[Pride 2021] Living in the Margins: Desire and Power in 'Shirley'

You would be forgiven for thinking Shirley Jackson’s house had peeled itself from the pages of one of her stories. Perhaps The Haunting of House Hill, or maybe The Sundial. Gaunt architecture and a suffocating interior—“A clean house is evidence of mental inferiority,” quips Jackson—it is American Gothic personified. Something monstrous lurks in its depths, hiding in shadows cast by liquored mid-afternoon sunlight. But this is not a story; there is no monster. Unless you count Shirley herself.

Alienated, agoraphobic, anxious, depressed, and vindictive, we never gain a clear picture of Shirley. Other characters constantly try to frame her. Some call her unwell, others call her cruel. She is jaunted to the margins of a movie that bears her name. Shirley is not the protagonist, the protagonist is Rose (Odessa Young), a fictional character invented by Susan Scarf Merrell, from whose novel the film adapts. 

Rose reads Jackson’s short story ‘The Lottery’ on the train destined for the Jackson household. Aroused by how “thrillingly horrible” ‘The Lottery’ is, Rose pulls her new husband Fred (Logan Lerman) into the train bathroom where they have sex. Shirley is seen as powerless, but with words alone she can influence others, shifting temperaments, inspiring action.

This scene, the first of the film, foreshadows Rose’s relationship with the reclusive Shirley: one steeped in Gothic narrative traditions, where a connection born out of circumstance evolves into obsession, artistry and sexual desire blending together into a morbid longing for life, dark and picturesque and completely divorced from the one she is trapped in.

After falling pregnant out of wedlock, having a shotgun marriage, and being cut off by her family, Rose and Fred have been taken in by Shirley’s husband, Stanley (Michael Stuhlbarg). It is soon clear that Stanley views the couple as exploitable labor: Fred a competent, if uninspiring, academic grunt; Rose a domestic jack-of-all-trades — cleaner, cook, and nurse to Shirley. Rose doesn’t want to be there; she would rather be studying; she would rather be waiting on any other woman than Shirley, who has no time for the couple.

But as a woman in the 1950s, Rose lacks the agency to protest her situation. When Rose tramps around Bennington running errands, women her age, who are living the student life she has had to abandon, stare at her as if she’s an alien. Her eyes flicker with resentment but she swallows the feeling.

Rose finds herself drawn to Shirley. The mind that conceived of ‘The Lottery’, that made her feel “thrillingly horrible”, is alluring. What is Shirley’s prose if not a portal to a world where that alienness is not a mark against her character but something empowering? Shirley, with her acidic personality, is a portrait of the power that can come of willingly setting up shop in society’s margins. Rose detests Shirley for her freedom; Rose wants to be Shirley.

Shirley detests Rose too. But she is struggling with her new novel, Hangsaman, based on the disappearance of a Bennington student, Paula. To distract herself, she invites Rose into her study (“Do you want to see what a writer does?”) and offers to read her Tarot. She draws The Hanged Man, a sign to stop resisting change and embrace new illuminations, three times in a row. We’re treated to a brief sequence of shots, Rose in a red jacket — the same jacket Paula wore when she disappeared — running through Vermont woods. Intercut is Shirley, eyes widening, breath held.

Epiphany: in that moment the dynamic shifts. Through some cosmic convalescence, Paula is or has become, Rose. And Rose, through chance now recast as fate, has become Shirley’s muse.

Rose feeds Shirley inspiration. Perhaps, suggests Rose, extrapolating her feelings, Paula disappeared because it was the only way she could be noticed. Shirley, in turn, feeds Rose’s desire to be seen, sending her on fact-finding errands. Rose interrogates a postman about a ride he gave to Paula. She steals a file from the Doctor’s office. For the first time in a long time, perhaps in her whole life, Rose feels truly alive.

The story of the artist and their muse is one we’ve heard told and retold endlessly. The relationship of the artist and the muse is an intersection of passion and desire. The art brings the participants together, the process intensifies their feelings. Passion for the project becomes a passion for the person. So too with desire.

Jackson’s sexuality has been the subject of some debate. She referred to lesbians in one of her journals, but there is nothing to suggest she felt homosexual desire, let alone acted upon it. Shirley has no scruples about taking speculation and portraying it as fact. For a brief period, Rose and Shirley’s artistic bond hits a fever pitch and the two become sexually involved. The relationship, like so much of their lives, like the traces of Jackson’s potential queerness, is hidden in the margins, communicated through suggestive camerawork and editing.

Would Rose and Shirley have become sexually involved had they met under other circumstances? Rose unmarried; Shirley without a project? Probably not. But this does not lessen the value of their relationship. From the moment Rose encountered Shirley’s writing, art and sex have come hand in hand. The power the other needs flows from them like water, and they drink greedily from each other’s cups.

But the relationship between an artist and muse is never equal. At first, the artist needs the muse, then the muse needs the artist. The question is not whether the bond will break but how, and in what shape the players will be left. Does the art consume (The Picture of Dorian Gray) or does it empower (Portrait of a Lady on Fire)?

Rose and Shirley’s dynamic flips almost exactly halfway into the film. When Shirley has an emotional break, she runs into the woods. Rose chases after her. They come to a stop next to a fallen tree where mushrooms grow. Shirley picks one, a death cap she informs Rose, fatal. “Most young women are fascinated by their mortality,” says Shirley. She offers it to Rose who refuses. 

Shirley’s expression quirks and, suddenly, she bites the mushroom. Rose demands she spit it out, slipping back into the maternal role she is trying to escape as habituality as breathing. Shirley breaks into laughter. The mushroom is harmless; the fragility of Rose’s newfound power is exposed. 

Shirley offers Rose the mushroom again: consume or be consumed. This time Rose accepts.

When Stanley confronts Shirley about the novel, telling her the project is wrong, that she knows “nothing” about Paula, she lashes back, “There are dozens of girls like this littering campuses across the country. Lonely girls who cannot make the world see them. Do not tell me I do not know this girl.” 

The girl in question, of course, is Rose. She is the subject and the audience. When Rose read ‘The Lottery’ she believed it was the words that were “thrillingly horrible”. As Shirley’s muse, Rose’s domestic veneer is peeled back; in searching for hidden facets of Paula, she finds hidden facets of herself. Shirley has transformed Rose into someone willing — eager — to admit that everything she finds thrillingly horrible is already within her.

Then Rose and Fred leave the Jackson household, he suggests that everything will go back to normal. She, sneeringly, dismisses the idea of playing “wifey”.

“That was madness,” she says, with a Shirley-like smirk.