“Her life is controlled, possessed, by a shifting set of laws that make your garden-variety savage initiation rite look like milk time in the nursery school.”–Shirley Jackson, “On Girls of Thirteen”.
Shirley Jackson wrote extensively about the experiences of teenagers and young people across her considerable body of work. In her humorous domestic fiction, she, like many post-war adults, looked on in bemused wonder at the strange rites and rituals of the newly-formed teenage demographic. In her novels and short stories, she described young people navigating the often tumultuous, occasionally traumatic, passage from childhood to adulthood (The Road Through the Wall, Hangsaman, “Louisia, Please Come Home”). Her depictions of teenage girls, in particular, are often deeply complex and surprisingly nuanced, especially within the context of a culture that frequently dismissed female adolescents as greedy, frivolous, superficial and ridiculous. Multifaceted and possessed of a striking emotional and intellectual depth, her adolescent characters run the gamut from the clever, resourceful narrator who outwits the Devil himself in “The Smoking Room” to the murderous Merricat Blackwood in We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
The depth and variety of Jackson’s treatment of adolescence is perhaps all the more surprising when we consider that she was writing in age when the teenager was still a comparatively new cultural phenomenon, with the term “teenager” only emerging in the first half of the 1940s. In those years, teens became a flash point in a range of debates and discourses generated by everyone from parents and educators to manufacturers and advertisers. An increasingly powerful consumer base and an emblem of America’s post-war prosperity, adolescents were also a source of anxiety as various authorities fretted over their rebellious attitudes, peer-focused social lives and byzantine dating practices.
In this issue, we seek to explore Jackson’s interventions in the construction of the American teenager and how her work interrogates this nascent cultural icon. In doing so, we will investigate how Jackson employed the adolescent as an avatar through which to explore broader questions of gender, power and family dynamics. We are also interested in considering how Jackson’s fictional adolescents anticipated many later trends in the development of Gothic, horror and YA fiction through her engagement with archetypes such as teenage witches, juvenile delinquents and awkward, directionless young adults.
Possible article topics include, but are not limited to:
- The representation of teenagers in Jackson’s domestic stories
- Jackson’s teenagers and magazine market
- Jackson and young adult fiction, film and/or television
- The figure of the adolescent or youth as inflected by race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.
- Adolescents and family/community power dynamics
- Adolescence and the post-World War II American context (advertising, popular culture, music, media, moral panics)
- Gothic childhood/adolescence
Abstracts of 500 words plus short author bio should be sent to shirleyjacksonstudies@gmail.com by November 30, 2024. Upon acceptance, completed articles of 6,000-8,000 words will be due by May 30, 2025 with revisions to follow.