Throughout her life, Shirley Jackson struggled with a conflict between her dogged individuality and society's requirement that she adhere to its norms and standards. Jackson saw a second level of human nature, an inner identity lurking beneath the one which outwardly conforms with society's expectations. Society's repression of her individuality haunted Jackson in her personal life and expressed itself in her writing through the opposition of two levels of reality, one magical and one mundane, but both equally real. All of the various dichotomies that make up Jackson's double-sided reality can be traced to the hidden human nature, the repressed individual she saw within each of us.

From an early age, Jackson did not feel completely comfortable in the society around her. She preferred to sit in her room and write poetry rather than play with the other children in her neighborhood (Oppenheimer 16). Alone in her room, Jackson explored the magical worlds, the alter-egos which her family did not understand. "I will not tolerate having these other worlds called imaginary," she insisted (Oppenheimer 21). Jackson did not satisfy her mother, a wealthy socialite who wanted her

Like Jackson's children, the children in her short fiction must be taught the mores of their society. In "The Lottery," fitting in to the village society means blindly following tradition and accepting the yearly lottery despite its horrible consequences. The children in this story are the first to gather for the ritual, piling stones as if they were playing a game without understanding why. As the villagers begin to attack the victim of the lottery, "the children had stones already, and someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles" (Magic 145). Davy, the son of the victim, is apparently too young to understand that he must help kill his mother, so the adults show him what he must do (Kosenko 32). In "Flower Garden," a boy who is new to the town quickly learns the racial prejudice that characterizes the society. The new boy joins his friend in eagerly shouting slurs at a black boy, creating a scene chillingly reminiscent of the children piling stones in "The Lottery."

As samples of raw human nature, children in Jackson's work are associated with the supernatural of her "other worlds." When Laurie tells his parents of a friend's adventures in a haunted house down the street, they recall nostalgically the haunted houses of their own childhoods. The parents, however, must act in society's name to impose order. "My husband and I found ourselves repeating the same amused platitudes about boys who went into haunted houses that our parents had used to us," Jackson says. (Magic 490). In fact, she regards her son's free spirit with more than simple parental caution; she indicates that "I personally have always believed in ghosts" (Magic 490), showing that for Jackson, the demons of the human spirit are not just figurative devices. The story of the haunted house exemplifies Jackson's association of magic and the supernatural with the uncorrupted individual.

Hill House is Eleanor's fantasy and an extension of her insane mind. Eleanor's stay at the house amounts to an exploration of her double-sided psyche. The line between the real supernatural apparitions of the house and the fabrications of Eleanor's imagination is blurred by the biased narration, oscillating between statements by Eleanor and by an omniscient third-person narrator (Sullivan). The manic style of the narration, as in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, reflects Eleanor's unstable psyche. The ghosts of Hill House may be real or may be manifestations of Eleanor's madness; the ambiguity is intentional. To Shirley Jackson the supernatural and the insane are both part of a magical "other world," the repressed human nature within us.

Image source: The Hallowed Halls of Ouija At age thirty-something, Eleanor Vance in The Haunting of Hill House is technically older than Merricat. Yet Eleanor's psychotic insecurity and childish behavior, and the fact that she has lived out most of her life caring for her mother, indicate that she is a parallel symbol for natural man. Eleanor's arrival at Hill House represents an escape from the ordinariness of her existence with her family, similar to the escape of the Blackwoods or of the heroine of "The Tooth" who sheds her domestic identity when her inflamed tooth is extracted. "During the whole underside of her life, ever since her first memory, Eleanor had been waiting for something like Hill House. Caring for her mother,... Eleanor had held fast to the belief that someday something would happen.... Eleanor, in short, would have gone anywhere" (7-8).

Jackson's mother wrote to her once that "you were always a wilful child" (Oppenheimer 14). This careless statement captures Jackson's stubborn assertion of her individuali

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