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Shirley Jackson and domestic terror
The American Golden Age was fueled by female madness.
The symptoms of this disease were bizarre — sometimes subtle, sometimes theatrical — but impossible to miss. Some women would tear out of their houses and wander the streets for hours. They could not abide being indoors. Others never left the house; they’d sleep for 10 hours a day and complain that they were exhausted when they woke up. Woman after woman reported to her doctor’s office with bloody blisters covering her arms. The first thought was invariably that something was wrong with their soap or their dishwashing detergent, but changing soaps didn’t do anything to stop the bleeding, and medication couldn’t cure it.
Things got violent. In suburban Chicago, a mother of eight decapitated her two youngest children and displayed them on her front lawn. Word reached the poet Adrienne Rich, who, upon discussing this with her female colleagues, found that “every woman in that room, every poet, could identify with her.” Another poet, one of the most promising of her age, laid out breakfast for her children and gassed herself to death with her own oven. Even the women who managed not to kill anyone were prone to flameouts and grand gestures: “You’d be surprised,” one doctor told a journalist, “at the number of these happy suburban wives who simply go berserk one night and run…
