Shirley Jackson had two sides to her life. One side was a character she brought brilliantly to life in her stories and novels. The other side of “Jackson dedicated herself to rejecting her mother’s sense propriety, drank and smoked and fed to buttery excess. Dabbled in magic and voodoo, and interfered loudly when she thought the provincial Vermont schools were doing an injustice to her talented children”(3). “All of the various dichotomies that make up Jackson’s double-sided reality can be traced to hidden human nature, the repressed individual she saw within each of us”(4).
Shirley Jackson most famous short story was “The Lottery”. The short story can be related to her life in many ways. One way is Jackson takes pains to describe a village of hard-working, upstanding Americans to her insanity life of mental illnesses, overweightness, arthritis, and Jackson felt she didn’t fit into society when she was little. The normal activities that took place in “The Lottery” were the “square dances, the teenage club and the Halloween program”(2, 1718) was symbolism to her getting married and having children like ordinary people. “The Lottery” also took place in a rural area just like where Jackson had lived when she wrote “The Lottery”. Jackson wrote in this short story about evil caught in the good and prejudice.
Another short story Jackson wrote was “One Ordinary Day with Peanuts”. The theme of this short story was evil found in ordinary things. I believe that Mrs. Johnson portrayed Shirley Jackson’s mother. Mrs. Johnson played the role of an evil woman in the short story. One of the things she did was she “went into a department store this morning and accused the woman next to me of shoplifting, and had the store detective pick her up”(1, 50). “We know, of course, that she married, raised a family and wrote, but “Just an Ordinary Day” reminds us that Shirley Jackson also went under-cover never flinching from the darkest clues she might find, and that in her stories and novels she remains on the trail, of herself, her neighbors, all of us”(3).
Shirley Jackson’s main writer technique was irony. She was able to influence us in ways’ no other author could. She made us believe that a character were true then they would suddenly change at the end of her stories. But what makes it really so great is that she was able to do it in such a clear manner or in a way we could understand, what the meaning she was trying to get across to the reader. If she didn’t live the life she had, she would have never been able to write such great, well-written short stories.
Shirley Jackson Reports
John's Shirley Jackson Report
Jayson's Shirley Jackson Report
Jenny's Shirley Jackson Report
Jason's Shirley Jackson Report
Bonnie's Shirley Jackson Report
Tausha's Shirley Jackson Report
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