“Amateur witch”: Shirley Jackson’s Paratextual Black Magic

Praised by Stephen King as one of the masters of supernatural American fiction in his 1981 book Danse Macabre, Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) is today mostly renowned for her Gothic works such as The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), both centered on troubled female characters who nonetheless find a way of asserting themselves in a patriarchal world. Indeed, according to Ruth Franklin, Jackson’s lifelong fascination with witchcraft was in itself “a way of embracing and channeling female power at a time when women in America often had little control over their lives ” (Shirley Jackson 13). The author’s feelings towards magic and occultism were first made known to the public by her husband Stanley Hyman, who defined her as “perhaps the only contemporary writer who is a practicing amateur witch” (Temple). Her interest in witchcraft was then readily employed by her publisher Farrar, Straus as a promotional strategy, and frequently used in the paratextual presentations of her subsequent works. Despite her initial discomfort with such a characterization, Jackson finally seemed to surrender to this tailor-made authorial persona and began to help craft it herself with anecdotes and subtle jokes. In this article, I further explore the presence of witchcraft in the editorial paratexts of Jackson’s works. In order to do so, I draw on evidence of her (self-)representation as a witch (interviews, autobiographical notes, etc.), to pinpoint how Jackson and her publishers collaborated in constructing an incredibly effective authorial persona which, as the renewed interest in her works seems to suggest, proves somewhat successful nowadays too. The focus on paratexts, rather than authorial texts, will be useful in demonstrating how witchcraft and its public display were not passively accepted and re-interpreted by Jackson, but actively employed by the writer to undermine traditional discourses on femininity, embracing them in her own unique way (by exploring, for instance, the countless connections between housework and stereotyped witches’ occupations such as cooking and gardening); thus proving how, for Jackson, the lines between witchcraft and homemaking were indeed extremely blurred.