Shirley Jackson’s Affective Gothicism: The Discourse of Melancholia in The Bird’s Nest
Shirley Jackson’s Affective Gothicism: The Discourse of Melancholia in The Bird’s Nest

Summary/Abstract: The article discusses the discourse of melancholia in Shirley Jackson’s most critically neglected novel The Bird’s Nest (1954). I argue that Jackson’s narrative not only illustrates a melancholic subject’s pathological attachment to the past, but is itself melancholic in its mourning for the loss of female inherent multiplicity. While the novel may be seen to anticipate in many ways Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, it may be read as a commentary on the 1950’s cultural politics and the problem of the medical pathologization of women whose complex subjectivity rendered them psychologically unstable. Through its critique of scientific methods of treating female melancholy and through an implicit defense of “madness,” the novel combines the psychological and the social to make an important political statement.

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