Tell It Again: The Anxious Rituals of Postwar Domesticity in The Road Through the Wall

By Emily Naser-Hall

Emily Naser-Hall is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies and coordinator of the Film Program at Western Carolina University. Her research focuses on cultural and legal narratives of sexuality, femininity, and privacy post-1945 American literature and film. She has published on the works of Shirley Jackson, gothic domesticity, sexuality, and gendered labor, with forthcoming projects on the frontier in American folk horror, sonic rhetorics in post-#MeToo cinema, and animated motherhood in new indigenous horror films. Her first monograph, Conceive and Control: American Narratives of Privacy, Sexuality, and Reproduction, is forthcoming from UNC Press in fall 2027.

In the years following World War II, the quotidian domestic dreads of the Cold War housewife intersected with the geopolitical existential terrors of the atomic age. Contemporary gothic literatures redefined traditional generic conventions in light of these cultural anxieties. Postwar gothics articulate a tone of simultaneous horror at the endemic embeddedness of crisis ordinariness and exhaustion within an all-encompassing yet mundane system of culturally mandatory fear and surveillance. Developing homemaking technologies in the American midcentury promised to ease the housewife’s labor in the interests of saving time and promoting marital harmony. Writing in the context of a culture industry centered on the ideologies of a happy home, Shirley Jackson explores and ultimately rejects mandatory domestic routinization to rescript routine as an exercise in futility, a form of delaying that inevitable that, by virtue of the inevitable always arriving anyway, fails to maintain the security it promises. 

In her debut novel The Road Through the Wall, Jackson utilizes linguistic repetition and a narrative emphasis on household patterns to recast postwar domestic routines as anxious rituals emptied of their magical potential, incapable of accomplishing anything. Jackson constructs a superficially utopic California suburb whose security derives specifically from its residents’ performance of small social rites to forestall the inevitable breach of the eponymous wall. When the combined forces of Pepper Street’s domestic routines fail to prevent the wall’s destruction, what invades the street’s tenuously maintained stasis is an extreme iteration of violence that dismantles the security that fastidiously adhered-to routines cannot evade.

The Road Through the Wall (hereinafter Road) establishes Jackson’s career-long preoccupation with domesticity as a fundamentally violent enterprise. Published shortly before her famous story “The Lottery” appeared in The New Yorker on June 26, 1948, Road reads almost like a fully fleshed explication of the social and familial conditions that could, in Jackson’s worldview, conclude with the stoning of Tessie Hutchinson. Road takes place on Pepper Street, an upper-middle-class neighborhood in California loosely based on Jackson’s own childhood home. The majority of the novel seems to accomplish little aside from an extended explication of the daily goings-on of Pepper Street’s residents, a series of suburban near-replicants whose demographics Jackson explains in a walk-through of the street’s homes and their residents in the novel’s first chapter. Aside from a few outliers—a single Jewish family, a working widow with two children, the transient residents of the street’s one rental property—Pepper Street is populated by nuclear families intent on maintaining the suburb’s respectability. When news breaks that the wall that separates Pepper Street from its adjoining lower-class neighborhood is to be demolished and a new housing development constructed, the street’s residents, their children in particular, rapidly devolve in a series of broken patterns, secret rituals, and illicit debauchery. 

In the novel’s explosive climax, three-year-old Caroline Desmond, the daughter of Pepper Street’s wealthiest family, goes missing during a raucous party and is later found dead. Although the novel refuses to reveal whether Caroline’s death was the result of foul play or an accident, the families immediately turns on Tod Donald, the neighborhood outcast who, during his interview with the police, hangs himself in his family’s kitchen. Road concludes with brief mentions of the fates of Pepper Street’s residents after the destruction of the wall and the exposure of the suburb to the outside world.

Domestic Routinization in Postwar America

In the aftermath of World War II, cultural narratives of security and normality reified the home space and its association with maintaining a form of social stability that would guarantee peace on the national front. The postwar half of the 1940s, William Graebner argues, was characterized by a culture of peace that valued privacy, family, and consumption, all of which relied on the reunification of a domestic American community (9). The promise of a new day, however, remained tinged with residual wartime anxieties made more potent by mounting tensions with the Soviet Union and a general unease concerning what, after two world wars and the Great Depression, so-called normalcy was even supposed to be. Graebner coins the 1940s the Age of Doubt, with contingency and anxiety serving as the dominant tones of the immediate postwar era. The failure of World War II to establish international security, the Holocaust, the dropping of the atomic bomb, and the beginning of the cold war created an atmosphere of uncertainty in life itself and in the values of American life in particular. “Americans turned to peace with an almost desperate self-consciousness,” Graebner argues, “as if living itself had been suspended for the duration and might prove a custom difficult to revive” (101). Given this continual uncertainty and doubt, the American people sought a bulwark, a source of stability and security. They found that stability, at least superficially, within the familial home.

Fortunately for contemporaneous readers, an explosion of texts concerning the establishment and maintenance of the nuclear family home provided guidance on the rituals that would ensure the domestic space’s, and therefore the nation’s, security. A wealth of advice columns in Good Housekeeping, Woman’s Day, Collier’s, and others, many of which Jackson herself penned, emphasized proper housekeeping techniques not only as a method for maintaining an inviting home, but also as a strategy for keeping a marriage happy and a family at peace. A compilation of popular advice columnist Abigail Van Buren’s Dear Abby articles on marriage pithily links the domestic and the public as mutually reinforced by a peaceful marriage, as one section of columns is published under the subtitle “Putting up a good (home) front” (42). Homemaking advice writing became so widespread that it developed its own rhetorical and generic conventions. “Although a widely available popular culture text,” David Gudelunas argues, “the newspaper advice column takes on a position of authority and seriousness by its place within the pages of the mainstream, ‘hard news’ press” (3). Typically presented in a question-and-answer format, columns establish a relationship between reader and writer as dependent on the columnist’s authority and domestic prowess, an ethos acquired through the writer’s own subject position as a fellow housewife with years of experience. The columnist herself thus serves “as a moral barometer as much as a source of interpersonal advice” (Gudelunas 4). 

The specific content of homemaking advice columns matters less than the sheer proliferation of the genre and the narrative conventions that they create. At the level of language, advice columns, particularly when presented in collected volumes, utilize repetition and a moralistic tone to convey both the necessity of routine in domestic spaces and the centrality of these routines to such critical matters as marital harmony and security. Frances Benton’s 1956 Etiquette, for instance, promises a complete guide “for day-to-day living the correct way” (2). She defines etiquette as not purely a matter of manners, but as “form—the specific and rigid form established by tradition” (3, italics original). Benton combines manners and form with the third factor of usage, “our knowledge of how thing are done today,” with the objective to “help you fit comfortably, smoothly, and with confidence into any group of people you find yourself among, in any part of America” (3). Maintaining etiquette as a matter of manners, form, and usage, then, acquires the mandate of homogenization, such that adhering to domestic standards equates to social acceptance and harmony. The specific form of standard-keeping manifests, as Etiquette and other contemporaneous advice tomes establish, as rigidly respected routines. Even Heloise, whose Housekeeping Hints she dedicates not to “the fanatical housekeeper…but to the everyday housewife,” lays out her advice in to-do lists, often moving from room to room in a geography of endless tasks that must be performed regularly and with militant attention (3).

Road locates the heart of domestic routinization within the American suburbs. Jackson describes Pepper Street’s residents as spending their lives “living in the patterns set out by other more enterprising men” (3). She clearly demarcates the spatial configurations of Pepper Street’s suburban haven in the language of routinized naming: “It was called the wall, and the highway was called the highway, and the gates were called the gates” (6). The repetitive quality of Jackson’s language in describing the borders of the suburb lends this listing of names and boundaries an aura of mystical protection, as if by naming these features and characterizing said naming as a kind of call-and-response, Pepper Street may safeguard its physical structures within the magic circle. The suburban residents rely on the predictability of cyclical time to govern the rituals of their lives. The novel begins, however, at the downswing in the nuclear family’s cycle, with the onset of summer vacation both foretelling a predictable seasonal temporality and introducing a liminal period determined less by set patterns and more by its separateness from the rest of the year: “It was the last day of school; fortunately the weather was to continue warm and fair until the end of summer, when school began again” (7). This suburban time structure, as Zofia Kolbuszewska argues, “looks forward only to encounter the mythical past of the origin…in order to retreat into a tidily controllable new old world” (90). The events of the novel, then, take place during this rupture from the familial routine of school, and as such the ubiquitous presence of Pepper Street’s children will play a vital role in the unfolding of the suburb’s dissolution.

The residents fastidiously maintain their borders through performative domestic rituals that Jackson foretells early in the novel will ultimately fail. “Mrs. Merriam’s clock had stopped,” Jackson writes. “Mrs. Merriam’s kitchen had a built-in electric clock (and a built-in dishwasher and a built-in refrigerator) but the electric clock had broken long ago….So that when the living-room clock stopped Mrs. Merriam was without the time downstairs” (9). Mrs. Merriam’s home, like the others on Pepper Street, boasts the modern domestic technologies that Kate Baldwin identifies as crucial to the cultural imaginary of the suburban kitchen as “an historical place of women’s labor [and] a feminine touchstone” (3-4). But the clock in Mrs. Merriam’s kitchen has stopped, and her tenuous knowledge of her own place and time in the world of Pepper Street depends entirely on the living-room clock enduring. This early observation indicates that something is amiss on Pepper Street and that an inconvenience as miniscule as a broken clock can destabilize the domestic routines on which the suburb depends for its normative security.

The children who populate Pepper Street, released from their seasonal schedules of school-time into the home-bound domestic routines of the summer, further disrupt the performance of suburban customs by crafting their own private routines that exist within yet apart from those mandated by their parents. Harriet Merriam returns to her clock-less home on the last day of school and retreats to her notebooks, which signify her burgeoning independence from an overbearing mother yet reflect the same rites of language by which her mother and the other Pepper Street adults organize their thoughts. “The notebook labeled ‘Moods’ she put aside unopened,” Jackson writes; “it was dedicated ‘To my unknown hero,’ and perhaps if she did not read it now, her mother would not have read it earlier” (13). The children’s attention to language foreshadows the fracture in the suburb’s equilibrium and reinforces the novel’s preoccupation with repetition and linguistic slippages that foretell Pepper Street’s fate. In her “word notebooks,” for instance, Harriet’s friend Marilyn “opened it to the first blank page, and ‘storied,’ she wrote, and ‘grisly’” (18). The children (and Jackson, when describing them) utilize language as a form of ritual itself, its repetition a kind of working through their anxieties as the next generation of midcentury suburbanites. Repetition, however, temporarily pauses cyclical temporality, as it freezes time while the children and Jackson decide upon the most accurate language for the construction of des/proscriptive identity. Regarding two of Pepper Street’s younger girls, one of whom will meet a grisly end, Jackson compares, “Caroline was little and delicate and clean, and Hallie was lean and dirty and wet-faced” (21). Jackson’s lists are additive, but not expansive; they serve more as a method of repetitions of comparable yet opposing qualities between the two girls than as methods of full characterization. Furthermore, lists stop the progression of the narrative altogether, instead lingering on a subset of subjects to forestall the arrival of the story’s next event. Language, then, is itself a disruptive force to the suburb’s tidy progression of time.

Jackson satirizes etiquette’s compulsory prongs of form and usage by ridiculing the Pepper Street residents’ insistence on proper social performances, rendering their anxieties about appearance and being seen as proper (rather than actually being proper) a source of humor. Tasked with supervising the unmarried, sickly Miss Tyler, preteen Artie compliments her on her garden design, claiming, “‘You’ve certainly made it look good’” (43). He then “congratulated himself; the remark had made sense, it belonged in the conversation, it was complimentary” (43). Artie prides himself on his appropriate performance of respectful young manhood, a quality that he embeds within his use of compliments and relevance. Similarly, Johnny Desmond, the oldest son of the suburb’s most respected family, must prove his masculine mettle through repetitive argumentation about whether he can obtain a driver’s license: “[I]t was an old argument and [Mr. Desmond] had every intention of giving in eventually, but first he must prove Johnny in a number of vehement arguments over a period of months, must find the boy manly and proud and strong-willed” (57). By contrast, Mrs. Williams, the first resident of the rental property, rarely exposes herself to the suburb’s prying eyes who could judge her and find her wanting: “Mrs. Williams was obviously conscious of the eyes of her neighbors and their children; they saw her seldom enough as it was, without getting their last look at her by daylight, surrounded by the pitiful implements she used to live and eat and dress and sleep and sit and hold and bring her children up with” (59). Suburbs in Jackson’s oeuvre presents this historical phenomenon as both isolated and universal, embodying a “liminal status” that function as “the perfect breeding ground for fictional expression of anxiety and unease” (Murphy, Suburban, 20). Just as some texts, such as Jean Kerr’s Please Don’t Eat the Daisies and Jackson’s own collections of domestic writing, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, satirize the earnest and rather militaristic conventions of the housekeeping advice genre by highlighting the homemaker/author’s repeated failures and the cyclical, never-ending nature of housework and childrearing, Road critiques both the form and the usage of etiquette and the writing used to solidify its standards.

Routine as Ritual in Jackson’s Gothic Suburbs

Although Road approaches its critique with the humor Jackson displayed in her own domestic nonfiction, the novel further unpacks the insidiousness of anxious domesticity in its latent gothic turn. Postwar gothic literature displays a pervasive failure of language to articulate the entrenched terror and anxiety of the atomic age. Referencing Leslie Fiedler’s 1960 Love and Death in the American Novel, James Mogart contends that American fiction, when laced with Gothic imagery or conventions, reveals the hidden horrors that national narratives of unity, freedom, and equal opportunity anxiously attempt to bury (14). Postwar American gothic melds established Gothic themes and images with what Suzanne Clark calls the “dream logic” and real-world horrors of Jackson’s historical era (23). Within the context of postwar domestic containment, Kate Ferguson Ellis’s observation that “[i]t is when the home becomes a ‘separate sphere,’ a refuge from violence, that a popular genre comes into being that assumes some violation of this cultural ideal” acquires the additional layer of gendered mandates concerning conformity, violence against women, and the imprisoning home (3). The patriarchal family, which Vivian Sobchack claims served “as a place of refuge from social upheavals,” contorts instead in the postwar era into the site of these upheavals “and now serves as a sign of their representation,” with the family exposed as a cultural construction (175). 

Jackson, however, unveils the potential for darkness lurking within everyday homemaking practices, such that not the practices themselves but rather the social compulsion to perform them becomes insidious. Jackson’s characters face threats of sexual violence and false imprisonment, threats that inhere not solely through content, but within language itself, revealing the inherent embeddedness of Gothicity within the defining anxious structures of the postwar era. Prior to Road’s publication, Stanley Hyman drafted a biographical statement of his wife in which he called Jackson “an authority on witchcraft and magic…perhaps the only contemporary writer who is a practicing amateur witch” (Franklin 217). This biographical statement constitutes the most oft-cited evidence of Jackson’s own witchcraft practices, which has been further supported by stories from friends and interviews about Jackson’s use of image and number magic, the most famous of which is the legend that Jackson used witchcraft to break Alfred A. Knopf’s leg following a disagreement between the publisher and Hyman (Jackson, “The Real Me,” 357; Oppenheimer 189-190). “Real or not,” Alissa Burger observes, these stories of Jackson’s reputed witchcraft have “become an enduring part of her literary legacy…and reflects the mystery, power, and enigmatic nature of Jackson as both a writer and an individual” (98). Furthermore, these stories of home-bound witchcraft become evident in Jackson’s fiction, in which “this theme of magic is also inextricably intertwined with domesticity in Jackson’s novels and nonfiction” (98). 

Pepper Street’s security depends on repetitious public performances of domesticity. A failure to comply with both the “public” and the “performance” components of these rituals serves within the world of the novel as sufficient justification for either social castigation or expulsion. The neighborhood’s two single elderly women, Mrs. Mack and Miss Fielding, cloister themselves in their homes and rarely participate in the suburb’s social niceties. Of Mrs. Mack, “the children believed that she spent all day in her shack peering out at them through the boarded-up windows, putting spells on anyone who enters her yard or touched the battered apple trees” (62). She “was allowed to continue on Pepper Street…because she had apparently always owned the little piece of land where she lived,” her status as perpetual resident protecting her from expulsion (62). Although “[t]he children called her a witch…the parents called her an unfortunate old woman, and she looked like either one” (62). Mrs. Mack’s spells become enfolded into Pepper Street legend, but because her private rituals remain sequestered from the prying eyes of her suburban neighbors—both narratively and formally within the novel’s structure—she earns the moniker of “witch.”

Miss Fielding fares slightly better; although she maintains her own regimes which she refuses to interrupt even to find a missing child, she occasionally sits on her front porch to allow herself to be observed by passers-by. Rendered obsolete in suburban nuclear family logic by virtue of her age and childlessness, Miss Fielding maintains her own private rituals: “[F]or more years than she could remember Miss Fielding had been following herself along a well-defined path, around the circle of hours that made a day, around the circle of days that made a year, around the circle of years that made Miss Fielding older and nearer to lying down for good” (120). The disruption of these rituals joins a larger pattern of fractured repetition and custom that signals the impending shattering of Pepper Street’s contained security. When Frederica, an already-disruptive force by virtue of her status as the child of transient renters of a Pepper Street house, interrupts Miss Fielding’s carefully timed meal preparations because her younger sister Beverly is missing, Miss Fielding responds not with compassion but with annoyance bordering on panic that spirals into catastrophic thinking: 

A horrible thought found Miss Fielding. Her eggs would be too hard, she would have to do them over, she would be late finishing her dinner, it would be dark by the time she got to her porch, with nothing to watch she would be bored and go in before she had had enough air, and then sleep badly and wake up with a headache tomorrow (122).

Miss Fielding’s desperation at the implications of Frederica’s interruptions both indicates the extent of her reliance on her domestic rituals and clarifies the terms by which language determines the potency of those rituals. Her anxieties progress as run-on sentences, accelerating rather than suspending time as with Jackson’s frequent use of repetition. If her ritual relies on precisely timed actions taken one after another, with the prompt completion of one action enabling and foretelling the successful completion of the next, then the elimination of appropriate grammar to distinguish one action from another signifies within the larger scheme of Jackson’s ritualistic language the precariousness of the ritualized domestic routines upon which Pepper Street builds its interrelated schemata of time and security. Its rituals, in other words, must remain contained within a delicate balance of linear time; allowed to become uncontained, the rituals serve no magical function and the suburb’s security structures will fail.

This suburban structure of homeostasis and boundary maintenance comes about in Jackson’s fiction through representations of domesticity as itself a ritualized structure. “Jackson uses domesticity in a way that not only reinforces gothic tropes of the familiar-turned-terrible,” Michael Dalpe argues, “but she also adds a gendered urgency, which cannot be ignored due to its interruption of expected order” (44). Domesticity to Jackson, Dalpe continues, “is a form of power; inasmuch as domestic spaces are powerful, they are also traps, both for those who live within the expectations of ‘normalcy’ and for those who seem to be betrayed by the perceived security those spaces offer” (44). Domestic privacy, because of its duality as both a refuge and a prison, a trap for both those who enjoy it and those who are expelled from it, “therefore merges as being far closer to the carnival and all it connotes that middle-class ideology might wish” (Downey, “Inverted,” 164). The boundary between the domestic and the carnivalesque must be preserved in Jackson’s writing through the performative power of the ritual. “Domesticity is a performance,” Dalpe contends, “and as such, when performances go awry, the hegemonic systems these performances work within are challenged” (44).

Although critical consideration of magical themes in Jackson’s gothic novels is widespread, an analysis of even the most quotidian practices of midcentury domesticity as rituals themselves remains unexplored. As the father of French ethnology Marcel Mauss argues in A General Theory of Magic, “Actions which are never repeated cannot be called magical. If the whole community does not believe in the efficacy of a group of actions, they cannot be magical. The form of the ritual is eminently transmissible and this is sanctioned by public opinion” (23). Domesticity itself entails precisely this kind of magical action—routines of cooking, cleaning, and caregiving must be repeated daily or on a strictly adhered-to schedule, and the wealth of midcentury homemaking manuals, from Ladies Home Journal to Good Housekeeping to Heloise’s Housekeeping Hints to Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, testify to the extent to which such rituals were socially sanctioned, to the degree of being mandatory. Mauss, furthermore, explores the conditions of magical rites, including the time and place of performance, the necessary materials, and the tools. “Ritual acts,” as opposed to legal or religious rites, Mauss claims, “are essentially thought to produce much more than a contract: rites are eminently effective; they are creative; they do things” (23-24, emphasis original).

But what of rituals that lack creativity, that do nothing but maintain a hegemonic social security in which the practitioner has little role in delimiting? Jackson’s pointed critique of domestic routinization becomes most apparent in Road’s depiction of children, which exemplifies the interlocking nature of domestic and sexual rituals at the heart of midcentury containment culture. At a sewing circle, the Pepper Street housewives deride the perceived failings of the next generation: “‘None of those high-school girls can really do housework.’ ‘They are terribly inefficient.’” They further indict the girls’ promiscuity: “‘I had a high-school girl once, for about two weeks…’ ‘She was always making eyes at Brad’” (124). This interaction microcosmically encapsulates the gendered process of routinized ritual in 1950s America, in which high school girls do not belong in the normative society that Pepper Street emblematizes because they cannot keep house and refuse to respect the norms of sexual containment. One of these high school girls, the allusively named Hester, has recently been fired from her job with the Roberts family because Mrs. Roberts suspected that Hester was making plays for her husband. Hester represents the liminality of teenaged girlhood; neither fit for housework as a proper married woman nor given the benefit of innocence as a child, she functions as a destabilizing, uncontainable force, a role she adopts readily when she chooses to disrupt one of the children’s own rituals. “Tin-Tin,” Jackson describes, “is probably as old as children….Wherever children congregate they will probably have their own version of Tin-Tin, its elaborate ritual determined by the children and their fathers and their grandfathers operating individually on an immutable theme” (99). The terms of the game, set down by grandfathers and passed through the generations, therefore emulate the mimicry involved in performing gender. When invited to play, Hester uses the ritual of Tin-Tin to get her revenge on the Robertses; she was assigned, according to the game’s archaic rules, to say the name “Art Roberts” when her turn arose, but instead pronounced the name of his father, “Mike Roberts.” Hester misuses the name of the father, under whose authority the game’s rules were concretized, to disturb the game and call into question its underlying function in regulating the gendered performances of the neighborhood’s children.

The novel hinges on the refusal of certain Pepper Street children who, like Hester, disregard the rituals of domestic performance to establish their own antinormative magic. Marilyn and Harriet, for instance, meet in a secret clearing to express what remains inexpressible on the main road: “[P]erhaps the only reason she needed Harriet, or any friend, was to get this said, finally” (110). Social pariah Tod Donald is not permitted to participate in the games and rituals of the other suburban youths and instead crafts his own private practices that break the boundaries of containment, both literal and figurative. “Tod Donald rarely did anything voluntarily, or with planning, or even with intent acknowledged to himself,” Jackson writes, introducing Tod as an unwitting cog who participates in yet remains uncommitted to the rituals of Pepper Street. Instead, Tod practices his own brand of magic by breaking into the Desmond home and sitting among the excessive femininity of Mrs. Desmond’s closet. His presence in the closet itself demonstrates the precarity of the suburb’s containment, as he easily accesses a space that should, by containment logic, remain inaccessible. Furthermore, while in the closet, Tod practices a linguistic ritual of uttering “dirty words,” and “[s]ince there were only three or four words really bad enough, he said them over and over” (67). The children, whom suburban rituals of domesticity are intended to guide, actively contort these rituals into rejections of compulsory performance of routines while utilizing the same tools as the practices intended to mandate their conformity.

Anxiety and the Futility of Domestic Rituals

Jackson’s emphasis on housework as a magical ritualistic practice suffuses her entire body of work, with the often-overlooked Road serving as her initial working-through of the tonal and linguistic dimensions of literary ritual. Road, Darryl Hattenhauer argues, “evinces concern with language in subject formation and interpellation, destabilizes narrative reliability a little, and lacks clear plot resolution” (83). It is precisely this disruption of language and refusal of resolution that constitutes Jackson’s critique of the ritualistic performance of domestic security. Jackson’s, and by extension Heloise’s and Good Housekeeping’s, rituals in Road only operate in service of anxiety. These rituals fail not because they disqualify as magical practices in their repetition and community investment, but rather because the practitioners who perform them do so out of the anxiety that pervades the age. If the vacuuming schedule and the beautification practices are the rituals of our times, then Jackson empties these rituals of their magical capabilities when they are practiced with anxiety rather than belief.

Why, when Jackson’s language echoes the repetitive quality of domestic routines that contemporaneous authorities claim will maintain a healthy homefront and ensure peaceful homogenization in any social circle, do the Pepper Street rituals accomplish so little, and ultimately fail to prevent the dual incursions of violence that the wall’s destruction and Caroline’s death signify? Ultimately, “[i]t was the destruction of the wall which put the first wedge into the Pepper Street security, and that security was so fragile that, once jarred, it shivered into fragments in a matter of weeks” (131). This introduction of a temporal structure, which for the first hundred-plus pages has been largely lacking in Road as Jackson merely explicates the residents’ daily activities with little attention to how much time has passed, links the novel’s dueling preoccupations with ritual and anxiety as both deeply concerned with time and space. 

Sianne Ngai unpacks anxiety’s unique quality of projection as a matter of both time and space; anxiety remains “intimately aligned with the concept of futurity, and the temporal dynamics of deferral and anticipation in particular” while simultaneously involving “actual and phantasmatic acts of throwing [that] reinforce the boundary between center and periphery, and thus the distinction between ‘here’ and ‘yonder’ on which the experience of threat depends” (210, 212). Ritual requires repetition to effect some action in the future in a linear trajectory with a clearly established relationship between present and future. Anxiety, however, can only defer what is present into some unascertainable future; nothing can happen in the future except what the anxious subject wishes to avoid in the present. Furthermore, ritual assumes a connection between the space of the present, where the ritual is performed, and the space of the future, which will be somehow different than the space of the present if the ritual succeeds. Anxiety, in contrast, remains stuck, because by virtue of “throwing” the present into the future, the space remains the same. Anxiety can therefore accomplish nothing, and rituals performed as mandatory social forms of containment etiquette cannot achieve anything other than that which the ritual seeks to avoid in the present. Anxious rituals, then, may succeed in pausing time, but that time will catch up in the future.

Jackson foreshadows the violent failure of Road’s anxious rituals from the outset, when Mrs. Merriam’s clock stops and the entire family finds themselves unable to situate themselves in time within their own home. When the namesake road breaks through the wall that sequesters the suburb, Pepper Street’s rituals begin to falter en masse, and the narrative structure reflects this profound alteration. Following this revelation of the suburb’s impending geographical openness, Jackson shifts the novel from its litany of quotidian domestic concerns and indications of the children’s rebellion to an extended explication of a party in which Pepper Street’s residents intermingle, flirt inappropriately, and generally enjoy a Bacchanalian pause in their routine. The party concludes, however, with the novel’s explosive final act, in which Caroline Desmond is found dead and Tod hangs himself during police interrogation. This climactic moment “uncovers the disturbing truth that evil lurks not outside but within the enclosed space of the miniature world” (Antoszek 21). Caroline’s disappearance and death paralyze the formerly routinized community: “Nothing that anyone said had any purpose; they were waiting for something” (181). And as with the other suburban rituals, this shattering event becomes magicked into existence through language that anxiously aims to stop the clock on the violence that everyone knows is coming: “”They were all silent, realizing that the first person who spoke now would have to say something worse…something which, whether true or not, would be the most horrible thing that had ever happened on Pepper Street” (184). Caroline’s cause of death, when placed within the context of Jackson’s next publication, enlightens Road’s depiction of anxious ritual as futile. Next to Caroline’s body is a large rock covered in blood, implying that Caroline died from blunt force trauma. Whether her death is accidental or intentional Jackson never reveals, but what is clear is that Caroline died by stone. Jackson picks up the same instrument of death in “The Lottery,” in which Tessie Hutchinson dies by stoning. The distinction between dying “by stone” and “by stoning,” however, reveals a passivity in the case of Caroline’s death that is noticeably lacking in Tessie’s socially compulsory murder in an active, communal ritual. Caroline’s true cause of death, then, is inactivity, the failure of Pepper Street’s routines to protect or secure even its most prized residents. The senselessness of Caroline’s death predicts dwindling faith in the promises of domestic security in the suburbs that will arise in popular texts in the mid-1950s; the introduction to John Keats’s The Crack in the Picture Window begins with four words on purchasing a suburban home that could easily describe the narrative arc of Road: “For literally nothing down” (1)

Despite lack of direct evidence, suspicion lands on Tod not solely because of his outsider status, but also because of his social failings: “Tod had left the party without saying good-bye to Mrs. Ransom-Jones; while leaving stealthily was a social error, technically he was still at the party until he told Mrs. Ransom-Jones that he had had a lovely time” (186). Tod serves as the neighborhood’s scapegoat, and his final appearance in Road emphasizes his body specifically as a cultural one: “Hanging, his body was straighter than it had ever been in life” (188). Tod’s body, so ill-fitting both to himself and to Pepper Street, complies only in death. Tod’s scapegoating, then, reveals not his monstrosity but the monstrosity of a social order that demands a ritualistic sacrifice. But his death as the novel concludes has already become enfolded into the domestic rituals that will keep future residents of Pepper Street in line, its status as suburban legend solidified and strengthened with each subsequent retelling. The novel’s chilling final dialogue hints at a future that depends on ritualized violence to maintain its normative borders: “‘Tell it again,’ Beverly begged, scarcely breathing with excitement, ‘Frederica, tell it again’” (193).

The novel concludes with sparse parting observations about the fates of the residents, with one clear elision; as Joan Wylie Hall observes, “the reader looks in vain for any reference to the boys of Pepper Street, some of whom must surely have journeyed westward to war” (268). Caroline’s murder and Tod’s suicide illuminate, then, the violence necessary to perpetuate the broader American nation that Pepper Street miniaturizes. Road, Patrycja Antoszek observes, “comments on the vision of America as …a self-enclosed world,” depicting the suburban community’s alienation and anxiety as emblematic not of the merits of such an enclosure, but the dangers of a containment that requires the repeated performance of patriarchal rituals (13). The novel and its suburb “signify the essence of the American social structure,” Richard Pascal contends, dependent upon “an ineluctably secure hedge against social and financial disruption” (83-84). The novel’s experimentation with ritual as both subject and formal property, through Jackson’s use of structure and language, unearths domesticity itself as a form of magical thinking, an anxious practice of forestalling time that, as Road so unforgivingly reveals, violently marches on. That these violent ends both implicate and victimize children exemplifies the dangers of imposing the rituals of domestic routinization upon those individuals responsible for perpetuating the suburban milieu and philosophy. As Mary Kittredge observes in her few remarks about Shirley Jackson, “If you practice the ritual, you’ll get the magic” (11). Whether the magic that the rituals produce conjure good or evil, however, remains, despite the highly regulated rituals of time and language that Road explores, ambiguous, tenuous, and chaotic.

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