How Shirley Jackson exposed the horror of home life

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Listen to the stories we discuss in this video:    • Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery and Ot...  
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Shirley Jackson: wife, mother, and writer of incredibly unnerving and sadistic domestic horror stories (and not necessarily in that order). What is domestic horror? How is it different to regular blood-and-guts horror? And how did Jackson revolutionise this way of writing? Distilling the silent scream of the housewife into the thrilling pages of her short stories, Jackson exposes the suffering of women in 1950s America. Want to find out exactly how she does this? This video is for you.


Content Warnings
Discussion of animal abuse, domestic abuse, suicide, body horror.


Written, presented, and edited by Rosie Whitcombe
@books_ncats

Directed, produced, and edited by Matty Phillips
@ma_ps_
mphotos.uk

Special thanks to Harri Hudson for their assistance in finding the pages for Franklin (2016)


Bibliography

Chrenek, Nicole, ‘Housewife Horror: Reconciling Contrasting Depictions of the Domestic in the Works of Shirley Jackson’, (https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/downlo...)

Franklin, Ruth, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (New York: Liveright, 2016)

Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell, 1964)

Gaiman, Neil http://ruthfranklin.net/author/books/...

Hand, Elizabeth, ‘‘She exposed the fragility of so-called civilised life’: why Shirley Jackson’s horror speaks to our times’, https://www.theguardian.com/books/202... our-times-the-haunting-of-hill-house

Jackson, Shirley, Life Among the Savages (New York: Penguin, 2015)

Jackson, Shirley, The Lottery and Other Stories (London: Penguin, 2009)

Murphy, Bernice M., ‘Hideous Doughnuts and Haunted Housewives: Gothic Undercurrents in Shirley Jackson’s Domestic Humor’, Shirley Jackson and Domesticity: Beyond the Haunted House, eds. Jill E. Anderson and Melanie Anderson (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020)

Rosales, L.N., ‘“Sharp Points Closing in on Her Throat”: The Domestic Gothic in Shirley Jackson’s Short Fiction’, Shirley Jackson and Domesticity: Beyond the Haunted House, eds. Jill E. Anderson and Melanie Anderson (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020)

Smith, Andrew, ‘Children of the Night: Shirley Jackson’s Domestic Female Gothic’, The Female Gothic: New Directions, eds. Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith (London: Macmillan, 2009)


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