A "brutal, unprincipled, drunken, vice-ridden beast": Maternity in Shirley Jackson's The Bird's Nest

Abstract

A "brutal, unprincipled, drunken, vice-ridden beast":Maternity in Shirley Jackson's The Bird's Nest Lynne Ann Evans (bio) Although shirley jackson wrote six novels and one hundred and ten short stories, and is considered "one of the most prominent female writers of the 1950s" (Murphy 3), scholarship on her work is limited. In part, critical reticence to discuss Jackson's work is attributed to the author's interest in domestic fiction, an interest that helped substantiate Betty Friedan's claim that Jackson's work encouraged paternalistic stereotypes of women (52–3). More recently, Eric Savoy suggests that feminist scholarship's apathy toward Jackson's work is due, in part, to the fact that her texts evince a "troubling" and "recurring preoccupation with poisonous mother-daughter relationships" (829). Jackson's relationship with her own mother, Ruth Franklin notes, was a "poisonous" one in which Jackson was subjected to Geraldine's "belittling … all her life" (120). Franklin sees this tumultuous relationship as having a direct impact on Jackson's characterizations of women in that Jackson seems to have used her fictional world as a way, at least in part, to acknowledge her mother's cruelty (350). Jackson certainly does return to "poisonous" mothers repeatedly in her work, and her 1954 novel, The Bird's Nest, is no exception. While the novel may speak to Jackson's ambivalent feelings toward her own mother, at the same time Bird's Nest does have a broader potential feminist value. Jackson's novel [End Page 25] offers a fictionalized enactment of Freud's theories of female development during the "golden age" of psychoanalysis in America (Genter 137), a time in which motherhood itself was the subject of intense cultural scrutiny. Although the feminist value of Bird's Nest is not untroubled, Jackson's reliance on an underlying Freudian script opens up a space through which Bird's Nest imagines a maternal power, a potentiality that Freud insistently tries to repress in his own writing. In postwar America, the subject position of mother, informed by a popularization of a psychoanalytically inflected individual psychology and its attendant focus on the child's well-being, was identified as "the primary source[ ] of neurotic behaviour" (152). Mothering in midcentury America, as is the case in Jackson's text, is identified as the origin of filial psychosis. However, crafted as a dramatization of psychoanalytic theories of female subjectivity, maternity in The Bird's Nest ultimately reveals that psychoanalytic discourse relating to mothers and daughters is bound up with cultural notions of monstrosity. The Bird's Nest, considered Jackson's "best book" by biographer Judy Oppenheimer (161), recounts the story of Elizabeth Richmond, a young woman who suffers from "disintegrated personality" (Jackson 51). Darryl Hattenhauer—one of only a handful of critics to explore Bird's Nest—notes that Jackson sets a gothic tone from the start (119), employing, Hattenhauer suggests, the structure of Elizabeth's workplace—a museum with "an odd, and disturbingly apparent, list to the west" (Jackson 1)—as a metaphor for Elizabeth's collapsing self (119). Jackson's gothic narrative also has a psychoanalytic context from its opening moments. Construction at Elizabeth's workplace created a "hole the height of the building, from the roof to the cellar" beside Elizabeth's desk (Jackson 2–3), and as young woman hangs up her coat, she feels "an almost irresistible temptation to hurl herself downward into the primeval sands upon which the museum presumably stood" (3). Over the course of Elizabeth's treatment by Dr Wright, a psychologist hired by Elizabeth's Aunt Morgen when the caregiver can no longer cope with her niece's erratic behaviour, Elizabeth comes to understand that she has three "cruel sisters" (215)—independent personalities that live, and battle for existence, within her own body. Wright believes that the disintegration of Elizabeth's personality began with the death of her mother (63), and Jackson's narrative thereby evinces the same psychoanalytically informed cultural fascination with the mother's role in the child's subjectivity that characterizes a great deal of post–World War II fictional constructions of maternity. While Elizabeth's experiences recall those of Miss Christine Beauchamp, the subject of a...