'The Road Through the Wall' is the Blueprint for Suburban Gothic

Which we all should know is my favorite genre

 Shirley Jackson’s writing is a masterclass in how to build suspense and her first novel, The Road Through the Wall is no exception. Her debut book is treated a bit like a red-headed stepchild, probably due to the odd slow-thriller pacing and the lack of plot in favor of chilling neighborhood side stories. But personally? It’s my second favorite Jackson book and from chapter 1 has all the best ingredients of a Jackson-esque world.

What’s especially fascinating is how Jackson builds an atmosphere of dread while only allowing readers a superficial understanding of the characters. In fact, it’s the narrative distance from the characters that gives the readers so much unease. Through just the first chapter, Jackson triumphs in an ability to create a world that leaves readers feeling othered and crucified in the most mundane settings. 

  The novel follows the upper-class families who live on Pepper Street. The titular wall is a boundary that keeps the street divided from the lower class neighborhoods. In the opening pages, Jackson introduces the Desmonds, the Byrnes, the Roberts, The Perlmans, the Ransom-Jones, The Donalds, the Merriams, The Fieldings, and the Martins, each household with multiple family members. The amount of information given in just two pages leaves readers overwhelmed and a bit lost. But the inability to truly place oneself works in the novel's favor, setting up dauntless houses with vague faces.

    Creating an atmosphere of relentless hostility under a veneer of normalcy is where Jackson reigns supreme. Be it a young girl's threat to “cut the stomach and (use a hatchet) to hit”(Jackson 26) her even younger sister, the opening scene of a mother’s cruel intrusion on her daughters privacy, the homey small-town is relentlessly ruthless. In the opening chapter, Mrs. Merriams greets her daughter Harriet by illuminating Harriet’s flaws and shortcomings; she tells her daughter that she heard Harriet coming home because she was too loud and when Harriet apologies, Mrs. Merriam stiffly replies, “Of course you are…you always are, afterward”(Jackson 15.)   At no point does the interaction between mother and daughter leave reality, nor does it become openly abusive or shockingly cruel. Mrs. Merriam never directly insults her daughter and on the surface, nothing shocking is revealed. The hostility in the scene comes from a deep seated sense of distrust. 

     Jackson positions mother and daughter on opposing sides. The daughter is awkward, self-conscious, and anxious. The mother is breezy, remotely judgemental, and always collected.   It seems, even, that Mrs. Merriam subtly thrives on her daughters’ humiliation; the narrator notes that Harriet has an awkward way of speaking “when (Harriet) was uneasy, missing her words and stammering. Mrs. Merriam thought of it as Harriet’s nervous voice, and it made her own voice even more precise”(Jackson 15.) Instead of directly answering Harriet’s request to visit a friend, Mrs. Merriam drags out the unpleasant air between them by ‘daintily’(Jackson 15) saying, “You can go to Helen’s…but you may not”(Jackson 15.) . At no moment does she reveal why not. She instead lets Harriet come to the conclusion herself that her mother had looked through Harriet’s belongings and found the love letters she’d written to a boy. That evening, as Mr. Merriam eats lamb chops and potatoes alone, Mrs. Merriam makes Harriet skip dinner to “put Harriet’s diaries and letters and notebooks in the fire one by one”(Jackson 36.) Mr. Merriam is judgemental of the scene, but unsympathetic: “Seems like a man ought to be able to come home after working all day and not hear people crying all the time”(Jackson 36), he says stiffly.  He is not Harriet’s ally. Harriet has nobody. 

  The love letters are another detail that become a point of subtle horror. The narrator explains that all the girls on the street have been writing love letters to boys:“Virginia Donald was writing to Art Roberts, and Mary Byrne was, cautiously, writing to her own brother”(Jackson 17.) While this at first can seem like an innocent, if strange, gesture-little girls experimenting with lustless crushes- Mary’s letter is particularly scrutinized in hush whispers by the mothers. When Mary’s brother finds the letter, he tells her to stop with “viciousness”(Jackson 26) in his tone. Yet when Mary asks what he’s upset about, he “put his face close to his sister’s and said again almost helplessly, ‘you just cut it out, that’s all…I don’t want anymore of those dirty letters”(Jackson 27.) The adjective ‘helplessness’ gives readers a sense of desperate vulnerability, yet the narrator also didn’t commit to his helplessness. The narrator can’t or won’t fully tell readers what he feels, furthering the reader’s isolation. All that readers know is that Pat doesn’t want this attention. The girls who wrote the letters are also fiercely protective of their secrets. Helen, the ringleader, violently accosts her sister Mildred when she suspects her of telling the adults. When Helen shakes her, Mildred whispers for their mother, Helen snaps, “She can’t hear you, no one can hear you…if you ever tell anything, I’ll cut a big hole in your stomach with a carving knife and I’ll hit you with a hatchet”(Jackson 26.) The narrator cuts away there, lingering on the unsettling threat. Like Pat, both older siblings threaten their younger siblings in their homes but out of view of their parents. Helen’s promise that their mother can’t hear Mildred crying is a promise true for all the children: their parents either don’t notice or don’t care about their children's pain. Harriet’s father heard her crying and simply complained about the noise. All of the children on Pepper Street seem to exist in their own version of Hell.  Very fitting for Shirley Jackson.

  Chapter one does not introduce social outcast and thirteen-year old Ted Donald, nor does it introduce three-year-old Caroline Desmond, the neighborhood darling. Ted and Caroline are a catalyst for the rising action, but they’re not needed in chapter one. Rather than introduce the main plot, Jackson uses chapter one to build the dreadful setting. Though it’s a picturesque town, the characters feel monstrous or else victims to monsters. Readers don’t know where the plot is going yet, or which characters will be important, but the tone fills them with dread for what is to come. 

work cited:

Jackson, Shirley. The Road Through The Wall. 2nd ed., Farrar, Straus, 1948.