slate upon which the community inscribes its fantasy of timelessness. The tragedy of Pepper Street’s teenage girl lies not in the collapse of Eden itself, but in her role as both the outcome and the vehicle of a myth sustained by epistemic absence, repression and emotional stasis.

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press, 2014.

Antoszek, Patrycja. “The Suburban Unhomely: Alienation and Anxiety in Shirley Jackson’s The Road Through the Wall.” Explorations: A Journal of Language and Literature, vol. 5, 2017, pp. 12-24. 

Bartnicka, Anna Joana. “The Object World Re-Enchanted: The Agency of Humans and Things in Shirley Jackson’s The Road Through the Wall and The Haunting of Hill House.” Shirley Jackson Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, 2023.

Baxandall, Rosalyn and Elizabeth Ewan. Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened. Basic Books, 2000. 

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press, 2011.

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Notes