Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons (2013).

I knew I would have to get around to her sooner or later.  It was a question of when, not if.  That's because some authors are good at casting long, and influential shadows, and that couldn't be more the case than with the author I've got to talk about here.  She's been on my radar since perhaps as far back as the late 1990s, when I first ran across a mention of her in a children's book of Horror trivia.  That's where I heard mention of a book called The Haunting of Hill House, and its author Shirley Jackson.  Come to think of it, that was the second time I ran into a mention of her, not the first.  That came from yet another trivia book.  This one devoted a two-page section to a 1963 Robert Wise film.  This time is was titled as just The Haunting.  It was one of those chance encounters, looking back on it.  One of those fortunate accidents that life is sometimes kind enough to toss your way when you aren't looking.  I didn't have a clue who Shirley Jackson was when I picked up these two references collections (one of whose title now escapes me, except for the cover art, which depicted an old mausoleum graveyard painted in shades of light, dusky purple, and blood red).  I was just a young, budding fan with a growing fascination in the kind of fiction that goes bump in the night.  It was at a point in my life which is probably familiar to veteran Horror fans.  It's that moment where it seems like you've just discovered a brand new vista opening onto a hitherto unknown world, one whose landscape is both creepy, forbidding, and somehow wonderful and enchanting by turns.

If you're a fan of this sort of genre and (perhaps to your own surprise) you mean it, then looking back I'd have to say how it's always those first, great, influential years, where you're just starting to get your feet wet by dipping your toes into dark waters, that somehow manage to retain the most importance.  That's the point in life where the sample platters from the genre's table that you allow yourself to enjoy can go a long way toward determining just what kind of a Gothic enthusiast you'll grow up to be.  In my case, everything I watched or read back then tended in the same direction.  For whatever reason, I just kept getting drawn back to the what might be called the Classics of the format.  In my case, it first started out with John Bellairs.  Books like The House with a Clock in its Walls, and Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark are what amounted to my introduction to Fear Fiction.  Bellairs was the one who introduced my impressionable young mind to the sense of the Classical Gothic quality that Horror can have at its most sophisticated pitch.  Schwartz and his partner in crime, Stephen Gammell, meanwhile were the one's who gave me my first taste for all the gory details that the genre can sometimes be pretty great at.  The Scary Stories tomes were pretty much my generation's version of the the Tales from the Crypt comic books.  It was all like discovering two halves of the same Creative Idea all at once.  It was the discovery of an entire, Weird world, and for a number of reasons, I was hooked in seconds flat.

If I had to give a reason for why it was so easy for someone like me to find a place amidst the fiction of clanking chains and screams in the darkness, then the best explanation I have is the simplest.  It's because I'd met people who seemed like they kind of understood where I was coming from.  Another way to say it is to claim I'd made some new friends who sounded like they were on the same wavelength as me.  Looking back across the passage of years, what I think I can explain now that I probably couldn't then was that what drew me to Horror must have been some level of subconscious realization that the creators of these books were coming from a place that was at least similar to my own.  You have to have to know what it's like to be scared in order to write like that.  Not just to experience fear, either, but also the frightening sense of powerlessness that comes from being just a kid stuck in a world governed by adults.  One where most of the rules are so difficult to comprehend, and it seems as if the weight of that whole, damned entire world is going to fall on you if you aren't careful.  I'm not talking about anything dire on a personal level, here.  It was never anything like that.  Instead, it's a simple matter of being just five and realizing that it's impossible to get a good night's sleep once your parents have tucked you in, and then made the dumbest choice of their lives by not even leaving you with a simple night light to keep you company, compounding it with trite words of comfort.

Does anyone else remember times like that when you were a kid?  Your parents meant well, yet they could never truly connect with what you were going through in terms of a personal fear factor.  It's disconcerting as hell, and the worst thing about that happening when you're still just a child is that it carries the implication that in terms of handling your fears, you're on your own.  When you're a kid, that's a real mind-bending realization to arrive at in such a young age.  Maybe that's why there might have been this strange yet genuine sense of comfort that came from discovering the work of artists like Schwartz, Gammell, and Bellairs.  On some level, a part of my mind understood that I was running across guys who were no more than a bunch of little kids who still knew damn well what it was like to feel that particular grain of powerlessness that comes with being a scared youngster who can't even turn to the "adults" (so-called) for help.  What made discovering the Horror genre so welcoming (as I can see now) is that it's best described as Art created by people who are, themselves, scared.  That's not meant to be a catch-all description, one person's fear could be another's enthusiasm, or else just a normal part of the wallpaper of life.  It helps to remember that subjectivity has its role to play in the phenomenon I'm talking about.  Yet writers like Bellairs and Schwartz had a knack for zeroing in on the universal fears.

Their works function as both a catalogue and exploration of the things that have both fascinated and frightened them by turns over the course of their lives.  The net result of placing these shared worries down on paper meant they were able to participate in the Horror genre's strangest, yet somehow genuine accomplishment.  They were able to carve out a safe space which, paradoxically, allowed them to examine and in some cases even confront the things that scared them.  Schwartz's now iconic use and recontextualization of world folklore, in particular, offers young readers a great means of exploring tougher themes and subject matter in a way that was surprisingly effective, considering the art style that went along with it.  This creative efficacy was made possible by the fact that one of the points of world folklore is that it is meant to function as a repository of the collective wisdom of humanity.  It's never quite the same thing as moral didacticism, yet the ability to teach a lesson to the audience can be spoken of as part of the natural bells and whistles of the format proper.  As such, it isn't until you return to stories like "Harold" later on, and realize that you've gained an early understanding of real world issues such as bullying and bigotry.  It's just one of the many reasons for why collections like the Scary Stories series have become household items on a level similar to that of the Brothers Grimm (it also doesn't hurt that Schwartz and Gammell are drawing from the same well as their earlier Romantic predecessors).  At least this is as good an explanation I've got for why I became a Horror junkie.

Learning that there are other little big kids out there who went through some of the same fears as you, and needing the format of artistic expression as means of dealing with it, can go a long way toward developing a sense of natural comradery between the writers and their audience.  It's what allowed Schwartz and Bellairs to become my first major influences as a reader.  Pretty soon, things just began to pick up the pace from there, and it didn't take me long to become acquainted with all things Gothic.  Not long after meeting the two authors described above, others soon came along to carry my interests further afield.  Thanks to the efforts of guys like Steven Spielberg and Vincent Price, I was more or less told about writers like Edgar Allan Poe.  It was an old Disney film that alerted me to the efforts of Arthur Conan Doyle, add in a dash of R.L. Stine, Jane Yolen, and Bruce Coville for the middle school years, before graduating up a grade or two to Stephen King, and you've pretty much got my education in all things American Gothic.  At the same time, it's like this is an educational process that's never stopped, really.  Even today, I can't keep from digging further up and in to the realms of Weird Fiction in the hopes of learning more about why I like to read or watch stories of things going bump in the night.  It was somewhere in the middle of all this that I made the acquaintance of Ms. Shirley Jackson.

I got to know her on a gradual level.  It started with catching just a few choice references in a couple of pop culture trivia books.  Yet I guess that must have been enough, because from there I can recall getting curious enough about the exploits of Hill House to the point where I finally bought a copy of the book.  It took a while to get into, and I recall having some difficulty maneuvering along with the kind skewed, almost schizoid narrative voice that Jackson chooses to channel her entire story through.  In fact, if I'm being honest, then the truth is (say sorry) that I needed to find a good audiobook version in order to help me understand what was going on.  With the help of the talented narration of the late and great David Warner, however, the character of Eleanor Vance and her ghostly encounters soon came to life for me in a way that didn't just make the novel intelligible at last, it also sort of made me a Jacksonian for life.  The Robert Wise adaptation is no slouch either, so as I'm concerned.  It was like going all the way back to where it started with John Bellairs, and discovering that the initial contact point where you fell in love with the genre was suddenly able to take its inaugural hints of Gothic sophistication, and somehow elevate those notes into a higher, more adult voice.  The great thing about Jackson's voice in the novel is that she is able to utilize those same notes to deliver a grand narrative.

There's a great deal to be said later on about Jackson's strengths as a literary stylist, and how she's able to make this work to her advantage, yet for now it will be enough to get to know the author herself, first.  What kind of a personality must a writer have in order to create a setting like Hill House, or the Lottery Village in the first place?  According to her most recent biographer, Ruth Franklin, "Some writers are particularly prone to mythmaking. Shirley Jackson was one of them. During her lifetime, she fascinated critics and readers by playing up her interest in magic: the biographical information on her first novel identifies her as “perhaps the only contemporary writer who is a practicing amateur witch, specializing in small-scale black magic and fortune-telling with a tarot deck.” To interviewers, she expounded on her alleged abilities, even claiming that she had used magic to break the leg of publisher Alfred A. Knopf, with whom her husband was involved in a dispute. Reviewers found those stories irresistible, extrapolating freely from her interest in witchcraft to her writing, which often takes a turn into the uncanny. “Miss Jackson writes not with a pen but a broomstick” was an oft quoted line. Roger Straus, her first publisher, would call her “a rather haunted woman.”

"Look more closely, however, and Jackson’s persona is much thornier. She was a talented, determined, ambitious writer in an era when it was still unusual for a woman to have both a family and a profession. She was a mother of four who tried to keep up the appearance of running a conventional American household, but she and her husband, the writer Stanley Edgar Hyman, were hardly typical residents of their rural Vermont town—not least because Hyman was born and raised Jewish. And she was, indeed, a serious student of the history of witchcraft and magic: not necessarily as a practical method of influencing the world around her (it’s debatable whether she actually practiced magical rituals), but as a way of embracing and channeling female power at a time when women in America often had little control over their lives. “Rather haunted” she was—in more ways than Straus, or perhaps anyone else, realized. Jackson’s brand of literary suspense is part of a vibrant and distinguished tradition that can be traced back to the American Gothic work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry James (2-3)".  This ability to tap into the Gothic tradition seems to have had a by now pretty familiar sounding point of origin.  Like a lot of the author's mentioned so far, Shirley was a scared child growing up.

Her parents were wealthy New England socialites who decided to relocate to the West Coast of San Francisco and live among the beautiful people.  It's telling that when it comes to the birth and raising of their only daughter, there remains some dispute over whether she was a wanted pregnancy or not.  "It was not", Franklin tells us, "a warm home.  Even if (Geraldine Jackson, sic) had been pleased to have motherhood thrust upon her in her first year of marriage (and by all accounts she was not), Shirley was hardly the child she had imagined. “The pregnancy was very inconvenient,” Joanne Hyman, Jackson’s elder daughter, says. Geraldine had been groomed to be a socialite...“She was a lady, Geraldine was,” Laurence Hyman remembers. And she tried valiantly to shape her daughter in her image. In one of the earliest photographs of Shirley, the little girl wears an immaculate ruffled white party dress, white shoes and socks, and a giant starched bow nearly the size of her head. But it must have been clear early on that Shirley would not conform to Geraldine’s ambitions for her. “I don’t think Geraldine was malevolent,” recalls Barry Hyman, Jackson’s youngest child. “She was just a deeply conventional woman who was horrified by the idea that her daughter was not going to be deeply conventional.” “Geraldine wanted a pretty little girl, and what she got was a lumpish redhead,” Joanne Hyman says bluntly (23-24)".

Here's where a bit of gear switching is in order.  What Franklin tends to tip-toe around, an earlier biographer such as Judy Oppenheimer chooses to tackle head-on, without mincing words.  That's why the information she passes along in the first ever Jackson biography, Private Demons, seems worth recounting here.  The way Oppenheimer tells it, "Geraldine Jackson was not a tactful woman. Years later, when Shirley was struggling to make sense of her own problems, she told her daughter Joanne a chilling story: when Shirley was an adolescent, Geraldine had informed her she was an unsuccessful abortion. It could have been the simple truth—Geraldine had a tendency to blurt things out around her daughter—or one of Shirley’s intuitive guesses, but one thing was certain. This was the way Geraldine had made her feel, throughout her life. As a beautifully turned-out woman, Geraldine, having resigned herself to maternity, expected at the very least a beautifully turned-out daughter. Fashionable, superficial, and utterly conventional—a miniature version, in fact, of Geraldine Jackson herself, who was a strong adherent of the child-as-jewelry school of parenthood. 

"The fact that the child she gave birth to—exactly nine months and one day after her wedding—turned out to be Shirley seems almost too ironic, one of those quirks of fate second-rate novelists delight in. For Shirley was odd from the start, a restless, high-strung, difficult child; brilliant, messy, torrentially creative, and far from ornamental. “You were always a willful child,’’ Geraldine snapped at her daughter forty-six years after her birth, by mail, and both the sentiment and the misspelling underlined the vast gulf that had always stretched between them. “My most basic beliefs in writing are that the identity is all-important and the word is all- powerful,” Shirley said once. Her mother had managed to malign both in one six-word sentence. A goldfish giving birth to a porpoise, as one of Shirley’s sons described it. But a tenacious goldfish, one who never stopped trying to rearrange her porpoise daughter along more acceptable goldfish lines. Perhaps with a little guile she might have had more luck, but Geraldine was never a subtle woman. Strong-willed, yes; subtle, no. Years after Shirley had left home, married, and given birth to her own children, her mother still sent her corsets in the mail, trying foolishly but persistently to rein in the overgrown creature she had somehow, unbelievably produced. 

"This was no malleable clay, however; Shirley had, as her mother soon recognized, a will surpassing her own. Even as a small child, carefully groomed, her strawberry-blond hair neatly arranged under a large bow, there was a set to the chin, a cool appraisal in the light eyes. Shirley Jackson, born to be a writer, dug her feet in and fought. Eventually she would say no to all of it, to Geraldine’s whole world of proper breeding and grooming and social minutiae, would reject forever the torch of country-club conventionality. She would laugh at it, flout it, rebel against it. But she would carry her mother within her, unexorcised for the rest of her life. Shirley’s children, especially her daughters, grew up acutely aware of the terrible resentment Shirley bore her parents, particularly her mother. “She felt Geraldine had squashed her,” her older daughter said flatly. “Crushed her spirit.”” And yet Geraldine was not a cruel woman, or even an unloving mother—simply vain, foolish, unalterably conventional. No matter how strained the relationship, it was also true that a confused, hopeless love existed between them throughout their lives, right along with the anger, pain, hatred, and lack of forgiveness.  

"Not that it helped. In fact, a complete break between these two utterly unlike women might well have been the best thing that could have happened. Instead they remained entangled for life, even though they were separated by the entire country for the last seventeen years. “Who is looking over my shoulder all the time?” Shirley mused to herself months before her death, wondering at her inability to confront certain parts of herself. It could only have been the worried, disapproving, unrelenting specter of Geraldine Jackson (14-15)".  Remember what I said earlier about encounters with moments of anxiety in childhood?  Those early experiences with an overwhelming sense of otherwise normal enough (I suppose?) fear is one of those things that can determine vital aspects of what will later become the young child's adult character.  This process seems to have ended up as no different when it comes to an author like Shirley.  As a little girl, she seems to have been prone to those same outsized experiences of a terror that seems so personal that it can sometimes be difficult to make the grown-ups around you understand just where it is you're coming from.  I was lucky in that sense.  At least I knew I had parents who care about me.  It's always possible that Shirley never had even that luxury to fall back on.  Whatever fears she might have experienced as a child, she ultimately had to face them alone.

She seems to have survived, which is good news.  Yet it's those vital moments in youth that have a way of molding the outlook that determines one's character in later years.  In that sense, perhaps Oppenheimer got it just a bit wrong.  There was a certain level of malleability in Jackson as a child, yet the crucial thing is that this is something she seems to have realized on some basement level of her mind.  Thus even if she never had much of a clear idea of whatever issues she might have been dealing with as a child, she still had the sense coupled with the necessary amount of tenacity to ensure that whatever molding process she was undergoing as she matured, it would be as much to her own welfare as she could manage.  Feel free to debate how successful she was on that score in the long run all you want.  The point for me is that at least she was able to plant some sort of personal flag for herself at the end of the day.  That's got to matter more than all the trophies you could give in a single lifetime.  The way Shirley managed to handle her own fears was via a process that seems to be a recurring pattern in writers of the Gothic.  Like a lot of kids with artistic talent, Shirl soon developed a knack for reading that quickly translated into a desire for the written word.  Here's where the vital influences came in.

According to Oppenheimer, "There were few books in the Jackson house, although there was one curious collection: (Jackson's grandmother, sic) Mimi owned the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe, which occasionally read aloud to the children (just the thing to quiet an anxious, impressionable child). But for most books, Shirley had to look outside the home; she became an early, voracious library user (23)".  This is all that space that Oppenheimer devotes to this key bit of biographical detail.  What makes this particular instance of brevity so frustrating for a reader like me is that I'll have to swear Judy passed over a crucial part in the development of the artist's mind, without giving it the proper bit of attention and analytical unpacking that it deserves.  This goes doubly so in the case of an author like Jackson, as it is within the field of Horror fiction that her greatest legacy now resides.  With this in mind, learning that one of her first encounters with the genre came through an early exposure with one of its foundational architects sounds like an essential puzzle piece that shouldn't be just mentioned in passing.  Instead, it is possible to speculate on how this exposure to the works of Poe might have both fueled and helped Jackson's own experiences with fear.  This can be shown with a bit of theoretical, yet reality based supposals.  It's possible to conjecture the effect that Poe's words might have had on her.

It is not, for instance, too great a stretch to imagine Shirley as a little girl first horrified at the tales her Grandmother tells her.  Then, perhaps to her own surprise, that initial sense of terror turns to curiosity, spurred on by nothing more than the inherent artistry contained in Poe's ornate and Arabesque style and narrative description.  From there, a process of mental and Imaginative development begins.  Shirley goes from being curious to, as Oppenheimer likes to say, "voracious".  Entertain conjecture of a portrait of the author as a young girl first begging her Grandmother to read more Poe's stories to her, and then picture Shirley mastering the complexity of the Gothic writer's ornamental prose to be able to read him like a primer.  Thus it is possible to establish a working picture of where a taste for the macabre might have all began for Shirley.  Like with many young fright fans, a lot of her later enthusiasm for the genre could have been grounded in an inherent sense of kinship between kindred souls.  In reading Poe's fiction, she might have soon begun to recognize the telltale signs of yet another fellow little kid who went through something similar to her.  She might have been able to recognize the words of a man who, even as an adult, still knew what it was like to be afraid of the dark.  In that sense, it does not seem so far-fetched to me to theorize that Shirley saw Poe first as a friend, and later as something of a mentor, and maybe even, on some level, a posthumous parental substitute for her own peripatetic household.

Even if this is all just conjecture, what isn't is the net result of early exposure to the modern Horror story at such a young age.  It's here that the commentary of scholar John Tibbets is useful in describing Jackson's ultimate achievement.  He's talking about the books of Peter Straub, yet what he has to say functions so well as a description of what Jackson is up to in her own work, that it's worth utilizing and paraphrasing them here.  Jackson's "frequent implementation in" her "stories of the works of the great 19th-century Gothic practitioners...calls for close attention".  She "not only draws upon them, but...imaginatively transforms them and gives them fresh breath, in effect. Of particular importance here are those 19th-century literary architects of what is recognized as a distinctively American Gothic, whose forms and expressions were congruent with New World attitudes and ideas. Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, and Herman Melville claim pride of place...Yet, it seems that very little criticism has explored in any detail their connections with" Shirley's "work. Clearly, there is a deeply shared kinship that borders on identity". Jackson's "stories establish" her "not just as their artistic and spiritual heir, but as their standard bearer toward a modern American Gothic (26)".  This is the basic gist of Shirley's fiction, and there's a lot more waiting to be explored.

As you might expect, it's impossible to unpack all of her artistry in the space of just a simple review.  The best this article can do is to lay down an idea of the basic foundations that undergird all of Shirley's writings.  The best description I've ever had on that score comes from the pen of Prof. John Gordon Parks.  He's best described as a now obscure commentator on Jackson's work, yet we'll have plenty of reasons to circle back to him later on in the critique.  For now, his summation of the whole point that Shirley was driving at is enough to go on.  According to Parks, "Shirley Jackson's fiction is part of the American tradition of the gothic romance or tale of terror, and her relation to such authors as Poe, Hawthorne, Henry James, and Flannery O'Connor, among others, is shown throughout the study. With these authors she shares a dark view of human nature. But through the use of gothic, terror, and the grotesque, Jackson's fiction not only explores the inner experience of contemporary life, but also suggests that the recognition and confrontation of the evil in man may be the first step in transcending it (v)".  I knew that sooner or later I would have to try and find the right entrance way that would allow for the best possible beginners discussion of an author who contains the sort of multitudes described above.  The trick is how do you manage to talk about a writer who is one of the grand architects of the Gothic genre?  Because that's who Shirley is, or at least what she has become, at the end of the day.

She is, in many ways, like the Tigris and Euphrates of the modern Horror story.  Her writings managed to turn her into one of the foundation layers for the genre's modern voice, and my biggest fear these days is that the nature of that voice, and the value it holds for the sophistication of the contemporary Gothic format is in danger of getting lost.  So that I meant I had to try and find the best possible starting point which would allow for the beginnings of an intelligible enough conversation about her words.  It took some bit of digging, yet after a quick search, I think I might have found the best place to start.  It's with an unpublished short story of domestic chills known simply as "Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons".

The Story.

"The first sign that the Oberons were coming might have been early blossoms on the peach tree, but Mrs. Spencer did not know until she got the letter. It came on Thursday, when Mrs. Spencer was already beginning to feel the first tensions of anxiety over the day, with guests invited for dinner and Donnie’s dentist appointment at three—itself requiring split-second timing at the school—and then there was the shopping to be done and the flowers to be arranged and the lemon cream to be made early this week to avoid the near catastrophe of last time, when people actually had to eat it with spoons. Now here was a strange letter in the mail. Mrs. Spencer distrusted letters on principle, because they always seemed to want to entangle her in so many small, disagreeable obligations—visits, or news of old friends she had conveniently forgotten, or family responsibilities that always had to be met quickly and without enjoyment. If she had not persuaded herself that it was ill-bred to throw away a letter without opening it, Mrs. Spencer might very well have given up mail altogether, except for important things like Christmas cards from the right people, and announcements for the Wednesday Club, and invitations correctly engraved.

"The letter from the Oberons looked, even on the outside, as though it carried some request, and Mrs. Spencer regarded it with distaste. The address straggled across the envelope, there was a dirty finger mark on the flap, and the stationery was obviously cheap; sighing, Mrs. Spencer opened it daintily. “Why would anyone with handwriting like this try to write a letter?” she asked irritably, and frowned up at her husband. “I can’t even read it.” Annoyed, not wanting to touch the letter, she threw it down onto the breakfast table. Harry Spencer, who breakfasted in a mingled fragrance of good coffee, good shaving lotion, and the printers’ ink of his morning paper, reached for his orange juice and said lazily, “Couldn’t be anything very important, anyway.” He smiled pleasantly at his wife. “Throw it away,” he said.

“Nothing is ever important to you.” The lemon cream, and the dentist, and the flowers, and the silver to be polished; Mrs. Spencer sighed. “I have enough on my mind for one day,” she said. “You read it.” Mr. Spencer reached over and took up the letter and looked curiously at the sharp black handwriting. “It’s not really so bad,” he said. “A kind of puzzle, actually. He makes his e’s Greek style, and that funny little wiggle is an s. John Oberon—who is he, anyway?” “I certainly could not tell you. No one I know, I’m sure.” Mr. Spencer laughed. “You may get to know him,” he said. “This fellow wants you to find him a house.” “A house?” Mrs. Spencer stared as though she had not spent all her life in one house or another, adorning, cleaning, enriching. “A house?” “They liked our town when they drove through,” Mr. Spencer said, studying the letter. “Old friends of your sister’s.”

"Mrs. Spencer set the marmalade down abruptly. “Of Charlotte’s?” Mr. Spencer glanced up at her briefly, curiously, and then back to the letter, and Mrs. Spencer sighed again. “I can’t help it,” she said, almost apologetically. “You know I’m fond of my sister, and I do have them here every Thanksgiving, and I’d do just anything in the world for them—” Mr. Spencer glanced up again. “I never said a word,” he remarked mildly. Mrs. Spencer looked away. “It’s just,” she said helplessly, “that I feel it’s important for you, and your position at the bank, to have a house and a family you can point to with pride. I’m really terribly fond of Charlotte, you know I am, but even I can see that she’s not exactly the sort we want to know socially, and her husband is loud and coarse and vulgar and—” “I always liked him,” Mr. Spencer said.

“Really? Would you want him working with you in the bank?” “He hasn’t asked me.” Mr. Spencer smiled across the table. “Never mind,” he said. “Throw the letter away if you want to.” “Some people really have no consideration for other people,” Mrs. Spencer said, touching the letter with one finger. “They only want to know if you’ve heard of any summer places nearby,” Mr. Spencer said. “Three bedrooms.” “Really,” Mrs. Spencer said. “Really, Harry.” She pushed away her half finished coffee. “What earthly right…” “That old house down by the river is for rent,” Mr. Spencer said idly. “I heard the other day that Mrs. Babcock is very anxious to get a tenant this summer, and heaven knows she could use the money. Might just ask her,” he told his wife. “But why?” she demanded, staring. “Why?” Mr. Spencer gathered his newspaper and rose. “I don’t know why,” he said, not looking at his wife. “Why does anybody do anything?”

"Obscurely troubled, somehow defensive, Mrs. Spencer watched as her husband gathered his letters and left the breakfast room. “Don’t forget we’re having guests for dinner,” she said after him, but he did not turn. “Today, of all days,” she told herself, and took up the intruding, unreadable letter and carried it out to the garbage pail. She was putting the dishes into the washer when Mr. Spencer called goodbye from the front door, and she answered him absently, thinking lemon cream, silver, flowers; when she dropped the coffee grounds into the garbage pail the unreadable letter was covered, safely hidden away. I must try to get in a half hour of rest sometime during the day, Mrs. Spencer was thinking; I really cannot drive myself like this. The phone rang at about eleven, when the lemon cream was safely in the refrigerator and the living room was dusted and the silver polished, and she answered it upstairs, where she was mending a tiny rip in her dinner dress. Mrs. Spencer never allowed her clothes, which were expensive, to fall into disrepair, and the tiny rip infuriated her, since it had not been there before she sent the dress to the cleaner, and this meant that now she would have to remember to speak sharply to the cleaner’s delivery man when he came on Monday. When the phone rang she immediately assumed that it was Harry calling from the bank to say that he would be home for lunch after all, and that would be too much, altogether too much, this day of all days. “Yes?” she said into the receiver.

“Mrs. Harry Spencer? Long distance calling.” Her sister, Charlotte, had been in the back of her mind since breakfast, and Mrs. Spencer told herself that if this was really Charlotte calling just to chat over family news she would absolutely hang up; Charlotte ought to have more consideration, she thought, and tapped her finger irritably against the phone table. I will tell Charlotte frankly, she thought, I will tell her frankly that I simply have no time for— “Hello?” The voice was far away, truly a long-distance voice. “Hello?” it asked faintly. “Charlotte?” Mrs. Spencer said. “Hello?” “Maggie?” No one except Charlotte called Mrs. Spencer “Maggie” anymore, not since she had implored her husband to introduce her to his friends in this new town as Margaret. Margaret Spencer, it said on her stationery and her personal checks, Mrs. Harry Elliott Spencer. “Hello?” she said. “Maggie? It’s John. John Oberon.”

“Who?” “Driving home today…” The voice was really very faint; perhaps there was something wrong with this upstairs phone. Mrs. Spencer raised her eyes to heaven, thinking, I will have to call the man to check the phone. “Drop in about four…say hello…(29-33)”.

Conclusion: An Early Example of a Great, Gothic Gift.

I'm sort of curious about what kind of emotional reactions (if any) that might have been experienced by the reader of the lines of dialogue and description rendered above.  It's all the author's voice, by the way.  Every word, every passage, every phrase and stylistic choice comes straight from Shirley's mind, and ultimately onto the page.  With this in mind, there is a logic to my curiosity about what the reader might have felt as they read through her words.  What emotional climate did Jackson's narration create in your train of thought?  I know the one it crafted in my own head as I read on.  And I'd like to focus on that as a way of starting the critique portion of our program.  At least that's what I'll do to start out with.  This isn't going to turn into one of those essays where the critic insists on picking apart almost every bit of description and conversation that takes place like its William Empson trying to dissect The Waste Land.  Instead, it's just going to start out by examining Shirley's writing in order to suggest her skills as a Gothic stylist.  She's one of literature's great experts at crafting the perfect mood of domestic unease, and to me, at least, her work on "Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons" is no exception.  That's why I find Ruth Franklin's description of this story as a non-Horror based humorous piece so baffling.  A careful read-through was all it took for me understand that right away it was a case of the author clearly operating on her own chosen ground of home turf, and playing up all of her strengths as a creative talent.  This is meant to be read and interpreted as a straight-up work of Horror, and a brief examination of its opening scenes will or should be enough to help the reader understand why this story reading is the correct one.

Let's start with the way the author brings her main protagonist onto the stage.  We don't see Mrs. Spencer right away.  Instead, Jackson chooses to start her narrative out on a strong note, with words whose structure sounds practiced and casual.  Like we've just happened to catch a bit of small town gossip in passing.  Something about a new family moving into the neighborhood.  Yet the way Shirley doles out this opening bit of narrative information to her readers is presented in such a way as to carry the faint undertone of hearing a bad omen.  If this were an Eighteenth Century fairy tale of the Brothers Grimm variety, then it would not be out of place to see this information rendered in more ornate tones of open dread.  There would be colorful prose laid out to help establish the sense of fear the story is meant to work its way toward.  Perhaps it ought to be mentioned right now that this is one of those deals where there's no sense in claiming there's a clear cut right and wrong way of doing this sort of thing.  All storytelling lives or dies under the combined weight of strength that goes into both the opening and closing of the tale.  That's perhaps one of the few hard and fast rules that anyone can apply to the field of Creative Writing.  Beyond that, however, its a mistake to claim that one size or practice will always fit all.  It just doesn't work that way.  There can and will be times when the pattern Jackson follows here in her own little short story will be too out of place in, say, a more Lovecraftian setting and framework.

This is something that the author seems to have been aware of, as when we turn our attention from the style of this story, to the one she uses to describe the goings-on at Hill House, we can see the writer relying on a form of prose which contains a greater hint of that ornate Gothicism which is appropriate to the haunted house tale.  As it stands, her efforts here can be spoken of as an example of the artist carting over elements from ancient mythology, and yet finding the right sort of quiet indoor voice which is familiar to the average suburban audience.  Her style in this piece is geared toward the kind of reader who would know something about Reader's Digest or People magazine (or else The New Yorker and Saturday Evening Post as was the case in her own time).  Yet what's interesting is that she utilizes the voice of the modern suburb in such a way that allows it to take the elements of Celtic folklore, and find the most surprising and therefore gratifying way of translating it into terms the modern reader can understand.  She's something of a pioneer in that sense, yet she's by no means the first artist to plough this particular furrow.  Author's like Ray Bradbury and the two Ediths, Wharton and Nesbit, seem to have been among the first to suggest that the world of ancient myth could find a home for itself in modern settings.  Jackson just seems to have been the one to further the idea in the minds of readers.

What's important to note about all this is Shirley's skill at creating the proper opening mood.  Right away, when the reader hears that a family named Oberon is moving in, the tone of the words arrives with a sinking feeling.  The way Jackson is able to craft these opening paragraphs leaves me in awe of her ability to pack in several layers of meaning in just a handful of lines.  That takes a level of talent which few writers are able to master for themselves, and I'm not at all certain a capability like this amounts to something replicable.  Its not sui generis, yet it is more something that just comes natural, as opposed to ever being anything like an acquired skill.  It's this inherent aspect of talent that allows Shirley the ability to find just the right words her story needs in order to carry out its proper effect.  Even before the titular Oberons have arrived in the neighborhood, before we even know anything about them, the announcement of their arrival is conveyed in words that form a perfect combination of this informal, everyday. over-the-counter quality laced with a subtle note of quiet menace.  Shirley has given us an opening with the same sense of dreadful portent as that found in some of the best creepy children's stories.  What she's given us here amounts to the suburban slick magazine equivalent of, "In the land, a monster dwelt..  Some said it was a dragon, others claimed it was something worse.  Few knew where it was, yet many knew it stalked the land, and lived in mortal terror lest it should cross their paths".

It's this note of fairy tale Horror that Jackson gives as her opening note, and she delivers it so well that its immediate effect is to put her reader's minds on edge before a single line of dialogue has even been said.  Not long after this, we meet our main character for the evening, and here is yet another example of the artist at work in her own native soil.  The first thing we know about Mrs. Spencer is that we've probably met her somewhere before.  She's like a fixture in every street and town in this country.  One of those family women whose sole reason for existence seems geared, not so much for her husband and household, or even necessarily her children.  Instead, it's more correct to say that she's chosen to concern herself with the appearances as opposed to the substance of these elements, or aspects of her life.  In other words, she sees the man she married, and the children she gave birth to in the same light in which she views her front lawn.  They are all resources to be exploited, rather than people to both live with, guide, raise, and sometimes even learn from.  If our first impression of Mrs. Spencer is that we know of someone like her in every town, then the second imprint she leaves on our minds is very simple.  I don't think I like her all that much.  I wonder if she even likes herself, deep down.  In all this, Jackson is working on familiar turf.  Mrs. Spencer represents a recurring theme in all of her work.

If I had to find a good beginner's term for what the housewife at the center of this story means, then I'd have to say that Mrs. Spencer is a perfect example of a particular type of modern Gothic character.  I'm referring to a very specific aspect of Jackson's artistry here, something that she returns to in just about all of her fiction, that it has to be defined as one of her constant themes.  In order to unpack this particular aspect of her work, and its role in the curious adventures of Mrs. Spencer, we'll need to unpack the way that the elements of her story draw upon older literary traditions, some of which come from intriguing source material.  Let's start out with a basic gist of the short story's plot.  At it's core, it's about this strange group of characters who one day decide to move into a neighborhood that the titular Mrs. Spencer always thought of as nothing else except her own private kingdom.  For years, this woman has come to see herself as the undisputed ruler of a realm that she regards as having fashioned into her own image.  Whether or not this is the actual truth of affairs doesn't really matter so far as the protagonist is concerned.  Mrs. Spencer has carved things out for herself in a way that works for and soothes her ego, and that's all that matters.  What's worth noting is how this setup results in a lifestyle that always leaves her somewhat neurotic and on edge, even before she begins to receive a series of puzzling messages from people she's never met, and yet who claim to know her intimately, somehow.

This note of personal, neurotic discontent is a recurring feature in the vast majority of Shirley's writings.  It's present as a free-floating background presence for the cast of her first panorama novel, The Road Through the Wall, and reaches its apogee in "The Lottery", We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and the aforementioned Haunting.  It's all of a piece with how Mrs. Spencer functions as a textbook case of the modern Gothic figure.  The nature of her personality is best described by the journey of her encounter with the mysterious Oberons.  What makes that somewhat easy to talk about is the way the author infuses her Gothic satire with a series of familiar tropes drawn from the world of folklore, and the darker realms of the fairy tale, in particular.  Jackson gives the attentive reader hints that this is the direction her efforts are taking us in even before we've begun to read the story proper. Even before we've read a single single word of the opening sentence, the names of both title characters provide a clue as to the narrative's fairy tale origins.  The most obvious example of this can be found in the family moniker of the Oberons themselves.  Bardolotrists will recognize the name as belonging to none other than the King of Elfland in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream.  The ruler of the elves and his queen are, in turn, a borrowing from folklore such as the Erl King, from ancient mythology.

David P. Young seems to be the one Shakespearean scholar who can provide us with the best general description of these elemental figures as they were utilized in plays of the Elizabethan Age.  He claims "They are a curious mixture of wood spirits and household gods, pagan deities and local pixies.  They inhabit the environs" of civilization, yet on occasion have been know to take various sorts of interest in human affairs.  It's chiefly the nature of these "interests" that accounts for the sometimes ambivalent and cautious nature that the Fair Folk are regarded with in a lot of the earliest native source materials.  It's something Shakespeare touches on in the Midsummer play, where "in Oberon and Puck, he expresses their darker side, potentially malevolent in the lore of the time (26)".  Elsewhere, Young takes exception to the notion of the traditional Elf of folklore as totally harmless.  "The creature variously called puck, pouka, pixie, bugbear, and hobgoblin, as well as the other fairies, was dangerous, and an Elizabethan audience could not contemplate him or his associates as representatives of the unknown without some apprehension.  Reginal Scot speaks for all those mothers who:

'Have so 'fraied us with bull-beggers, spirits, witches, urchens, elves, hags, fairies, satyrs, pans, faunes, sylens, kit with cansticke, tritons, centaurs, dwarfs, giants, imps, calcars, conjurors, nymphes, changelings, Incubus, Robin Good fellow, the spoorn, the mare, the man in the oak, the hellwaine, the firedrake, the puckle, Tom thombe, hobgoblin, Tom tumbler boneles, and such other bugs that we are afraid of our own shadows'.  As a result, he continues, even "a right hardie man" has difficulty making himself pass a churchyard at night and keeping his hair from standing on end.  Fairies were sometimes said to be fallen angels and inhabitants of hell, so that a certain confusion about their moral status probably existed among the audience (28)".   Midsummer is a play in which both the writer and the character aren't done any real favors, yet it's clear they've left a mark on Jackson's Imagination.  

It left enough of one, at any rate, to take the supernatural figures such as the Erl King and make him (and perhaps his entourage?) into a key player for her little New Yorker effort.  It's this darker aspect of Fair Folk lore that Jackson felt intrigued enough to tap into, possibly as a result of their use and utilization in the works of early influences like E.A. Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, or perhaps this was all something she picked up later on, as part of her lifelong studies into the aspects of magic and folk belief in the field of early mythological studies.  The basic gist of Shirley's concerns on this matter seem to have been explained best in a college thesis written by one Havard Norjordet: "as so many other Gothic writers to come out of New England, she uses witchcraft, folklore, the occult, and the supernatural (often grounded in historical events) in a modern setting...for...artistically motivated purposes (6-7)".  The upshot is that here we have the author taking this folklore, and applying it to a recently modern American Gothic setting, and seeing what happens when the Folken encounter a representative of 20th century American modernity in the form of the story's main character, a neurotic and domineering suburban housewife.

The results that come about from Mrs. Spencer's encounter with a group of people who may or might not be entirely human is described by critic Alissa Burger as the author working within the parameters or a very specific literary motif: the Journey into the Wilderness.  She writes that, "Untamed nature and the forest specifically are staples of the Gothic tradition, from fairy tales like ‘Hansel and Gretel’ or ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ to the dark adventure of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (1983) and beyond. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic short story ‘Young Goodman Brown’ (1835) is a particularly salient example, in which a young man from Salem Village, Massachusetts, ventures into the forest at night on a dark journey to meet with the devil himself. As Hawthorne describes Young Goodman Brown’s walk, ‘He had taken a dreary road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees of the forest, which barely stood aside to let the narrow path creep through, and closed immediately behind.’ Confronted in these shadowy woods with his pious-seeming fellow villagers, all of whom have sworn their allegiance to the devil and are congregating in the heart of the woods for a witch meeting, Brown’s faith in humanity, his community and himself – as this was his purpose in venturing forth as well – is fundamentally compromised. This Gothic wilderness is a place where anything can happen, where the laws of reason and order governing communal ‘civilized’ society fall away, and the boundaries between the real and the fantastic become permeable and unfixed.

"The Gothic wilderness is the antithesis of civilization: darkness countering light, fantasy challenging reason, secrets threatening to upend the appearance of order. As Elizabeth Parker explains in The Forest and the EcoGothic: The Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination, ‘When we imagine the forest, we tend toward extremes. The landscape is commonly read as a binary space – as either “good” or “bad”. When it is “good”, it is a remedial setting of wonder and enchantment; when it is “bad”, it is a dangerous and terrifying wilderness... In this Gothic wilderness, fairy-tale children who are cast out into the forest might encounter neglect, starvation, wild animals or the threat of cannibalism, while in Young Goodman Brown’s Salem, the woods are the realm of infernal temptation, drawing the good people of Salem away from the community, the church, and one another. The Gothic wilderness is a liminal space, where anything can happen. As Heinrich Zimmer notes, ‘The magic forest . . . is always full of adventures. No one can enter it without losing his way. The forest has always been a place of initiation[,] for there the demonic presences, the ancestral spirits, and the forces of nature reveal themselves. 

"In addition to the physical and spiritual threats posed by the wilderness, it also reflects and interrogates the individual who dares to enter it, with Tony Magistrale arguing that ‘Hawthorne’s natural landscapes appear to be animated by subtle forces that ultimately invite his protagonists into a confrontation with ethical codes and principles’, forcing them to decide what they believe and who they truly are.5 Consequently, the Gothic wilderness is also often a reflection of the self, mirroring both the anxieties of individual identity and the larger mores and expectations of the community. Finally, as Parker notes, ‘there is a common, if largely undiscussed tendency to talk about the Gothic forest in decidedly vague terms’, making it difficult – if not impossible – to effectively define, respond to, or contain. 

"When the Gothic protagonist enters the woods, they are likely to become lost: in the wilderness, in the magical, and within themselves. While the modern wilderness may seem more easily knowable and navigable, elements of mystery, danger and the supernatural linger. There are still plenty of shadows to be found beneath the trees and within the self, and much of Shirley Jackson’s writing, from short stories like ‘The Summer People’ (1950) to her novel Hangsaman (1951), demonstrates what dark truths could be revealed if one strays from the beaten path and the well-lighted small town or suburban streets. Jackson’s consideration of the Gothic wilderness brings this world into direct contact and comparison with the domestic, which was a frequent focus of her work, ranging across a broad spectrum of styles from horror to humour. Add to these considerations the blurring of lines between the real and the fantastic, as well as the interrogation of selfhood and identity, and Jackson’s Gothic wilderness is a very dangerous place indeed.

One "of Jackson's posthumously published short stories that" engaged "with this trope" is 'Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons' Which "foregrounds the protagonists’ recognition of the wilderness as a space of both freedom and danger, as they negotiate interactions with others and their deepest sense of themselves through their isolation and engagement with the natural world around them, with the wilderness serving as a threshold of profound change and transformation". This story also draws upon "classic narrative tropes, with the invocation of the medieval and Renaissance figure of Oberon, king of the fairies...Through Jackson’s use of ‘interactive narrative modes’ in synthesizing elements of multiple genres, and her dynamic combination of classical and contemporary influences, the connections between past and present, the civilized and the wild, and perception and reality become impossible to disentangle with any degree of certainty. Finally, intersecting with a theme that runs through much of Jackson’s work, the domestic is of central importance in" the story under discussion here today, "through the entry into the wilderness which challenges the traditional domestic ideal and subverts the order it promises. A close consideration of" Mrs. Spencer's narrative "offers the opportunity to explore the ways in which Jackson builds upon and subverts literary traditions from the classical to the Gothic, as well as the explicit contrast between civilization and the unnatural wilderness which threatens to disrupt the community, the family and the self. 

"Mrs. Margaret Spencer is a very particular woman, preoccupied with appearances, devoted to the pristine maintenance of her home and family, and driven by a need for order and respectability. She is a woman whose ‘behavior is never anything other than correct’.8 The day that she receives the Oberons’ letter, in which they ask her to help them find a house in town for the summer, is filled with a litany of tasks that must be handled and which she repeats to herself almost like a talismanic mantra,  thinking ‘lemon cream, silver, flowers’ as she bustles about her day, maintaining an uneasy balance of efficiency and barely repressed hysteria. The Oberons are friends of Mrs. Spencer’s sister Charlotte and a wrinkle in her otherwise well ordered life. As far as Mrs. Spencer is concerned, the Oberons are not the ‘right’ kind of people, so she simply refuses to know them, privately avoiding them and publicly shunning them to the extent that Mrs. Spencer never actually meets them, hearing about them only through others. The Oberons are the very opposite of Mrs. Spencer: open and gregarious where Mrs. Spencer is reserved, fun and free spirited where Mrs. Spencer is rigid. The rest of the community is quickly taken by the Oberons, including Mrs. Spencer’s friends and even her own husband and children, and as Mrs. Spencer remains intractable in her opinion of the family, she is the one who becomes seen as unreasonable and unkind, excluded from the larger social strata of which the Oberons are now the centre (135-38)".

The rest of the story unfolds in what I can only describe as a creepy game of cat and mouse.  The narrative's camera lens follows along with Mrs. Spencer as she goes about what would be her ordinary daily routines under normal circumstances.  The catch is that with this new, shadowy family moving into the neighborhood, our heroine seems to have a great deal of trouble avoiding them, even when they don't meet in person.  Everywhere she goes, Mrs. Spencer will run into neighbors or other townsfolk with either something nice to say about the Oberons, and or else they're more than happy to share a little gossip about the "new fella" and his wife and kids at the drop of a pointed, jangling, jester's cap.  Each of these moments catches the protagonist off-guard, and puts her out of sorts, as ever since they've arrived, Mrs. Spencer has been doing everything in her power to avoid meeting any of the Oberons in the flesh.  It gets worse when her children come home one day and admit they've not only met the "New Folk", they've also made friend with the Oberon children, and wonder if they can maybe stay over one night.  The most disconcerting part in all of these affairs boils down to just one crucial fact.  The Oberons have claimed that they are old acquaintances of some kind, and yet it's clear Mrs. Spencer has never met any of them for so much as passing glance a day in her entire life.  Jackson paints all of these moments with a fine brush line of underlying and mounting dread.  Along with her other genre fellows, such as Jack Finney, Ira Levin, and Philip K. Dick, Shirley was one of those writers who was always capable of rendering the imaginative paranoia of modern American life into a veritable artform.  

It's a constant grace note in all of her major works, from The Lottery collection all to the way up the grounds, hallways, and environs of Hill House.  Like Finney or Levin, Jackson seems to have one of those natural internal barometers that was capable of detecting the discordant notes that kept reverberating off of the average American life in the mid-1950s.  However she was able to pick up on this erratic chord in her surroundings, once she did, she seems to have reached an intuitive understanding that the discord was itself an implication of something vastly wrong and out of joint with the nature of the American society that she both knew from birth, and that she still found herself at odds with, even as she called it home.  It was her ability to both recognize and tap into this seed-bed of mid-century American paranoia and place it in a fictional setting which accounts for a great deal of the power of the fear factors in her writings.  In "Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons", this discordant note is no different, and she's able to play it like a master violinist following that off-key note for all its worth.  As we continue to follow the story's lead, there is a constant sense of mounting terror until we can never quite tell whether it's possible that the Oberons might in fact be stalking Mrs. Spencer in some unseen fashion, or else if this is all just a delusion in the mind of a fevered homemaker coming unglued.  

Burger holds that the "Oberons’ name is significant, evoking the fairy king of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Tracing this influence further back, Shakespeare himself drew on Oberon figures who had come before, including John Bourchier, Lord Berner’s English translation of the French Houn de Bordeaux (1534) and Robert Greene’s The Scottish Historie of James the Fourth (1594).10 Laura Aydelotte explains that ‘The fairy tale king of the sources is an often contradictory character, at once a beneficent guide and a darkly powerful threat; a meddlesome trickster and a haughtily detached observer of human affairs’, a contradiction Shakespeare diffuses to some extent by separating these characteristics between Oberon and Puck. The Oberons of Bourchier, Greene and Shakespeare hold tremendous power for both good and ill and are capable of having a profound impact on the humans whose paths they cross. Similarly, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the appearance of the Oberons in Jackson’s ‘Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons’ is the catalyst for disruption, unpredictability and fun. While Shakespeare separated the contradictory elements of his source texts’ Oberons between his own Oberon and Puck, Jackson instead reflects this division through the other characters’ responses: the Oberons are a welcome change for everyone but Mrs. Spencer, who sees them as an enemy and a threat.

"Echoing the forest revelries of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Mrs.  Spencer finds herself drawn to the wilderness to at last confront the mysterious Oberons, when she comes home to find that everyone in town, including her own family, has gone out to the Oberons’ house for a picnic (138)".  It's in these passages that Shirley's writing begins to display her skill as a master stylist in the art of building dread.  Every paragraph or line of dialogue, and the events they are meant to showcase are all a series of well played hands from a card deck of which Jackson is the dealer.  Her talent with the Gothic format allows her to dole out all the necessary information she needs to help set her readers on edge, and all of it is building up to that fateful drive into the forest that surrounds the town..."in the night" as one of her characters in Hill House say, "...in the dark".  By this point the writer has us right in the palm of her hand.  Even if we might be able to see some of the cards she's still holding in the other, we're still dreading the notion of what those final few cards will look like when she finally turns them face-up.  By now, whether our protagonist represents an untrustworthy point-of-view or not, our knowledge of the folklore behind the name of Oberon, and the way the new couple almost seems to be playing a malicious kind of game with the protagonist's daily life has us consumed by the idea that something inhuman might have invaded the neighborhood, and this is how Shirley tells of Mrs. Spencer's journey.

"She did not often drive along the river road; many of the houses along there were only shacks set by the water, and Mrs. Spencer had been on a committee that stopped the people living in them from throwing their garbage into the river. She had to follow the main highway to the edge of the town, and then turn off, and as she came to the entrance of the river road she slowed down, watching for the abandoned, derelict gas station that marked the turn; it’s just like them to live along here, she thought, just like them. She could hear the sound of a waterfall through the still night, even over the soft sound of her car. She had not perceived how dark it had grown until she realized that the moon was rising; under other circumstances she might have slowed down briefly to admire the light across the water, as she admired all things done in an orderly manner, but tonight she had to hurry. The thought had crossed her mind that one of these days she might open her front door to find the Oberons and their friends crowding in for a visit, expecting hospitality in the style of their own; she could not get Harry and the children away quickly enough (44)".  It's worth pausing here just a moment in order admire and unpack the skill the writer displays.  In the space of just two paragraphs, what Shirley has done is to create a perfect state of suspense through the skillful blending of two diametrically opposed scene setups.

The first paragraph showcases Jackson's talent as a Gothic voice.  The road through which Mrs. Spencer travels is already a familiar one to veteran Horror fans.  It's the one that always starts out on a note of cool and rational civilization, only to end up vanishing into the dirt, mud, and weeds that marks out the home of some ghost, psychopath, or some other unspeakable monstrosity.  The country road that sooner or later leads to and betrays the protagonist up to the Horror at the heart of the scary story is one of those ideas that was practically a convention by the time the Grimm Brothers wrote of Hansel and Gretel loosing the trail of breadcrumbs.  The reason most chiller artists, including Jackson, still find plenty of ways to make good use of it is pretty obvious.  Even a trope as old as the proverbial hills can still be of use when you play its ancient and time-tested notes in just the right way.  Whenever that happens, when the writer of a Horror story is able to strike just the right chord of growing panic, it can sometimes make for a darn good build-up, one that's necessary to prepare the audience's mind for the confrontation with the narrative's Horror, whatever it's nature.  It's one of those life-long essentials in the composition of a fine bogie tale, yet it's one that often gets overlooked by those who are impatient to have the guy wearing the bedsheet or the rubber monster costume to come shambling out the dark and onto the stage.  Jackson is smarter than this, knowing just what details will help build the suspense.

A good example of this is the way she delineates Mrs. Spencer's journey as she travels down the road to the Oberons.  All she needs is just three quick bursts of description before we're shown our hapless heroine driving past the kind of abandoned and rundown building that we've seen in countless books and films from the same genre.  The minute the reader is told about the "derelict gas station", our minds are keyed up and our pulse quickens, because we know we're in familiar territory, and the author now has us primed to expect the worst.  This is the kind of stage setting where you expect to have encounters with guys like Jason, Leatherface, or the Hook.  Which means the one thing we hope doesn't happen to the main lead now is for something like her car to break down, leaving her stranded in what is clearly meant to be the prototypical Gothic wilderness.  Jackson's burst of genius here lies in the way she then proceeds to play around with this hoary old trope, thus creating a payoff to the previous setup that creates just the right dramatic result, and what makes it a perfect card play is that none of us saw it coming, because our minds are so used to a certain type of result on a stage setting like this.  We're expecting Mrs. Spencer to be menaced by a chainsaw wielding crazy, or something else in the same wheelhouse.  What we aren't expecting is the gas station to be the entrance to an enchanted glade.

"Driven by the thought of the Oberons crossing her trim threshold, Mrs. Spencer drove faster. The Oberons’ house on the river was not far past the waterfall, but tonight—perhaps because of the darkness growing steadily along the road, with only an occasional glimpse, now, of the moon through the trees—it was difficult to find. Once, Mrs. Spencer slowed down at a curve in the winding road, thinking she heard voices singing, and saw lights through the trees, but when she stopped her car there was nothing but silence, and she drove on. The Oberons’ house was set back from the road, down the slope to the river, and only a ramshackle fence post marked the turnoff that served as a driveway; peering through the darkness, Mrs. Spencer went on, and then found herself without warning on the broad highway that marked the end of the river road on this side; this highway would only lead her back home, alone. She had come too far, and must turn and go back. As she started back, she decided that she had taken enough. Tomorrow she would tell Mr. Sanson at the store, and Mrs. Babcock, and the florist, and all the rest that the Oberons were not to be trusted. “They used my name without any authorization from me,” she would say. “I wouldn’t let them owe me money; you may be sure that Mr. Spencer and I do not accept responsibility.”

"The () road was very dark now, and she had to turn on the car’s headlights; all they showed her were trees and quiet leaves. Far away was the sound of the waterfall and then, even more distantly, laughter. Mrs. Spencer stopped her car again and listened. She thought she could hear what might be children shouting, even one high voice that could have been Donnie’s, and above the thin noise of the children was music, perhaps a radio, with that peculiarly clear sound that music has near water. She sat in her car, head bent forward intently, and heard—she was positive—Harry’s voice singing. “Oh, my darling,” he was singing, “oh, my darling, oh, my darling Clementine,” and the children’s voices joined him, rising in glad disharmony, “Oh, my darling Clementine…” and the laughter went on.  Unsteadily, Mrs. Spencer opened the door of her car and got out, the stones of the road hard and rough under her thin high-heeled shoes. Somewhere along here, she thought, and moved, stumbling, to the side of the road. Even if she could not see the lights of the house through the trees, the driveway must be along here somewhere, and time was pressing; she could not, could not, endure to hear her husband singing and her children laughing somewhere down there at the Oberons’ house.

"There was a fence going along the side of the road, almost certainly a fence that led to the post that marked the driveway, and she took hold of the top rail—she had forgotten her gloves—to steady herself as she followed it. Even with the car’s headlights shining it was dark on the side of the road, among the trees, and the distant singing and laughter faded sometimes until it was only the sound of a very soft breeze going through the leaves. Walking almost blindly, Mrs. Spencer made her way along the fence, slipping into a ditch once, almost losing a shoe in a pile of dead leaves, straining to see lights down by the river. Then, turning at a curve in the road, she was halted; the fence ended in a tangle of fallen boards, and there ahead was the derelict gas station, and the other road home (44-46)".  I'm not sure how this kind of narrative hat trick will strike most readers in an age devoted to the likes of Sam the Clown and his always "amusing" ilk.  The best defense on offer is this.  There is a school of thought that exists as part of the Horror genre which holds to the idea  "Less is always More.  To give a good example of how this maxim has been applied to various specimens of the format with considerable skill, think of films like Session 9, where the fear factor is generated more from the atmosphere of the film's main setting, rather than through any of the usual tactics that most filmmakers rely on with this kind of story.

Session 9 is a movie where the dwindling cast members spend the majority of the film's runtime rambling their ways through the endless hallways of an old, abandoned mental hospital.  While it's true that this is a film with a kill count, even those moments are handled in a quiet, minimalistic fashion.  There's rarely that much of any drops of blood to be seen, and instead, the viewer is left with the feeling of something eerie and indescribable happening when one of the cast members simply vanishes into the thin air of the darkness surrounding them without barely making a noise.  The total effect is of something supernatural going on always just out of your line of sight.  As a result, the way the terror mounts throughout the film's runtime is down to a growing realization that someone (or, even worse, something) bad is out there, waiting for you in the shadows, and its picking your friends off methodically one at a time, leaving you increasingly isolated, and you can't even tell or see if it's coming for you right this minute..."In the night"..."In the dark"...Reading from the works of this author, I kind of get the impression that Shirley might have been able to appreciate a film like Session 9.  This conclusion makes even greater sense when you stop and realize that, while she is not the sole pioneer of the Less is More approach that the film goes for, she probably nonetheless taught its director, Brad Anderson, a thing or two about how to use Horror without showing it.  It's a technique she played to perfection in novels like The Haunting, and it's the same approach she uses in Mrs. Spencer's case.

What we have here is the basic Horror setup of a character who sets out to confront the story's problem on their home turf, only to realize soon enough that they were way in over their heads for thinking they could tackle a problem like this all on their own.  To give another helpful example, it's pretty much the same predicament that the cast of the original, 1999 Blair Witch movie end up stuck in.  That is yet another film I can imagine Jackson liking, though she might criticize it for, not being too graphic, by any means.  Instead, she might ask whether it had to be so loud.  In her mind, much like Lovecraft, a deafening silence can speak louder than all the stage screams in the history of the genre put together.  This is the technique that she puts to good use as she describes Mrs. Spencer's trek further into the mysterious woods surrounding the Oberon's property.  "When she came to the spot where she had heard the singing she went even more slowly, her head partly out of the car window. It was possible—considering the haphazard Oberons, it was even probable—that the fence post that marked the driveway had been allowed to fall down, but even so, the driveway ought to have been visible as an opening between the trees. From far away she could still hear the laughter and the singing, as though the guests wandered now all along the river, perhaps in boats, going up and down the river and singing (47)".

What the writer has done here, in essence, is to blend the best of both worlds into a seamless whole.  She has taken the dilapidated, and crumbling ruins typical of what's now known Hillbilly Horror, and used it as the entrance to the sort of haunted woodland dwelling you would expect to find in a work by Edmund Spenser, one decked out in the same atmosphere that's to be found in one of the poet's darker passages.  Indeed it even seems possible to speculate that the titular Mrs. Spencer gets her name as an allusive bit of wordplay hinting at the Elizabethan versifier.  If I had to offer a reason why she might do this, then the answer might be provided by one of the key architects of the American Gothic, Nathaniel Hawthorne.  As it turns out, the man was a lifelong Spenserian, even going so far as to utilize the poet's techniques in works like The House of Seven Gables and Twice-Told Tales.  What this means in practical terms is that someone found a way to take the material of a poem like (of all things) The Faerie Queene and find a new modern Gothic expression for it all.  Can't say that was something I ever expected to find out for myself.  Nor can I deny that it creates an interesting level of coolness and intrigue that it grants to Spenser's poetry.  It forges a link between his style of Fantasy, and the fictions of writers like Hawthorne, Jackson, Peter Straub, and Stephen King that makes for one of those fun head-turners that grants this quirky yet fascinating perspective on the fiction you grew up loving as a kid.

The semi-acknowledged fact that Shirley might have taken Spenser's fairyland, and redone the whole thing in darker shades, along with the undeniable truth that she's done the same for Shakespeare's Dream drama, and spun a better Horror tale from it, turns out to be one of those discoveries that somehow manages to grant the true fright fan an even greater appreciation for the fiction you can't help liking.  I think part of the fascination for me stems from seeing how its possible to take the contents of what amounts to the arch prototypical Fantasy setting, and finding a way to turn it all into one big haunted house.  Because that's what Jackson does to the enchanted forests of Spenser and the Bard.  She has more or less followed Hawthorne's lead by letting the darkness seep into the palaces and dwellings of Elfland, even going so far as to let the ambience of the American Gothic infect the otherwise normal inhabitants of such a realm.  Twisting and turning them into the most horrific counterparts that our own Imaginations can allow.  She then sets loose a random homemaker who amounts to nothing else than a great-grand-descendant of Hawthorne's warped Puritans, and leaves her stranded and at the mercy of beings who may be nothing more than humans, or else they could be dark faes.  Supernatural creatures who count as neither mortal nor immortal, living or dead, yet always existing somewhere in that troubling blind spot betwixt and between.  Or the woods could be full of other things, some with teeth.

Either way, it's clear the author is utilizing her shared knowledge of the tropes and source materials that Shakespeare and Spenser drew upon for their own works.  This can be seen in Jackson's tenebrous re-fashioning of various fairy tale motifs that were commonly associated with the Elves in folklore, such as the warping of the landscape due to supernatural influence, or the image of invisible singers boating on the water.  Both of these evocative images come straight from the lore surrounding the Folken, and its to Shirley's credit that she knows how to imbue these timeworn tropes of Fantasy with the right note of horrific menace.  From here, Alissa Burger is able to sum things up.  "While she can see the lights of the Oberons’ house and hear the laughter of the party, however, Mrs. Spencer  cannot make her way there as she ‘finds herself ostracized, wandering lost on a dark night, trying to follow the dreamlike sounds of laughter and singing that reach her from the Oberons’ distant house’. After driving the road a few times in both directions and finding herself unable to locate the Oberons’ driveway, Beginning to feel frantic, she turned her car quickly and drove back along the road until she came to the other end . . . and turning again, back once more to the lighted highway. Once, she stopped, hearing first only silence and then, far away, the voices singing and the laughter. It seemed to her that she had spent hours, perhaps years, searching up and down a dark and empty road, following the distant merriment, never able to find a way to get closer to it.

"Even when she gets out and walks, sliding in wet leaves and tearing her stockings, with ‘her hair . . . draggled and her lipstick worn away’, she cannot find the entrance.14 Following traditions of fairy stories and fantasy, Mrs. Spencer has encountered a magical barrier, one through which she cannot pass. She is an inadmissible outsider, with an invisible blockade confining her to the Gothic wilderness, keeping her from her family and friends, and she is ultimately forced to turn back and go home alone. Mrs. Spencer’s fruitless search echoes Hawthorne’s journey into the Gothic wilderness. In order to see what is right in front of him, Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown must change how he does his looking: he must accept the impossible, radically reframe the familiar faces he encounters in the woods and grasp the fallen nature of the human condition. Brown is completely transformed by this experience, his perspective is fundamentally shifted and he is never able to see his loved ones, his village or his fellow community members the same way again. In contrast, while Mrs. Spencer’s isolation echoes that of Brown’s, her journey remains unsuccessful and incompletely achieved because she is unable to see the world around her in a new or different way. She refuses to be changed or to reconsider her perspective, and instead it is the world around her that is transformed. When she ventures into the woods, she does so with an iron-clad belief in the sanctity of well-ordered meals, cleanliness, and formality, and even as her shoes are muddied and her singing husband’s voice echoes through the trees, these signs of disorder are aberrant to her, unequivocally wrong and in need of rectification.

"... Where Young Goodman Brown’s perspective is fundamentally changed by his journey into the Gothic wilderness, and he sees everyone and everything around him with new eyes, Mrs. Spencer has maintained her own firmly held beliefs, while the rest of the world has shifted without her. Mrs. Spencer has retreated to her home and the assumption of domestic safety and order, only to find that even that domestic space is not sacred. She initially looks forward to the return of her family, thinking that ‘she must be neat and ready for them . . . [but then] she realized that they would be coming home dirty and sticky and perhaps wet from the river, perhaps tracking mud across the white doorsill, putting grimy hands on the stair rail, bringing their filthy shoes into the living room’. The family’s anticipated raucous return mirrors the influence of the Gothic wilderness: the barrier between order and chaos, between civilization and the wilderness that surrounds it, has been breached and can never be restored. The revelry in the woods is horrifying  to Mrs. Spencer and she sees the Oberons’ influence as malicious and insidious, something that she cannot categorize, control or mitigate. Where others have heard laughter and seen lights in the trees, she has seen a threat to her well-ordered existence, a challenge to her supremacy in both her home and her community. The danger cannot be kept out, the fun cannot be forgotten, and while Mrs. Spencer will certainly cling to any shred of control and propriety she can, Jackson makes it clear that she is fighting a losing battle, that one housewife is no match for the forces of fantasy, chaos and the Gothic wilderness that the Oberons represent (141-42)".

I think most of what Prof. Burger has to say here is valid so far as it goes.  There is, however, one detail that I think is overlooked, and thus adds an interesting layer of complexity to the stories denouement.  It goes all the way back to an observation Stephen King once made in relation to Jackson's artistry.  In his 1981 non-fiction study, Danse Macabre, King is quick to highlight the specific Gothic tradition that Shirley was always utilizing in one way or another throughout her fiction.  The way she went about it, according to the author of The Shining, was through the use of old materials, or genre elements, in a way that was fitting for the times in which her stories were written.  It's what we can learn from the methodology that Jackson uses in telling her own brand of Domestic Horror which can tell us a greater deal about the nature of Mrs. Spencer and her new neighbors.  The literary techniques that Shirley employs in her stories are described by King in the following terms.  "Now let me suggest that, in addition to being" a well-wrought work, "Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons "succeeds on far more important ground; it is a prime example of what Irving Malin calls “the new American gothic".

"John G. Parks employed Malin’s idea of the new American gothic in an article for Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction. Park’s article is on Shirley Jackson’s novel The Sundial, but what he says about that book is equally applicable to a whole slew of American ghost and horror stories, including several of my own. Here is Malin’s “list of ingredients” for the modem gothic, as explained by Park in his article. First, a microcosm serves as the arena where universal forces collide (296-7)".  In the case of "Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons" the reader is confronted with a choice for which aspect of the story qualifies as the Microcosm that King, Parks, and Malin are talking about.  All three speak of that term as describing a sense of place, i.e. as a crucial setting, or backdrop for the narrative action.  What makes this literary diagram interesting in terms of Shirley's efforts here is that she's given not one, maybe even two, but as much as four interesting imaginary locales which could vie as candidates for the symbolic arena described by the three authors above.  To start out with the simplest, there's Mrs. Spencer's home, which she rules like a monarch in her own fortified castle.  Then there is there's the neighborhood, which the narration makes clear she views as her own personal realm, or fiefdom.  In addition, one might as well thrown in the entire small town and the forest which surrounds it as the main backdrop of the action.  The town itself seems to count as your basic, typical Norman Rockwell postcard.  The kind of vintage, man-made vista that would be proud to plaster itself on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.  It's nothing special in the grand scheme, yet it serves Mrs. Spencer's purposes more than fine.

The meager nature of the town's width and scope is what allows her the ability to fashion herself as the Big Fish of the Small Pond.  As Burger noted in her observations above, that is just the sort of station that fits our protagonist's desires to the proverbial letter.  If Mrs. Spencer ever had anything like a personal motto then it might be that hoary old saying, "A Place for Everything, and Everything in its Place.  Such is the setup that Shirley presents us with in this work of hers.  What we've got here is an abundance of potential symbolic riches.  The downside of that is how this makes it difficult to pinpoint the presence of Malin's critical typology at work in the narrative.  The good news there, however, is that in the critical tradition from which the terms emerges, the Microcosm isn't, by its nature confined to describing just the sense of place.  It can also be used to describe the human being, proper.  Hence the concept of Man the Microcosm.  It's with this knowledge under the cap that I'd argue it's still possible to preserve Parks and Malin's typology.  All we need to do is apply it to the short story's main lead, as opposed to any one of the work's four main settings.  Instead, the fact that the main stage of Jackson's story is so multi-faceted (and perhaps even in a numerically symbolic way) leads me to argue that the stage itself on which the action takes place is best described as the Macrocosm.  In an older form of literary criticism (one that would have been familiar to the likes of Milton, Spenser, and Hawthorne) the Macrocosm is nothing less that the world in which Man the Microcosm must learn to define himself.

This seems to be something like a common challenge in all works of fiction.  Not just something that can be confined to the realm of things that go bump in the night.  Yet it is precisely because its in the nature of Horror to be upfront and assertive in its themes that it allows us a clearer view of how such a thematic mainspring is able to operate behind the scenes.  With this in mind, the outline that King provides for Jackson's fiction can proceed as follows.  "Second", what I'll have to refer to here as the Gothic Stage, "functions as an image of authoritarianism, of imprisonment, or of “confining narcissism.” By narcissism. Parks and Malin seem to mean a growing obsession with one’s own problems; a turning inward instead of a growing outward. The new American gothic provides a closed loop of character, and in what might be termed a psychological pathetic fallacy, the physical surroundings often mimic the inward-turning of the characters themselves (297)" as is the case with Mrs. Spencer and her "encounters" with the Oberons.  In that sense, the main character crafted by and through Jackson's story functions as a textbook example of the mid-century American Gothic hero.

The way in which the delineation of Mrs. Spencer's character fits the mold Malin is talking about can be understood once you stop and consult his book-length study on the subject.  It's in this text that Malin lays out the parameters of the genre, and what that means for an imaginary figure like the homemaker at the heart of Jackson's short story.  He writes that the "New American Gothic is primarily concerned with love, knowing "there there can be no terror without the hope for love and love's defeat."  The typical hero is a weakling.  The only way he can escape from that anxiety which constantly plagues him is through compulsion.  He "loves" others because he loves himself: he compels them to mirror his desires.  Love for him is an attempt to create order out of chaos, strength out of weakness; however, it simply creates monsters.  Although it is easy to dismiss" the various monstrosities (human or otherwise) the emerge from the genre on a regular basis "as sensational cardboard figures, they are frequently powerful symbols of disfiguring, narcissistic love.  They "work" as does Frankenstein.  The concern with narcissism accounts in great part for the quality of the Gothic...Characters" such as Mrs. Spencer "cannot be "well-rounded" while they are obsessed with themselves (5-6)".  As such, the Weird happenings that occur around Jackson's "Average American Housewife" mark her out as someone who figures as a perfect fit for the contours of the Horror genre as critics like Malin describes it in detail.

"New American Gothic uses grotesques who love themselves so much that they cannot enter the social world except to dominate their neighbors (6)".  Malin then informs us that "gothic narcissism extends far back into American fiction (ibid)" and cites a passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance as a textbook illustration for the kind of personality that someone like Mrs. Spencer has.  "They have no heart, no sympathy, no reason, no conscience.  They will keep no friend, unless he make himself the mirror of their purpose; they will smite and slay you, and trample your dead corpse under foot, all the more readily  if you take the first step with them, and cannot take the second, and the third, and every other step of their terribly strait path".  Recall here the moment where Mrs. Spencer almost belted her own son because of a few spilt drops of ice cream, like little kids always do; the only thing holding her back being, not an acknowledgment of any possible moral center to her nature, but rather a self-obsessed concern with "Decorum".  Hawthorne continues, "They have an idol to which they consecrate themselves high-priest, and deem it holy work to offer sacrifices of whatever is most precious; and never once seem to suspect—so cunning has the Devil been with them—that this false deity, in whose iron features, immitigable to all the rest of mankind, they see only benignity and love, is but a spectrum of the very priest himself, projected upon the surrounding darkness. 

"And the higher and purer the original object, and the more unselfishly it may have been taken up, the slighter is the probability that they can be led to recognize the process by which godlike benevolence has been debased into all-devouring egotism (web)".  Such then is microcosmic nature of the main character of Jackson's story, in the most ironic sense of that old Elizabethan term.  The "hero" of the piece has rendered herself heartless, and in doing so has managed to remake the world around her in her own image.  And so, just like that, into this closed society comes this strange collection known as the Oberon clan, whose status as human could be either natural or ambivalent, at best.  In the best tradition of the Gothic story, the arrival of the supernatural on the scene arises in part as a response to things being in some ways out of joint within the main setting of the narrative and/or its characters.  The fact that the Oberons seems to target Mrs. Spencer in particular out of any other character in Jackson's secondary world seems to indicate that their presence in her neighborhood means that their arrival is meant as some sort of response to the narcissism displayed by the main character.  In makes her story operate on the same logic as that found in novels like Salem's Lot, where the supernatural evil finds itself drawn to a particular location because of the disorder in the life of the particular Microcosm.

Shirley's wrinkle to this formula is that it doesn't seem to be Mrs. Spencer's entire town, but rather the main lead herself that is being addressed by the Oberon's appearance on the scene.  In which case, Jackson's narrative can be said to be operating on a classic form of fairy tale logic, albeit one that is now being painted in darker, Gothic shades.  The narrative's approach is more accurate to cautionary tales such as myths dealing with creatures like the Bridge Troll, the Wendigo, or in this case, the Erl King.  In such folktales the Horror of the story is presented as a consequence of the moral dilemmas that the protagonist brings upon themself.  The terrors that are meted out in the story therefore serve as a consequence of transgression, with the denouement always carrying with it the proper note of just desserts.  A baseline theory would be that it's all rooted, at least part of the way, in the author's experiences of growing in just the sort of confining and constricted world personified by the author's parents.  That the writer's formative experiences of American society are what inform her series of fundamentally Gothic secondary worlds.  Shirley grew up knowing what it was like to be forced to live on a daily regimen of manners and propriety; first from her parents, and then others.  She also seems to have clued herself in to the way such behavior is used as a social masque to hide all sorts of moral lapses and failures.  It's easy to see how such experiences are ripe as a target for the Gothic satire.  In fact, the pity of it is that this is a sort of evergreen situation, one with plenty of fodder for the genre.

Summed up in essence, I think the valid reading is that its part of an instinctive response to the shady side of mid-20th century American life.  Just as with writers like Hawthorne, Shirley's writing tends to position itself in revolt from an unstable, reigning social norm, one that received its best contemporary catalogue during the author's own lifetime in works like Sloane Wilson's Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.  The plot of that novel is best described as the original Mad Men, except it manages to have a greater amount of sympathy for its own version of Don Draper.  Jackson's story is unable to extend the same olive branch for the figure of Mrs. Spencer, however.  Instead, just like Young Goodman Brown, or Ethan Brand, Shirley's main character ends up tapping into one of the oldest tropes in the Horror genre.  It's the one that Irving Malin typifies as the "voyage into the forest (79)", yet I think Tony Magistrale is able to provide a better summarization of what this particular theme entails.  He's also able to do so with a wealth of detail that Alissa Burger merely glanced at.  While it's true Magistrale is describing the themes of Stephen King's fiction, what he says there nonetheless contains a great enough scope of applicability to function as a valid critical description of the what Shirley is up to in her own writings.  It also probably doesn't hurt that King has pointed out that he himself has borrowed from Jackson's work multiple times in the past when telling his own stories, so there is a valid thread of relation there.

With this in mind, I think Magistrale help shines a light on the ultimate meaning of Mrs. Spencer's encounters with her mysterious and borderline spectral new neighbors by positing that, at it's core, it counts as one woman's journey (however ultimately Tragic) of self-discovery.  In telling this tale, Jackson has composed an example of what Magistrale refers to as "the nineteenth-century romance tradition (20)".  It's a strand of literary Gothic practice which can be said to encompass the works of King, Herman Melville, Hawthorne, and much closer to Shirley's experience as a Horror fan, the writings of Poe.  And much in the same vein as Hawthorne or King, Jackson appears to rely "on the journey motif" in this short story "for the same reasons the nineteenth century did: the literal voyage...into the mysterious woods of a New England forest", whether it qualifies as haunted, enchanted, or instead functions as a Gothic blend of both "becomes a metaphor for the journey into the self.  This journey is fraught with danger along the way because" Mrs. Spencer, like "King's young protagonists, like those of Twain and Hawthorne, learn that true moral development is gleaned only from a struggle with the actual" Horrors, "rather than avoiding them (ibid)".  Shirley's story provides a riff on this notion, in that at the end, while the Oberons may be inhuman, so is the main protagonist.

Mrs. Spencer wanders into a forest that shares hinted elements of both Survival Horror and Enchanted Fantasy all mingled together.  While she is only able to catch fleeting glimpses of the Oberons that are more overheard than seen, her trek through the dark fairy tale woods leaves her a visible shell, and hence a dancing mockery of everything she values in her life.  In doing so, Mrs. Spencer is revealed to have trod a path that is very familiar to both Magistrale and the authors of The Scarlet Letter and The Faerie Queene.  "Hawthorne's woods are a place of spiritual mystery; in them, Young goodman Brown, Reuben Bourne, and minister Arthur Dimmesdale must confront their own darkest urges (17)",  This appears to be the same task that Mrs. Spencer ultimately finds herself faced with.  Jackson's Gothic heroine, "like so many of Hawthorne's youthful idealists, discovers in the...woods that evil is no mere abstraction capable of being manipulated and ignored.  Instead", Mrs. Spencer "finds" her "own confrontation with evil to be overwhelming (ibid)", because the forest is revealed to also be a reflecting mirror of sorts.  It's yet another image of Irving Malin's triad of Gothic Images, the other being the haunted castle (79).  In Margie Spencer's case, what the encounter in the dark enchanted glade teaches here is that while it's still possible that there is evil in the thickets, the true Horror at the heart of the story is that the greater threat might very well come from within the heartless life of her very own self.

As a result, Shirley has written a story that fulfills both of the criteria that Stephen King mentions above.  It provides the reader with a Microcosm in which universal forces collide, and the result of this encounter is the revelation of a crippling narcissism that may be said to consume the protagonist.  This is the ultimate fate of Mrs. Spencer by the end of the story.  If I had to put the moral of the story in the same allegorical terms as that of the Renaissance author that inspired her name, then what we have here is a Tragic inversion of the typical Spenserian setup.  A heroine has ventured forth into the woods under the belief that she is there to slay either a dragon, or an evil Elven King.  Along the way, however, she discovers that she herself is the one who has become the firedrake.  Perhaps a better way to put it is that in going out to confront the Horror in the Oberon's woods, it is instead Mrs. Spencer who becomes the ghost.  Indeed, such a scenario would make for a fitting capper to this story.  Shirley ends her tale on a simple note, with Margaret left sitting disheveled on the hallway stairs of her house, waiting for her family to come home.  It's effective enough as it stands, because it leaves plenty of room for the Imagination to run wild in terms of what might happen next.  

My own surmise is that sooner or later the main character slumps into bed, and when she wakes the next morning, she's able to tell something is off.  Her immaculate house no longer looks musty, but almost like no one is living it it.  The rooms and hallways look barren, and even though she's just woken up, her bed looks as if no one has slept there in a long time  The bathroom mirrors are so smudged that it's difficult to catch her appearance in them.  You would almost think it's like she casts no reflection.  Then there's a knock on the door.  It's the Oberons, who have decided to come over for a visit, is what the voices whisper from outside the now derelict looking house that used to be her castle.  They'd like to have a word with her, if she doesn't mind.  For a moment, Margaret Spencer could just linger on the other side of the entrance to a dwelling that once could have been her home, and yet now is something else.  After a brief moment of fear, she seems to come to a slow realization of some sort.  Then, with a sigh, she unlocks the entrance to a place that is no longer home.  My own imaginings cut everything to black just as the front door swings open to let the Oberons in.  I think the fact that a simple short story like this can excite such musings is the best testament to its skills and qualities as an entertainment.

If you haven't guessed by now, I had great fun reading this.  This is one of those distinction pieces for me.  It a story that's able to work on two level simultaneously.  On the one hand, there is a great deal of learning and sophistication that's put into this singular and simple short story.  At the same time, the good news is that none of this sophisticated craftsmanship ever gets in the way.  Jackson may be a thinking person's writer, yet she also knows that her job description, and the main goal of her task as an artist, always comes down to just one point, at the end of the day.  Can you entertain your audience with a fine and fun yarn?  It's with not just relief, but also flat-out excitement that I'm able to claim that she's succeeds on that score beyond my best possible hopes.  I'd read enough of Shirley's efforts at this point to know what kind of Horror novelist she was, and how all the classic Gothic elements tend to play out in her work.  It means I never came into this short story asking for anything miraculous.  It didn't need to be Hill House all over again for me.  At best, all I could have hoped for was a fine tale of suspense.  One where everything seems normal at first, until you begin to notice tell-tale signs of less than natural possibilities lurking just at the corners and edges of the story, peering from the next page, and that's just what I got with Mrs. Spencer and her journey into Oberon's woods.  It's a technique that Jackson became the de facto master at eventually, and this story shows those capabilities firing on all cylinders.

What starts out sounding like a piece of light-hearted suburban satire soon morphs into a note of unmistakable dread as the initial hint of unnamed things begin to seep their way of their way out of the shadows in the corners of the page, until it reaches a crescendo where you can't tell if the protagonist is being surrounded on all sides and played with by horrors that our more superstitious ancestors use to think of as the Fair Folk, but which might also count as something even more spectral, and worse.  This is Shirley Jackson's approach to letting her Terrors go bump in the night.  In its execution it bears a great deal of resemblance to later efforts that were made in a similar vein, such as The Blair Witch Project, and the aforementioned Session 9.  Shirley is an expert in ratcheting up the suspense in such a way that leaves her readers at her total and complete mercy, as her approach means we often can't tell if our minds are playing tricks on us, or we're seeing faces leer and gibber at us from the leaves and hollows of the trees.  It might be one of the oldest tricks in the Horror writers arsenal, yet there's any number of very good reasons for why all the best practitioners in this particular office building keep utilizing it in their stories.  The biggest one is also the most obvious; when you've got a good creepy narrative on your hands, then the capability of wielding this particular hat trick well can sometimes still go a long way toward making your scare tactics work.  This is something artists like Anderson and Jackson know well.

Both of them apply a certain calculated approach to taking their audience to the edge of their seats, and the only reason that their more or less shared approach seems so remarkable to modern readers and viewers is because of how accustomed we've let ourselves become to kind of like the whole "Freddy and Jason School" of telling Horror stories.  I'm sure that's a method that can be valid, yet it takes real skills to make such an approach stick in your mind in any meaningful way.  To my knowledge, only writers like Stephen King, or filmmakers like John Carpenter and George A. Romero have been able to make this approach work on anything like a solid basis.  Yet even King shows he knows the value of the more quiet method on a multiple number of occasions.  It's just because we've come to let that whole Splatterpunk style define what the genre even means anymore that we're almost shocked to discover that an otherwise quiet little piece like The Haunting, Get Out, Salem's Lot, or Session 9 can floor us with no more than just a careful and proper placement of shadows, mood, and atmosphere.  In that sense, Shirley was a writer who knew that there was still a lot of value in the classical Gothic approach to Horror storytelling.  It's an awareness she shares with fellow house haunters such as Bram Stoker or Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick.  "Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons" is a short work of literary terror that fits right in well on this shelf or catalogue space.  This is a story that's well worth reading.