‘Reading her Difficult Riddle’: Shirley Jackson and Late 1950s’ Anthropology

Abstract

In a 1959 lecture on Edgar Allan Poe, the poet and critic Richard Wilbur expressed a certain dissatisfaction with what he called the ‘current critical habit of finding symbols in everything’. He continues, ‘We are all getting a bit tired, I think, of that laboriously clever criticism which discovers mandalas in Mark Twain, rebirth archetypes in Edwin Arlington Robinson, and fertility myths in everything.’¹ What Wilbur was referring to was the wholesale adoption of the language, concepts and imagery of anthropology into the language of literary criticism in mid-twentieth century America. While the focus of much British anthropology at the time was primarily sociological, a new breed of American cultural anthropologists such as Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead were foregrounding ritualistic, symbolic or mythological motifs in a manner that tended increasingly toward generalization and archetypes. Such a universalizing discourse provided the increasingly self-conscious discipline of literary criticism with a ready-made vocabulary and structure, and the so-called ‘Myth and Ritual’ school, including scholars such as Northrop Frye, Dorothy van Ghent, Leslie Fiedler, and Stanley Edgar Hyman (the husband of Shirley Jackson, the focus of this essay), set out to excavate such motifs from the most canonical works of Anglophone literature.