{"id":531,"date":"2025-12-19T16:24:45","date_gmt":"2025-12-19T16:24:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/shirleyjacksonstudies.org\/?p=531"},"modified":"2026-01-05T16:02:50","modified_gmt":"2026-01-05T16:02:50","slug":"531","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shirleyjacksonstudies.org\/?p=531","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Between Privilege and Constraint: The White-Middle Class Adolescent as a \u201cSet of Have-Nots\u201d in Shirley Jackson\u2019s The Road Through the Wall<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

By Paula Puigvert Crous <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Paula Puigvert Crous holds a master\u2019s degree in Construction and Representation of Cultural Identities from the University of Barcelona (2023), \u200b\u200band she is currently a PhD candidate in the Linguistic, Literary and Cultural Studies program at the same institution. Her research focuses on Shirley Jackson\u2019s work through the scope of queer studies and structural violence, focusing on how these fields gesture at alternative temporalities that could resist
patriarchal control. A key aspect of her research examines interpersonal violence among female characters, delving into how women navigate such violence through practices of conformity that simultaneously uphold gendered norms and convey strategic forms of agency.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Shirley Jackson\u2019s debut novel The Road Through the Wall <\/em>(1948)\u2014hereafter Road<\/em>\u2014is set in the seemingly tranquil Californian suburb of Pepper Street, where a predominantly white, middle-class community tries to uphold its sense of respectability through voyeurism, surveillance and exclusion. As one summer unfolds, the novel traces how the community\u2019s fixation to maintain its respectability gradually escalates into collective violence, culminating in the murder of three-year-old Caroline Desmond and the communal alienation of the adolescent Tod Donald. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within this tightly controlled setting, other adolescents like Harriet Merriam\u2014and her seemingly innocent acts, such as writing love letter to the local boys expose the mechanisms of containment that structure Pepper Street, and ultimately reveal female adolescence as a condition of lack, deprived of knowledge, desire, and agency. This article examines Harriet\u2019s encounters with her Chinese neighbor and her friendship with Marilyn Perlman, a Jewish girl, as key moments to understand how ideals of purity rely on the exclusion of racial and social \u201cothers.\u201d At the same time, it intends to show how Harriet\u2019s class privilege places her adolescent subjecthood in an ambiguous position, granting constrained agency while depriving her of political awareness. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Road\u2019<\/strong><\/em>s Fragmented Narration and Suburban Moral Vacuum<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his account of the formation of the suburbs and its subsequent developments, John Keats (1956) recounts that after World War II, the GI Bill and prevailing ideology pressured veterans into owning a house, using \u201cboth private and government propaganda\u201d (xiv) while masking economic limitations as a freedom opportunity. State housing policy, fed by private speculation, soon turned the rhetoric of mobility to a capitalistic logic focused on \u201chow much house could be offered for how little money\u201d (xiv). As a consequence, many families were misguided to buy mass-produced, low-cost homes because \u201c[i]t was, simply, the one thing available\u201d (xv). These material constraints clearly shaped the landscape and physical organization of the suburbs, but more importantly constituted a moral framework where residents\u2019 virtue was measured by their conformity to financial imperatives; an ideal that stood in stark contrast to the traditional American myth of self-reliance and individual freedom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Road <\/em>mirrors post-war conformity and lack of individuality through its fragmented narrative, rapidly shifting between Pepper Street residents when describing their households. Homeowners like the Desmonds, who \u201cwere able to build [their] first home\u201d (Jackson 1), lived in a \u201crambling modern-style house\u201d (2), and the Merriams, who owned several properties \u201cat various places in the country\u201d (5) represent those possessing both financial means and upward mobility. In contrast, there are tenants such as the Donalds or the Martins, who \u201cwere not rich enough to live in the style they coveted and not proud enough to live in opposition to it\u201d (3). Through the relationship with their houses, Jackson depicts a wide-range of social strata to underscore disparities in wealth and mobility, yet more importantly to reveal how all social classes are bound by the same logic of suburban conformity; either through performative adherence, as in the meticulous maintenance and display of one\u2019s home, or through passive compliance, merely existing through \u201cpatterns set out by other more enterprising men\u201d (3).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Significantly, in her depiction of Pepper Street\u2019s residents, Jackson\u2019s narrator intertwines the limits of physical spaces with descriptions of domestic life, quickly shifting from the exterior of the houses to the inner lives of its dwellers. Caroline Desmond\u2019s unfolding, for instance, is narrated in parallel with the growth of the family\u2019s hedge, which \u201crequired the services of a boy [\u2026] to keep it trimmed\u201d (2), as though Caroline\u2019s own development were measured through the same logic of domestic upkeep. Similarly, Mr. Donald\u2019s house is defined by its ability to accommodate all his family \u2014\u201cample enough for [\u2026] their three children\u201d and \u201cpretentious enough for Mr. Donald\u2019s wife and daughter to feel at home\u201d (3)\u2014while the Martin\u2019s yellow house, \u201cdefiantly on Cortez Road,\u201d is immediately followed by the narrator\u2019s assessment of their children, George and Hallie, as \u201cregrettable\u201d (5). As Ruth Franklin observes in her introduction of the novel, Jackson\u2019s children are portrayed \u201cwith at least as much gravity as the adults and are well their equals in connivance and inhumanity\u201d (viii). In Pepper Street, children\u2019s subjecthood stems from the premature immersion in their surroundings, where spatial order and social discipline are simultaneously absorbed. Then, the narrator\u2019s rapid shifts from fa\u00e7ades and gardens to constant references to children\u2019s attitude blur the line between setting and self. In doing so, Jackson reveals from the very opening of the novel that the physical and moral architecture of suburbia mutually reinforce one another, fashioning both adults and children into products of the same enclosed social order. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Michael Louis Nardacci (1979) sustains, this formal disjunction reproduces the suburb\u2019s lack of interpersonal connection within the community, with residents that once \u201caccustomed to the failure of old values, \u2026 run the risk of moving into a moral vacuum\u201d (54). In the same vein, in \u201cThe Suburban Unhomely,\u201d Patrycja Antoszek argues that the fragmented form of the novel <\/em>mirrors the emotional and behavioral discipline embedded in the suburban order of the 1950s, which was governed by an \u201cinsistence on order and hygiene characteristic.\u201d Beyond architectural design and domestic upkeep, this suburban logic shaped the affective life of its inhabitants, casting \u201can overt expression of feelings\u201d as \u201csocially awkward or embarrassing\u201d (16). Jackson\u2019s fragmented narrative thus mirrors the suburb\u2019s own fractured emotional terrain, where genuine feeling must be restrained and both material and conduct anomaly carefully flattened to preserve the community\u2019s pristine fa\u00e7ade. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Narrating Innocence: Epistemic Gaps and the Formation of Girlhood<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The drive toward writing and self-expression among adolescent girls in Road<\/em> ought to be understood as part of a larger cultural context shaped by wartime disarray and the expectations of conformity in its aftermath. As Helgren and Vasconcellos (2010) explain, wartime mobilization had drawn young girls into close contact with adult forms of labor, accelerating their impasse into maturation and positioning girlhood at \u201ca conflicting and uneasy intersection between a presumed childhood innocence and eroticized femininity\u201d (172).1<\/a><\/sup> This tension was deliberately reinforced by cultural narratives, in which popular media promoted figures of moral decline like the \u201cVictory Girl\u201d or the \u201cuniform chaser\u201d\u2014that is, girls \u201cwith tight sweaters and bright lipstick\u201d (172)\u2014while military propaganda explicitly positioned \u201cThe Victory Girl\u201d overtly as \u201cMenace No. 1.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the post-war period, media further fed anxieties about adolescent subjectivity through what Miranda Corcoran (2022) identifies as tropological strategies. The media portrayals of girls gossiping and speaking privately on the telephone with their friends ultimately represented a set of \u201cassociations with promiscuity, disobedience and consumerist avarice\u201d (29), and thus placed girls as instruments for instilling caution against female independence. In this way, Corcoran notes that this ordinary image of the girl on the phone, more than a simple depiction, functioned as a \u201cdiscursive formation\u201d (29) that placed teenage girls not as a naturally occurring phenomenon, but a socially manufactured narrative which \u201cmediate[d] a significant transition in how teenage girlhood was being conceptualized during this period\u201d (29).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within this cultural framework, Harriet Merriam\u2019s letter writing in Road<\/em> reflects the broader tension between adolescent self-expression and cultural attempts to contain it. The aforementioned letters, written \u201ccautiously\u201d to the boys of the community and \u201c[in] the way love letters were written\u201d (Jackson 12), represent a deliberated display of power and reveal the girls\u2019 awareness of the performative nature of love letter writing. What unsettles the mothers, then, especially Mrs. Merriam, who label the letters as \u201cindiscreet things\u201d and as \u201cchildish [\u2026.] but improper\u201d (15), is not so much the content itself, but the image of their daughters engaging in a form of communication that implies knowing <\/em>how to articulate their thoughts \u201ccautiously\u201d and discern the \u201cright\u201d way to write them. This supposed cognitively emptiness that mothers attribute to their daughters functions as a symbolic screen onto which adults project fantasies of innocence and purity, echoing Kincaid\u2019s notion of the child as a \u201cset of have nots,\u201d similar to a blank slate without notions such as agency, sexuality, or knowledge. As a result of this persistent infantilization \u201c\u2018[the child\u2019s] flatness signifies nothing\u2019 and therefore \u2018does not interfere with our projections,\u2019 our interest \u2018to discover the erotic [\u2026] in the blank page\u2019\u201d (qtd. in Stockton, 12). Harriet\u2019s \u201csaying,\u201d then, becomes threatening not for its content, but for how it embodies visually and discursively a shift from silence to self-expression that ultimately destabilizes the sociocultural image of the innocent and unknowing child.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fact that Mrs. Merriam refers to the letters in terms of indiscreetness and improperness does more than to convey a moral judgement; it cuts off Harriet\u2019s access to alternative modes of desire and expression. As Butler notes in Bodies That Matter <\/em>(1993), \u201cthe \u2018subject\u2019 is produced in language through an act of foreclosure\u201d (190), and what is excluded persists as a \u201cdefining negativity\u201d (190). Harriet\u2019s growing awareness of the performative nature of her writing becomes fully clear once her mother discovers the letters. At that moment, she understands \u201cwithout question, the eventual series of acts to be forced from her\u201d (Jackson <\/em>11), revealing that her growing comprehension of suburban codes is inseparable from the obligation to perform them correctly. That is why when she asks herself how to proceed after her mother\u2019s demand that she stops writing the letters, the question is not an exploration of agency but a rehearsal within the pre-scripted framework of propriety, simply \u201cbecause \u2018What-shall-I-do?\u2019 seemed the formation of sounds most likely to apply to a situation like this\u201d (11). With a subjectivity rooted in a negative rhetoric, her agency is built upon a framework of lack; then, rather than actively resisting this \u201cseries of acts\u201d that she realizes lie ahead of her, she only wonders about finding the appropriate way to perform them gracefully and with dignity in the eyes of her mother. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her \u201cfreedom,\u201d then, is not constrained by her naivety but by the absence of a cultural language to openly reject gender scripts. In fact, Harriet fully understands the tone and content a proper love letter should have, like those written by Helen Williams; it is the critique towards her friend\u2019s sentimental rhetoric that allows her define what she does and does not want to express. Helen\u2019s letters ended, \u201c\u2018kiss you a thousand times\u2019\u201d (13), but Harriet admits that she \u201ccould not bring herself to write such a thing, at least partly because the thought of kissing George Martin\u2019s dull face horrified her\u201d (13). The danger, then, lies less in the content of the letters than in the circulation of narrative forms, which enables a trial-and-error process to articulate their subjectivities beyond fixed notions of innocence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, even Harriet rejects Helen\u2019s sentimental rhetoric, she still remains trapped between that rejection and the inability to replace it with her own verbal framework. According to Kathryn Bond Stockton (2007), cultural misconceptions of children as non-violent and politically inert render their resistance invisible, resulting in what she calls \u201csideways growth\u201d: a hidden and oblique development where feelings and motives are not fully recognized, ultimately \u201cmak[ing] for a model of surreptitious sideways growth (for motive and the child) that we, as a culture, otherwise deny\u201d (303). Harriet recognizes the gendered and sentimental scripts she is expected to follow but cannot openly refuse them. Instead, she misplaces her frustration onto George\u2019s \u201cdull face,\u201d reframing her resistance into the socially acceptable language of personal dislike rather than confronting the broader heteronormative rituals inherent to the adolescent experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Protecting Innocence: The Role of Otherness in Shaping Girlhood<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Miranda Corcoran\u2019s account (2022), adolescence, far from neutral, has always been a historical and cultural stage shaped both by the interplay of race and class. Prior to the 1930s, the term \u201cadolescent\u201d referred primarily to white children attending school, while working-class and non-white youth carried the label of \u201claborers.\u201d Still, teenage population was brought in a broader cultural framework due to the expansion of schooling during the Great Depression, which started fostering an ideal of teenage innocence grounded on the contain of sexuality and labor threats. Postwar affluence further deepened these socioeconomic divisions: white, middle-class teenagers, supported by families able to provide \u201cpreviously unimaginable luxuries\u201d (120-121), could explore the unruliness of their identities. This freedom posed an ambivalence into the figure of the adolescent seen as \u201can adult in training\u201d (121), making it oscillate between \u201cfresh-faced innocence and threatening, precocious sexuality\u201d (122). However, this space for ambiguity granted to white-middle class innocence did not shelter minority and working-class girls, whose sexuality was framed as inherently dangerous and deviant.2<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Jackson\u2019s novel, the focus on Helen Williams after the letter scandal confirms that suburban innocence is relationally constructed, dependent upon a particular socioeconomic system of privilege. Harriet, as a white, middle-class girl, moves within an ambivalent space where her transgressions are reframed according to the standards of her class; an indulgence that Helen, daughter of a working-class household, is denied since the beginning. Helen\u2019s curiosity and emerging sexuality\u2014seen in walking around at night with a gas station man or seeking to visit her father in the city (Jackson 21-22)\u2014are deemed as inherently dangerous, leaving no possibility of redemption or reframing. The neighborhood mothers, especially Harriet\u2019s, label Helen as \u201cthe source of it all\u201d (15) and \u201ca bad influence on all the children in the neighborhood\u201d (55), diminishing her into a cautionary figure. Harriet\u2019s playfulness with letter-writing is quickly neutralized through comparison with Helen, whose perceived precociousness \u2014\u201ca good deal too mature<\/em> for their own good\u201d (39; emphasis in the original)\u2014 constantly reinforces the purity Harriet must uphold. In the same vein, Mrs. Merriam insistence on her daughter that \u201cwe won\u2019t see that Helen Williams any more […] there\u2019s no need for my girl to run around with that sort of person\u201d (30), emphasizes Harriet\u2019s necessity of distancing herself from emerging sexuality and working-class traits. More importantly, Mrs. Merriam\u2019s use of the pronoun \u201cwe\u201d initially seems to create the illusion of mother-daughter boundness. Yet, voiced through the perspective of a stay-at-home mother, it also signals Harriet\u2019s privilege familial situation which, unlike Helen\u2019s, places her within a protective \u201cwe\u201d; a social and economic buffer that safeguards her while simultaneously enforcing moral restraint within the domestic sphere. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By enacting such behavior, Mrs. Merriam embodies the postwar domestic ideology tied to the housewife\u2019s role, shaped by the expectation that \u201cit was their patriotic duty to leave the workforce to become housewives, mothers and especially consumers, to get the economy rolling again\u201d (Ewan and Bawandall 149). This position extended beyond domestic labor, granting the stay-at-home mother both institutional authority and moral guardianship within the domestic realm. The very oversight Mrs. Merriam exercises\u2014enabled by her class position\u2014allows Harriet to encounter difference and test boundaries within limited freedom, though always conditioned and restrained by white middle-class decorum. Then, when Harriet tells her mother that some neighborhood girls have visited Mr. Lee, the Chinese neighbor, Mrs. Merriam warns her against doing the same, yet she transmits the commandment through mixed cues\u2014\u201cdrop[ping] her voice slightly,\u201d \u201cglanc[ing] sideways at her husband,\u201d and \u201cappear[ing] to enjoy it so much\u201d (Jackson <\/em>56)\u2014as if enforcing restraint and permitting transgression at once.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Harriet and Virginia\u2019s later encounter with Mr. Lee confirms how their apparent transgression is, in fact, enabled by the class constraints inherent to their status. The ease with which both girls move through the neighborhood, bringing them to visit Mr. Lee\u2019s apartment, stands in stark contrast to his clear prohibition from renting there: \u201cI couldn\u2019t rent an apartment in this house […] Not in this neighborhood\u201d (83). In this sense, Mr. Lee\u2019s housing remark gestures the persistence of broader racial and legal inequalities underpinning post-war America, which were enforced through protective covenants, Federal Housing Association policies, and \u201c[u]nofficially [\u2026] unwritten agreements and traditions of segregation\u201d (Ewan and Bawandall 175). Beyond legal restrictions, these practices were reinforced socially through \u201cinterlocking friendships, mutual loyalties and existing social pressure\u201d (174), ensuring the neighborhood remained \u201clily white\u201d (175) even after the official abolishment of formal barriers. Examining the broader context surrounding Mr. Lee encounter with the girls clarifies how Harriet and Virginia\u2019s privilege derives not from an inherent quality, but rather from institutional and housing policies, as well as communal loyalties, that allow their transgression to unfold within a deeply protective enclave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later, when Virginia realizes that Mr. Lee is only a servant in the apartment, she quickly urges them to leave, yet Harriet, guided by the moral framework instilled by her mother, instinctively placing propriety above ethical reflection. She thus falls back on \u201cher conscious manners,\u201d addressing Mr. Lee with deliberate politeness: \u201cIt very nice to ask us to come […] I hope you won\u2019t get into trouble for having guests up here\u201d (Jackson 84). Harriet\u2019s insistence on performing innocence during a tense encounter enables her to enjoy privilege without real awareness, turning overt racial segregation into an anomaly she can manage effectively through decorum and civility. Consequently, both girls inhabit a subjectivity that, as Lauren Berlant (2011) puts it, is \u201cvirtually ahistorical, fleeting, phantasmatic, or a space of symptomatic pseudoactivity\u201d (64), symptomatic of a structural privilege that allows them to engage with social \u201cothers\u201d while insulating them from any political understanding of the systemic inequalities. In his analysis of the novel, Richard Pascal (2016) further extends this argument emphasizing how the girls\u2019 prejudice mirrors the \u201cideological unobtrusiveness\u201d (135) of suburban exclusion, embedded so deeply in voyeuristic social life that is disguised as morally neutral. For instance, just as Harriet and Virginia display apparent politeness, the exclusion of the Perlmans, the Jewish family, from community events like the neighborhood play reveals how social belonging is maintained through collective acts of moral policing, \u201cboth in behavior and gossipy innuendo\u201d (Pascal 135).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same containment that maintains racial boundaries permeate in the interactions with those children with a working-class background, such as the nine-year-old Hallie Martin. Similar to Hellen Williams, Hallie is being raised by a family who \u201cwere out, working at their respective jobs\u201d (Jackson <\/em>135) and thus inhabits a social space largely ungoverned by decorum and maternal oversight. Consequently, her actions are condemned for the sole reason of Hallie performing them outside the structures of restraint that would otherwise lend them legitimacy. One afternoon, Hallie steps daintily into the street to flirt with the wall\u2019s builders, but her audacity is not read as innocent play\u2014unlike Harriet\u2019s letter writing\u2014but as premature impropriety, an indicative of the lack of supervision tied to her working-class status. Mrs. Perlman\u2019s later speech in her visit to Mrs. Merriam, in which she reports that her husband found Hallie \u201c[a]ll alone […] just standing there with her\u2014with her thumb, you know, and she was all dressed up, and she was wearing lipstick\u201d (138), draws attention to the visible emblems of unrestrained femininity. The act of dissecting Harriet\u2019s feminine attire constructs her body as one of uninhibitedness, an embodied deviance resulting from a mother who \u201cworks until late at night\u201d (138) and from one unable to provide the continuous moral and physical supervision that post-war ideology expected of the stay-at-home mother.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kincaid argues that innocence, far from being an inherent trait in children, has evolved into \u201ca consumer product, an article to possess, as a promise to the righteous and the reward to the dutiful\u201d (15). In Road<\/em>, the writing task that Mrs. Merriam assigns to Harriet, presented as an invitation to write together (Jackson 30), exemplifies a transaction of power where the girl is kindly invited by her mother to \u201cprove\u201d her moral worth under the guise of intimate bonding. Although Mrs. Merriam admits she writes \u201cnot very well\u201d (30), she insists on supervising Harriet\u2019s work, revealing that the exercise\u2019s purpose lies not in expression but in the hierarchical mother-daughter transaction it enacts. In fact, after the letter incident, Harriet feels sorry for her to the extent of admitting that she loved her \u201cas one should love a mother, tenderly and affectionately\u201d (30). The transactional nature of the mother-daughter bond becomes evident as Harriet turns affection into duty, driven by the logic that genuine love must be expressed through a sentimentalized, morally acceptable language that reaffirms her blind obedience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mrs. Merriam\u2019s regulation of Harriet\u2019s writing production reflects the broader logic of children\u2019s objectification in Jackson\u2019s fiction that Anna Joanna Bartnicka (2023) addresses in her analysis of the novel. Bartnicka argues that children, as a result of \u201cbeing in a disadvantageous position with respect to age,\u201d are frequently compelled to embody the traits their parents wish to display to the community\u2014strength, purity and refinement\u2014with the risk of being reduced to the label of object and thus forced to face all \u201cits ethical consequences.\u201d When placed as symbolic objects, teenagers like Harriet can be shaped and disciplined in ways reminiscent of Pat Byrnes or Arti Roberts, whose seemingly trivial behaviors, from sitting to eating, are strictly policed by their families. That is, just as the physical rituals of other children transform the most trivial living actions into \u201ca matter of following instruction,\u201d Mrs. Merriam\u2019s policing of Harriet\u2019s writing converts complex affective experiences into exercises of structured and formal discipline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also, from her habit of reading, Harriet learns to adjust her emotions according to the sentimental scripts of nineteenth-century fiction. Her reading of romantic texts such as Louisa May Alcott\u2019s Little Women<\/em> leads her not to interrogate her class status but to render her emotions legible through acceptable feminine tropes. As Hattenhauer points out (2003), Harriet\u2019s engagement with literature reflects \u201cthe narratives that inserted her into the social text, or failed to\u201d (88). Thus, when she fantasizes about the girls who might move into the house-for-rent, she envisions their friendship not through real affinity, but leveling it as a literary legend, as \u201cthey would be like in Little Women<\/em>, and Harriet\u2019s friend would be Jo (or just possibly Beth, and they could die together, patiently)\u201d (Jackson 97). The friendship, then, becomes more of a kind of script resulting in a narrative and coherent resolution, which eventually denies the intimate and potentially disruptive dimension of any real bond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unlike Harriet, whose emotions are disciplined by an aesthetic narrative framing, Marilyn Perlman, a Jewish girl navigating the constant scrutiny of a white suburban neighborhood, embodies a more candid and unfiltered embodied response. So, when the mothers of both friends strike up a conversation delicately addressing the disappearance of the nine-year-old Hallie Martin, Marilyn \u201cbroke in eagerly\u201d (138), speaking with blunt honesty: \u201cHer grandmother said she was going to give Hallie the beating of her life, and I don\u2019t blame Hallie for not wanting to go home because they were sure mad at her\u201d (138). In explicitly addressing the violence that the adults only hint at, Marilyn reveals an approach to the situation through the legacy of communal solidarity inherent to her Jewish heritage, while gesturing to an alternative kinship that actually contemplates feelings such as anger and the awareness of vulnerability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although Harriet\u2019s persona is bound by class and narrative convention, her friendship and secret ritual with Marilyn of \u201cburying their writings\u201d and vowing not to \u201cshare or look at each other\u2019s writing for ten years\u201d opens up a rare space for unconstrained emotional expression (112). According to Bartnicka, within the social children-adult hierarchy embedded in Jackson\u2019s suburban setting, childhood occupies a marginal not-yet-defined zone where alternative ways of being can be conceived. Harriet and Marilyn\u2019s deferred ritual momentarily frees the girls, especially Harriet, from the rigidness of the hierarchy, allowing them to experience in nature \u201cthe kind of calmness, equality, and future potentiality that is absent from the restricting subject-object hierarchy upheld by their parents in their homes.\u201d Furthermore, the ten-year delay of their ritual subverts the social economy of girlhood, which, as Kincaid notes, ties a girl\u2019s value to her romantic or sexual potential within a \u201csave-and-squander economical model\u201d (54). By removing their writings from immediate circulation, both girls postpone their engagement with adult scrutiny and thus craft a space for desire and affect that cannot be consumed or codified, at least immediately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Therefore, when Harriet is compelled to end her friendship with Marilyn and relocate their bond into the socially sanctioned framework, following Mrs. Merriam\u2019s demand to \u201cset a standard\u201d and \u201cdo what is expected of us\u201d (Jackson 148), she again channels her uncomfortable feelings through the lens of sentimental narration. Drawing on Kristeva\u2019s claim that abjection involves expelling what \u201cdisturbs identity, system, order\u201d and \u201cdoes not respect borders, positions, rules\u201d (qtd. in Antoszek, 18), Harriet\u2019s socialization pressures her to reject Marilyn for safeguarding her own status as a \u201cgood decent girl\u201d (Jackson <\/em>29). Her mother\u2019s instruction to \u201csee her once more, in order to tell her exactly<\/em> why you are not to be friends any longer\u201d (149; emphasis in the original) converts what was an emotional and pre-symbolic bond into a socially coded act of separation, compelling Harriet to speak not in her own \u201cfilthy words\u201d (149) but in the purified language her mother \u201chad spread over so long a time\u201d (158).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, just as in any sentimental text from the nineteenth century in which social decorum is required, Harriet is positioned as a dutiful protagonist who must \u201cmove on\u201d by setting class standards under the guise of responsibility: \u201cPeople of my class are always nice to everybody [\u2026] but we have to set standards\u201d (158). The discourse of decorum obscures the underlying harshness of the act\u2014the racial and class marginalization of a Jewish girl within a WASP neighborhood\u2014, being articulated by a protagonist who, when the narrative requires inner complexity, is suddenly confronted with the fact that \u201cshe had no words to use to go any further, whatever she tried to say now would only be the same words over again\u201d (158). Ultimately, Harriet\u2019s privilege to be schooled in propriety strikes in contrast with Marilyn, who throughout the novel becomes less a friend than a cautionary figure. So, when Marilyn insults Harriet after ending the friendship, calling her a \u201cbig fat slob,\u201d Harriet initial pain is quickly neutralized by adult authority: \u201cI\u2019ll tell my mother\u201d (158). In Pepper Street, otherness is never absorbed into the moral order of whiteness; it functions only as a moral warning, reinforcing the boundaries the dutiful girl must respect to secure her place within proper suburban womanhood. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Violence Turned Inwards: The Child as a Blank Slate <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Harriet\u2019s ending of her friendship with Marilyn by setting class boundaries mirrors the symbolic role of the wall separating Pepper Street from a larger state; a structure less a physical barrier than as an apparatus for preserving the resident\u2019s moral and social integrity. As Richard Pascal states, the wall represents \u201can effective end to Pepper Street life\u201d (11), suggesting that the villagers envision threats\u2014\u201csmall boys with stones\u201d and \u201ccurious trespassers gathering flowers\u201d (Jackson 134)\u2014only in imagination, never as a tangible reality. What the residents truly fear, then, is not intrusion itself, but the lingering presence of difference. Within this logic, the wall safeguards what Pascal describes as the \u201csacred\u201d inward gaze of suburban life, in which \u201c[t]he \u2018enclosed spaces\u2019 of modern households and communities are \u2018sacred\u2019 primarily insofar as they look inward upon themselves\u201d (Pascal 140). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the same vein, Harriet\u2019s unease during her walk with Marilyn past the men dismantling the wall stems less from the workers\u2019 presence than from the fear of being seen<\/em> outside the familiar guidelines of propriety that protect her position within Pepper Street: \u201c[m]aybe the men were laughing [\u2026] because she was so fat, and Marilyn looked so small beside her\u201d (Jackson 157). Her discomfort with the men\u2019s laughter is recast similarly to the earlier incident with Mr. Lee\u2019s; it is not a critique of social issues such as anti-Semitism or class prejudice, but a performance of manners and fear of maternal judgment as \u201cshe was oppressed with the dreadful thought that perhaps her mother would hear the men laughing at her\u201d (157). In this sense, Harriet\u2019s anxiety about being misread gets translated into class propriety and maternal oversight, with an inward, moralized anxiety that sustains the repressiveness of suburban logic even after its physical boundaries have crumbled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Harriet\u2019s focus on polished performance mirrors the community\u2019s neutralization of violence, especially Caroline Desmond\u2019s murder. Just as Caroline\u2019s life is narrated through clich\u00e9s of feminine purity\u2014\u201csimply an angel\u201d (37)\u2014her death is reduced to vague tropes like \u201ca great climactic festival\u201d or an impersonal \u201ctragedy, in which case they were all called upon to act together as human beings\u201d (181). Under a universalizing rhetoric that points at a collective moral obligation as humans, not as specific members of a community, the focus shifts from a concrete material context to an abstract ideal of humankind. Similarly, the wondering among the villagers about the crime\u2019s perpetrator, fixated on trivial details such as Tod Donald being \u201ctoo small\u201d (190) to \u201cheft a rock that big\u201d (190), seeks a logical resolution of the case, rather than a real understanding of the killer\u2019s motive. Then, by posing the attention only on the identification of the scapegoat, the crime is narrated instead of processed: a consumable story that prioritizes closure and coherence over confrontation with systemic violence. As Pascal notes, the villagers\u2019 handling of Tod\u2019s alleged culpability through \u201cits guilty pleasures\u201d such as gossip and voyeurism operates less as an act of moral reckoning than as a ritual of collective self-definition that allows them to act \u201cfor a brief while, as an old-fashioned community, a village, rather than a mere agglomeration of autonomous and discrete individuals\u201d (149). Yet this fleeting sense of togetherness ultimately reinforces the same mechanisms of containment once upheld by the wall: an ethic of individualism grounded in the constant surveillance of both self and neighbor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through this illusion of moral order, the community seeks to uphold what David W. Noble identifies as \u201cthe central myth of America as a new Eden: \u2018timelessness\u2019 (Eternal)\u201d (96). Yet, according to Hattenhauer, Jackson\u2019s proto-postmodern approach diverges from the usual model of sacrificial scapegoating, rendering this renewal \u201cat best qualified\u201d (96). The violence that emerges becomes ambiguous in its effect, folding inward and becoming self-defeating. Shaped by her middle-class upbringing, Harriet takes in external pressures as a form of self-repression, which ultimately turns the mythic \u201ctimelessness\u201d of the American Eden into a state of emotional stasis. One of the villager\u2019s remarks at the party celebrated near the novel\u2019s end, when she tells Harriet that she does not have the \u201cair<\/em> of a pretty woman,\u201d condemning her to \u201cwalk like you\u2019re fat, whether you are or not\u201d (Jackson 170; emphasis in the original), does more than disrespect Harriet\u2019s appearance. Based on a temporary physical observation, it becomes an existential and permanent truth that positions Harriet within a social label; not only the one of the non-beautiful, but also of the dis-empowered. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, the morning after the tragedy, she wakes \u201cwith a recollection of disaster,\u201d yet lacking the means to process grief or violence, she experiences it only as a \u201cflat dead feeling inside her\u201d (189). Even Mr. Desmond, Caroline\u2019s grieving father, who should appear as an embodiment of paternal mourning, is flattened as \u201ca part of it, [\u2026] standing laughing in the kitchen when she went by, following Miss Tyler into the house to hear … fat\u201d (189). This emotional incongruence \u2014laughter intertwined with a child\u2019s murder\u2014 momentarily fractures Harriet\u2019s perception. However, rather than recognizing it as the villager\u2019s moral failure or as their voyeuristic tendencies, Harriet internalizes it through the language of self-discipline: \u201cfat fat fat girl […] You\u2019ll always be fat, she thought, never pretty, never charming, never dainty\u201d (189). This repetition turns fleeting shame into an ontological truth; she is not just feeling<\/em> fat but being<\/em> fat, deprived of any possibility of change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unable to externally articulate her grief, Harriet turns pain inward, enacting Freud\u2019s notion of melancholic as a process in which \u201cthe ego refuses to let go of the object, and preserves the object \u2018inside itself\u2019\u201d (qtd. in Ahmed, 159). As a white middle-class adolescent shaped by privilege, Harriet becomes a collateral damage of the suburban logic of containment, caught between the desire to transgress social boundaries and the need for self-discipline that her class upbringing requires. Unlike adolescents such as Helen Williams, Hallie Martin, and Marilyn Perlman\u2014socially unprotected by their lack of class privilege and racial difference\u2014, Harriet\u2019s unruly actions are contained by a socioeconomic structure that can reframe her innocence through negation of otherness. Yet this same privilege produces its own absences, because in internalizing maternal standards of propriety Harriet transforms her emotions into aesthetic objects and recasts systemic inequities as questions of personal behavior. In doing so, she embodies the figure of the child defined through absence; stripped of any political awareness, authentic desire, and the possibility of genuine adolescent experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The community\u2019s fixation on Tod Donald\u2019s alleged guilt and its moralized account of Caroline Desmond\u2019s death further reveal how Pepper Street sustains its illusion of order through voyeurism and internal surveillance, instead of the redemption promised by older sacrificial myths. These forms of watchful surveillance extend inward through Harriet\u2019s shame and self-surveillance, ultimately leaving her in emotional stillness and preventing her from grieving Caroline\u2019s death within a framework of understanding. In this sense, Harriet\u2019s adolescence, shaped by privilege as much as the withholding of desire and self-awareness, becomes the blank slate upon which the community inscribes its fantasy of timelessness. The tragedy of Pepper Street\u2019s teenage girl lies not in the collapse of Eden itself, but in her role as both the outcome and the vehicle of a myth sustained by epistemic absence, repression and emotional stasis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion<\/em>. Edinburgh University Press, 2014.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Antoszek, Patrycja. \u201cThe Suburban Unhomely: Alienation and Anxiety in Shirley Jackson\u2019s The Road Through the Wall<\/em>.\u201d Explorations: A Journal of Language and Literature<\/em>, vol. 5, 2017, pp. 12-24. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bartnicka, Anna Joana. \u201cThe Object World Re-Enchanted: The Agency of Humans and Things in Shirley Jackson\u2019s The Road Through the Wall<\/em> and The Haunting of Hill House<\/em>.\u201d Shirley Jackson Studies<\/em>, vol. 1, no. 2, 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxandall, Rosalyn and Elizabeth Ewan. Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened. <\/em>Basic Books, 2000. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism<\/em>. Duke University Press, 2011.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of \u201cSex\u201d <\/em>Routledge, 2011.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Corcoran, Miranda. Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture<\/em>. University of Wales Press, 2022. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hattenhauer, Daryl. Shirley Jackson and the American Gothic<\/em>. SUNY Press, 2003.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Helgren, Jennifer and Colleen A. Vasconcellos. Girlhood: A Global History<\/em>. Rutgers University Press, 2010.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jackson, Shirley. The Road Through the Wall. <\/em>Penguin Classics, 2013.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Keats, John. The Crack in the Picture Window. <\/em>Houghton Mifflin, <\/em>1956.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kincaid, James. Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting<\/em>. Duke University Press, 1998.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nardacci, Michael Louis. Theme, Character, and Technique in the Novels of Shirley Jackson<\/em>. 1979. New York University, PhD Dissertation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 Pascal, Richard. \u201cThe Road Through the Wall<\/em> and Shirley Jackson\u2019s America.<\/em>\u201d Shirley Jackson, Influences and Confluences<\/em>, edited by Melanie R. Anderson and Lisa Kr\u00f6ger, Routledge, 2016, pp. 76-96.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century<\/em>. Duke University Press, 2009.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

—. \u201cFeeling Like Killing? Queer Temporalities of Murderous Motives among Queer Children.\u201d GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies<\/em>, Volume 13, Number 2-3, 2007, pp. 301-325.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notes<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

  1. According to Helgren and Vasconcellos, young girls\u2019 involvement with war was often portrayed as \u201cdistorted patriotism,\u201d and actions such as frequenting \u201cbus depots to meet servicemen on leave\u201d (172) were misread as behaviors of delinquency and morally suspicion. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  2. Corcoran draws upon Grace Palladino\u2019s study of mid-twentieth-century adolescent sexuality, highlighting the case of Mexican-American pachuquitas<\/em>, whose displays of femininity based on \u201cshort skirts, sheer blouses and red lipstick\u201d were described by critics as \u201clittle tornados of sexualized stimulus\u201d (122). \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Between Privilege and Constraint: The White-Middle Class Adolescent as a \u201cSet of Have-Nots\u201d in Shirley Jackson\u2019s The Road Through the Wall By Paula Puigvert Crous Paula Puigvert Crous holds a master\u2019s degree in Construction and Representation of Cultural Identities from the University of Barcelona (2023), \u200b\u200band she is currently a PhD candidate in the Linguistic, […]<\/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\":\"According to Helgren and Vasconcellos, young girls\u2019 involvement with war was often portrayed as \u201cdistorted patriotism,\u201d and actions such as 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