Traveller’s Comments (group member since Jan 14, 2015)

Traveller’s comments from the On Paths Unknown group.

BJ wrote: "Hi everyone,

I'm going to have to mostly bow out of the rest of this discussion unfortunately, because I'm traveling and Shirley Jackson somehow didn't make it into the suitcase (not on purpose! J..."

Hmm, my problem was that I read the collection a while before the discussion started, just to be sure I'd have time, and by the time we'd get to the discussion, I would have forgotten my initial thoughts and perhaps some of the details - but now that you mention this interpretation, I do remember thinking that one interpretation might be that the parents never really "saw" her, who she really was, even when she was still living there. So if your take is naive, then so is mine! No, I actually think that's quite a subtle and astute take on it, BJ!

On the other hand, our different interpretations also just show what a clever, thought-provoking author Jackson is, that she can write a story so ambiguously that it becomes a bit like cut glass, a prism, that reflects many facets, depending from which angle you look at it.

Anyway, I'm so sorry to hear that you won't be joining us, I kept hoping that you'd still chip in eventually - can't we convince you to read a few of these stories online and join us? Even if you post days or weeks later, we will be notified, and I can't speak for the others, but I will definitely come and reply!

Be safe in your travels!

BJ wrote: "Also Amy what is this tantalizing possibility you are entertaining? ..."

Yes, Amy, don't forget, now! 😉 Even if you think it's a silly or unformed thought, out with it - we might have thought of the same thing or find it a good idea. And if I don't, I'll pretend it is anyway.... 😂

Hmm, I'm not so sure all of those were completely helpless, it's probably at different levels, with the guy in (view spoiler)[ Paranoia being the least able to escape his fate. (hide spoiler)]

But yes, I think if you were a woman living in those times, you were pretty much trapped anyway, as many women in some societies still are to this day.

Amy (Other Amy) wrote: " I feel like there's an element of damned if you do, damned if you don't, ..."
Mm-hmm, a kind of trapped feeling, which is most definitely not good for a person's state of mind.

Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "
Jack The Ripper
..."
Hmm, Interesting! (view spoiler)[ I think I missed the time travel part, because I felt a bit bored by the story - it's such a much-milked theme, and the name gives it all away. I would have liked a variation or a nice twist on it, but if she did a twist, I must have missed it, because he did have a knife in his hand? Maybe the shock part is that he has a wife and presents a "caring" face to the world? I suppose that was shocking back in the 50's before books like: Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work and The Sociopath Next Doorcame out. (hide spoiler)]

Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "All She Said Was Yes
LOVED this story! Jackson just writes nasty people SO well. And I loved Vicki. And I loved the comeuppance. Just so great all around
..."
Indeed! (view spoiler)[ Ignore Vicki at your own peril.... (hide spoiler)]

Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "I didn't quite get caught up tonight though; still adjusting to the later hour. I did get three in."

No worries, Amy, we don't have a train to catch, unless you've been wanting to re-read White Noise.

Amy (Other Amy) wrote: (view spoiler)["I liked that Mrs. Smith is committing suicide via serial murdering husband.." (hide spoiler)]
..."
Ouch, that's bleak....

Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "The Story We Used to Tell:
[I am reminded heavily of M.R. James..."

Yes, I was thinking Tanith Lee, one of my fave fantasy writers from my teenage years. Very nicely executed little gem.

Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "The Sorcerer's Apprentice: Hated it.."
Oh goody, at least there are some we agree on!

Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "I'm also still in, I just had kind of a strange weekend. I should be able to catch up tonight."

Sounds like our reading matter is spilling into your real life Amy! :P Hope you are fine regardless. No hurry! Rather late than never, as they say.

I think it's also a lot of that Shirley didn't have a lot of agency at home - far less so, in fact, than in her writing. When she writes, she calls the shots in the story, so it's a form of escapism for her. She probably also received more validation from her fans (although she had a lot of detractors as well) than in her own home.

(Says yours truly, rocking back and forth on her amateur psychologist armchair.)

Linda Abhors the New GR Design wrote: "I was struck by the "performative" aspect of her thoughts. What she and the children must look like to others, what the state of the house might give away to the outsider's eye, etc"..."

 Ha, I seem to have missed some of that, let me read through it again!
Also, I think in her kinda lonely existence, she must have had some strange fantasies, there's a lot of alienation from reality radiating out of her work, for me, and a lot of fantasizing - some of it wishful thinking, and some of it just nightmarish.

Oh, I see! Ok, no reason to do both at the same time, they're both rather long, so I suppose The Bus would be the most logical to do first.

Hi guys, have we officially stalled with this discussion? Linda? Amy? B.J.?
If you guys would care to indulge me, there's one story that I would really like to discuss with you, and that is "The Visit".
Actually, "The Bus" as well.

With the the next story, The Beautiful Stranger, we are back at the play with identity again, and now that I've realized that a lot of the stories were a reflection of Jackson's own psyche, I wonder if she fantasized about something like this story coming true in her own life.

Look what she does in the story: (view spoiler)[ the husband is still the same man she fell in love with, just this is an alternate copy of him who doesn't hurt her and is actually the man of her dreams. (hide spoiler)]

I'm going to jot down the names of the rest of the stories so that I don't have to look them up every time:
The Beautiful Stranger (Husband who was away and wife story)
All She Said Was Yes (Orphaned girl with neighbor)
What a Thought (The wife and the ashtray)
The Bus (Old Miss Harper)
Family Treasures (Orphan at college)
A Visit (Big house)
The Good Wife
The Man in the Woods (Christopher)
Home (Ethel Sloane)
The Summer People

Let's see, that would be: The Story We Used to Tell, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, and Jack The Ripper?

I loved The Story We Used to Tell, it's very unlike her usual style and setting, and more like a proper (view spoiler)[ ghost story in a parallel universe (hide spoiler)]

I hated The Sorcerer's Apprentice (view spoiler)[ That little kid needed a little smack on the bottom right from the start! I hate how she allows the kid to firstly intrude on her privacy, and secondly, to be a complete brat, and then she herself ends up acting like a child instead of an adult. Yuck. (hide spoiler)]

I found Jack The Ripper rather meh, the only thing I was wondering about, was (view spoiler)[ Why did he do what he did in the darkness? Surely half the fun for a person like that, would be to see and know the results of their dark deeds? I don't know, the anonymous darkness was kind of an anti-climax for me. It would, for example, have been much cooler if the girl did something back to him, or turned out to be a vampire or something. It's just so meh the way it is. Maybe I'm missing something? (hide spoiler)]

Something that might illuminate a few stories including the Louisa one: I found this article https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/20...

Here's the most salient excerpt:

Ticking away in the background to Shirley is the absence of Paula Weldon, a Bennington student who has gone missing. While Hyman (Shirley's husband) brushes Weldon’s disappearance off, Jackson becomes fascinated with it, poring over the “missing” posters that scatter campus and pouring her imagining of Weldon’s inner monologue into her manuscript. {...}

While Hangsaman’s protagonist is called Natalie Waite, not Paula, she was inspired by a real missing person case – that of Paula Jean Weldon – who disappeared while walking on Vermont’s Long Trail route in 1946. Before Truman Capote invented the “nonfiction novel” with In Cold Blood, Jackson was folding true crime into her work.

[...] Shirley really comes into its own in illustrating Jackson’s potential thought process behind the novel. “So what will become of your heroine?” asks Hyman, to which Jackson replies: “What happens to all lost girls: they go mad.”
'Do not tell me I do not know this girl, don’t you dare'

What Decker does so well is to reflect the extent to which Jackson sees herself in figures like Paula or Natalie, in one particularly potent conversation near the film’s climax: “There are dozens and dozens of girls like this littering campuses across the country,” she tells Hyman. “Lonely girls who cannot make the world see them; do not tell me I do not know this girl, don’t you dare.”

Guys, I loved the next one, The Story We Used to Tell - it's so un-Shirley-like, and it also ties in with another story later on in the collection which is quite a brain-knotter!

Linda Abhors the New GR Design wrote: "I'm not sure at all what to think of The Honeymoon. Will wait to see what you two say. .."
Spoilers re The Honeymoon:
(view spoiler)[ Well, it seemed obvious to me that he's a serial killer and everybody knows it, and also obvious that she is meekly going along with the fact that he's going to kill her. When I read it, I found the latter unfathomable, but after my little discussion with Amy, I think I see Shirley in the bride, who knew what her husband was, and still knowingly walked into a liaison with him, and committed herself, knowing full well that he was destroying her as surely as the serial killer destroys his wives.

I can't help getting a strong suspicion that many of the stories Shirley wrote were as messages to her husband - in fact I think she admitted to it somewhere. And yet her thick-skinned husband just plowed on, apparently impervious to her suffering. (hide spoiler)]

Amy (Other Amy) wrote: " The thing I find interesting with her is how right her depictions feel. The characters she writes are people who could easily be my own family, friends, and neighbors. ..."

That might explain why we're like chalk and cheese (but I like it - if we mixed myself and yourself, you'd probably find some golden mean) on many of our readings. To me, again, her characters' inner lives seem incomprehensible and alien. I guess I always believed people needed to have more agency in their lives, and saw it lived in the lives of my parents - my mother was a helpless fly caught in a web at first, but she grew out of it, and broke that web and walked away from it - so I sort of saw how bad it is when you're caught, and how good it is when you break out.... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We can still comment on the previous two stories, but I just want to make mention of the next story, The Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith.

Now, I bet Amy is going to say she loves this one, and point a lot of things that I've missed, out to me, but I hated this story for many of the same reasons that I hated a lot of the stories out of the Lottery collection.

The biggest thing that I hated about most of those stories were that many of the characters were so helpless- many of them were like deer in the headlights. They would see their future doom approaching, but would just stand there, stock-still, either too uncomprehending or too will-less to move.

..and here I feel it yet again apropos to mention something about Shirley: She really hated her husband messing around, but he was absolutely impervious to her unhappiness, and cheerfully did it publicly and right in her face. She obviously, for reasons known to her, felt that she loved him, plus she shared 4 children with him, so she stayed, even though the relationship gradually ate away at her mental health. ...and I can't help wondering if she's not writing her own helplessness, and sometimes rage, into these stories.

It's worth noting that Paranoia and The Man In The Woods were added to Jackson's body of published work posthumously, after Jackson's children unearthed a bunch of as yet unpublished work; so we have the added layer of wondering whether Jackson was completely finished and satisfied with these two stories.

Amy, you and I am being Yin and Yang again, - I liked this story and didn't see the end coming. I personally felt it was a delicious twist which hit ME in the Dopamine receptors again. Whoever else did it later - I'm sure Shirley did it first.

Linda Abhors the New GR Design wrote: "
The self-assurance isn't necessarily a sign of narcissism ..."

Well, some of the characteristics of narcissistic personality disorder as it is currently classified, are that they have a grandiose sense of self-importance and sense of entitlement, but those things also go with being very wealthy, of course. And her acts of running away and spoiling the wedding can be seen as passive aggressive behavior, which can also be a symptom, on top of what you said, the conviction that anything that goes wrong is someone else's fault.

Linda Abhors the New GR Design wrote: "A clutch is a small bag which has no shoulder strap, thus one "clutches" it in one hand. ..."
Ah, yes, of course! I tend to associate those kinds of small purses with formal evening wear.

Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "The raincoat for $6.80! The hat! The older lady letting a room! The shop manager being an up and coming job! These were the 50s things for me....."
Heh, don't forget the stockings and the gloves...

Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "I think whether one uses pocketbook is a regional thing. My mom has one. I use it myself, to distinguish the long pouch with zippers from a wallet, which to me is the smaller usually trifold thing...."

Hmm. interesting. In America generally speaking, I've experienced that biggish thing, smaller and fancier than a briefcase, that you carry with you that contains things like your wallet, Kleenex, hairbrush, etc., called a "purse", which is rather funny to the British, who call a woman's wallet a purse and they call what the Americans call a purse, a handbag. (I think the Australians call it a handbag too). I've also heard it being called a "clutch"something? I don't remember the exact detail of that now.

But it's the purse (America)/ handbag (Britain) which she refers to as a pocketbook, which apparently started off being a small thing, but which sounds funny to me in the 50's context, because they were quite big by then and would not nearly fit into a pocket.