{"id":314,"date":"2024-08-22T16:13:49","date_gmt":"2024-08-22T16:13:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/shirleyjacksonstudies.org\/?p=314"},"modified":"2024-09-06T12:46:04","modified_gmt":"2024-09-06T12:46:04","slug":"314","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shirleyjacksonstudies.org\/?p=314","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Queer Transport: Shirley Jackson\u2019s Automobiles and Autoerotic Desire<\/h6>\n\n\n\n

By Liz Popko<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Liz Popko is the Associate Director of Writing for UC San Diego's Sixth College where she trains graduate student instructors and teaches literature, often about spooky things. Her pedagogy and scholarly work are invested in the relationships among language, narrative, and the body, and she enjoys how monster stories enable students to examine those intersections. In her free time, she practices yoga, crochets, and watches her husband swim competitively.<\/pre>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Despite the dominant scholarship on Shirley Jackson that positions her work within specific mid-century American discourses of the home, I have always been interested in the few, but notable, appearances of automobiles and public transportation in her work. In this article, I look specifically at the appearance of driving and the private automobile in Jackson\u2019s The Haunting of Hill House <\/em>and The Sundial<\/em>. A close look at Eleanor\u2019s drive out to Hill House and Julia\u2019s attempts to escape the Halloran estate reveals moments of female self-love that I\u2019ve deemed \u201cautoerotic.\u201d In joining the abbreviated term \u201cauto\u201d with \u201cerotic,\u201d I want to draw attention to the heavy cultural baggage of automotive technology within the post-war American landscape, which is tightly bound to mid-century narratives of gender, sexuality, and subjectivity. As Cotton Seiler explains in his cultural history of American automobility, \u201cAs a problematic modern practice and discourse, automobility resembled nothing so much as sexuality\u201d (61-62). I aim to use the concept of \u201cautoerotic\u201d to tease out multiple lines of thought and hopefully provide some new and interesting contours to scholarship on Jackson\u2019s use of space, time, and female desire. 

Scholarship on Jackson is rich with the many ways that her narratives and characters disrupt patriarchal and heteronormative ways of being through uncanny domestic spaces. Yet, within the same time and place of Jackson\u2019s writing\u2014a Cold War, midcentury America\u2014the automobile was also beginning to serve a similar purpose as the home of focalizing cultural shifts and anxieties related to gender and sexuality. Cotton Seiler argues that automobility and the activity of driving operate to constitute American citizenship and \u201c[organize] a compelling mode of self-government anchored in liberal notions of freedom\u201d that were threatened by global politics and rising corporate culture (14, 18). As much as Jackson\u2019s work grapples with female subjectivity through the home, to leave automobiles unaccounted for in her scholarship limits the understanding of Jackson\u2019s participation in the larger drama of midcentury America

I take as my starting point Audre Lorde\u2019s definition of the erotic, which sets up a framework for understanding one\u2019s desires from a deeply creative place within the self. According to Lorde, the erotic is a particular use of the sexual (55) that requires spiritual intention and \u201ctrue feeling\u201d (54) rather than a mere emphasis on sensation, which she identifies as the pornographic. My reading of Lorde understands the erotic to be an experience of joy and power within both one\u2019s body and spirit, which includes sexual desire and sensation. In this way, one\u2019s sexuality can be an expression of the erotic and can inform one\u2019s non-sexual experience of joy and power. To Lorde, I add Ellie Anderson\u2019s definition of the autoerotic as \u201ca genuine form of Eros [\u2026that \u2026] involves an irreducible alterity, rather than being enclosed within the independent self-absorption of a sovereign subject figured by traditional views of masturbation\u201d (53). Discourses of the erotic speak to twentieth century American narratives of what it means to be a sexual subject and how one\u2019s sexual subjectivity should encounter another\u2019s sexual subjectivity, both issues which animate midcentury discourses on automobility and Jackson\u2019s fiction. 

As many historians and cultural critics of the United States have explored, the Cold War or post-war era can be understood as both a crisis of masculinity as well as a crisis of the individual, since the legitimate American citizen was the (white and heterosexual) autonomous male. K.A. Cuordileone notes that the political culture of the Cold War \u201cput a new premium on hard masculine toughness and rendered anything less than that soft and feminine and, as such, a real or potential threat to the security of the nation\u201d (516). Indeed, the Lavender Scare, during which supposed homosexuals were fired from government, serves as the most explicit narration of the overlap between queerness and national security (Johnson 2). Post-war economic and social abundance also inspired fears of conformity and a \u201ccrisis of the individual,\u201d as a blossoming consumerist culture was thought to make Americans (men) passive and pliant (Seiler 76-77), and therefore susceptible to the enemy Other. Autoeroticism within this framework can be understood as especially dangerous in that it joins \u201cthe desire, inclination or pull towards something irreducibly other\u201d (E. Anderson 56) with a sense of the self as other. Ellie Anderson explains that the autoerotic \u201crequire[s] a troubling of any easy distinction between self and other or sameness and otherness\u201d (56), a description which aptly characterizes the fears of midcentury America. 

The danger posed by a self-othering-desiring practice such as the autoerotic can also be understood through Halberstam\u2019s concepts of queer time and space. Halberstam argues that queer time challenges a reproductive temporality that upholds hetero- and other-normative structures and queer space challenges a \u201cbody-centered identity\u201d to locate \u201csexual subjectivities within and between embodiment, place, and practice\u201d (19). Although Halberstam\u2019s theory is linked specifically to the late twentieth century postmodern paradigm, the politics to which queer time and space respond come directly out of those anxieties of Cold War America. The narrowly conceived masculine individualism that was understood as a strategy of national security may be exercised through the act of driving, but it is also manifest in the heterosexual family, in that the heterosexual family offers evidence of the masculine individual\u2019s potency. The autoerotic not only resists the timeline of heterosexual procreation, but it also disrupts the post-war spatial politics of public and private so important to the social coherence and legibility of the masculine individual, which \u201crequired that some people be denied the elemental self-possession of the autonomous individual\u201d (Seiler 19, emphasis original). That \u201cWoman \u2018touches herself\u2019 all the time, and moreover no one can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact\u201d (Irigaray qtd. in Njeng 5), regardless of where she might be, is an assertion of self-possession that queers both time and space and makes desire legible outside of patriarchal subordination or objectification. 

The automobile, too, enabled conceptions of desire outside of the patriarchal heterosexual norm, even as, according to Seiler, it facilitated a reclaiming of masculine republican citizenship in the midcentury. Throughout its history, the car has functioned as signs of feminine objectivity, masculine virility, and even maternity, giving automobility an unstable gendered meaning and implicit queer character. The automobile also radically fractured the boundaries of public and private that had historically fostered the heterosexual family. For example, with the increasing availability and affordability of cars, the U.S. shifted from a culture of courting\u2014interactions between young men and women supervised by parents\u2014to a culture of dating, which gave young people independence in pursing romantic and sexual desires. The automobile was also just the most recent mobility technology to inspire anxieties over feminine modesty. From the horse to the bicycle, women\u2019s automobility has been subject to salacious speculation, whether regarding the physical impact on women riding astride or the mere increasing presence of women in public spaces. In providing a space unregulated by expectations for marriage and family, the automobile also helped to conceive a new developmental age between childhood and adulthood, the teenager, an identity that was anchored in exploring desire outside the institution of the home. Thus, the automobile inspired a link between sexuality and discourses of maturity that sought to police desire, especially in women.

Jackson\u2019s fiction dramatizes the tangled midcentury web of gender, sexuality, and age with her \u201cqueer girls\u201d who operate \u201cbetween adolescence and maturity\u201d (de la Parra Fern\u00e1ndez 29), and her work is abundant with characters navigating the fuzzy distinctions between self and other, especially as those experiences animate feelings of desire. Much scholarship has already examined the queerness of Jackson\u2019s women in their implied and euphemistic lesbianism, but these characters are also solitary, and their experiences of desire at all can also be read as queer. I aim to supplement queer readings of Jackson with a focus on young women\u2019s experiences of desire, whether or not the\u2014if any\u2014objects of desire can be read as lesbian. I am interested in the ways that automobiles offer Jackson\u2019s characters a productive \u201cself-othering\u201d (E. Anderson 53) time and space that works towards repairing the woman\u2019s sense of self as<\/em> Other within the patriarchal and heteronormative postwar American landscape, even if such experience is limited to the queerness of the car. 

Eleanor\u2019s Highway Fantasies<\/strong>
The Haunting of Hill House<\/em>, not only Shirley Jackson\u2019s most famous novel, but also the text that cemented Jackson as a primary architect of the American haunted house, is bookended by road trips. In framing the notorious Hill House with Eleanor\u2019s solo journey away from her family of origin and her eventual death by suicide, Jackson\u2019s novel reflects the way in which automobility, car culture, and women drivers exist on the peripheries of a Cold War era obsessed with home security. Certainly, Hill House in its remote location as well as ambiguous ownership speak to national anxieties over identity and power and \u201cfeatures [Jackson\u2019s] fullest development of the house as a metaphor for the disunified subject\u201d (Hattenhauer 155). Yet, as important and significant as Hill House is for criticism of both Jackson and American literature more generally, Jackson presents this monument of the ghostly to us by car. Indeed, the toxicity of Hill House and Eleanor\u2019s mental breakdown are better understood when examined through the joy ride Eleanor takes to get to the house. Eleanor\u2019s drive to Hill House allows her to experience self-desire that evaporates within the demands of the domestic that require desire to have an object other than the self. 

The fight between Eleanor and her sister over rights to the car distills the larger national anxieties over mobility and gender. Although Eleanor and her sister, Carrie, own the car equally\u2014Eleanor having paid for half of it\u2014Carrie refuses to let Eleanor take the car for the summer so she can participate in Dr. Montague\u2019s research. Carrie\u2019s justification for her sole right to the car is her position as a wife and mother. Even though Eleanor insists that Carrie will not need the car while she and her family are in the mountains, Carrie posits the hypothetical scenario of her child getting sick as reason enough to deny Eleanor use of the car. Carrie represents the paradigm by which the automobile and the freedom it offered women drivers were narrated to serve the only appropriate subjectivities for women: daughter, wife, mother. Further, Carrie speculates that Eleanor\u2019s desire to use the car is prurient when she says, \u201ceven if Eleanor<\/em> is prepared to run off to the ends of the earth at the invitation of any man, there is still<\/em> no reason why she should be permitted to take my car with her\u201d (Hill House<\/em> 7, emphasis original). Notably, Carrie expresses her sentiment \u201cdelicately, addressing her teacup,\u201d which indicates the taboo nature of Eleanor\u2019s sexuality that remains unnamed, but ever present within the argument. Indeed, despite Eleanor\u2019s clear plans to use the car to travel to Hill House for the purposes of participating in a psychological study, Carrie depicts Eleanor\u2019s desires as incomprehensible as she complains \u201cWe don\u2019t know where you\u2019re going, do we?\u201d, \u201cI\u2019d never forgive myself, Eleanor, if I lent you the car and something happened,\u201d and \u201cMother\u2026would certainly never have approved my letting you run wild, going off heaven knows where, in my car\u201d (Hill House<\/em> 7, my emphasis). Carrie can only use abstractions to refer to Eleanor\u2019s intentions for the car, even as Eleanor\u2019s need for it is more real than Carrie\u2019s hypothetical need. Because Carrie\u2019s imagined use of the car holds the need of the family as the object of intention, her desires are legible in comparison to Eleanor\u2019s use of the car that seems unanchored from a legitimate object, or any object at all.

Despite her sister\u2019s refusal, Eleanor takes the car anyway, signaling an exercise of autonomy she did not have when their mother was still alive. The death of the mother leaves Eleanor without a legible subjectivity\u2014she doesn\u2019t have children, nor is she married, so without a mother, her daughter-identity loses its stability. Eleanor herself senses this instability as she secretly escapes from her sister\u2019s home to take the car from its garage without permission. She \u201ctrembles\u201d with excitement and fear, knowing that she might not only be caught but would be criminalized: \u201cThere she is\u2026there\u2019s the thief\u2026\u201d she imagines her sister and brother-in-law saying if they caught on to her (Hill House<\/em> 8). Although \u201cthief\u201d is a criminalized identity, it is also the first sense Eleanor has of herself outside of a family, and even outside of her gender, which the automobile facilitates. With the car, and explicitly through driving the car, Eleanor has come into the subjectivity promised by the car, one of individuality and freedom. Eleanor\u2019s taking of and driving of the car lives up to the cultural narrative promised by automobile. That Eleanor is a woman claiming \u201crights\u201d to the car, and therefore all its promises, queers the traditionally masculine narrative of driving of the era.  

Once Eleanor takes to the road, her desires take on a legibility that often signals her queerness. When she stops to explore a gateway protected by rows of oleanders, she fantasizes that she walks beyond the flowers into a garden that \u201clies under a spell\u201d and where \u201cthe queen waits, weeping for the princess to return\u201d (Hill House<\/em> 13). As Lynne Evans explains, \u201cThe central object of desire within Eleanor\u2019s fantasy world is not a prince, but a waiting queen,\" and she in fact positions herself in the role of the prince who will lift the spell (105). Similarly, Eleanor\u2019s cheering on of a little girl at a rest stop who refuses to do as her mother asks is read as Eleanor\u2019s objection to compulsory heterosexuality that would \u201ccoerce girls into growing into a pre-defined identity that consists of caring for and fulfilling the demands of others\u201d (de la Parra Fern\u00e1ndez 39). But these readings are focused on Eleanor\u2019s desire outward, which fail to see how Eleanor\u2019s driving facilitates a particular orientation towards giving herself pleasure. To the extent that Eleanor\u2019s daydreams about the landscape and her identification with the obstinate little girl are read as self-oriented, they are interpreted as markers of childishness rather than autoeroticism. Richard Pascal argues that Eleanor is \u201cvery immature\u201d and that \u201cEleanor\u2019s gradual descent into childishness marks The Haunting of Hill House<\/em> as a sort of bildungsroman in reverse: she doesn\u2019t grow into adulthood, but rather develops her hitherto latent capacity for immaturity\u201d (479, 480). And, in describing Eleanor\u2019s fantasies, Darryl Hattenhauer claims that \u201cEleanor lives in her childhood world of fairy tales, imagining enchanted gardens as she drives through the country. She also lives in adolescent romances\u2026\u201d (157). Something about Eleanor\u2019s expressions of desire either demand a love plot with an object\u2014the lost maternal, Theodora, even Hill House itself\u2014or demand a dismissal through signaling an incomplete sexual subject.

When read as an autoerotic journey, however, Eleanor\u2019s travel to Hill House can be read as a repair of her sexual autonomy and subjectivity which were denied within her biological family and will be doomed within the walls of Hill House. Eleanor describes her initial moments on the road in seductive, even masturbatory language: \u201cShe meant to savor each turn of her traveling, loving the road and the trees and the houses\u2026teasing<\/em> herself\u201d (11, my emphasis) and \u201cThe road, her intimate friend now, turned<\/em> and dipped<\/em>, going around turns where surprises waited<\/em>\u2026\u201d (12, my emphasis). Eleanor\u2019s automobility allows her an erotic pleasure in which she develops a sense of power and even joy in her solitude. In one of her first fantasies, Eleanor imagines herself living alone in a village house and she narrates the fantasy by repeating \u201cI\u201d followed by different action verbs: \u201cI swept,\u201d \u201cI patted,\u201d \u201cI washed,\u201d \u201cI took,\u201d \u201cI dined,\u201d etc. (Hill House<\/em> 12). Not only does she give herself agency through these fantasized actions that she does solely for herself (and not her mother), but she also breaks with linear time in creating a new past for herself with verbs in the simple past tense. As she drives, she thinks, \u201cin these few seconds I have lived a lifetime\u2026\u201d (Hill House<\/em> 12), challenging the reproductive futurity that would designate the length and experiences, such as marriage and childbirth, that would characterize \u201clifetime.\u201d The meditative setting created by the car\u2019s enclosed space as it moves through the landscape fosters experiences outside the social order, and Jackson gives Eleanor\u2019s imagination just as much legibility as any \u201creal\u201d experience she might have. Eleanor\u2019s desire to participate in the marriage plot may be suggested by her recitation of lines from Twelfth Night<\/em>\u2014\u201cjourneys end in lovers\u2019 meeting\u201d; \u201cin delay there lies no plenty\u201d\u2014but Eleanor\u2019s purposeful prolonging of her journey offers her an abundance of pleasure and implies that she has already met her lover, herself, within the journey\u2019s continuation. 

Even when another character arrives within her fantasies, be it a queen or a little girl, Eleanor\u2019s desire and arousal is still self-directed. Eleanor identifies with both the queen and princess of one fantasy, and Eleanor\u2019s identification with the little girl who refuses to drink her milk from a cup that is not her \u201ccup of stars\u201d need not be read as her desire to act out in a childish way, but rather a desire to care for herself as a child. The fantasy queen and the little girl function more like doubles than objects of Eleanor\u2019s outward-focused desire. In Freudian terms, the double becomes \u201cthe ghastly harbinger of death,\u201d but that is only after an individual has left the \u201cmind of the child\u201d (601). Given that Eleanor seems to exist in a state of \u201cimmaturity,\u201d for her, the act of doubling remains, as Freud says, an original \u201cinsurance against destruction to the ego\u201d or \u201ca preservation against extinction\u201d (601). Rather than this extension of the ego being an immature or narcissistic act (in that it works against reproductive futurity), this doubling can be better read in line with the doubling found in Luce Irigaray\u2019s schema of autoeroticism. As Ellie Anderson summarizes, \u201cIrigaray imaginatively plays off the feminine \u2018lips\u2019 in order to demonstrate the autoerotic nature of selfhood as figured by the feminine. As opposed to the independent, autonomous individual of the phallic imagination\u2026the lips are autoerotic inasmuch as they indicate a body that is doubled and self-touching, selfsame only in its self-differing\u201d (64). Here, in the imagery of the lips, the distinction between each lip can only be understood within the context that they are also not separable\u2014autonomy actually comes from the ability to \u201cself-other.\u201d Eleanor\u2019s doubles are evidence of her ability to love herself and experience desire, not only outside the traditional family, but also outside of a coupling. 

Within the space of the car and its disruption of socially ordered time and space, Eleanor can double herself many times, but once she leaves the automobile and reenters the patriarchal structure of the home, her autoerotic journey does come to an end. Much of Eleanor\u2019s experience within Hill House concerns her drive to direct her desire onto an object\u2014most notably Theo, but also Luke. If any of Eleanor\u2019s autoeroticism appears, it seems to manifest in the haunting of the house, specifically the messages written on the walls to Eleanor that the group suspects that she wrote herself. Thus, self-directed desire becomes terrifying and dangerous within the house and ultimately unsustainable: the group demands that she leave Hill House. Eleanor protests to stay, but to no avail; she has returned to her life as a submissive girl who must follow the orders of others. She has lost her agency in \u201cothering\u201d herself as she submits to the group\u2019s will and designation of her as an \u201cother\u201d to be rejected. She carries this loss with her as she \u201cslid into the car; it felt unfamiliar and awkward\u201d (181). In becoming \u201ctoo used already to the comforts of Hill House\u201d (181), Eleanor has lost her ability to imagine herself outside the domestic space. 

Her final attempt to regain her power and pleasure is an aggressive, but ambivalent act. Eleanor slams on the gas pedal and speeds directly into the great tree next to the house, dying by suicide. In the few moments that Eleanor has before she dies, she repeats, \u201cI\u2019m really doing it\u2026I am doing this all by myself\u2026\u201d (181-182), which parallels the beginning of the novel when she takes the car and repeats \u201cI am going\u2026I have finally taken a step\u201d (10). In this way, Eleanor\u2019s \u201cdeath drive\u201d is positioned as a final effort to relive her autoerotic subjectivity, but one that is ultimately illegible to the rest of the world. Her subjectivity, in the end, becomes illegible even to herself as she shifts from her ecstatic self-talk of \u201cdoing it\u201d by herself to a pitiful query of \u201cWhy am I doing this? Why don\u2019t they stop me?\u201d (182). Hill House and the group\u2019s ultimate adherence to rational social norms has disrupted the possibilities of the car for pleasurable self-othering and reasserts a linear temporality that requires an \u201cend\u201d to the journey, a destination. The agency and subjectivity made possible by automobility are shown to be always liminal within a social order dominated by the home and family. Eleanor\u2019s car crash is a (sexual) climax that makes a spectacle of female desire\u2019s illegibility outside the queerness of automobility. 

Julia\u2019s Road Rage<\/strong>
The Sundial<\/em> in its \u201cbunker mentality\u201d (J. Anderson 114) and disruption of traditional family leadership and inheritance logistics is ripe for queer readings. Emily Banks argues that the novel \u201ccomically combines common midcentury household anxieties with fears of nuclear annihilation to imaging how catastrophic destruction might make way for new forms of kinship and domesticity\u201d (882). Such new forms are no doubt attributed to the dual main characters of the novel, the widow Mrs. Orianna Halloran and her spinster sister-in-law Aunt Fanny, who in each her own way set about reorganizing and consolidating power in the aftermath of the death of the patriarch and the prophecy of the coming apocalypse. Yet, Julia Willow\u2019s excursions in cars illustrate the importance of mobility to queer space. In this specific case, Julia\u2019s autoerotic desires are devalued and even exploited by those set on achieving domestic dominance.

Initially, Julia Willow\u2014the daughter of Orianna\u2019s cash-strapped friend Augusta\u2014seems to be just one of the motley crew who have found themselves at the Halloran residence awaiting the end of the world. In many ways, Julia is not a very interesting character. She lacks the absurd theatricality of Orianna and Aunt Fanny, she isn\u2019t made a tool of social cohesion as Gloria is, and her cynicism of the apocalyptic scenario is not nearly as funny as the young Fancy\u2019s. Yet, in her ordinariness, Julia operates as a foil to the spectacular plot in which a group of people come to quickly and easily believe that the end of the world is coming, and that survival depends on staying in the Halloran house. Julia provides readers with a small point of doubt in the apocalyptic logic, and it matters that her character\u2019s most notable scenes are also the only scenes that take place inside a car. Despite the very real power that Orianna and Aunt Fanny have in queering the patriarchal family structure, they manipulate Julia\u2019s use of the car to render her submissive to whatever social structures await the post-apocalypse. Both women are complicit in, if not directly responsible for, censoring Julia\u2019s autoeroticism, which threatens to disrupt the distinction between self and other\u2014an untenable subjectivity within the \u201cbunker\u201d culture of the Halloran house. Not only is Julia\u2019s pursuit of self-love and erotic pleasure fleeting, as in the case of Eleanor, it is carjacked by those who desire to maintain the complete separateness of self and Other.  

Julia\u2019s character, in its notable ordinariness, points to an entity that has yet to become a self. When the Willows are introduced to the Halloran home, Julia is not given a memorable description, especially in comparison to her sister Arabella. Julia and Arabella are primarily known as Mrs. Willow\u2019s \u201cgels\u201d who she is trying desperately to marry off. Mrs. Willow is particularly concerned for Julia\u2019s fate as she is not the pretty one. There is very little about Julia that distinguishes her from others and readers could easily lose track of her among the other young women of the home\u2014Arabella, Miss Ogilvie, Maryjane, and Gloria\u2014who are similarly overshadowed by the personalities of the older women. Julia does not initially seem to pose any threat to the competing powers of the house because she doesn\u2019t even seem to have a self. Julia only begins to distinguish herself and to build her subjectivity with her first opportunity to drive a car. In driving the car, Julia finds a pleasure in the simple experience of mobility, which resists the containment logic necessary to the Halloran clan\u2019s ethic. The self and Other must remain distinct per the post-war American narration of the legitimate independent subject. But according to Derrida, \u201cself-othering is in fact what constitutes the self\u201d (E. Anderson 61) and Julia\u2019s continued assertion of herself as different from the rest of the group and her refusal to venerate an impenetrable barrier between public and private establishes her as a character with clear subjectivity. Throughout the novel, Julia looks to herself as the source of truth, power, and even pleasure, amidst the sensationalized space of the Halloran estate. Julia comes to model how \u201cthe structure necessary\u2026for having a self at all\u201d (E. Anderson 61) is autoerotic, and \u201cfinds pleasure almost anywhere\u201d (Irigaray 28), which threatens the power of the Hallorans as they continue to use space to exercise control over everyone\u2019s identities.

Like Eleanor, Julia initiates her autoerotic subjectivity by stealing a car and claiming the right to its promises of freedom. And, like Eleanor, the taking of the car generates \u201can internal sense of satisfaction to which, once [one has experienced it, [one knows one] can aspire\u201d (Lorde 54). For readers, Julia\u2019s stealing of the car is a moment of hope that the containment logic will have a successful detractor. Yet, Miss Ogilvie and Aunt Fanny are soon discovered to be passengers in the car on the way to the village for some survival shopping. Still, Julia\u2019s personality is suddenly imbued with a great deal of energy and action, as she is depicted as a reckless driver. The vignette that introduces readers to Julia\u2019s subjectivity begins with her defiant expression as she races to get off the property: \u201c\u2018Well, I <\/em>don\u2019t care what the old biddy says,\u2019 Julia said, taking the turn by the gates in a wide sweep of the steering wheel, and barely slowing the car, \u2018I\u2019<\/em>d go anywhere I<\/em> pleased\u2019\u201d (Sundial<\/em> 70, emphasi original). While Julia had been quick to defer to the interests of her mother and Mrs. Halloran earlier in the text, this moment marks a clear shift in tone. Julia explicitly claims her right to please herself. When Miss Ogilvie comments that they are all dependent on Mrs. Halloran, Julia exclaims, \u201cNot me<\/em>\u2026You saw the way I<\/em> take care of things; I just told him it was all right with the old lady, and maybe he thought I was taking you two to church or something, because he wouldn\u2019t dare<\/em> to keep me<\/em> inside\u201d (70, emphasis original). As a driver, Julia is suddenly able to define the boundaries of her subjectivity and prioritizes herself through her emphasis of personal pronouns. Julia\u2019s self-emphasis is paralleled in her driving that is clearly a pleasurable act for her as she expresses the rage she has been suppressing while in the house. Her subjectivity is fostered by her mobility and her navigation of \u201cembodiment, place, and practice\u201d (Halberstam 19), and it absolutely threatens Aunt Fanny.

Julia\u2019s reckless driving is linked to the sexual anxieties of the time that saw the car as something of a Pandora\u2019s box. Aunt Fanny remarks, \u201cYour modern automobiles\u2026particularly this one; Julia, do you mind moving just a little more<\/em> slowly? Automobiles, and noise and dust and strange people\u2026I prefer a somewhat less feverish life, thank you\u201d (70, emphasis original). Aunt Fanny is not only uncomfortable by Julia\u2019s recklessness, but also the association of the car with the public sphere that makes life \u201cfeverish.\u201d When Julia snipes back at Aunt Fanny that she, too, is \u201cgallivanting around,\u201d Aunt Fanny rejects this depiction and says, \u201cI do not gallivant around\u201d (70). Like \u201cfeverish,\u201d gallivanting carries a sexually suggestive connotation in its definition as traveling purely for pleasure, especially when paired with automobility and the culture\u2019s saturated connection between cars and sexual adventure. While Aunt Fanny may be queer in her own way, she still finds Julia\u2019s excitability distasteful. There is something in Julia\u2019s enjoyment of driving that even Aunt Fanny can\u2019t stand as it pushes the boundaries of femininity and decorum and characterizes Julia as self-serving in an erotic way.

Indeed, once the group reaches the village, Julia lets Aunt Fanny and Miss Ogilvie out of the car and drives off on her own to wait until the other women are ready to return from shopping. When Aunt Fanny inquires what Julia will do on her own, cautioning her away from seeking company with the Watkins brothers, Julia replies, \u201cI wouldn\u2019t dream of going near them\u201d (76). Despite Julia\u2019s increasing depiction as a sexual subject, she is far more interested in being alone and \u201cjust getting out of that house is enough\u201d (76). Julia proceeds to drive off and readers don\u2019t see her again until she picks up the shoppers. Here, the car takes on a queer quality as it disappears out of the narrative time and setting. Jackson never represents these moments with Julia and there is no way to tell exactly where she went, nor how long she was gone. Just as Julia becomes a notable character, she fades out of the surveillance of the Hallorans, and even of the reader. Although Julia remains in the public space of the village, she is finally able to enjoy the privacy she\u2019s desired since the beginning as the narrative shifts back to the focus on the apocalyptic domestic narrative.

Even as Julia\u2019s automotive excursion takes a back seat, so to speak, to the larger story, her exercise of self-gratification also threatens Orianna. She seeks to not simply quash Julia\u2019s mobility but aims to corrupt Julia\u2019s experience of mobility completely. Upon the shoppers\u2019 return to the house, Orianna admonishes Julia and threatens to kick her out of the house if she \u201cever again touch[es] anything belonging to me\u201d (89). Despite this threat, Orianna goes through a great deal of trouble to keep Julia confined to the house. She does not simply hold Julia hostage in the house, but rather makes a humiliating spectacle of her autonomy. First, Orianna grants Julia \u201cpermission\u201d to leave with another \u201cconvert,\u201d the captain, but then she manipulates the captain into not leaving the house. Then, she hires a corrupt driver to take Julia to the city. Although Julia is frightened by her sudden solitary travel and the disagreeable driver, she was determined \u201cto hide from this creature, and so from Mrs. Halloran, that she was frightened, and bewildered, and lonely\u201d (128). Orianna\u2019s efforts to put Julia in danger as she tries to exercise her individuality and freedom seems excessive for how minor Julia\u2019s character seems to be in the text as a whole. But the extravagant drama Orianna directs points to the power Julia has to disrupt the exclusivity of the home by simply finding pleasure in exercising movement. When the object of desire is the self, the object cannot simply be removed or replaced to control a person\u2019s erotic power; rather the whole sense of self must be damaged. 

In the case of Julia, Orianna contrives to sexually humiliate her to force a suppression of her autonomy. The driver Orianna hires is an aggressive, disgusting, rapacious man, and his car is barely functional. But, even when \u201cThere was only one place in the car for Julia to sit, and that was in front next to the driver\u201d (129), Julia remains steadfast in her decision to use the car for the purposes of taking care of herself. Indeed, Julia does her best to ignore the driver and caresses herself: Julia \u201ctold herself joyfully that beyond them lay the city; \u2018Tonight I will be there myself,\u2019 she had thought, hugging herself ecstatically<\/em>\u201d (130, my emphasis). Yet the car ride eventually takes on the claustrophobic feeling like the Halloran house as the driver raises the cost of the drive and threatens to rape her. Eventually, the driver kicks Julia out of the car for her refusals and leaves her to walk in the dark and fog on her own. But even in this more vulnerable form of automobility of walking, Julia pursues her desire to keep going. Throughout her blinded walk, she reminds herself several times to \u201cwait\u201d for the climatic pleasure of revenge: \u201cwait, she said over and over again through her teeth, wait till I can get even with all of them\u201d (134). She also speaks to herself as a loved one after she trips and falls, saying to herself \u201cNow, my girl, now, Julia my fine creature\u2026my sweet baby\u201d (136). Julia maintains her autoerotic orientation even when the car is taken over by literal \u201ccompulsory heterosexuality\u201d and tries to keep moving. Unfortunately, Julia is unable to make her way out of the fog to the city and ends up back at the Halloran house where Orianna coyly tells Julia she must behave, otherwise, \u201cI shall not let you go to the city again\u201d (137). Julia spends the rest of the novel drunk. Orianna could have simply refused to provide Julia any mode of transport to the city, but instead, she co-opts the space of the car where Julia had previously found erotic power. Unlike Eleanor who seems to eventually buy back into the heterosexual social order, Julia decides to numb herself with alcohol, making her unable to safely or consciously exercise automobility. Julia may be trapped in the Halloran house, but she makes herself unable to properly participate in any social order at all. 

Both Eleanor and Julia illustrate the power to be found behind the wheel as driving allows the women to enjoy their otherness to the social order\u2014a pleasure that they give to themselves. And as much as Jackson\u2019s fiction offers queer depictions of women\u2019s relationships to others, the automobile allows for women to develop a specifically erotic relationship with themselves. Queerness here is not merely resisting heteronormative time by desiring objects that would disallow reproductive futurity, but it is also following the logic of self-government\u2014autonomy\u2014to erotic ends. The automobile and the autoerotic both collapse and expand time in ways that blur public and private and therefore enable new conceptions of the self, which are especially gratifying for women who find all that they need, they already have.

As the stories of Eleanor and Julia\u2019s automobility are peripheral to the primary plots of their respective novels, they each offer a lens through which to view the other to see a more complex narrative of women\u2019s midcentury automobility. The \u201clifetime\u201d that Eleanor lives in her highway fantasies offers readers an example of the kind of pleasure that Julia must have experienced when she drives off in the car alone and temporarily out of the narrative. But Julia\u2019s tragedy of not failed, but exploited, subjectivity provides a new perspective on the Hill House group\u2019s role in Eleanor\u2019s fate. Just as Seiler concludes that the freedom offered by the automobile during the post-war corporate era was contrived and easily manipulated by national and economic narratives, Jackson shows that the queer erotic power made possible by the car cannot ultimately withstand the national domestic logic of gender and sexuality. Yet, the space that the car opens up for women, even temporarily, offers a view and an experience of the feminine self that holds real and dangerous power. 

Works Cited

Anderson, Ellie. \u201cAutoeroticism: Rethinking Self-Love with Derrida and Irigaray.\u201d Ph\u00e6nEx<\/em>, vol. 12, no. 1, 2017, pp. 53-70.

Anderson, Jill E. \u201cHomemaking for the Apocalypse: Queer Failures and Bunker Mentality in The Sundial.\u201d Shirley Jackson and Domesticity: Beyond the Haunted House<\/em>. Eds. Jill E. Anderson and Melanie R. Anderson, New York, Routledge, 2020, 113-131.

Cuordileone, K.A. \u201c\u2018Politics in an Age of Anxiety\u2019: Cold War Political culture and the Crisis in American Masculinity, 1949-1960.\u201d The Journal of American History<\/em>, 2000, pp. 515-545.

de la Parra Fern\u00e1ndez, Laura. \u201cBlowing Up the Nuclear Family: Shirley Jackson\u2019s Queer Girls in Postwar U.S. Culture.\u201d Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos<\/em>, vol. 25, 2021, pp. 25-49.

Freud, Sigmund. \u201cThe Uncanny.\u201d Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan<\/em>, Hoboken, NJ, Wiley-Blackwell, 1998, pp, 592-614.

Halberstam, J. Jack. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives.<\/em> New York, New York UP, 2005. 

---. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters<\/em>. Durham, NC., Duke UP., 1995.

Hattenhauer, Darryl. Shirley Jackson\u2019s American Gothic<\/em>. Albany, NY., State U. of New York P, 2003. 

Heitmann, John. The Automobile and American Life<\/em>. Jefferson, NC., McFarland & Company, Inc., 2009.

Irigaray, Luce. \u201cThis Sex Which Is Not One.\u201d This Sex Which Is Not One<\/em>. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cornell UP, 1985, pp. 23-33.

Jackson, Shirley. The Haunting of Hill House.<\/em> New York, Penguin, 2006.

---. The Sundial<\/em>. New York, NY., Penguin, 2014.

Johnson, David K. \u201cIntroduction: Panic on the Potomac.\u201d The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government<\/em>. U of Chicago P, 2004, pp. 1-14.

Lorde, Audre. \u201cUses of the Erotic.\u201d Essays & Speeches by Audre Lord<\/em>e. Berkeley, CA, Crossing Press, 2007, pp. 53-59.

Njeng, Eric Sipyinyu. \u201cQueering Masturbation in Lorde\u2019s Life and Writing.\u201d CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture<\/em>, vol. 16, no. 3, 2014, pp. 1-9.

Pascal, Richard. \u201cWalking Alone Together: Family Monsters in The Haunting of Hill House.\u201d Studies in the Nove<\/em>l, vol. 46, no. 8, 2020, pp. 868-883.

Seiler, Cotton. Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America<\/em>. Chicago, U of Chicago P, 2008.
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