“Comfortably isolated”: Folk Horror and the Suburban Ideal in Shirley Jackson’s The Road Through the Wall
By Miriam Richer
Miriam Richer is a SSHRC-funded master’s candidate in English (Creative Writing) at the University of New Brunswick. Her criticism has appeared in Monstrum and The Ex-Puritan. Her fiction has been published in Best Canadian Stories 2027 (forthcoming), carte blanche, Augur, Plenitude, and elsewhere. She sits on The Fiddlehead’s editorial board and co-hosts the writing-themed Craftwork podcast with Dr. Mike Thorn.
Much has been written on folk horror conventions in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (1948), but scholarship to date has largely overlooked similar features in the author’s rich debut novel, The Road Through the Wall, published the same year. The Road Through the Wall is a bloodcurdling case study in the insidious oppression lurking beneath the idyllic facade of quiet suburbia. Pepper Street—“charming and fairly expensive and even comfortably isolated” (Jackson, Road 1)—is a place where stifling conventionality governs every aspect of suburban life. Genteel residents wander the manicured landscape, unaware of the mysterious forces that influence their every move. Alienated husbands and wives perform strict roles while secretly longing for an ever-elusive household harmony; teenagers obediently regurgitate their parents’ prejudicial stock phrases in the name of keeping outsiders at bay; neighborhood youth reify the repressive cruelty of their adult counterparts through ancient rituals disguised as innocuous children’s games; a prohibitory “Special Reasons” list imposes homogeneity upon a community theatre roster; and the destruction of a totemic wall plummets an entire neighborhood into paranoid chaos. Finally, a garden party murder ambiguates the distinction between scapegoat and sacrifice, thereby indicting a community openly convinced of its moral righteousness. Given folk horror’s preoccupation with the vexed relationship between insularity and harmony, the genre offers rich potential for investigating the unforetold and inevitable entropy of North America’s suburban ideal. That is, folk horror provides a critical lens to expose the prejudicial mindset undergirding the suburban fantasy of harmonious, collective identity. Reading Jackson’s acerbic debut novel through the lens of folk horror highlights the book’s commentary on the brittle fragility of the suburban ideal, and the fanatical convictions that keep it alive.
Folk horror is a rapidly growing area of scholarship with a much-debated genealogy. Despite its contentious origins, scholars working in the genre generally agree that its revival is owed in large part to Adam Scovell’s influential 2017 monograph, Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Scovell’s “folk horror chain” has become the de facto framework for genre analysis (Edgar & Johnson 2). This “chain” is composed of four constitutive links: landscape, isolation, a skewed belief system, and a disruptive happening/summoning (Scovell 17-18). In terms of landscape, folk horror’s most iconic setting is the English village. The folk horror creator “channel[s] a sense of the uncanny” into recognizable topographies, thereby defamiliarizing such places as they exist in the collective unconscious (Scovell 38). Scovell posits that in folk horror, landscape is “a character itself,” and an antagonistic one at that, given its tendency to adversely affect “the social and moral identity of its inhabitants” (18). Ruth Heholt and Dawn Keetley build on Scovell’s premise, citing the folk horror landscape’s tendency to “wrest away human agency” (21), which complicates the question of social responsibility when violence inevitably disrupts the community’s fragile security. The isolation of the folk horror community facilitates the development of a skewed belief system typically characterized by an eerily homogenous depiction of conventionality. The subgenre ultimately demonstrates that this zealous attachment to collective identity can only survive under highly regulated conditions. The moment an outside force infiltrates the insular community, a hubristic downfall is set in motion, and “the obedience, hierarchy and harmony belonging to the ideal of rustic simplicity” are exposed to be achievements based in “fanaticism and violence” (Bayman & Donnelly 12). These narratives typically culminate in scapegoat sacrifice, a phenomenon derived from James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), a work of pseudo-anthropology in which a “peculiar [figure] of semi-divinity” is “obliged to carry away the sins of the people” (Fraser xxiv). The removal of the outside threat functions as a silver bullet, allowing the folk to perpetuate their collective fantasy of a rural idyll until the next “summoning or happening” initiates a fresh iteration of the cycle.
While folk horror originates with the English village, The Road Through the Wall exhibits all four of Scovell’s distinguishing features, but displaces them onto American suburbia. The former setting’s more obvious American analogue would be small-town New England, where Jackson established her own nuclear family. However, the archetypal suburban community where Jackson grew up is an equally iconic setting. “Cabrillo,” Road’s fictional setting, is based on Jackson’s hometown in California—the “major cultural hearth” of suburban development (Meinig 169). Cabrillo is a portrait of eerie homogeneity; Jill E. Anderson observes that its homes “all look the same,” and that its residents have “similar-sounding names and only very subtle differences in personalities” (137). Suburban developments such as Cabrillo are “discrete and independent landscape[s]” (Meinig 169), both in terms of location (comfortable distance from the city) and architecture (freestanding, single-family houses). These topographical features are designed according to a tribalist conviction that traditional family values are best promoted through the geographical isolation of white middle-class Americans. Catherine Jurca posits that the suburban “practice of self-segregation is not represented as unmotivated exclusion,” but as a “necessary retreat from and defense against a colonizing presence that is metonymically figured as the city” (7). This self-imposed isolation is based upon the false premise that race, religious persuasion, socioeconomic status, and other such demographic identifiers have any bearing on a person’s ethics. The white middle-class adherents of such homogenizing imperatives are hubristic in the sense that they fail to see such systems of belief as anything other than paranoid, prejudiced, and oppressively conventional. The suburban ideal is attractive in its blueprint form because it lacks this self-awareness. Conversely, suburban reality, with its “sheer mass and homogeneity of landscape and society” (Meining 182), summons a broad range of negative affect ranging from boredom to frustration to downright cruelty. In The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture, Bernice Murphy writes that “no matter how calm and settled a place looks, it is only ever a moment away from dramatic (and generally sinister) incident” (2). In the case of suburban folk horror, it is this very quality of eerie calmness that one ought to be most wary of. Folk horror’s façades of settled harmony are always bolstered by social tyranny, and suburbia is the ideal breeding ground for such dynamics to play out.
The first link in Scovell’s folk horror chain—landscape and agency—is fulfilled by Jackson’s eerie portrayal of suburban landscapes. The “most prominent strand of American folk horror,” according to Murphy, tends to depict “rural and/or backwoods life” (“Folk Horror” 139). In Road, Jackson depicts a topography that is entirely distinct from the rural and/or backwoods, yet just as quintessentially American, and equally ripe for folk horror. Observe the following scene, wherein two neighborhood teenagers repose on the site of a creek-bed-cum-fairway: “Above them on either side were the steep banks, grown over with moss and grass and high above the eucalyptus and fir trees heavy and ending far up in the sky. The old creek was the border of the golf course which spread over a vast area near Pepper Street” (50). This scene is inherently unsettling because it exemplifies what Judy Oppenheimer describes as Jackson’s penchant for “pattern[s] precariously imposed upon the chaos of human development” (125). The contrast between the overgrown creek bed and the manicured golf course—an exclusive space where men partake in the ritualized conflation of business and pleasure—draws attention to the constant upkeep that goes into maintaining the suburban fantasy, thereby proving Anderson’s claim that “there is nothing ‘natural’ about ‘nature,’ and the boundaries between built environments and those environments we deem ‘natural’ are porous” (134). Anderson’s observation regarding the mid-century suburban environment hews closely to Dawn Keetley’s conception of folk horror as “embod[ying] an explicitly ecological worldview in which human and nature, human and nonhuman, are thoroughly imbricated” (9). Pat Byrne and Art Roberts—the suburbanite “folk”—perceive the golf course as an “active landscape” (Bayman & Donnelly 4): Pat “saw the sky overhead as arched personally for him, and concerned in his immediate welfare”; Art “liked . . . the way the creek sides crowded closely against him, hiding him” (Road 52). In presenting the golf course’s supposed benevolence through the lens of human subjectivity rather than narrative objectivity, Jackson establishes a sense of dramatic irony that is critical to the folk horror genre. Whereas Road’s folk perceive the suburban fairway as a nurturing ally, Road’s omniscient narrator maintains the landscape’s eerie inscrutability.
Jackson’s depiction of suburbia’s environmental isolation—and its concomitant atmosphere of alienation—fulfills the second link in Scovell’s folk horror chain: isolation and insularity. No American setting is more deliberately insular than the “discreet and independent landscape” of suburbia (Meinig 169), which Pepper Street exemplifies. Far from fulfilling its promise of harmony, the isolated suburban development becomes a prison in which those “deep undefined need[s] in neighborhood life” fester untreated (Jackson, Road 100). Infinitely bored with “‘Just living on the same, day after day’” (Road 140), Mr. Roberts channels his suburban ennui into an extramarital affair with the hired help. Mrs. Roberts consequently passes a sleepless night in her bedroom chair, chain-smoking, “plann[ing] in detail how to pack the boys and their clothes and take them to New York, where she would find a job, anything, and [Mr. Roberts] would never see them again” (Road 71). When the sun rises, however, she gives up on escape “for the hundredth time” (Road 71). She prepares breakfast for her family and “wait[s] for her husband to enmesh himself” once again into the facade of domestic harmony (Road 71). The image of the Roberts’s master bedroom filling with cigarette smoke—the wife brooding in the chair while her husband sleeps mere feet away—functions as a metonym for the suburbs at large: lonely, quiet, claustrophobic. Ruth Franklin writes of Road that “Both house and marriage are valued for the status they confer upon their possessor rather than for their intrinsic worth” (215); in this sense, the Robertses are the rule rather than the exception. Both spouses feel deeply unsatisfied with their circumstances, but neither can emancipate themselves from the suburban dream in which they have invested so much. Mr. Roberts continues to commit adultery, and Mrs. Roberts continues punishing him by driving him into positions “so extreme that he must humiliate himself to get back” (Jackson, Road 71). The couple is doomed to lower their respective expectations and suppress their individual desires—a form of self-inflicted violence that inevitably distorts their senses of right and wrong.
The Road Through the Wall instantiates Scovell’s third folk horror link (skewed belief system) in the white-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant community’s fanatical belief that the increasing attainability of suburban homeownership poses an imminent threat to its existence. The Pepper Street elite believe their otherized neighbours exist on a spectrum ranging from socially undesirable to obliquely terrifying. Mrs. Merriam “relish[es]” telling her daughter that the houses of “Chinamen” are made with “heavy walls, extra heavy, so you can’t get out and no one can hear you if you scream’” (Road 56). This assertion is, of course, deeply hypocritical: the same architectural quality that promotes privacy in a white middle-class household reads as sinister in other applications (even though, in the context of Road, there is far more evidence of domestic unrest in the former). Whereas Mrs. Merriam exhibits bombastic racism, most Pepper Street residents are more covert in their prejudicial stratagems. The aspirational Mr. Desmond prefers to read paperback mysteries in his leisure time, but when it comes to organizing community theater for the local youth, he insists that they must stage Shakespeare, and that the only Jewish child in the neighbourhood must therefore be excluded as a matter of social tact. In the name of carrying out his covert discrimination, Desmond creates an ad hoc “Special Reasons” list: a document which outsources his anxious attachment to homogenizing social imperatives. The unstated foundation of the “Special Reasons” list is the superstitious fear of a distinctly American strain of social progress, and the concomitant impulse to “preserv[e] a perceived cultural loss in the face of modernity” (Cheeseman 405). It is folkloristic in the sense that it is driven by “an urgency, a sense of the past disappearing” (Cheeseman 405). By showing the expediency with which Desmond’s list is naturalized as an authoritative ledger, Jackson presents a darkly poignant illustration of ritualized social order within the insular cult of the suburbs. The aristocratic Desmonds have been happy to accumulate wealth through the exploitation of otherized Americans, but the increasing democratization of their suburban empire requires new and improved versions of their Puritan ancestors’ zealous edicts.
The destruction of Road’s titular wall brings its elitist community’s innate yet hidden malignance to the surface. From the perspective of Pepper Street’s white middle-class suburbanites, this breach portends “intrusions from the outside world” (134). From the perspective of Jackson’s omniscient narrator, however, it drives a wedge in a security “so fragile that, once jarred, it shivered into fragments in a matter of weeks” (131). Jackson’s deft use of dramatic irony exemplifies the fourth and final link in Scovell’s folk horror chain, the summoning/happening, an event that “uncover[s] the results” of a “skewed social consciousness” rather than initiating it (18). Whereas Road’s white middle-class characters locate evil outside the community, Jackson telegraphs that the wall’s destruction only suggests an external presence; Pepper Street spills its own blood before any potential infiltrators get the chance to cause harm. Pepper Street’s “fragile security” is internal, as demonstrated by the moonlit tryst between Mr. Roberts and Mrs. Martin that takes place in the wake of the wall’s breach. This suburban set piece begins with Mr. Roberts standing on his porch, “breath[ing] deeply of the night air, so gentle, so tender,” until the claustrophobic thought of his wife “leaning forward in her chair to look out of the window” drives him from his property (Road 140). Shortly thereafter, Mr. Roberts encounters Mrs. Martin on her way home from work and seduces her: “From inside the wall Mr. Roberts said softly, ‘Not so bad in here,’ and Mrs. Martin, after one quick look over her shoulder at the Martin house, gathered her skirt tightly against her legs and edged around the pile of bricks to join him” (Road 143). Darryl Hattenhauer posits that the hole in the wall’s facilitation of this extramarital tryst (as well as its role in the concealment of Caroline’s body) goes to show that “[t]he demolition of the wall signifies the repressive desublimation of Eros and Thanatos” (94). Hattenhauer’s Freudian reading accords with a folk horror analysis of Road, for it speaks to an imposition of rational order that fails to keep humanity’s baser instincts in check. The suburban development, founded as it is on the baseless theory that harmony can be achieved through homogeneity, is doomed from its inception. Sooner or later, the inherent social tyranny of suburban idealism will rot its foundation from within. Road dramatizes this dynamic: the wall’s destruction merely accelerates a process of moral erosion that was temporarily staved off by the artificial security of carefully laid bricks.
Folk horror’s communities tend to be simultaneously “defined and imprisoned” by their “dogged adherence” to indefensible ideals (Murphy, “Black Boxes” 75). Pepper Street’s residents endure their private despair because their collective faith in the suburban project borders on fanatical. We see this play out for Mrs. Desmond, who indulges in a fantasy of the harmonious nuclear family while Mr. Desmond is at his office in the city: “When she thought of her family, beyond meals and clothes and table linen, she thought of them as a unit” (Road 57). Whereas the patriarch’s absence facilitates the illusion of calibrated domestic perfection, his presence proves oppressive. Such is the case during a Desmond family dinner party, wherein “[Mrs. Desmond] felt that her husband was imposing on her, living happily far away in his distant softly colored world, while his wife laboured and sometimes cried unnoticed” (Road 89). Mrs. Desmond envies her husband’s capacity to escape from the suburbs, to exist—be it mentally or physically—in a better reality. Whether Mrs. Desmond is aware of it or not, her resentment undermines the supposed harmony of the insular suburbs. Anderson argues that carefully planned suburban communities, with their “aesthetic and measurable orderliness,” unintentionally “facilitate the formation of a suburban disease” (135). Mrs. Desmond might rationalize her unhappiness as the result of the city’s residue clinging to her husband’s grey flannel suit (or the grey matter of his brain), but she has admitted on some level that the city is a happier place. Hattenhauer posits that Jackson “defamiliarizes her readers from their myths” by “expos[ing] contradictions in social formation” (97). Given the nature of her cognitive dissonance, Mrs. Desmond functions as a stand-in for such idealistic readers. She can only buy into the suburban fantasy while operating in the solitary role of homemaker; as dinner party hostess, she is confronted by her alienation from the social formation that promised her happiness and fulfillment. The irony of Mrs. Desmond’s resentment towards her husband is that she, too, is happiest in her own dreamworld. Suburban reality will never measure up to its mythic promise; it can only be accessed in the mind. It naturally follows that the white middle-class suburbanite who refuses to relinquish the suburban dream is condemned to exist in a state of quiet and perpetual alienation.
The dogged adherence to the mythic promise of the suburbs demands perpetuation through intergenerational transmission. According to Keetley, the horror of folk horror is rooted in an insular community’s being “bound together by inherited tales” (4). In Road, this is dramatized in the brief friendship between the Jewish Marilyn Perlman and the Christian Harriet Merriam, which is arguably the novel’s most functional relationship (while it lasts). In the private wooded area on the outskirts of Pepper Street, hidden from Mrs. Merriam’s hypervigilant gaze, the two girls engage in “pleasant co-operative” play (109), conjuring images of “dim pagan temples” and “long white dresses” befitting high priestesses (110; 112). Unfortunately, this “informal mud-pie state of mind” is short-lived (109). When Mrs. Merriam learns of the friendship between her daughter and their Jewish neighbor, she orders Harriet to end it, and feeds her a script with which to do so: “‘My mother says to tell you that people of my class are always nice to everybody, in spite of their religion or their background but that we have to set standards. Standards,’ Harriet repeated; it was a solid word in the midst of confusion” (Road 158). Harriet’s muddled recitation of her mother’s ‘us’ versus ‘them’ worldview sounds the death knell of her attempt to cultivate empathy. Marilyn’s nonplussed reaction to Harriet’s inadequate explanation exposes Mrs. Merriam’s stock phrase—we have to set standards—for what it really is: a zealous incantation intended to enshrine a rapidly eroding fantasy of prestige achieved through exclusivity. This rehearsed speech presents as rational and measured, but it comes from an irrational and reactionary tribalism based in fear and paranoia. Marilyn correctly identifies the inherent sophistry of Mrs. Merriam’s sermon, but Harriet cannot afford to do so. Passed “from generation to generation” like the black box of “The Lottery,” the sociocultural mores espoused by Mrs. Merriam “grow ever more cumbersome, meaningless, and indefensible” (Nebeker 104). To think about one’s privilege too closely—to want something other than what one’s ancestry rewards—is a perilous endeavor for those who stand to inherit suburbia. Having realized that she “had used up, so quickly, all that her mother had spread over a long time, Harriet finishe[s] icily: ‘Isn’t that enough?’” (Road 158). In this final utterance of polite cruelty, Harriet concludes that it doesn’t matter whether her speech makes sense; it is a conjuration intended to reify an oppressive social hierarchy, without which the white middle-class American Dream might cease to exist.
Given its temporal setting of 1936 and its publication date of 1948, as well as its depictions of anti-Semitism, The Road Through the Wall inevitably invokes the Holocaust. Indeed, Mr. Desmond’s Special Reasons list resembles the “stock phrases and self-invented clichés” described by Hannah Arendt as “the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil” (49; 252). Jackson prefigures Arendt’s portrayal of Nazi mentality in her depiction of those who put homogenizing imperatives into action as being akin to mindless automata. Jackson, who once wrote that she “relished the ‘grotesque effect’ of the ‘absolutely wrong word’” (Franklin 215), employs mechanical language throughout Road to illuminate the banal evil lurking within suburbia’s isolated community. The novel’s opening paragraph includes the hubristic assertion that “some people are automatically above suspicion” (1); those who fall under suspicion are consistently and indiscriminately otherized by the white middle-class “folk.” Take, for example, Harriet Merriam’s comportment when a Chinese acquaintance hosts her at his employer’s residence. Though Harriet’s mind ceases to function in the face of her prejudicial paranoia, she is programmed to such a degree that “her mouth, well-trained, sa[ys] ‘Thank you,’ automatically” when her host offers her a piece of candy (Road 82). Harriet accepts her Chinese acquaintance’s candy from a place of rote politeness, but an unease borne of cultural ignorance prevents her from eating it. Hattenhauer aptly describes Harriet as a sentient product of history rather than an individual with free will: “Her mind is more of an effect than a cause. Her behavior is more a response than a choice” (55). The same could be said of Miss Fielding, who reacts to a distraught working-class neighbour’s plea for help with peevish panic:
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. (Road 122)
The true horror of this scenario is not the outsider’s intrusion, but Miss Fielding’s indignant sense of entitlement to the security and stability promised to her (and only those like her) by the suburbs. She embodies the “brutally utilitarian and exclusive” folk horror community “for whom the collective ‘good’ will always take precedence over individual agency, and white supremacy is a foundational principle” (Murphy, “Black Boxes” 151). In the context of Road, these eerie clockwork residents who do not question their entitlement are the ones that thrive; the suburban environment proves inimical to those who struggle to relinquish their sense of humanity.
Mrs. Merriam’s quest to reel her daughter back into the hive mind of white middle-class suburbia is far from an isolated incident on Pepper Street. This insidious practice of tribalism is codified in a longstanding neighborhood game known as Tin-Tin. Just as “There’s always been a lottery” (Jackson, “Lottery” 297), Tin-Tin is presented as an ancient suburban ritual: “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” (Jackson, Road 99). In Tin-Tin, an instigator (“It”) interrogates a collective assembly of players with the intention of selecting a victim. Tin-Tin’s manifest objective is to make the victim laugh, but the grim solemnity with which the game (or the “procedure” [100], as Road’s narrator calls it) is undertaken suggests a sinister latent purpose. Its players experience “miser[y],” “desperat[ion],” “fright,” “excruciati[on],” and “malice” (99-100); its mechanics are less like the pleasant co-operative make-believe games shared between Harriet and Marilyn, and more like the public humiliation at the novel’s outset. Whereas the former scene interfaces with identity in a boundless, improvisatory manner (“‘You mean,’ Harriet said slowly, considering, ‘you mean, I could be anything?’” [110-11]), the latter features Helen Williams (i.e. “It”) galvanizing a group of girls to gang up on Marilyn (i.e. the “victim”) because of her Jewish identity (“‘We’ve been wondering,’ Helen said, looking at the other girls, who laughed, even Harriet, ‘we’ve been wondering about Christmas’” [17]). What disturbs Marilyn most of all is not Helen’s menacing interrogation, but the faceless collective to which this instigator belongs: “It was the feeling of having them all around her that bothered Marilyn; they were all together, and when one of them left they would all go, even Harriet. They were all looking at Marilyn at once, and she could only look at them one at a time” (18). This tension between the individual and the collective is crucial to folk horror narratives. Keetley posits that the folk horror community is “bound so tightly” by “shared beliefs, traditions, and practices” that it constitutes a “monstrous tribe” (11); Jamie Chambers identifies the folk horror trope of the “monstrous communal”, wherein “the perceived homogeneity of supposedly bounded communities is positioned as sinister, uncanny, and unnatural” (22). After the fact, Harriet privately remembers the “ugly look on Marilyn’s face” with shame (Road 97), but during Marilyn’s public humiliation, Harriet is a passive bystander, complicit in the monstrous collective’s “eerie singularity of mind” (Chambers 22).
Tin-Tin’s enduring popularity is symptomatic of the monstrous collective’s shared desire for a scapegoat upon which to ritualistically purge the malaise endemic to suburbia. The first scapegoating of Marilyn Perlman lacks efficacy owing to its unscripted nature; the collective loses interest, and Harriet later recalls the incident as “some sort of a meaningless fuss about Christmas” (97). Tin-Tin is equally nonsensical—“the entire introductory ritual had lost its meaning and probably its accompanying dance” (Road 99)—and yet it has been in circulation for so long that its practitioners neglect to question its purpose. Road’s narrator attributes Tin-Tin’s lasting power to the fact that it “filled some deep undefined need in neighborhood life never exactly equalled by prisoner’s base or tag” (100). Hattenhauer astutely suggests that this deep, undefined need is the “pleasurable play of victimization” commonly known as “scapegoating” (96). While Tin-Tin’s rites are seemingly harmless (the objective of the “nonsense syllable[s]” and “idiot name[s]” is to make the victim laugh [Road 100], not to kill them), its fulfilment of a near-pathological strain of schadenfreude suggests a palliative treatment of a pervasive malaise. Note that this is not limited to the youth who play Tin-Tin; instead, it impacts neighborhood life at large. When Caroline Desmond’s absence is first registered, the adults similarly enjoy “the feeling that the terrors of the night, the jungle, had come close to their safe lighted homes, touched them nearly, and departed, leaving every family safe but one” (Road 182). Anderson, who cites this passage as evidence of Pepper Street’s residents’ propensity for “tak[ing] pleasure in each other’s misery” (137), indicts the suburban dream on the basis that “the very ideals centering on normalcy, security, and inheritance, born from a stable home environment, are actually those that lead to malaise” (135). Murphy echoes Anderson’s sentiment in her discussion of “The Lottery,” wherein she observes that the “ritualised execution of a symbolic outsider/scapegoat will continue to be the method by which internal discord is repressed, communal ties are reinforced, and ‘catastrophe’ averted for another year” (“Black Boxes” 76). Ralph Beliveau’s interpretation of the titular lottery as an ancient practice that a community holds onto “without questioning [its] long-forgotten origin” applies equally to Tin-Tin’s insidiously pervasive influence (21). The scapegoat sacrifice is both cause and symptom, poison and cure; the neighborhood’s homogenizing imperative is, in effect, an inescapable vicious cycle that will never cease to demand new victims.
The Ransom-Jones household’s garden party—a quintessential suburban festivity—has all the hallmarks of a pagan ritual, including the folk horror trope of the scapegoat sacrifice. Murphy identifies “a close relationship between Christianity and paganism” as a hallmark of American folk horror (“Black Boxes” 139), and Brandon R. Grafius describes folk horror narratives as religious palimpsests wherein “Christianity is a modern veneer, laid over the underlying, older religion” (91). While Road’s climactic backyard party is not explicitly Christian, Mrs. Ransom-Jones’s timing coincides with the imminent “unleash[ing]” of so-called “Barbarian hordes” via the titular wall (Road 130). The fear of barbarian hordes has Christian connotations, and Hattenhauer observes that the very first event following the wall’s destruction “is that Mrs. Perlman has the temerity to undermine anti-Semitism by paying a friendly visit to Mrs. Merriam” (94). Paradoxically, the Ransom-Jones’s genteel garden party quickly devolves into a decidedly unchristian bacchanalia, including but not limited to singing, dancing, underaged drinking, and intergenerational flirtation. Jackson is no stranger to “Peel[ing] back the skin of Christianity” (Grafius 91); just as she imbues the “The Lottery” with the “overtones of ancient ritual” and the “air of festivity, release, even license” (Nebeker 102), she populates the Ransom-Jones’s backyard with a “long table garlanded with branches” and partygoers who “renew their dutiful homage to the garden” (167; 166). The symbolic significance of the backyard block party is reified in Keetley’s folk horror reading of Eden Lake (2008), wherein a “seemingly banal neighborhood party turns out to be a ritual gathering of sorts that will end in [the protagonist’s] sacrifice” (18). Unlike Eden Lake, wherein the scapegoat materializes in an outsider who crashes the party, Pepper Street’s efficacious gatekeeping means that it must sacrifice its own kind. While the garden party is intended as a ritual reinforcement against the insular community’s imminent democratization, the prejudicial exclusion of otherized neighbors means that Caroline Desmond’s murder is unquestionably committed by one of Pepper Street’s elect.
The tragic death of Caroline Desmond and subsequent scapegoating of Tod Donald completely undermines the white middle-class residents’ belief in their innate moral supremacy. Tod, whose name aptly means death in German (Hall 264), lacks his peers’ eerie automaton ease; instead, he wears a “perpetual nervous smile which deepen[s] occasionally into apprehensive trembling” (Road 32). Though he is a member of the white middle-class elite, he is too natural and authentic—too human—to be properly enmeshed. The masculine pursuits celebrated on Pepper Street do not come easily to Tod: he “ha[s] learned, painfully, to ride a bicycle and play football and roller-skate; no one had ever taught him anything” (Road 32). James disparages his younger brother’s autodidacticism on the grounds that it is an “inefficient” methodology; Tod is thereby labeled “evil” according to James’s “athletic sense” of morality (Road 32). Tod’s unique idiosyncrasy makes him the ideal scapegoat, and James outsources “any form of evil in his own personality” onto Tod (Road 33). Jackson deliberately obfuscates Tod’s motive in hanging himself, ultimately denying the self-righteous Pepper Street residents the conviction they have sought throughout the novel. Though the white middle-class suburbanites ultimately convince themselves that Tod’s suicide is evidence of his culpability, some are haunted by the idea that the innocent teenager only anticipated his ritual punishment at the hands of the “suburban lynch mob” (Murphy, Suburban Gothic 202). Jackson’s ambiguous ending serves as an indictment of a community that uses efficiency, athleticism, racial purity, and socioeconomic status as yardsticks with which to measure good and evil. Tod is not an agent of evil, but a symptom of a larger social ill. Pepper Street’s residents have so much faith in the efficacy of the wall (and all that it symbolizes) that their inability to maintain social stability in its absence plays out as a self-fulfilling prophecy. This dynamic accords with a particular strain of the twentieth-century novel identified by Jurca, in which “the suburb and suburban house cheat characters out of the very thing that is supposed to be their white, middle-class, property-owning due” (5). Road’s elite residents’ unwillingness to acknowledge their complicity in an ongoing legacy of racial violence, their insistence on seeing themselves as the rightful heirs to suburbia, results in the deaths of their most innocent community members.
The Road Through the Wall shows us how the folk horror genre can lay bare the perils of homogenizing social imperatives and dogmatic moral convictions. Jackson employs uncanny topographies, eerie residents, prejudicial superstitions, bacchanal festivities, and a scapegoat sacrifice in her indictment of the claustrophobic suburban ideal. Given the rise of white Christian nationalism and the return of the trad wife in the contemporary United States, Jackson’s distinct strain of American folk horror remains relevant. Her portrayal of a cruelly conventional white middle-class exists on a continuum that extends to the present-day national projects of isolationism and anti-immigration, whose cracks are already beginning to show, even as their proponents double down on their supposed efficacy. Road challenges the myth of the American Dream that persists in the national consciousness. That is, Jackson’s novel exposes the oppressive social norms, rigid gender roles, and tense sociopolitical dynamics that have always simmered beneath the harmonious fantasy of a collective identity based in traditional customs and values. Reading The Road Through the Wall as a work of folk horror illuminates Jackson’s commentary on the sick fragility of the American suburban dream, and the homogenizing imperative that keeps it alive. Jackson’s regimented suburban world represents the ongoing fantasy of American exceptionalism for what it truly is: a delusion of grandeur.
Works Cited
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