`There's A Terrible Difference': Bodies of Knowledge in Shirley Jackson's America

Abstract

This thesis explores the interaction of bodies and minds in the work of American author Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) through the investigation of Jackson's historical contexts. I frame my exploration on the work of Jackson's mentor Leonard Brown, drawing from a variety of historical, theoretical, and sociological perspectives to situate Jackson as an important American writer. Foregrounding the idea of 'bodies of knowledge,' I first explore changing perceptions of both physical and communal bodies in Jackson's formative years during the interwar period (1918-1939), a time of growing boundaries between community bodies and a narrowing of norms for physical bodies. I then examine Jackson's adult years in the postwar period (1945-1965), an era increasingly concerned with the mind and 'normality,' yet plagued with anxieties about expertise and intellectualism. I then apply these contexts to three areas of Jackson's work. First, I explore how Jackson uses knowledge and contagion to construct community boundaries in small, working-class towns. Next, I investigate how Jackson's rewriting of Christian Science results in absent female bodies, allowing for a liberation from embodied containment for Jackson's adolescent girls, usually through imagery of sickness or disgust. Finally, I explore postwar anxieties about masculinity and how Jackson employs them to undermine discourses of hegemonic male knowledge. Investigating bodies of knowledge in these various interactions reveals how Jackson embraces an undecidability that must be acknowledged.