Does an author’s pain transfer through their text? Do their cries of desperation ring in the ears of their audiences? For Shirley Jackson’s writings, this is exactly the case. Her novels and short stories of fear and horror capture and depict the troubles of her own twisted life. Her severe afflictions gave her feelings of dread and terror and followed her throughout her life. These sentiments are reflected in her literary work and she uses her writing as a release of these insidious emotions. Shirley Jackson’s anxiety, drug abuse, and acute agoraphobia greatly influenced her works to have darker content and more serious themes.
To fully understand how Jackson’s illnesses affected her work, one must be understand Jackson’s complex history.
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This story was written to be more realistic than the lottery but then incorporate the great unknown of the supernatural world. Main protagonist, Eleanor, is brought to a haunted location in search of spirits and ends up going mad and committing suicide. Jackson commented on this story saying that, ”what tortures her (Eleanor) and ultimately drives her to insanity is her own complex of childhood fear and guilt.” (Jackson) This is most likely a projection of Jackson’s own fear and guilt and she is just showing a character in one of her stories going through something that she deals with on a daily basis. Eleanor is not the only troubled character in this novel, but she is just the one who is most affected by these “spirits” and eventually is killed by her own hands. In the actual novel, one quote says, “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.” (Jackson 84) This quote can again be brought back to Jackson’s own life and how she is saying how is she supposed to live at all in a home that is hyper realistic and serious. There can be no happiness found in a place of solemness and despair and Jackson is lamenting this through her literary works. These emotions are actually not only shown but are the leading forces that caused her to write these stories showing how her illnesses strongly affect her themes and