Anxious Architecture: Shirley Jackson’s Insecure & Uncontrolled American Suburbs
By Madison T. Harmon
Madison Harmon is a doctoral candidate at the University of South Carolina. Her research interests include late 19th- and mid 20th-century American literature, women’s writing, and the lesbian literary imagination. Her forthcoming dissertation focuses on 1950s America, Cold War articulations of lesbianism, and how genre fiction writers—such as Shirley Jackson, Carson McCullers, and Patricia Highsmith—and their pulp fiction contemporaries collectively humanized and complicated the cultural figure of “the Lesbian” during the postwar era.
In the lecture “About the End of the World,” published posthumously in Let Me Tell You (2016), Jackson reflects on the birth of The Sundial (1958). When rereading earlier works in preparation for her fourth novel, Jackson shares a pattern she observed: “I find a wall surrounding some forbidden, lovely secret, and in this wall a gate that cannot be passed… I found it odd that in seven books I had never succeeded in getting through the gate and inside the wall” (373-374). Meditating on this “gate-wall” framework, Patrycja Antoszek surmises that “Jackson’s physically enclosed spaces—be it a walled neighborhood, a college room, a haunted house, or, on a different level, a haunted mind—are more than just particularly effective metaphors” (76). Antoszek highlights Jackson’s insistence on authoring architecture and settings that function beyond background or non-sentient elements. Jackson’s architectures, whether bodily or physical, are simultaneously a symptom of and a symbol for the pervasive anxiety woven throughout her fiction. Jackson once wrote in her diary that “insecure, uncontrolled, i wrote of neuroses and fear and i think all my books laid end to end would be long documentation of anxiety” (qtd. in Franklin 477). Jackson’s body of work reflects the wider individual and collective paranoia and fears associated with the postwar “Age of Anxiety.”
Jackson wrote the majority of her fiction amidst a backdrop of the “politics of containment,” nationwide paranoia about the other, and the looming threat of nuclear warfare. Elaine Tyler May, in Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, emphasizes that, according to the dominant ideologies of the period, “if subversive individuals could be contained and prevented from spreading their poisonous influence through the body politic, then the society could feel secure” (16). Binaries such as “us/them,” “insider/outside,” and “public/private” preoccupied the social consciousness of America: a nation urgently reordering itself, its citizens, and defining its role amongst a fractured, war-fatigued geopolitical stage. Jackson’s writing reflects postwar anxiety, exposing its sources as patriarchal oppression, American exceptionalism, and consumer capitalism–ultimately targeting its headquarters. For 1950s America, the utmost boundary to preserve and protect from invasion or disorder was “the home.” The family home became a bunker, a sanctuary, and a symbol for signifying and fortifying a stable white middle-class identity. Sylvia Grider emphasizes that “we humans have an incredibly powerful psychological attachment to our house—our sanctuaries—and the intrusion of a threatening, otherworldly force in that otherwise safe setting is terrifying to consider” (143). Jackson, acutely aware of this terror, contorts this most sacred of national institutions, weaponizing it to expose both the architectural and ideological cracks riddling the nation’s foundation.
The majority of scholarship engaging with Jackson’s use of disturbed, unnerving architecture focuses on her “House Trilogy” (The Sundial [1958], The Haunting of Hill House [1959], and We Have Always Lived in the Castle [1962]). Her last three novels do not merely fashion spaces for setting or ornamental purposes but rather anthropomorphize the “home.” Whether it’s the Halloran Estate, Hill House, or the Blackwood family home, Jackson’s “House Trilogy” situates the domestic realm as an antagonistic force driving both the narrative and her characters’ fate. Darryl Hattenhauer proposes that Jackson, by repeatedly dropping both characters and readers into anxious and off-kilter spaces, “exposes the home as a repressive location for the policing of gender roles” and America’s exclusionary paranoia (86). Jackson’s “House Trilogy” expands the nascent characterizations of spaces and institutions that inform her first two novels. Critically re-examining Jackson’s The Road Through the Wall (1948) and Hangsaman (1951) as precursors to the manipulation of space and place integrated in her “House Trilogy” demonstrates how anxious architecture has been, from the very beginning, a driving force in Jackson’s corpus.
Jackson’s debut novel, The Road Through the Wall, masterfully deconstructs the suburban ideal through her near surgical dissection of the Pepper Street neighborhood and the individual households that line its sidewalks. Jackson’s fictional Pepper Street is in the city of Cabrillo, which is modeled after the suburbs of Burlingame, California, where she grew up. Through episodic chapters, the omniscient narrator oscillates between the different families that make up the idyllic, isolated neighborhood. Jackson wrote the novel in a postwar context whilst strategically setting the novel in 1936. This time shift enhances the novel’s overall anxious tone as Jackson presents her reader with a cast of unaware characters teetering on the cusp of a second World War. Woven throughout the narrative is a complex web of overlapping commentary on race, religion, and an inscribed fear of outside threats informed by both pre- and postwar sentiments.
At the heart of The Road Through the Wall is a pervasive instability regarding both safety and identity for these suburbanites, with Pepper Street acting as a microcosm for postwar America. Jackson antagonizes the postwar racial, ethnic, and political othering anxieties held by white middle-class citizens by locating the fatal threat to Pepper Street’s idyllic stability as an internal product of the very suburban ideal meant to keep the neighborhood exclusive and safe. When the novel was first published, critics wrote it off because of its singularity in time and space, reading it as merely “a casebook study, which tends to leave the reader emotionally untouched” (Antoszek 75). The strategic insulation of Pepper Street and the narrative structure is precisely Jackson’s intention though—to author a suffocating space festering with paranoia. There is minimal scholarship focusing solely on The Road Through the Wall, most of which explores how the dichotomies of “us/them” and “insider/outsider” are inscribed through the interactions and characterizations of the Pepper Street residents. However, these same dialectics are just as readily identified in the physical material and overall architecture of the Pepper Street homes.
Jackson’s architectural designs in The Road Through the Wall engage heavily with “spatial rhetorics,” defined as “the importance of the built environment in shaping public opinion, perception, and belief about a range of cultural conditions” (Harris 10). As Hattenhauer argues, “architecture is rhetorical because it induces us to do what others would have us do” (71). Applying a rhetorical approach illuminates that the physicality of Pepper Street is key to understanding the motives driving each family and character, which ultimately catalyzes the suburban collapse, and the novel concludes with a murder of one Pepper Street child and the suicide of another. The novel opens with the narrator laying out the configuration of Pepper Street, introducing the different households: the Desmonds, the Byrnes, the Roberts, the Perlmans, the Ransom-Jones, the Donalds, the Merriams, and the Martins. There are two singular occupant homes, Mrs. Mark’s and Miss Fielding’s, and a “house-for-rent” that is initially occupied by the Williams before the Terrels move in. The street is bookended by Cortez Road in the west, Winslow Road to the east, with a new highway being built and apartment homes to the north, and a wooded area backing up the south. Pepper Street and its occupants are isolated from any other neighboring complexes as Winslow Road is parallel to two adjacent vacant lots at the end of the street and Cortez Road runs parallel with the “Wall,” surrounding the private estates that lie beyond it.
The encroaching urbanity represented by the highway and rental apartments, combined with the prominent exclusion marked by the titular “Wall” and its gate, leaves the Pepper Street residents to occupy an isolated middle-ground, culturally and socioeconomically. The narrator even states as much, remarking “they all lived on Pepper Street because they were able to afford it, and none of them would have lived there if he had been able to afford living elsewhere, although Pepper Street was charming and fairly expensive and even comfortably isolated” (5). There is a shame held by several of the families, like the Ransom-Jones, who “were not rich enough to live in the style they coveted and not proud enough to live in opposition to it” (7). Seemingly, to live on Pepper Street was to reside with an overwhelming sense of dissatisfaction, due to either economic, ethnic, or homeowner status.
Of the Pepper Street families, only five are stated directly as owners (the Roberts, the Desmonds, the Ransom-Jones, the Merriams, and the Martins) whereas the Perlmans, the Donalds, the Byrnes, the Terrels, the Williams, and Miss Fielding are explicitly denoted as renters. Dianne Harris, in Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race, emphasizes that “home ownership served as a safeguard…an investment that represented security against uncertain times. Owning a house was the surest way to cement one’s (and one’s family’s) inclusion in the nation” (15). This blending of owning and renting within the neighborhood, along with the encroaching rental apartments around the corner correlates with the racial and ethnic othering performed by some of the Pepper Street residents.
For example, the Donalds (a white family) rent their home but are judgmental and racist towards the Terrel family who move into the “house-for-rent” directly next door. On one occasion, a couple of the young girls naively venture into the apartments on Cortez Road with a Chinese immigrant who lives there, and they note the ethnic differences in both the apartment complex’s population and design. Similarly, the Perlmans—the only Jewish family on the block—are renters, just like several of the white families, but are cast out socially because in 1936, the year the novel is set, “whiteness” did not yet include immigrants. This rhetorical othering and dissatisfaction are then met with varying corrective, superficial, and aesthetic approaches by some of the residents. Due to pre- and postwar racial housing discrimination, widespread anxiety about owning versus renting, and the varying cultural statuses signaled by one’s homeowner status, Harris furthers that “the configuration, decor, possessions, and maintenance of the house (and the labor involved in that maintenance) all provided opportunities to convey a range of images and lifestyles” (21). If the Pepper Street residents couldn’t change their economic or cultural status, they could instead engage with certain postwar consumer practices, like landscaping or over-gardening to conceal a shoddy home aesthetic, in hopes of changing how their neighbors and society, at large, perceived their household.
As the narrator continues to detail each of the residences of Pepper Street, the Desmond house becomes a focal point and is situated as representative of the postwar suburban architecture and cultural ideals. It’s the largest home on the block, and “on the corner of Pepper Street and Cortez Road, facing Pepper Street…tall blank windows on the Cortez Road side” (5). Furthermore, “the tall windows belonged on the inside to the Desmond living-room where the family sat in the evenings, and the Venetian blinds were always closed after dark” (5). The “tall blank windows,” the front facing family room, and the drawing of Venetian blinds illuminate several facets of architectural design attached to the postwar era. These “tall blank windows” act as a “mirror,” physically reflecting the (white, middle-class, nuclear family) values of the interior to the outside world. Despite being set in 1936, the Desmond family and their home are the quintessential image (and mirror) of the “ordinary postwar home,” which was designed to perpetually reaffirm white, middle-class identity and anxiety regarding the other. Luke Reid notes that “Jackson’s ironic use of the mirror-as-window revisits the contentiousness of glass architecture within postwar suburban design” (135). Glass architecture—as a mirror—became a weapon of postwar design because “to design the private domestic space was to design the family, and to design the family was to assimilate and affirm American identity” (Harris 122). However, there were drawbacks to this architectural design becoming commonplace as it enabled the home’s interior to become both a spectacle and deeply vulnerable to voyeuristic gazes.
Glass architecture became popular in the 1930s when Libby-Owens-Corning, a glass manufacturer, began advertising “the Picture Window Idea” in home & lifestyle magazines (Harris 134). These windows offered a way to bring the outdoors into the domestic design while simultaneously allowing outsiders to surveil, enacting voyeurism in an anxious age insistent upon privacy. A 1946 issue of Home Beautiful magazine echoes this very tension, reading “many people who responded to the urge for more sun and light are living behind drawn venetian blinds and thin curtains to escape living like fish in a bowl” (Harris 136). To combat this notion of a “fishbowl,” backyards became an extension of the postwar home, with more fencing and privacy measures put in place. The installation of aluminum-framed sliding glass doors in the back of the home became commonplace, allowing a blending of the interior and exterior worlds without front-facing voyeurism from the sidewalks that “tall blank windows” welcomed. How Jackson explores these architectural phenomena in The Road Through the Wall ultimately exposes the fragility of certain stability measures, especially through the insistent focus on the Desmond house and its reverence as the postwar home.
Once again, a focal point for the anxiety of Pepper Street, the Desmond house is broken into one afternoon by Tod Donald, an outcast 13-year-old in the neighborhood. Tod seemingly has a fixation on Mrs. Desmond and, by proxy, 3-year-old Caroline Desmond. He approaches the home, noting that “it never occurred to him to slip into the Desmond yard; and once there, when he saw the glass door from the Desmond terrace slightly open, his mind did not encompass the notion of stepping into the Desmond house, nor did it suggest to him, once in, that he had no right to be there” (62). The sliding glass doors stand as a chink in the home’s armor, allowing Tod, as intruder, to easily penetrate the sanctity of the home. Surveying the house’s configuration, noting the heightened convenience of the Desmond’s layout and the materiality of the home compared to his family’s, Tod “bent over the table and saw his face reflected dimly in the polished wood. He looked at the chairs, they had light leather seats and graceful rising backs; the rug on the floor, barely pressed by the legs of the chairs and the table, was pale and smooth” (63). Harris notes that the materiality and specific furnishing choices of the postwar home were “part of an aesthetic emphasis on surface appearances, on the way things look, and on the ‘skin’ of all things as a determining factor in status and identification” (192). The reflectivity (mirroring) of the physical surfaces, the “pale” nature, and the lightness of the furniture all symbolize the suburban ideals of whiteness, civility and decadence that the Desmond’s represent. Tod continues his “intimate investigation” of the Desmond house until he finally reaches Caroline’s nursery and Mrs. Desmond’s bedroom.
The bedroom of Mrs. Desmond is in the very back of the home, draped in green as the multiple mirrors in her room reflect and amplify the green curtains, a green bedspread, and overall green accents throughout. Tod, walking carefully on the yellow carpeted floor, notes the overpowering scent of her perfume before approaching the closet. There are seemingly two mirroring closets, one for Mrs. Desmond’s vast array of different color dresses and a coordinating one for Caroline’s toddler dresses. He approaches, “half-shutting the closet door behind him, he wormed his way in through Mrs. Desmond’s dresses and negligees until he reached the most hidden part of the closet, and he sat down on the floor” (65). Then, “quite loudly, [said] all the dirtiest words he knew” before exiting the closet and smoothing the Mrs. Desmond’s dresses (66). Finally, “the perfume still on his hand was beginning to make him sick, and he rubbed his hand against a dark coat of Caroline’s” (66). Any psychoanalyst could have a field day with the psychical and psychosexual implications of Tod’s episode here. However, and for the sake of this argument, Tod’s verbal and physical desecration of both the closet space and Caroline’s garments are most telling. Harris emphasizes that “the walk-in closet, once the privileged storage space of the upper classes, became a desirable…middle-class aspiration and a symbol of economic success” (211). The Donalds not holding homeowning status, mixed with Tod’s individual desire for a loving maternal figure out of neglect by his peers and family, makes the Desmond home a projection of what he lacks. The anxiety surrounding his inability and perhaps the inability of his family, at large, to live up to the ideals of the suburban promise comes to a head with his disdain for Caroline.
Jackson pays careful attention to the colors of the rooms in the Desmond home, specifically Caroline’s nursery being yellow and white. Yellow is associated with Caroline repeatedly throughout the course of the novel, including being the color of dress she’s murdered in. Rather notably, one of the “Colors of the Year” prior to the publication of The Road Through the Wall was “Banana Yellow,” according to House & Garden. Beginning in 1946, House & Garden began publishing an annual “Color Report” in their September issues. In the 1947 issue, it was stated that “Yellow has the highest visibility of any color…gives an impression of sunshine…Yellow accents are light and sparkling” (87). Furthermore, the report claimed that children love yellow and encouraged homeowners to “use it in a nursery. Combined with white, it is a delightful change from the conventional pink and blue” (90). Jackson was no stranger to lifestyle and home magazines given that she wrote for Good Housekeeping and Woman’s Home Companion. Therefore, it’s not a far reach to suggest Jackson was aware of these “Color Reports,” infusing contemporary design aesthetics into the interiors of her fictional homes.
These colors and their metaphorical associations are not accidental and recontextualize the mysterious bludgeoning of Caroline at the end of the novel as a young symbol for postwar, white, idyllic suburbia. Simultaneously, Tod’s invasion of the home, disdain for Caroline, fixation on Mrs. Desmond, and pariah-status among the other children complicate his suicide and potential involvement with Caroline’s death, which Jackson intentionally leaves ambiguous for both the Pepper Street residents and readers. Tod finally exits the Desmond home, stepping into the backyard, noting “he could see the glass doors, see into the dining room, but not the hallway, not into the bedrooms” (66). The vulnerability of the family’s home is on full display as Tod was able to slip in and out, undetected. Through that easily penetrable glass barrier, the only thing outwardly visible becomes the dining room, marking it as the symbol for the postwar nuclear family image. The hallways or bedrooms, spaces garnering more privacy and intimacy, seem safely tucked out of view of any outside, surveying gaze. Tod flees as Mrs. Desmond returns home with Caroline in tow, unaware that her family’s home and sanctuary were just violated, invaded not by an othered outsider, but one of Pepper Street’s (white, middle-class) own.
The event which enacts the final crisis of the novel is the arrival of a construction crew intending to tear down the wall. The residents fall distraught as “part of the wall was to come down. A breach was to be made in the northern boundary of the world. Barbarian hordes were to be unleashed on Pepper Street. A change was going to come about without anyone’s consent” (123). Remembering that the novel was published in 1948 but set in 1936, this “invasion” should be understood as a foreshadowing of fascism and the rippling effect felt by America during the Second World War. The cushioning of Pepper Street’s insulation and overall ignorance of the suburban ideal was soon to be stripped away. As the wall is deconstructed, “dust from the old bricks filled every living room on the block” (126). An identity crisis amongst much of the neighborhood ensues, tensions rise as “the idea that placid Pepper Street was being deformed by workmen and dirt and great foul machines was almost as bad as the prospect of being shortly on a direct road with the rest of the world” (126). The ultimate suburban fear of urbanity, modernization, and total dismantling of the exclusive (white, middle-class) suburban bubble is emblematized by the removal of this singular wall.
The concluding action of the novel is a neighborhood block party interrupted by a frantic search for a missing Caroline and the subsequent discovery of her body on the greens of a nearby golf course. Tod is also missing from the party, implying that he was the one who lured the toddler away. The chaos of the clamoring families and Tod’s brief interrogation by the police are cut short when it is discovered that Tod had hanged himself in the Donalds’ kitchen, leaving his body “straighter than it had been in life” (178). Only once Tod is dead does his corporeality match the narrow, restricted, and conventional architecture of his family’s suburban home and, by proxy, identity. The fallout of Caroline’s murder and Tod’s suicide leaves not only the two families but the entire neighborhood to reckon with how to move forward after the sudden violent and unexpected turn of events. In hindsight, and ironically, all the signs had been there, but the Pepper Street residents were blind to the impending undoing of their suburban bubble. The threat was always supposed to come from the outside because that’s what they had been conditioned to believe based on the architectural and cultural ideals that built Pepper Street.
While The Road Through the Wall focalizes its narrative paranoia within the sequestered West Coast suburban scene, Jackson’s follow-up novel, Hangsaman takes place in an entirely different anxiety-inducing environment. Hangsaman’s main setting is a small liberal arts college nestled in a fictionalized rendering of Bennington, Vermont. Hangsaman, published in 1951, is loosely based on the real-life disappearance of Paula Jean Welden, a college student who went missing in 1946 during the time Jackson’s husband was employed as a professor at Bennington college. Hangsaman departs from the episodic structure of The Road Through the Wall with Natalie Waite as the sole focus of the narrative. The novel is a blend of loose threads from the Welden case, folkloric elements, and Gothic mechanisms to depict the complete psychological unraveling of Natalie during her first semester of college. Notably, as the novel progresses, the question of whether Natalie or the narrator are directly addressing the reader blurs, increasing the narrative’s unreliability. Hangsaman’s opening quickly lays out the dynamic of the Waite family as a typical 1950s nuclear set-up: son, daughter, patriarchal husband/father, domesticated housewife/mother. Natalie’s father, Arthur Waite, is a domineering academic hellbent on priming his daughter for her soon approaching freshman year whilst her mother, Charity Waite, quietly seeks refuge in the kitchen.
Throughout Jackson’s oeuvre kitchens function as ambivalent spaces. Sometimes for Jackson’s characters “the kitchen” is a place of refuge, like for Mrs. Waite, or Mrs. Dudley in The Haunting of Hill House promptly shutting herself away in the kitchen all day to keep the house’s evil out, and perhaps Aunt Morgen from The Bird’s Nest (1954) with her affinity for overconsumption. Alternatively, some of Jackson’s kitchens are sites of violence, such as Tod’s sudden kitchen-table suicide in The Road Through the Wall or Merricat Blackwood using the kitchen to aid in the arsenic poisoning of nearly her whole family in We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Jackson’s ambivalence stands as a means of “depicting the house as complicit in the strategic domestication of women and the reproduction of mothering” (Reid 77). Kitchens are femininized, representing nourishment, and embodying, as Jackson writes in Hangsaman, “a sort of mother-daughter relationship that might communicate womanly knowledge” (199). The only time Natalie and her mother are with one another intimately is in the kitchen, a space Natalie vehemently rejects. Natalie tells her father, “she [Mrs. Waite] makes the kitchen like a room with a sign saying ‘Ladies’ on the door” (199).
Hattenhauer, in Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic, posits that Natalie rejects anything maternal due to her “conflicting desires to both like and dislike her mother.” Diagnosing Natalie with “domestiphobia,” Hattenhauer continues, insisting she “feels trapped by her mother’s behavior, which makes the kitchen physically feel like a trap door for only them” (100). The feeling of being trapped, and Natalie’s overall rejection of the mother-daughter relationship, is symptomatic of postwar anxiety and the urgent, state-sponsored push to reaffirm domesticity as a cornerstone of American democracy. This re-domestication and the subsequent architecture perpetuating it left women with only a singular space (the kitchen) that’s “only for them,” demarcating where their jurisdiction in the home begins and ends. Jackson’s work, as a touchstone for this postwar anxiety, uses “domestic spaces [to] demonstrate how architectural discourse and physical design actively take part in the policing of female sexuality and the essentialization of the maternal” (Reid 79). Mrs. Waite’s relation to the kitchen in her 1950s suburban home emulates just that:
The kitchen was, in fact, the only place in the house that Mrs. Waite possessed utterly; even her bedroom was not her own, since her husband magnanimously insisted upon sharing it. He also shared the dinner table and the services of the patio in the living room; he felt himself privileged to sit on the porch and to use a bathtub. In the kitchen, however, Mr. Waite amusedly confessed himself “inadequate,” and so Mrs. Waite, one day a week, was allowed a length of time unmolested (199).
Mrs. Waite’s lack of autonomy in her marriage mimics that same stripping of jurisdiction bestowed on her within the home. The kitchen is the only room seemingly not under patriarchal occupation, the only space that is “hers,” but only because Mr. Waite deems himself “inadequate.” Mr. Waite’s inadequacy is a clear euphemism for his inability to bear children, which is solely women’s labor, and inherently capitalistic. Reid surmises that “domestic spaces [kitchens] demonstrate how architectural discourse and physical design actively take part in the policing of female sexuality and the essentialization of the maternal” (79). Therefore, Mrs. Waite’s labor and body when in the kitchen, even when she feels like it’s “hers” and “unmolested,” is still inevitably a servant to and victim of an oppressive cycle surrounding the reproduction of capital.
Specific architectural designs for the ordinary postwar house, as discussed with The Road Through the Wall, functioned as mirrors for re-domestication and capitalist ideologies. Kitchens were moved to the back of homes so mothers could overlook their children playing in a fenced backyard and kitchen desks began to be installed, reflecting the new type of labor—strictly domestic—that women were contributing to the family’s overall functioning. Similarly, the kitchen space was opened-up with the elimination of certain doors and walls in the architectural design, pass-throughs became commonplace, which “served as part of the spatial lexicon that marked the worker as mother and wife rather than as servant” (Harris 197). Mrs. Waite is not wholly submissive though as she understands the role she must serve within the nuclear family structure, conscious of the toll it takes on her incoherent sense of self. In response to Natalie’s outward annoyance regarding “kitchen time with her mother,” Mrs. Waite remarks “a mother gets very lonesome without her daughter, especially when it’s an only daughter. A mother gets more lonesome than anything in the world” (203). Mrs. Waite wishes to commune with her daughter in the kitchen because she, too, is aware it has a “Ladies” sign on the door; Natalie is the only person in her domestic sphere who might one day sympathize with the plight of the housewife. Natalie ultimately fails to truly understand her mother and, in pure Freudian-fashion, abandons any attachment to her mother, instead clinging to her father. Mrs. Waite’s characterization is emblematic of the suburban ideal and domesticity, which Natalie fervently rejects for herself. Arthur Waite, on the other hand, represents the domineering, institutional mindset that the collegiate environment reflects, which Natalie anxiously awaits.
When Natalie arrives on campus, the narrator notes the college was “a place modern, authentic, progressive, realistic, honest…it was supposed to be, and had to be, a strictly budget-balanced proposition, a factory in which the intake must necessarily match the outgo” (229). Hattenhauer suggests that “[Jackson’s] fiction represents not self-creating individuals but rather the constituting of subjects” (86). In this sense, the collegiate atmosphere is not liberating or nurturing—rather pretending to be progressive, but ultimately just as constricting as the domestic realm. The campus as “budget balanced” transforms into a constitutive cog in the wider capitalist system. If the college is a “factory,” then the students become “products” with an inherent value attached rather than individuals with varying senses of self. Just like the Waite household, or the suburban ideal at large, a particular outcome is expected, and a respectable image must be maintained. Natalie’s dorm hall reflects this same insistence upon pedigree and aesthetics:
Its discreet neutral walls, the green-and-gray-striped chairs, the helpless vase on the mantel, and picture over the fireplace, which may have been of a past president of the college or a financial lover of education—all were so carefully devoid of personality that the room as a whole reduced conversation to the exact-level which a well-bred girl would choose. (232-233)
Beatriz Colomina, in Sexuality and Space, emphasizes that “architecture is not simply a platform that accommodates the viewing subject. It is a viewing mechanism that produces the subject. It precedes and frames its occupant” (83). The room’s design is entwined with its larger metaphorical purpose, not just its architectural one. The overall ordinariness, dullness—the room being “devoid of personality” – is meant to encourage that same dilution of self and literal reduction of space (via speech) taken up by its subjects. Harris denotes that “architecture is not benign, even (and sometimes especially) when it is spectacularly beautiful or when it is so ordinary we hardly notice it” (3). Jackson pointedly calls the reader’s attention to these mundane objects, such as the “helpless vase on the mantle” or dull paint colors because the design is not simply aesthetic but inherently manipulative and rhetorical. The same constitutive, capitalistic intent of the campus is mirrored in this dorm hall, a potential financial donor is quite literally mounted above the mantle as an overseer of the room’s activity. Both the outer exterior of the campus buildings and its mirroring dorm interiors are designed to target and frame the “well-bred girl” as both subject and product.
Natalie’s dorm room is no different, she finds it “almost square…blank and empty…it was expectant, almost curious” (230). The room’s physical state matches Natalie’s psychological one as she too is expectant and curious about how the college experience will unfold for her. The room becomes personified, “the floor was readied for the movements of her feet…in respectful anticipation of anything Natalie might be inclined to set upon it.” The room’s, and subsequently Natalie’s, anticipation regarding this fall term is equally dashed by the anxiety inscribed in its aesthetics. The walls and ceilings “a dull tan, in the proper institutional bad taste, so uninspired as to be almost colorless…the smallness of the room made it seem cell-like and dismal.” Additionally, those same floorboards, eagerly waiting to be used by Natalie, are still institutional property as any scratch or dent “must be eradicated at the comptroller’s office by the payment of a small fine.” Natalie’s movements within her “new room,” don’t belong to her—hence the feeling that the room is “cell-like.” The notion of the dorm room not truly being Natalie’s echoes the anxieties around renting that were present in The Road Through the Wall. Her movements bear financial consequences; she’s inevitably being surveilled and her “new room” doesn’t truly belong to her. This subtle surveillance extends to the singular “uncurtained window,” fashioned parallel to the door, like an all-seeing eye. The window, uncovered and vulnerable, echoes the postwar paranoia attached to “picture window” architecture, situating the private realm as a “fishbowl,” ultimately affording voyeurism.
Privacy and security become even greater concerns as Natalie begins to meet the other girls in her residence hall. Understanding that she is now constantly surrounded by others, she realizes she isn’t ever truly “alone” or secure in her room. For Natalie, the dorm becomes this series of stairs and doors and at one point in the middle of the night, she is awoken by sudden knocking. She finds herself frightened, thinking:
A knock on her door was as strange a thing to her as the fact of the door itself…as she looked at the outside, and meant to mark the next day whether the panels outside were the same as those inside…someone standing outside could look at the door, straight ahead, seeing the white paint and the wood, and I inside looking at the door and the white paint and the wood (245).
Natalie’s anxiety surrounding the door becomes enmeshed with her anxiety about who or what may be on the other side. The door represents an impenetrable barrier both protecting Natalie while also barring transparent access to the outside world. Hague emphasizes that “the fear that pervades much of Jackson’s fiction is the terror of what is unseen and unacknowledged; the enemy cannot be confronted because it inhabits a world that lies hidden but generously close by” (90). The unknown that a closed door represents triggers Natalie, and she thinks to herself “are two people regarding the same thing not looking at each other?” (245). This physical barrier perpetuates Natalie’s increasing derealization as she situates herself in third person as one of those two people looking at but not seeing the other. The door, now an uncanny object, fosters her growing paranoia about safety and security.
Security and privacy continue to be stripped from Natalie, especially when two of her fellow dorm residents sneeringly admit to breaking into her room. The two girls reveal to Natalie that “all the corresponding rooms on each floor use the same lock. Your room is 27, so the keys to 17 and 37 and 7 all unlock it” (267). This direct threat to privacy and the lack of true security presumed by Natalie clashes with the purported “authentic” and “honest” campus promise. Natalie slowly absorbs the fact that she can’t trust her environment, the girls living amongst her, or even her own locked dorm room. A locked door as an imprisoning structure, demarcating one’s jurisdiction—like the kitchen door—continues to antagonize Natalie in her unraveling, especially when she first visits the faculty home of her English professor, Arthur Langdon. Natalie arrives at the faculty home with its campus-aesthetic “architecture, done by a fellow faculty member, since deceased” and “the college stonework” adorning the front façade” (255). The Langdon House, as a department-issued home, is nothing more than an extension of the institution and its governing patriarchal values at large. Langdon is domineering and has a proclivity for crossing boundaries with his young students. He lives in this faculty home with Elizabeth Langdon, his wife and former student.
Natalie, initially enamored with her professor, remarks that “the fact that this was certainly the house where Arthur Langdon lived seemed to somehow color the air of it” (255). Elizabeth, on the other hand, lets Natalie in, closes the door and “had changed, as a bird stepping again inside its cage is no longer a creature of circle and parabola, but a hopping thing” (255). Upon re-entering a domestic space, the housewife, and in this case—the faculty wife—is immediately re-associated to subjugation, becoming an object with limited agency, clipped wings, and only so much room to exist. Natalie isn’t entirely aware of this, but she too falls victim to the masculine designs of the home. There is an oversized armchair that Natalie occupies in the living room, it seemingly swallows her and she remarks how difficult it was to stand up and remove herself from it. The decorum of the room, the arrangement of the coasters or ash tray in the living room all dictate Natalie’s behavior, forcing her—like Elizabeth—to become small and at the whims of the home. The faculty home, and Natalie’s relation to Elizabeth, emblematizes Natalie’s growing dissociation within the campus setting as she’s unable to stabilize her identity despite the promise this new environment once held.
A bit later, Natalie again visits Elizabeth at the Langdon home, realizing that it is “the only place except my own home where everybody knows my name” (287). As Natalie continues to fall into derealization, her dorm room and, by proxy, the college becomes “dark.” She feels “it must be assumed that at one point, to be known as there, was the college, dark and drowsy….and that at another point, known as here, was the home where her mother and father and a brother lived” (326). The notion of “home” for Natalie has blurred, neither the Waite family house nor her dorm feels safe or reflective of her internal self, yet the domestic familiarity of the Langdon home holds some resonance.
Ultimately, Natalie’s dull, uninspired dorm room that can be easily broken into fuels her paranoia about wanting to flee, not feeling safe, and ultimately—losing touch with reality. Hattenhauer posits that “Jackson’s characters do not try to formulate a self as much as they try to cope with the self that history gives them” (86). In Hangsaman, the college-campus, as an institution, is emblematic of this very tension—to do more with constituting of one’s subjectivity than really foster individual choice or creative expression. Furthermore, Jackson’s anxious architecture—like the dorm room or the Langdon faculty house—contributes to Natalie’s destabilization of identity and a coherent sense of self. The physical spaces of Hangsaman, just like the suburban microcosm that is Pepper Street, directly mirror and function according to the deep-seated postwar anxiety informing Jackson’s writing. In The Road Through the Wall, Jackson constructs Pepper Street as a failed suburban ideal, displaying the consequences of thinking safety was a guarantee because of the politics informing the suburban sprawl.
Jackson’s first two novels grapple with varying critical identity structures amidst the “Age of Anxiety.” Jackson wrote both whilst heavily embedded in a web of postwar paranoia regarding national security, individual stability, and identity politics. The architecture, uncanny spaces, and the palpable suspicion informing both novels’ narratives and characters are contingent on postwar political and cultural ideologies about race, class, and individuality. Both novels reflect Jackson’s originating use of architectural influence over her characters, standing as precursors to her distortion of space and place in her later “House Trilogy.” Analyzing these earlier works recontextualizes how Jackson initially understood the influence of environment over self and how to represent that dynamic narratively. Ultimately, the characters and anxious architecture in both The Road Through the Wall and Hangsaman are governed by oppressive capitalist and patriarchal institutions, whether in the shape of the postwar family home or the appropriation of these constrictive ideals within the confines of a campus dorm room or even faculty housing.
Works Cited
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“Color Story: Color Schemes, Pages of Decorating Ideas.” House & Garden, Sept. 11, 1947. https://www.usmodernist.org/HG/HG-1947-09.pdf
Grider, Sylvia. “Five Haunted Houses.” Haunting Experiences: Ghosts in Contemporary Folklore, by Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, Jeannie B. Thomas, Colorado UP, 2007, pp. 143-170.
Hague, Angela. “‘A Faithful Anatomy of Our Time:’ Reassessing Shirley Jackson” Frontiers, vol. 26, no. 2, 2005, pp. 73-96.
Harris, Dianne. Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America. University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Hattenhauer, Darryl. “The Rhetoric of Architecture: A Semiotic Approach.” Communication Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 1, 1984, pp. 71-77.
—-. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. SUNY Press, 2003.
Jackson, Shirley. Four Novels of the 1940s & 50s, edited by Ruth Franklin, Library of America, 2020.
—–. Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings, edited by Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman DeWitt, Random House, 2016.
May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. Basic Books, 1988.
Reid, Luke. “Romancing the Nostalgic Future: Prophecy, Planning and Postwar Architecture in The Sundial.” Shirley Jackson: A Companion, edited by Kristopher Woofter. Peter Lang, 2021, pp. 129-141.
