{"id":321,"date":"2024-08-27T17:32:12","date_gmt":"2024-08-27T17:32:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/shirleyjacksonstudies.org\/?p=321"},"modified":"2024-09-06T13:04:17","modified_gmt":"2024-09-06T13:04:17","slug":"321","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shirleyjacksonstudies.org\/?p=321","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Queer \u201cParanoia\u201d: Post-war Masculinities and Queer Panic 1<\/a><\/sup><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

By Janice Lynne Deitner<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Janice Lynne Deitner completed her PhD on bodies of knowledge in Shirley Jackson’s American contexts in early 2024. She is Assistant Editor of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies <\/em>and a co-organizer of “Reading Shirley Jackson in the Twenty-First Century,” an online resource investigating the past and future landscapes of Shirley Jackson studies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cMales do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

–Kinsey et al, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male<\/em> (1948)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the words of Shirley Jackson\u2019s son Laurence Jackson Hyman, her posthumously published story \u201cParanoia\u201d (2013) \u201cexplores one of her common themes, the gradual realization of no escape, where the horror is that there is no help coming\u201d (Leyshon, n.p.). Jackson regularly employs such scenarios of entrapment in her work, the dark side of a domestic ideology that revered the home and the nuclear family after 1945. In post-war America, \u201cthe values of the white middle class \u2026 shaped the dominant political and economic institutions that affected all Americans.\u201d The \u201cnorms\u201d created from these values \u201crepresented the ideal\u201d of American identity and \u201creflected the standard against which nonconforming individuals were judged\u201d (May 15). Jackson\u2019s work regularly explores how these norms impact women, but \u201cParanoia\u201d instead examines post-war America\u2019s anxieties about masculinity. The story follows a businessman named Beresford as an unnamed man in a light hat and a growing number of seeming collaborators follow him through the city for no apparent reason, evoking anxieties about identity, masculinity, American Individualism, and homosexuality that were rampant after World War Two.\u00a0 This article discusses these various, interlocking anxieties while introducing Jackson\u2019s tendency towards male characters with non-normative masculinity. Finally, it explores themes of imperiled masculinity, homosexuality, and queer panic in \u201cParanoia\u201d and how the story comments on hegemonic post-war gender roles, particularly the impact of a normalizing \u201ccrowd\u201d that dictates and controls masculine performance and behavior. By reading \u201cParanoia\u201d through the lens of post-war anxieties about queerness and masculinity, we can see that Jackson\u2019s embrace of ambiguity in storytelling is itself a subversive act in an era of narrowly defined norms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These norms were a result of an America that was struggling with the aftermath of decades of cultural trauma, including both World Wars and the Great Depression. In response, \u201cthere was an artificial straining and striving for social cohesion and national unity\u201d (Caute 21). Though it is impossible to say when this drive toward unity began, there is evidence of a cultural shift toward nationalism as the US entered WWII in late 1941, which may be around the time Jackson wrote \u201cParanoia\u201d (see Leyshon). As mentioned, this push toward stability and conformity resulted in an enshrinement of behavioral norms; \u201cthere were no groups in the United States for whom these norms were irrelevant\u201d (May 15). These norms, and the anxieties behind them, also prompted attention to homosexuality. Amanda Littauer delineates causes for the attention to homosexuality in girls, including \u201canxiety about wartime disruptions of sexual norms, Cold War fears about hidden threats to American family life, the influence of Freudian psychology, women\u2019s growing social and economic mobility and Kinsey\u2019s studies of 1948 and 1953\u201d (61). These same forces shaped anxieties regarding men, including \u201canxious debate about sex roles and a particular concern about American masculinity\u201d (Baldwin 3), which also centered debates about queerness. The worry was that if masculinity were on the wane, this would have repercussions in other areas of public and private life.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jackson engages with these debates, creating male characters who often seemingly enforce these norms while gently undermining them. Her male characters appear to wield complete control over the women in their lives (see Murphy). However, Jackson uses methods to diminish their power. In the case of such overbearing or all-knowing god-like figures as Arnold Waite in Hangsaman <\/em>(1951) and Dr Montague in The Haunting of Hill House <\/em>(1959), through their increasing unimportance their influence wanes as the text goes on. The first Mr. Halloran in The Sundial <\/em>(1958), Hugh Crain in Hill House<\/em>, and John Blackwood in We Have Always Lived in the Castle <\/em>(1962) are all masculine figures that are dead before the books start, patriarchal ghosts haunting texts that increasingly center women. The male figures who take their place in the texts, the second Mr. Halloran in Sundial <\/em>and Julian in Castle, <\/em>are often infantilized or dependent. As we will see, Jackson also employed gendered expectations and cultural norms to comment on masculinity in other ways. In \u201cParanoia,\u201d intentionally or not, she reflects and critiques contemporary anxieties about American Individualism, homosexuality, economic anxiety, and what these anxieties reflected about post-war masculinity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

American Individualism is an ideology that former president Herbert Hoover codified in the 1920s, a time in which much post-war ideology came into being (see, for example, Berrett, Cowan). Generally, the construction of American Individualism is coded as uniquely masculine, and \u201cthe \u2018individual\u2019 was predominantly assumed to be a white, middle-class male.\u201d Thus, a tendency towards \u201cbecoming conformist and homogenised,\u201d a side effect of the post-war push toward stability, was \u201cseen as threatening to American masculinity, including \u201ca fear that America was becoming feminised\u201d (Baldwin 7). A key figure in this discourse was intellectual and historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who asked in 1958, \u201cWhat has happened to the American male?\u201d or rather \u201cWhat has unmanned the American man?\u201d (237, 240). He directly connects the upheaval in American ideology and the resultant loss of certainty after WWII to masculinity, arguing that \u201c[t]he ways by which American men affirm their masculinity are uncertain and obscure\u201d (237). He also connects these anxieties to American Individualism. Referring to \u201cthe cult of the group\u201d (243), Schlesinger, Jr. writes that \u201cmass democracy … offers new moral authority to the group and thereby sets off a new assault on individual identity\u201d (242). His ideas reflect a wider struggle between desires for safety and certainty, and fears that such desires endanger masculinist Individualism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Schlesinger, Jr., however, writes back against the more extreme views of some of his contemporaries, such as those presented in the 1958 book The Decline of the American Male. <\/em>Published by the editors of Look <\/em>magazine, Decline <\/em>includes a section on the deterioration of Individualism entitled \u201cWhy Is He Afraid To Be Different?\u201d The chapter centers a fictional American male, aptly named \u201cGary Gray,\u201d as gray is an important color in postwar discussions of conformity, which I discuss below. Gary Gray suddenly \u201crealize[s] he had forgotten how to say the word \u2018I\u2019\u201d; even when he can say it, \u201cits force and meaning [are] gone\u201d (Leonard, Jr. 25). A crucial scene shows Gary waiting to cross the street and hearing a voice command the \u201c\u2018Man in the blue suit\u2019\u201d to \u201c\u2018step back on the curb until the light has changed.\u2019 Automatically, as if by reflex action, Gary\u201d complies before \u201crealiz[ing] that he was not wearing a blue suit, nor was he standing off the curb.\u201d The author bemoans that this \u201c\u2018safety education,\u2019 designed to encourage lawful behavior by publicly shaming erring individuals … would also accustom individuals to faceless authority\u201d (28). It is important to note that the author seems to be comfortable with the idea of shaming those who step outside of accepted behavioral norms. His concerns lie with the impact of a \u201cfaceless authority,\u201d echoing Cold War fears of Communism, not with the normalizing pressure of the crowd. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jackson engages with such anxieties and seeming paradoxes in \u201cParanoia.\u201d Up front, she clearly states that her businessman protagonist, Mr. Beresford, is not <\/em>an individual: \u201cThere were twenty small-size gray suits like Mr. Beresford\u2019s on every New York block, fifty men still clean-shaven and pressed after a day in an air-cooled office, a hundred small men, perhaps, pleased with themselves for remembering their wives\u2019 birthdays\u201d (3). Any uniqueness he may have disappears in the exponential increase of men just like him, from \u201ctwenty\u201d to \u201cfifty\u201d to \u201cone hundred.\u201d Importantly the description foregrounds his suit, replacing a description of his body with one of many \u201csmall-size gray suits.\u201d In fact, the men are described as \u201cstill […] pressed\u201d after the workday (3), as if their suits commandeer or replace their physicality.\u00a0 The reference to gray suits evokes the 1955 novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit<\/em> by Sloan Wilson. Though probably written after this story, the novel is a reaction to the same cultural pressures that Jackson comments on with Beresford. One contemporary reviewer of Wilson\u2019s novel noted that \u201c[a]s calm and serene a garb as a man can wear is the standard gray flannel suit of commerce, a habiliment supposed to betoken solidity of character tastefully touched with quiet nonchalance\u201d (McNulty BR18). Wilson\u2019s protagonist Tom Rath pokes fun at this clothing trend when meeting a prospective new boss. He notes that both are \u201cdressed in a gray flannel suit. The uniform of the day … Somebody must have put out an order\u201d (8). It is fitting that in Look <\/em>magazine\u2019s anecdote, the endangered individual has the surname \u201cGray,\u201d while the individual who breaks the rules by stepping off of the curb wears a more noticeable blue suit. The man in \u201cParanoia\u201d who follows Beresford wears \u201ca light hat\u201d (4), another anomaly from the standard gray. By contrast, Beresford and those like him are an undifferentiated mass of conforming gray, far from the ideal of American Individualism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Concerns about conformity sapping masculine agency and vitality were ubiquitous, but because of the need for stability, reactions against conformity were also concerning. As Barbara Ehrenreich writes, post-war \u201c\u2018conformity\u2019 became the code word for male discontent\u201d (30), a discontent that had to be contained. In fact, \u201cthe charge of homosexuality\u201d in the post-war era was \u201cthe ultimate sanction against male rebellion\u201d (50). Estelle B. Freedman notes that starting in the 1930s, Americans began \u201cmeasuring normality and defining deviance\u201d (90), with homosexuality often included with the \u201csexual psychopath\u201d (91). Robert J. Corber argues that society equated homosexuality with \u201ca form of psychopathology that undermined the nation\u2019s defenses against Communist infiltration,\u201d a necessary boundary in\u00a0 \u201cthe consolidation of the Cold War consensus\u201d (3; see also Whitfield 43).2<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 Men were expected to embrace rugged, masculine Individualism without stepping too far outside of expected values, behaviors, and norms, creating the appearance of difference while staying in line with the accepted crowd.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet, as briefly mentioned, Alfred Kinsey\u2019s work, beginning with Sexual Behavior in the Human Male<\/em> in 1948, found that \u201cmillions of Americans were unwilling to follow conventional ethical codes\u201d when it came to sex, a truth that was \u201cearthshaking to the American public … highly troublesome and possibly subversive\u201d (Bodnar 21; see also Showalter 394). In fact, Kinsey and his co-authors concluded that \u201cit is difficult to maintain the view\u201d that homosexuality is \u201crare and therefore abnormal or unnatural, or … evidence of neuroses or even psychoses\u201d (Kinsey et al. 659). Kinsey\u2019s work also pushed back against stereotypes that, to use his now-outdated term, \u201cpreference\u201d has any connection \u201cwith various physical and mental qualities\u201d that would \u201cmake a homosexual person obvious and recognizable.\u201d3<\/a><\/sup> Such supposed physical qualities included being \u201crarely robust physically\u201d or \u201cuncoordinated or delicate,\u201d with \u201chigh-pitched voices\u201d and \u201ca feminine carriage of the hips\u201d (637). In a study of homosexuality begun in 1935, published in 1941, and republished and reprinted throughout the 1950s, George Henry \u201cattempted to arrange\u201d forty case studies \u201caccording to the extent to which they deviate from heterosexual adjustment\u201d (xiv). Henry used \u201cthe M-F test\u201d (xiii), or the Terman-Miles scale of a subject\u2019s masculinity or femininity. Henry labels many of his subjects as \u201ceffeminate\u201d or, with more detail, as \u201c[p]assive, effeminate homosexual[s]\u201d (3-14), stressing the conflation of feminine behaviors with homosexuality. Kinsey instead refutes this scale, its supposed connection to homosexuality, and other attempts to measure masculinity (638). Discourse of gender and sexuality in the post-war years is marked by this tension between attempts at strict classification and ideas like Kinsey\u2019s, which recognized that things are not so clearly delineated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though Jackson\u2019s story may<\/em> have been written before Kinsey published his work, she engages with well-entrenched stereotypes evident in studies such as Henry\u2019s. Jackson codes Beresford as stereotypically effeminate to comment on his inability to fit a strictly defined gender role, despite his place within the gray-suited, uniform crowd. Early on, Jackson tells the reader that the \u201cviolent exercise necessary to catch a taxi\u201d is \u201cusually more than he [is] equal to\u201d (\u201cParanoia\u201d 3\u20134), using two words, \u201cviolent\u201d and \u201cexercise,\u201d that would not normally apply to hailing a taxi. It is in Beresford\u2019s repeated interactions with a \u201c[f]unny-looking\u201d man with \u201ca small mustache\u201d <\/sup>(4), however, that Jackson allows space for the story to comment on these stereotypes and their connection to post-war queer panic, which I discuss further below. Of course, Beresford\u2019s increasing paranoia and resultant emotional outbursts support his queer coding, as homosexual men were also believed to be \u201cemotionally unbalanced\u201d and \u201ctemperamental to the point of being unpredictable,\u201d supposedly the \u201cconverse of \u2026 the typical heterosexual male\u201d (Kinsey 637). As we will see, however, Jackson is not engaging with these stereotypes to support them, but rather, instead, to allow space for their interaction with hegemonic masculinity and the impact of the normalizing crowd as part of her critique of post-war masculine gender norms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another area of post-war anxiety that was also tied to perceptions of homosexuality is economic instability. In addition to keeping men in line, post-war fears of queerness were linked to domestic failure. Ehrenreich references a 1966 case study in the American Journal of Psychiatry <\/em>which argues that pressures to provide for the family can cause \u201cpsychoneurotic illness, with latent homosexual features\u201d (21). Economic instability, or being an ineffectual provider, plagues many of Jackson\u2019s male characters. For example, Castle<\/em>\u2019s Uncle Julian is completely dependent on his niece Constance at the start of the book. Fixated on the past, Julian regularly revisits his economic dependence on his wealthy brother John, whom he describes as \u201coverly fond of the world\u2019s goods\u201d (92). Julian\u2019s memories often focus on consumption, \u201cMy brother sometimes remarked upon what we ate, my wife and I,\u201d while by contrast, his nephew Thomas, John\u2019s heir, \u201cate hugely\u201d (48). As a male, Julian exists within the hegemonic power structure, but his economic dependence and inability to provide for his wife feminizes him. In fact, he is equal to his wife in his brother\u2019s patriarchal system. Jackson featured such ideas as early as the 1940 story \u201cHad We But World Enough,\u201d published in her college literary journal. In the story, young lovers dream of possible domestic bliss. In response to the girl\u2019s argument that, \u201cAll you have to do is get a job,\u201d the boy responds, \u201cI guess I\u2019m a pretty lousy specimen\u201d (28), his scientific language here evoking ideas of incorrect classification.  Jackson also revisits such a conversation in \u201cThe Root of Evil\u201d (1953), where a man\u2019s financial instability becomes a comment on his masculinity (126-27). One post-war psychoanalyst invented the term \u201cpseudohomosexuality\u201d to describe an \u201c\u2018adaptive failure\u2019 to meet the standards of masculine conformity,\u201d which results in \u201ca subconscious slide toward a homosexual identity,\u201d eventually leading to full homosexuality (Ehrenreich 24-25). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jackson often plays with masculinity and this sense of \u201csliding toward\u201d queerness and was aware of her own tendency towards feminized male characters. In a 1960s journal entry, she wrote about a very masculine man who appeared in a dream: \u201c(he was a very big man, and perhaps superhuman) … i wonder if i could put him in a book; how effeminate luke and essex are,\u201d referring to male characters in Hill House <\/em>and Sundial<\/em>, respectively (SJP Box 1). Jackson here comments on her own tendency to avoid a certain type of masculine characterization; her male characters are often ineffectual, or they generally undermine ideological norms. In certain cases, they are more directly effeminate or coded as queer. In \u201cLike Mother Used to Make\u201d (1949) Jackson\u2019s protagonist David Turner moves \u201cin small quick movements\u201d (29), which illustrate his fussy, feminized domesticity, reinforced by his knowledge of goods in the supermarket and his love for the domestic details of his home. In \u201cMy Uncle in the Garden\u201d (1996), an unnamed narrator visits her two uncles, queer-coded domesticated bachelors who live in a flower-laden cottage. One uncle goes into \u201ca hysterical temper\u201d from \u201cthe strain of baking a chicken pie\u201d (188), conforming to post-war stereotypes of fragile domesticated femininity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Beresford, in \u201cParanoia,\u201d is another such effeminate, queer-coded character, not only because of his physical diminishment as one of many \u201csmall-size gray suits,\u201d as discussed above. The story takes place on Beresford\u2019s wife\u2019s birthday, and he is \u201cpleased with himself particularly for remembering\u201d to buy her chocolates (3). He only reveals later, in the midst of his ordeal, that \u201c[h]e had left his office with a group of people, … all reminding [him] that it was his wife\u2019s birthday\u201d (8). Beresford needs the normalizing crowd to remind him of his own obligations as husband. In fact, \u201chis gray suit,\u201d not him, is \u201calmost unaffected by the crush on the corner\u201d (5), demonstrating both the suit\u2019s signifying dominance and his comfort within the crowd. When pushed beyond masculine norms, \u201cMr. Beresford decide[s] to … remember that it was his wife\u2019s birthday\u201d (5), recalling his heteronormative responsibilities. Jackson makes sure to reference the candy box throughout, a symbol of those responsibilities, yet \u201chis wife\u2019s<\/em> favorite chocolates\u201d (4), as he first calls them, become \u201chis<\/em> candy box\u201d or \u201chis<\/em> box of candy\u201d (5, 7, 8, 12; emphasis added). Also, obtaining the candy has taken up so much time that he cannot afford the leisurely bus ride home, which brings him into contact with the man with the light hat.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As mentioned, Beresford does not like to hail taxis, and when he attempts to do so, his voice goes \u201chelplessly into a falsetto,\u201d after which he retreats in failure \u201cwhile the taxi [goes] by uncomprehending.” The sense of the \u201cuncomprehending\u201d taxi gestures towards currents of hidden meanings throughout the story. Immediately after his emasculating failure with the taxi, a man \u201cin a light hat\u201d with \u201ca small mustache stop[s] next to Beresford … and … stare[s] at\u201d him. The man does not speak, but instead seems to recognize something in Beresford and communicates this recognition physically. However, \u201cMr. Beresford stare[s]\u201d back at the man \u201cas people sometimes do without caring particularly what they see\u201d (4), wording that implies Beresford does not share this recognition. Additionally, the attempt at unspoken communication evokes what William L. Leap calls \u201cGay English,\u201d or \u201coral, written, and signed text making\u201d (xii), which includes gestures, looks, and \u201ccode words that confirm gay identity during informal conversations between strangers in public places\u201d (xi). The sense of \u201cpublic places\u201d is a regular feature of such communication. In a 2003 article on the British gay slang known as polari which was popular after WWII, Liz Gill quotes one polari speaker: \u201c\u2018If you liked the look of someone,\u201d you would use polari. \u201c\u2018If they were straight they wouldn\u2019t pick up on it but if they were gay there might be a shriek of recognition,’\u201d as connection was made through a knowable language system. Yet Kinsey argues that the \u201cconsiderable taboo\u201d on homosexuality means \u201ceven among males who desire homosexual relations,\u201d there is \u201cignorance\u201d of such systems of communication (632).4<\/a><\/sup> Beresford\u2019s first interaction with the man appears to be an attempt at just such a connection, one that Beresford cannot decode. It is telling that this interaction happens \u201cin the middle of the crowd\u201d (4), as Beresford starts the story in a crowd of gray suits, the normalized, conforming crowd, and ends it isolated from everyone. This is literalized when he again tries to hail a cab, after being forced from a \u201cpacked crowd\u201d on the bus by the man in the hat. Because he is \u201cunder the influence of his annoyance\u201d at the man, and thus \u201cnot trusting his voice\u201d to retain a masculine register, he runs into the road and is \u201calmost run down by a delivery truck.\u201d In response, \u201cthe truck driver … yell[s] something unrecognizable,\u201d after which \u201cMr. Beresford s[ees] the people around him on the corner laughing\u201d (4). Beresford cannot understand the truck driver\u2019s language, and can\u2019t recognize what the crowd is laughing at, which literalizes and cements his outsider status. The recognition by the man in the hat, the attempt at communication, has forced Beresford outside of the understanding of the normalizing crowd and has \u201cqueered\u201d his connection to hegemonic masculinity.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, Beresford\u2019s initial response to the man entails an \u201calmost unconscious gesture\u201d of mimicry in response to the man\u2019s mustache, \u201clightly touching his own clean-shaven lip.\u201d In his gesture, Beresford communicates something which he fears is \u201coffensive\u201d because the man \u201cfrown[s] and look[s] Mr. Beresford up and down\u201d and \u201cturn[s] away\u201d (4). Beresford\u2019s response does not fit whatever language the man is using. The man\u2019s mustache is also a physical signifier of a certain type of masculinity, giving meaning to Beresford\u2019s gesture. According to the \u201cmasculine code\u201d of the post-war era \u201ca clean-shaven man was sociable and reliable. A mustached man … demonstrated a willful independence\u201d (Oldstone-Moore 47).  Perhaps this is why Beresford internally calls him \u201c[f]unny-looking\u201d and an \u201c[u]gly customer\u201d as he touches his own lip (\u201cParanoia\u201d 4), as if his own desire for rebellion, sexual or otherwise, instigates an automatic Othering of the man he wants, or wants to be. A 1958 article in The Saturday Evening Post <\/em>entitled \u201cBeards Stage a Comeback\u201d defends facial hair, arguing that \u201ca bearded man is more of a man among men\u2014and among women too\u201d (Gehman 40). After detailing previous social opprobrium in reaction to facial hair, the author claims that \u201ctimes are changing\u201d and \u201cconventional, proper and respectable men\u201d are growing beards (41). Yet, again, conformity is central to his argument, because a \u201cbeard provides a man with a small opportunity for a personal revolt against sameness\u201d (106). A mustache similarly symbolized a \u201cfree agent who was able to play by his own rules\u201d (Oldstone-Moore 48).  Still, the author of the Post<\/em> article excessively defends his own decision throughout, worrying about the reaction of strangers and friends alike, striving against conformist norms but worried about straying too far from them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beresford is not similarly paradoxically torn between the competing desires of conformity and Individualism. Instead, his initial interaction with the man has forced him completely out of the conforming crowd. Beresford\u2019s initial response to the man is to \u201cwatc[h] the people\u201d around him, \u201chis perspective sharpened\u201d (5). However, this increased perception serves merely to note the man in the hat\u2019s ubiquity. Somehow, having left on a bus a moment before, he is at Beresford\u2019s elbow right after, then ahead on the corner, and later on another bus. This constant, recurring presence signifies either a real threat, something fantastical, or a figment caused by Beresford\u2019s queer panic. The threat remains unexplained as Beresford escapes over and over from the man and his growing number of supposed accomplices. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At one point, he hides in a souvenir shop, the souvenirs graced with images of \u201cthe Trylon and the Perisphere\u201d (6). These structures were part of the 1939 World\u2019s Fair, and to a contemporary audience were symbols of futurity and hope in the shadow of World War Two\u2019s imminence (Spence 68-69). In Jackson\u2019s hands, these symbols become a joke as their image adorns a souvenir \u201cmatch holder made in the form of a toilet\u201d (\u201cParanoia\u201d 6), which two tourists laugh over. Just as Beresford\u2019s businessman masculinity is belied by his anxious inabilities, his effeminacy, and his lack of individuality, the symbol of American futurity gracing a toilet undermines the lie of post-war American prosperity and patriarchal stability. The crude figure of a toilet also makes public something that should be private, a concern of Beresford\u2019s. In fact, one of the reasons he does not like hailing taxis is \u201cthe public display\u201d of the act (3). Concerns about what is public increasingly worry him. For example, when he later sees the man \u201con the corner ahead, waiting,\u201d Beresford thinks, \u201cIt\u2019s preposterous, all these people watching\u201d (7), as if the man or himself were behaving indecently in public. Later, when he finally confronts the man in the hat, again reasserting that he \u201c’do[es]n\u2019t understand any of it,\u2019\u201d and threatening to go to the authorities, the man says nothing and gestures toward a policeman. Beresford realizes that making his private issues public is not possible: \u201cWhat did he have to report? … and why? \u2026 there was nothing he could tell the policeman\u201d (11). He is implicated in the situation, either possibly mad or possibly queer, and outside of the structures of power that would previously have come to his aid. It is with the breaching of public\/private boundaries in the shape of the toilet that the man follows Beresford into the store. In response, Beresford attempts to understand the situation, thinking it through: \u201c[t]he question of what the man in the light hat wanted was immediately subordinate to the question of whom <\/em>he wanted\u201d (6; original emphasis). The multiple meanings of wanting <\/em>someone provide a variety of readings here, including sexual. Beresford decides that \u201cif his light-hatted designs were against Mr. Beresford, they must be nefarious, else why had he not announced them before now?\u201d (6). Beresford assumes everything public is decent and sanctioned by the crowd, everything reputable and good spoken aloud, a mindset belied by the toilet-shaped souvenir. In fact, from the 1940s on a \u201cpublic<\/em> homosexual world\u201d was being established \u201cin the United States\u201d (Freedman 103; emphasis added). There is now a confusion of boundaries, at least for Beresford, as what he thinks should be private is made public and what is public now seems to him obscene.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With no clear understanding available according to his worldview, Beresford ponders taking stereotypically masculine action, \u201cof accosting the man and demanding his purpose,\u201d thoughts upended by his \u201cvivid recollection of his own small size and innate cautiousness\u201d (“Paranoia” 6). In his work on masculinity and anxiety in mid-twentieth century fiction, Clive Baldwin discusses physicality and \u201ca need for the performative\u201d of gender expectations: \u201cAny ambiguity of bodily performance undermines the necessary distinctions between men and women,\u201d which \u201ccontributed to the pressure to conform\u201d (12).\u00a0 Beresford\u2019s diminutive stature invites unwanted ambiguity. In discussing Kinsey\u2019s intervention into homosexual stereotypes, Baldwin remarks that \u201cthese defining signifiers \u2026 are inscribed on the body,\u201d thereby \u201cconstruct[ing] and mak[ing] visible the \u2018other\u2019 male\u201d while \u201calso defining and constituting the supposed \u2018real\u2019 man\u201d (133). Beresford\u2019s body is not that of a \u201creal\u201d man, he therefore cannot solve this problem with masculine violence, though \u201cstrength, aggression (and the willingness to commit violence) \u2026 were central to American notions of masculinity in this period\u201d (3). Beresford instead refuses hegemonic masculine violence and thereby makes himself Other. Later in the story, when a driver refuses to let him off a bus, he threatens to \u201csmash the glass in the door and shout for help\u201d (“Paranoia” 11). Though he ponders violence, he ultimately refuses stereotypical masculine agency, instead threatening to call for someone else to act. Additionally, the driver makes fun of him, asking if he intends to smash the glass with his box of candy, the present for his wife that has instead become a signifier of his increasing feminization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This bus driver is part of a growing mass of possible accomplices that appear to be conspiring with the man, eventually becoming the controlling, normalizing crowd, dictating Beresford\u2019s movements and pushing him towards revealing his proclivities, starting with the souvenir shop clerk who suggestively asks, \u201cSee anything you like, mister?\u201d Beresford’s response, “[n]ot tonight” is equally suggestive. The clerk surpasses this provocative phrase by adding, \u201cGot some nice things you didn’t look at,\u201d his manner \u201cunusually persistent\u201d (6). Whether the clerk is actually soliciting Beresford or not, Beresford avoids him while \u201ctrying to make his tenor voice firm,\u201d another masculine performance belied by his high voice. However, the clerk and the man corral him; Beresford is \u201cforced to step backward as the two men advanc[e] on him\u201d (7). In response, he demonstrates \u201cthe ineffectuality of the ordinary man caught in such a crisis\u201d while \u201cstill clutch[ing] his box of candy under his arm,\u201d and thinking, \u201cI’m safe on the street \u2026 as long as there are lots of people, they can’t do anything to me\u201d (7). He wishes for the anonymity of the normalizing crowd with which he started the story and continues to believe that the activities he imagines could not take place in public. This is also the first time he uses \u201cthey\u201d to delineate the threat: \u201cPerfectly silly. It\u2019s still broad daylight. How they<\/em> ever hoped to get away with it\u201d (7; emphasis added), the \u201cit\u201d unspoken or undefined and therefore, in Beresford\u2019s mind, inappropriate. After he escapes from the shop, he sees the shop clerk \u201clooking after him\u201d but \u201cthe man in the light hat [is] not in sight\u201d (7). This implies that the continued presence of the man in the hat is a figment, embodying Beresford\u2019s own queerness or fear of such, and that the ever-growing crowd of accomplices is Beresford\u2019s perception of being outed, or Othered from the norms by which he has always lived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is just after this scene of escalating danger that Beresford does <\/em>have a moment of masculine assertion, shouting for a taxi \u201cboisterously … in a great voice he had never suspected he possessed until now. A taxi stop[s] as though not daring to disregard that great shout\u201d (8). However, this masculine display, a surprise even to himself, is immediately undermined by an unidentified hand \u201cclos[ing] over his\u201d on the taxi door as Beresford becomes \u201caware<\/em> of the light hat brushing his cheek\u201d (8; emphasis added). These intimate touches break the boundaries of physical distance and unspoken communication, even if not recognized nor understood, that have existed up to this point. The man touches him with a hand and the hat, a symbol of nonconformity in its non-gray coloring. That this touch comes in response to Beresford\u2019s assertion of masculinity is key, as it reveals the assertion to be a failed performance of expected gender norms. Again, Beresford\u2019s heightened perception only adds to his awareness of the man. At the same time, the taxi driver says, \u201c[c]ome on if you’re coming\u201d (8), the word \u201ccome\u201d having sexual connotations as early as the seventeenth century (\u201cCome\u201d). Beresford \u201cresist[s] the push that urge[s] him into the taxi\u201d (\u201cParanoia\u201d 8), though it is unclear if this push is internal or external. This is the moment of choice, when entering the taxi, accepting the man\u2019s touch, means assuming or accepting a queerness that he has so far evaded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, from this point in the story, Beresford begins to worry about being contained within spaces, evoking ideas of containment of post-war women, discussed above. He boards another bus and, with \u201chis box of candy on his lap,\u201d again attempts to understand. \u201cObviously,\u201d he decides, the man does not hold \u201ca grudge \u2026 about Mr. Beresford\u2019s almost unconscious gesture toward his mustache, unless he was peculiarly sensitive<\/em>\u201d (8; emphasis added), the last words undefined but again carrying queer connotations. In his rationale, and to avoid other possibilities, he rewrites the past. He decides that \u201cthe man in the light hat had been trying to push him onto <\/em>the bus and into the crowd, instead of\u201d isolating him outside (8). This restructuring allows Beresford to cast himself as an Individual, one who is not isolated but chooses to forge his own path. Like with the taxi, being pushed into an enclosed space is a trap that contains him within a feminized domestic or queer identity. Of course, he has this thought while trapped on another bus with the man in the light hat. When he attempts to deboard, an old woman\u2019s shopping \u201csomehow … g[ets] in his way and spill[s].\u201d The shopping leaves \u201c[a] coil of pink ribbon … caught around [his] shoe\u201d (9), as if visibly tethering him to a feminized identity. He is similarly tethered by behavioral norms to be chivalrous and help the woman pick up her items while, \u201c[o]ver his shoulder,\u201d he watches \u201cthe man in the light hat sitting comfortably\u201d and \u201csmoking,\u201d with \u201chis head … thrown back and his eyes … shut\u201d (10), an image of contentment or physical ecstasy. It is at this point that Beresford threatens to smash his way off of the bus, as already discussed, in an attempt to again reclaim masculine agency, and is ridiculed by the bus driver.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beresford finally escapes the bus and enters a large department store, again seeking anonymity in the crowd. However, within the store, he \u201cmove[s] slowly\u201d through \u201cstockings first, … and then \u2026 handbags,\u201d forced through feminine-defined space. Then he encounters \u201cmedical supplies, with huge almost-human figures wearing obscene trusses, standing right there on the counter, and people coming embarrassedly to buy\u201d (13). Of course, the only medical supply mentioned is one typically worn around the groin, the use of the word \u201cobscene\u201d revealing Beresford\u2019s internal connection of any private garb to his repressed desires. Again, the private and secretive has been put on display, \u201calmost-human\u201d physicality shaming Beresford, even if there should be no shame in medical needs. Though he seeks to escape the man through crowds, it is telling that he chooses a shopping center, a space of post-war plenty but also one associated with the supposedly feminine pastime of shopping. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, it is only after passing through this space that he is able to get away and head home, to the domestic space and ostensible safety. There is \u201cno light hat, no odd person watching for\u201d him; \u201c[i]n the elevator, alone, with no one to see which floor button he pressed,\u201d he can finally relax (13). Alone, he is removed from all external pressures, though they return in the figure of his wife, and domestic space poses just as many dangers as the outside world.\u00a0 In fact, he has to ring the doorbell to be allowed access to his own home, demarcating the space as not his. His wife is \u201cwearing her blue dress, and that meant she knew it was her birthday and expected him to take her out\u201d (13). Though Beresford was unable to read the man\u2019s unspoken communication, he understands the language of heteronormative demands and husbandly expectations. He responds by embracing a supposedly queer physicality as he \u201chand[s] her the box of candy limply<\/em>\u201d (14; emphasis added). He also plays up his fatigue, \u201cseem[ing] more tired than he really was, and … glorying in all [the] attention,\u201d embracing his own infantilization. We are not privy to this couple\u2019s usual interactions, so we do not know if these are their usual roles, but the fact that he is acting out a role here implies that he has changed through his ordeal or, more telling, that he is always performing a role in their marriage.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is no comfort nor safety at home, however, as his wife locks him in the living room. Importantly, Beresford had previously been unaware of the traps of the domestic space, as he \u201c[n]ever knew that door had a key\u201d (14). He learns too late and is literarily contained within the home. The last line of the story is his wife on the phone, telling an unidentified person, \u201c\u2018I\u2019ve got him.\u2019\u201d In a discussion of Demon Lover figures in Jackson\u2019s work, Erika Kvistad argues that this story \u201chas hints of a gender-swapped Demon Lover pattern, with a female aggressor and a male victim\u201d (53). However, Beresford\u2019s wife is not so much an individual aggressor as part of that normalizing crowd, controlling and containing a man who has transgressed, or who believes he has. There is no safety in heterosexual relationships. If Beresford\u2019s ordeal was queer in intent, he has been changed by it and no longer conforms to the prevailing norms; by post-war standards, he must be contained. If it was a figment of his mind, his new awareness means that he can no longer live within the crowd. Either way, a rift has opened that cannot be closed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To conclude, I return to Schlesinger, Jr.\u2019s investigation of the decline of American masculinity. When he asks, \u201cWhy is the American man so unsure today about his masculine identity?\u201d his answer is that \u201che is so unsure about his identity in general\u201d (242).  He argues that \u201ca man must visualize himself as an individual apart from the group\u201d to clarify his identity (244). However, for the post-war man, even the ideology of American Individuality fell within strictly demarcated, uniform lines, the individual only defined as part of a group, in opposition to an outsider. Interestingly, as Corber points out, \u201c[m]any gay male writers\u201d of the post-war era \u201ctreated homosexuality as a subversive form of identity that had the potential to disrupt the system of representation underpinning the Cold War consensus\u201d (3). Reading \u201cParanoia\u201d through this lens, Beresford\u2019s encounter with the light-hatted man allows him to visualize himself outside of the normalizing crowd, but he rejects the freedom of self-creation that can be found there. Instead, he increasingly sees the crowd as a threat because it insists that he accept an identity outside of the masculine norm. Jackson uses queer coding to reveal the paradoxes and cracks inherent in hegemonic masculine identities, thereby challenging both the normalizing crowd that upholds such narrow post-war gender identities and the middle-class white values that the crowd holds dear. Jackson\u2019s refusal to define the threat as real or imagined, to clearly explain the man\u2019s motives or the wife\u2019s involvement, further undermines any comforting certainty to readers of her time, or ours. The open ending allows for any number of possible readings, but, unlike Beresford, Jackson\u2019s meaning cannot be contained. Her very refusal to clearly state what happens pushes back against post-war America\u2019s desire for clarity, certainty, and classification. In the end, Beresford is truly an individual because he is now outside of the crowd, though trapped in the domestic space and cast out of the society that he has known; but he will not embrace his freedom. By writing back against the constraints of her time, Jackson embraces a freedom of her own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Works Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baldwin, Clive. Anxious Men: Masculinity in American Fiction of the Mid-Twentieth Century<\/em>. Edinburgh UP, 2020. EBSCOhost<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Berrett, Jesse. \u201cFeeding the Organization Man: Diet and Masculinity in Postwar America.\u201d Journal of Social History<\/em>, vol. 30, no. 4, Summer 1997, p. 805. EBSCOhost<\/em>, https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1353\/jsh\/30.4.805.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bodnar, J. \u201cUnruly Adults: Social Change and Mass Culture in the 1950s.\u201d OAH Magazine of History<\/em>, vol. 26, no. 4, Oct. 2012, pp. 21\u201323. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1093\/oahmag\/oas031.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Caute, David. The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower<\/em>. Secker & Warburg, 1978.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCome, V., Sense II.Iv.22.\u201d Oxford English Dictionary<\/em>, Oxford UP, https:\/\/doi.org\/ 10.1093\/OED\/8165261434.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Corber, Robert J. Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity<\/em>. Duke UP, 1997. EBSCOhost<\/em>, https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1215\/9780822382447.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. \u201cTwo Washes in the Morning and a Bridge Party at Night: The American Housewife Between the Wars.\u201d Women\u2019s Studies<\/em>, vol. 3, no. 2, Jan. 1976, p. 147. EBSCOhost<\/em>, https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1080\/00497878.1976.9978384.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ehrenreich, Barbara. The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment<\/em>. Anchor Books, 1983.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Franklin, Ruth. Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life<\/em>. Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2016.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Freedman, Estelle B. \u201c\u2018Uncontrolled Desires\u2019: The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920-1960.\u201d The Journal of American History<\/em>, vol. 74, no. 1, 1987, pp. 83\u2013106. JSTOR<\/em>, https:\/\/doi.org\/10.2307\/1908506.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gehman, Richard. \u201cBeards Stage a Comeback.\u201d The Saturday Evening Post<\/em>, vol. 231, no. 20, 15 Nov. 1958, pp. 40\u201341, 106, 108.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gill, Liz. \u201cLavender Linguistics.\u201d The Guardian<\/em>, 14 July 2003. The Guardian<\/em>, https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2003\/jul\/14\/referenceandlanguages.gayrights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Henry, George W. Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns<\/em>. One-Volume edition, Paul B. Hoeber, Inc., 1948.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jackson, Shirley. \u201cHad We But World Enough.\u201d Spectre<\/em>, vol. 1, no. 3, Spring 1940, pp. 28\u201330. Syracuse University Special Collection Resource Center, Box 048.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

—. \u201cLike Mother Used to Make.\u201d The Lottery: And Other Stories<\/em>, Penguin Books, 2009, pp. 29\u201340.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

—. \u201cMy Uncle in the Garden.\u201d Just an Ordinary Day: Stories<\/em>, edited by Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman DeWitt, Bantam Books, 1996, pp. 186\u201392.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

—. \u201cParanoia.\u201d Let Me Tell You<\/em>, edited by Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman DeWitt, Penguin Books, 2015, pp. 3\u201314.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

—. \u201cRoot of Evil.\u201d Fantastic<\/em>, vol. 2, no. 2, Apr. 1953, pp. 124\u201329, 162.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

—. The Letters of Shirley Jackson<\/em>. Edited by Laurence Jackson Hyman, Random House, 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

—. We Have Always Lived in the Castle<\/em>. Penguin Books, 2009.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kinsey, Alfred C., et al. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male<\/em>. W. B. Saunders Company, 1948.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kvistad, Erica. \u201cDemon Lovers, Bluebeard\u2019s Wives: Folkloric Intertexts and Horror in Shirley Jackson and Carmen Maria Machado.\u201d Shirley Jackson\u2019s Dark Tales: Reconsidering the Short Fiction<\/em>, edited by Joan Passey and Robert Lloyd, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024, pp. 46\u201363.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leap, William L. Word\u2019s Out: Gay Men\u2019s English<\/em>. University of Minnesota Press, 1996.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lecklider, Aaron S. \u201cInventing the Egghead: The Paradoxes of Brainpower in Cold War American Culture.\u201d Journal of American Studies<\/em>, vol. 45, no. 2, May 2011, pp. 245\u201365.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leonard, Jr., George B. \u201cWhy Is He Afraid To Be Different?\u201d The Decline of the American Male<\/em>, by The Editors of Look, Random House, 1958, pp. 25\u201348. Internet Archive<\/em>, http:\/\/archive.org\/details\/declineofameric00look.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leyshon, Cressida. \u201cThis Week in Fiction: Shirley Jackson: \u2018Paranoia.\u2019\u201d The New Yorker<\/em>, 26 July 2013, https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/books\/page-turner\/this-week-in-fiction- shirley-jackson-.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Littauer, Amanda H. \u201c\u2018Someone to Love\u2019: Teen Girls\u2019 Same-Sex Desire in the 1950s United States.\u201d Queer 1950s: Rethinking Sexuality in the Postwar Years<\/em>, edited by Heike Bauer and Matt Cook, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 61\u201376.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era<\/em>. Fully Revised and Updated 20th Anniversary Edition, Basic Books, Inc., 2008.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

McNulty, John. \u201cTom Rath, Commuter.\u201d New York Times<\/em>, 17 July 1955, p. BR18.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Murphy, Bernice M. \u201c\u2018I Am God\u2019: The Domineering Patriarch in Shirley Jackson\u2019s Gothic Fiction.\u201d Horrifying Sex: Essays on Sexual Difference in Gothic Literature<\/em>, edited by Ruth Bienstock Anolik, McFarland, 2007, pp. 135\u201348.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oldstone-Moore, Christopher. \u201cMustaches and Masculine Codes in Early Twentieth-Century America.\u201d Journal of Social History<\/em>, vol. 45, no. 1, Fall 2011, pp. 47\u201360. EBSCOhost<\/em>, https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1093\/jsh\/shr002.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur. \u201cThe Crisis of American Masculinity (1958).\u201d The Politics of Hope<\/em>, Houghton Mifflin, 1963, pp. 237\u201346.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Showalter, Elaine. A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx<\/em>. Vintage Books, 2010.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SJP, Shirley Jackson Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Spence, Kenneth C. \u201cIndependents: Lamenting the Late Trylon and Perisphere.\u201d Film Comment<\/em>, vol. 20, no. 2, 1984, pp. 68\u201369.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whitfield, Stephen J. The Culture of the Cold War<\/em>. Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.Wilson, Sloan. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit<\/em>. Pocket Books, Inc., 1956.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. This article contains a deeper exploration of ideas briefly touched on in my chapter \u201c\u2018I Could Do With a Change\u2019: Shirley Jackson\u2019s Engagement with Postwar Science Fiction.\u201d Shirley Jackson\u2019s Dark Tales: Reconsidering the Short Fiction<\/em>, edited by Joan Passey and Robert Lloyd, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024, pp. 181\u201399. A quick note on language: in this article I tend to use \u201chomosexual\u201d when talking about specific historical conceptions and \u201cqueer\u201d in the more modern usage to refer to less-defined, non-heteronormative identities. Similarly, the term \u201cpost-war\u201d refers to the period from 1945 until the early 1960s, centering the 1950s.
    <\/sub>     \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  2. Many of these anxieties are entrenched in discourses of power and loyalty, particularly regarding the status of the intellectual in post-war America. \u201cThe exaggerated masculinity\u201d of McCarthy (Whitfield 44, see also 223), stood in opposition to the \u201cegghead,\u201d a post-war term for intellectuals who were \u201cconceived as queerly feminine\u201d (Lecklider 249\u201350). In the subway, trying to avoid the man in the hat, Beresford ponders his own intellectual mien: \u201cHe\u2019ll think if I\u2019m very stupid I\u2019d head downtown, if I\u2019m smarter than that I\u2019d go uptown, if I\u2019m really smart I\u2019d go downtown. Does he think I\u2019m middling smart or very smart?\u201d (\u201cParanoia\u201d 11). He immediately concludes that \u201cIt\u2019s no good \u2026 no good at all; he knows just how smart I am\u201d (12), implying both that he cannot outsmart the man and that the man knows how smart he is because he is a figment of his imagination. He does, in fact, go downtown, which means he is either \u201cvery stupid\u201d or \u201creally smart.\u201d<\/sub>
    \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  3. \u00a0Kinsey\u2019s work does, however, show some confusion about this point. In debating external recognition of homosexuality in the military, Kinsey notes that \u201c[o]nly a naive individual, one who was badly neurotic and upset over his experience, or an effeminate type of male who freely exhibited his homosexual interests,<\/em> was ordinarily detected through the official channels\u201d (621\u201322; emphasis added). The equation of effeminacy with open homosexuality seems to prove that \u201c[i]n large city communities \u2026 an experienced observer may identify hundreds of persons in a day whose homosexual interests are certain\u201d (627). The stress on visual confirmation here goes against his assertion elsewhere that such external confirmation is impossible. For more on Kinsey\u2019s ambiguity on this matter, see Heike Bauer, \u201cSexology Backward: Hirschfeld, Kinsey and the Reshaping of Sex Research in the 1950s\u201d in Queer 1950s: Rethinking Sexuality in the Postwar Years<\/em>, edited by Heike Bauer and Matt Cook, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 133\u201349<\/sub>. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  4. This is not to say that Jackson had knowledge of these systems of recognition, but she did have homosexual friends and acquaintances (Franklin 203). She was also familiar with Kinsey\u2019s work, though possibly not before a 1964 visit to his institute (Letters <\/em>571)<\/sub>. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li><\/ol><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Queer \u201cParanoia\u201d: Post-war Masculinities and Queer Panic 1 By Janice Lynne Deitner Janice Lynne Deitner completed her PhD on bodies of knowledge in Shirley Jackson’s American contexts in early 2024. She is Assistant Editor of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies and a co-organizer of “Reading Shirley Jackson in the Twenty-First Century,” an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"[{\"content\":\"This article contains a deeper exploration of ideas briefly touched on in my chapter \u201c\u2018I Could Do With a Change\u2019: Shirley Jackson\u2019s Engagement with Postwar Science Fiction.\u201d Shirley Jackson\u2019s Dark Tales: Reconsidering the Short Fiction<\/em>, edited by Joan Passey and Robert Lloyd, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024, pp. 181\u201399. A quick note on language: in this article I tend to use \u201chomosexual\u201d when talking about specific historical conceptions and \u201cqueer\u201d in the more modern usage to refer to less-defined, non-heteronormative identities. Similarly, the term \u201cpost-war\u201d refers to the period from 1945 until the early 1960s, centering the 1950s.
    <\/sub>\",\"id\":\"5d522c39-7055-4717-bbfd-cdfb09177f03\"},{\"content\":\"Many of these anxieties are entrenched in discourses of power and loyalty, particularly regarding the status of the intellectual in post-war America. \u201cThe exaggerated masculinity\u201d of McCarthy (Whitfield 44, see also 223), stood in opposition to the \u201cegghead,\u201d a post-war term for intellectuals who were \u201cconceived as queerly feminine\u201d (Lecklider 249\u201350). In the subway, trying to avoid the man in the hat, Beresford ponders his own intellectual mien: \u201cHe\u2019ll think if I\u2019m very stupid I\u2019d head downtown, if I\u2019m smarter than that I\u2019d go uptown, if I\u2019m really smart I\u2019d go downtown. Does he think I\u2019m middling smart or very smart?\u201d (\u201cParanoia\u201d 11). He immediately concludes that \u201cIt\u2019s no good \u2026 no good at all; he knows just how smart I am\u201d (12), implying both that he cannot outsmart the man and that the man knows how smart he is because he is a figment of his imagination. He does, in fact, go downtown, which means he is either \u201cvery stupid\u201d or \u201creally smart.\u201d<\/sub>
    \",\"id\":\"a549a8a0-3888-4f03-bdca-fe17f9bc0cf5\"},{\"content\":\"\u00a0Kinsey\u2019s work does, however, show some confusion about this point. In debating external recognition of homosexuality in the military, Kinsey notes that \u201c[o]nly a naive individual, one who was badly neurotic and upset over his experience, or an effeminate type of male who freely exhibited his homosexual interests,<\/em> was ordinarily detected through the official channels\u201d (621\u201322; emphasis added). The equation of effeminacy with open homosexuality seems to prove that \u201c[i]n large city communities \u2026 an experienced observer may identify hundreds of persons in a day whose homosexual interests are certain\u201d (627). The stress on visual confirmation here goes against his assertion elsewhere that such external confirmation is impossible. For more on Kinsey\u2019s ambiguity on this matter, see Heike Bauer, \u201cSexology Backward: Hirschfeld, Kinsey and the Reshaping of Sex Research in the 1950s\u201d in Queer 1950s: Rethinking Sexuality in the Postwar Years<\/em>, edited by Heike Bauer and Matt Cook, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 133\u201349<\/sub>.\",\"id\":\"47c6b034-e4d9-4908-8406-00d0d7f53b32\"},{\"content\":\"This is not to say that Jackson had knowledge of these systems of recognition, but she did have homosexual friends and acquaintances (Franklin 203). She was also familiar with Kinsey\u2019s work, though possibly not before a 1964 visit to his institute (Letters <\/em>571)<\/sub>.\",\"id\":\"0c79775d-6347-4adc-9d1e-be81ca52777f\"}]"},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\n- Shirley Jackson Studies<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/shirleyjacksonstudies.org\/?p=321\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"- Shirley Jackson Studies\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Queer \u201cParanoia\u201d: Post-war Masculinities and Queer Panic 1 By Janice Lynne Deitner Janice Lynne Deitner completed her PhD on bodies of knowledge in Shirley Jackson’s American contexts in early 2024. She is Assistant Editor of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies and a co-organizer of “Reading Shirley Jackson in the Twenty-First Century,” an […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/shirleyjacksonstudies.org\/?p=321\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Shirley Jackson Studies\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2024-08-27T17:32:12+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2024-09-06T13:04:17+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"drjillelizabeth\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"drjillelizabeth\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"32 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/shirleyjacksonstudies.org\\\/?p=321#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/shirleyjacksonstudies.org\\\/?p=321\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"drjillelizabeth\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/shirleyjacksonstudies.org\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/5f8451e4ac28b42b7c48f6ebc4c1ea32\"},\"headline\":\"No title\",\"datePublished\":\"2024-08-27T17:32:12+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2024-09-06T13:04:17+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/shirleyjacksonstudies.org\\\/?p=321\"},\"wordCount\":7070,\"commentCount\":0,\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/shirleyjacksonstudies.org\\\/?p=321#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/shirleyjacksonstudies.org\\\/?p=321\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/shirleyjacksonstudies.org\\\/?p=321\",\"name\":\"- Shirley Jackson Studies\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/shirleyjacksonstudies.org\\\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2024-08-27T17:32:12+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2024-09-06T13:04:17+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/shirleyjacksonstudies.org\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/5f8451e4ac28b42b7c48f6ebc4c1ea32\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/shirleyjacksonstudies.org\\\/?p=321\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/shirleyjacksonstudies.org\\\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/shirleyjacksonstudies.org\\\/\",\"name\":\"Shirley Jackson Studies\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\\\/\\\/shirleyjacksonstudies.org\\\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/shirleyjacksonstudies.org\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/5f8451e4ac28b42b7c48f6ebc4c1ea32\",\"name\":\"drjillelizabeth\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/secure.gravatar.com\\\/avatar\\\/ff1196d047b8a7c634f9272e4cea404581400781d487628a5c773b1722cda1ba?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/secure.gravatar.com\\\/avatar\\\/ff1196d047b8a7c634f9272e4cea404581400781d487628a5c773b1722cda1ba?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/secure.gravatar.com\\\/avatar\\\/ff1196d047b8a7c634f9272e4cea404581400781d487628a5c773b1722cda1ba?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"drjillelizabeth\"},\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/shirleyjacksonstudies.org\\\/?author=1\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"- Shirley Jackson Studies","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/shirleyjacksonstudies.org\/?p=321","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"- Shirley Jackson Studies","og_description":"Queer \u201cParanoia\u201d: Post-war Masculinities and Queer Panic 1 By Janice Lynne Deitner Janice Lynne Deitner completed her PhD on bodies of knowledge in Shirley Jackson’s American contexts in early 2024. 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