Mrs. Arnold of Shirley Jackson's story Colloquy (1944) feels driven to see a psychiatrist because of her confusion and bewilderment over her loss of 'a where a lot of people lived too and they all lived together and things went along like that with no fuss.' 1 The psychiatrist tries to get her to accept reality, which to him means to accept and adapt to a with patterns rapidly disintegrating. Mrs. Arnold refuses to adapt to the doctor's disoriented world and leaves his office. But the reader senses that the price for her refusal to accept the doctor's, and the rest of society's, definition of reality will be loneliness and madness. This story is in many ways representative of the concern of most of Jackson's fiction, which is to reveal and chronicle the outrage, at times tempered with laughter, stemming from the violation of the self by a broken world. Through the effective use of gothic conventions Jackson reveals the contours of human madness and loneliness in a disintegrating generally bereft of the meliorating power of love and forgiveness.2 The broken depicted in Shirley Jackson's fiction, with its attendant madness and possibilities of evil, has been the subject of much analysis in recent years. Robert Jay Lifton writes of the breakdown of fundamental human boundaries due to several major psychohistorical developments-a loss of a vital and nourishing connection with the cultural past, the flooding of imagery produced by the mass media, and the threat of nuclear disaster. These forces have brought about what he calls an Age of Numbing.3 Rollo May describes the contemporary experience as schizoid where people are out of touch with their feelings and thus avoid close relationships.4 R. D. Laing argues that contemporary culture is schizophrenic and that