Shirley Jackson by Kristopher Woofter

Author:Kristopher Woofter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Peter Lang

The Problem of the Missing Subject

Except in rare cases (the passages we see quoted most often in Jackson scholarship) it is difficult to locate the subject in Jackson’s stories of family life. Where, for example, is the mother-writer, in this case a successful author, ←161 | 162→who struggles to find time at the typewriter between dishes, carpooling, laundry, entertaining, and so on? We are reading that woman’s writing, but never read about her writing, or even about her not-writing.4 The silence around the writing life of mothers is a phenomenon grounded in the history of social constructions of womanhood, family, and the (masculine) artist. Ursula K. Le Guin elucidates the problem in her essay “The Fisherwoman’s Daughter”:

The difficulty of trying to be responsible, hour after hour day after day for maybe twenty years, for the well-being of children and the excellence of books, is immense: it involves an endless expense of energy and an impossible weighing of competing priorities. And we don’t know much about the process, because writers who are mothers haven’t talked much about their motherhood […;] nor have they talked much about their writing as in any way connected with their parenting, since the heroic myth demands that the two jobs be considered utterly opposed and mutually destructive. (2001, 174)

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