Jackson, as Franklin shows, was fascinated by, even obsessed with, escape from the throttling censure and domination of others, most especially on the domestic front, returning to the theme in both her fiction and private writing. Jackson's horror stories, she notes, "are grounded in the domestic" and, indeed, can be said to constitute "nothing less than the secret history of American women of her era." Finally, her low opinion of human nature and sympathy with those treated as outsiders was amplified by racial prejudice, segregation and anti-Semitism, the ugliness of the first witnessed through her and her husband's friendship with Ralph Ellison, the last brought home to her by her own parents. Also fundamental to Jackson's dyspeptic view of things was, as Franklin points out, the tension between the midcentury ideal of the happy housewife and the stifling reality. Thence come so many of her central characters, all women, alienated, rejected and humiliated, all the while running inner monologues of shame, resentment and rage. Here, in mother and husband, are the springs of Jackson's vision of a dark, cruel world, of autonomy stifled, and even of malevolent ghostly forces feeding on suffering. Jackson both loved and hated this man, sometimes seeing him as her indispensable savior, at others, and increasingly, as her intolerable tormentor and herself as a captive.
Beyond that, he left all housework, cooking and child care to her, and seemed to take pleasure in belittling her. He slept with other women throughout their courtship and marriage, often flaunting it, causing Jackson great pain. Well-matched in intelligence, interests and drive, the two fell deeply in love and married - thus enraging both sets of parents.Īs Franklin points out, Geraldine's relentless carping prepared Jackson "to accept a relationship with a man who treated her disrespectfully and shamed her for legitimate and rational desires." Chief among those desires was for sexual fidelity, a notion Stanley denounced pompously as bourgeois morality. She eventually graduated from Syracuse University, where she met Stanley Hyman, a bearded, Jewish intellectual from Brooklyn who would become a critic and teacher. The Jacksons moved from California to Rochester, N.Y., when Shirley was in high school.
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