Hill House

 I've been on a bit of a Shirley Jackson journey lately, mostly because I'm teaching We Have Always Lived in the Castle in the context of Jackson's female gothic. Also, I'm a sucker for anything New England gothic having written my own nonfiction volume on the history of Danvers State Hospital. I'm currently watching the 1999 version of The Haunting and hoping to finish the Netflix version of We Have Always Lived in the Castle with the kids on Monday as their semester ends Thursday. Because of the trials and tribulations of remote learning, we haven't been able to go quite as deep as I hoped.

Despite all the COVID restrictions and the fact that I haven't left my house since...well...last March, our library has begun doing curbside pickup and it's become something of an addiction for me so this week I picked up Susan Scarf Merrell's Shirley, a novelized imagining of Shirley's life told from the point of view of their young houseguest, Rose, whose professor husband has accepted a position working with Shirley's husband Stanley at Bennington College. 

I really, truly wanted so much more out of this book which was adapted to film in early 2020 starring Elizabeth Moss as Shirley. The movie was exceptionally well done but the book itself was equally disappointing. I had a hard time buying the fictional Shirley. While I clearly never met her, I've read enough about her and enough written by her to have a solid idea of what Shirley Jackson might have been like. In this novel, she's painfully unlikeable and very much a slave to domestic life. Where she did indeed wind up trapped in domesticity, she did not sit back and accept her lot. She rebelled in her writing and against her husband. Instead, this book portrays her as a woman who has given up, given in to her husband's proclivities for cheating with his students. The narrator of the story, Rose, is equally difficult to empathize with. She idolizes Shirley, which of course is understandable, but she also lets Shirley bully her and push her around. When Rose finally makes an attempt at writing something of her own, Shirley chastizes her and essentially tells her that writing is her sin, her calling-- not Rose's. 

I'll admit that I found myself simply skimming a good deal of the book. There was too much tell without much show and the endless narration became tedious and did very little to move the plot (of which there wasn't much) along to a satisfying end. Overall, a bit of a disappointment. I think I'll stick to reading Shirley herself!