Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson

It escapes her grasp and soon she has summoned the humans to help her recapture it. In an early scene in Life Among the Savages, an oft-pregnant expert huntress named Ninki brings a chipmunk into the house. I think it’s no accident, for example, that the creatures whose mannerisms Shirley Jackson most expertly describes are her cats. It’s not just the overt ironies, either, that make Jackson’s critical view of mothering so apparent. She pokes fun also at the idea that her children ought to be at the center of her universe, confessing her desire at times to leave them behind and check into a hotel.” That’s the wrong way to approach it, she says: “Part of what Jackson mocks is her own ineptness at being a housewife – and, implicitly, the expectation that every woman belongs in that role.

The critic and future Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin writes about that in this weekend’s New York Times Book Review, where she notes that among the people taken in by the faux-veneer of “fun” in Jackson’s memoirs was the American feminist Betty Friedan.

When Jackson’s husband joins the scene he gets a similarly distant reaction: “I gave my husband another smile of patient, tolerant understanding, and asked him sweetly if he would care for coffee?” The edge is subtle, but it is there. In the middle of a comic anecdote, Jackson will admit that she’s listening to a her daughter’s story about an elephant who gave her bubblegum, one of those stories by children that goes on and on, while “smiling maternally”. They misbehave only up to the point that it serves the comic anecdote.īut these are not, somehow, cheerful books.

The children are precocious: one oft-cited passage describes Jackson’s son Laurie’s elaborate tales of “Charlie”, a classmate who does not exist. The setting is bucolic: a ramshackle house in the woods of Vermont, which we are told over and over again has four tall white pillars, though these are presented as absurdities rather than crowning decorations. They have all the markers of the sort of peacock-parenting that is now the scourge of your social media feeds. Originally published in the 1950s, at the height of conformist fetishization of the home and particularly of the woman who keeps it, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons are packaged as light fare.

Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson