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Domesticity Is the Real Monster in ‘Shirley’
A new biopic casts horror writer Shirley Jackson as a villain — but it’s the forces that drove her to cruelty we should be scared of
Shortly after the trailer for Shirley, Josephine Decker’s new biopic about 20th-century horror writer Shirley Jackson, hit the internet, I found myself chatting with a friend about the movie. “I worry that they’re going to portray Shirley Jackson as crazy,” she said. Having finally seen the film, I must say: The friend will not be pleased. The Shirley of Decker’s Shirley is unremittingly bonkers, a contagious font of mental illness, a vicious drunk, a corrupter of the young and innocent — in the words of one of those young, innocent people, a “fucking monster.” Yet, somehow, this doesn’t come off as disrespectful. Instead, it feels like the best way to honor Jackson’s work, which gave women’s domestic struggles gravity by imbuing them with terror.
Jackson is sort of a patron saint of misunderstood female genius. She became a writer in the pre-feminist 1950s, writing exquisite literary fiction about human greed, madness, and cruelty that was dismissed as pulpy horror. She was one of relatively few female writers to carve out a financially viable career, but her earnings were controlled by her husband, the critic and professor Stanley Hyman, who lived off them while he produced his own, much less memorable work (his 1947 book The Armed Vision, in which Hyman laid out his ideas for a more “scientific” method of literary criticism, was hailed in reviews for its “almost breathless irresponsibility and lack of judgment”). While footing the bill for Hyman, Jackson was also expected to raise their children, take care of domestic chores so that his highly unmarketable genius could be undisturbed, and tolerate his many, many affairs.
It’s enough to drive a woman mad, and that is exactly what happened to Jackson, who developed severe agoraphobia in her mid-forties and spent the last years of her life frequently unable to leave her house. She became dependent on massive amounts of alcohol and tranquilizers to quell her anxiety. At age 48, shortly after filing for divorce from Hyman, she died in her sleep. Jackson’s stories, in retrospect, all seem to be about her hellish home life; they…
