The Crime Lady: Shirley, You Jest

Dear TCL Subscribers:

I did not expect to like Shirley, Josephine Decker’s newest film. I had very much disliked its source material (Susan Scarf Merrell’s 2014 novel Shirley) for a multitude of reasons I outlined in my review at the time, including: a simplistic portrayal of Jackson’s struggles with marriage to the literary critic and Bennington professor Stanley Edgar Hyman, with motherhood, with depression and substance abuse; using the real-life disappearance of a girl as plot contrivance. What tipped me over, though, was Merrell’s bizarre choice to put dialogue in the mouths of Jackson’s children, who were — and still are — alive, not public figures, and able to sue if they chose to.

The problems of Merrell’s novel carry over into Shirley’s script, written by Sarah Gubbins. But the film makes an additional choice, quite likely to fend off any potential litigation: the Hyman children are entirely absent. This is particularly noticeable in the many dinner scenes featuring Shirley (Elisabeth Moss), bedraggled and astringent; Stanley (Michael Stuhlbarg), magnetic and boundary-breaching; and the fictional young couple, Fred and Rose Nemser (Logan Lerman and Odessa Young), who board at the Hyman household and become ever intertwined in the older couple’s web.

Shirley, like its source novel, leans heavily on the trope of the middle-aged woman writer gone mad. But the nebulous time period — early 1950s in the film, a change from the early 1960s of the novel — obscures the bald fact that Jackson had had three of her four children (the last, Barry, was born in 1951) and that she made a significant amount of money writing domestic tales of being a mother to said children for magazines like Good Housekeeping and Ladies Home Journal. Tales that were eventually collected in Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957).

Jackson’s novels and stories, suffused with dread and menace, are what readers today know best. The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle are genuine masterpieces, to say nothing of “The Lottery”. I’m quite fond of The Sundial, The Bird’s Nest, and yes, Hangsaman, a brilliant exploration of how female loneliness and introversion coded as dangerous. And nearly a decade after reprinting “Louisa, Please Come Home” in Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, I still can’t get that story out of my brain.

But Jackson’s life and work cannot be fully examined without reading through the highly crafted, humorous stories she wrote about her children — referred to as Laurie, Jannie, Sally, and baby Barry. The stories teem with their adventures and misadventures, as when a kindergarten-aged Laurie attempts to pass off his own bad behavior as the work of a classmate, “Charles”, or when Jannie tries to emulate a morally hidebound first grade teacher, or when Sallie indulges in every facet of her childhood imagination. All the while, Shirley describes ferrying them to and from school, the cooking, the cleaning, and the times when nothing quite seems to work out the way she wants, thanks to failed furnaces, flooded cars, and absent husbands.

A recent reread of both Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons confirmed my earlier suspicions. The books (which string previously published magazine stories into loose memoir) are funny, but they are also revealing of Jackson’s main conflict: how to be a mother and housewife while supporting her household through writing. The tension could never be resolved in these stories because the commercial market for domestic fiction had no room for these complex questions.

Consider the exchange when Jackson goes to the hospital to deliver Sally, child number three: she lists “Writer” as occupation. The receptionist responds, “Housewife.” The receptionist wins, because in the late 1940s, the thought that women could pursue creative work as a profession when there was a home to keep and children to raise was, if not unthinkable, deemed socially unacceptable. Things had changed by the time Jackson died in 1965, but as Ruth Franklin delineated in her essential 2016 biography, the changes came too late — and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was only two years removed from publication.

What to do, then, with Shirley, the film? It’s beautifully shot, well acted — Odessa Young is a marvel, and I enjoyed Stuhlbarg’s version of Stanley, considering how much more he could have had to work with — and entirely empty. Erasing Jackson’s children meant erasing Shirley Jackson. The dinner table of two couples suffered for the absence of children, for in removing them, Shirley removed the heart of what made Shirley Jackson, the writer, tick.

Until next time, I remain,

The Crime Lady