Satirical, comic, and disturbing, The Bird’s Nest is a remarkable artistic achievement. It is about a young woman with multiple personalities—four of them—each struggling for ascendance. They come and go from the woman’s active consciousness like passing shadows, each speaking in its own voice—Elizabeth, Beth, Betsy, or Bess. They often speak to one another. Sometimes they communicate even as one of the other personalities is talking, as Betsy does when her voice comes out in what she writes as Bess speaks.
In other words, Ms. Jackson presents us with a main character that is actually four main characters. These characters struggle to become the dominant personality against a backdrop of mystery. What caused this young woman to splinter into four people?
1916 to 1965
As good as The Bird’s Nest is, it does have its flaws, the largest one being Jackson’s love of satire and parody. Some characters are less characters than caricatures.
While often amusing, even funny, there is also a sense of self-indulgence to it. There are times when it becomes too much.
The satire has a broad, social target, but it’s largely focused on two characters: Aunt Morgen and Doctor Wright (or, as Betsy refers to him, Doctor Wrong).
Aunt Morgen is a target of fun early in the book. She even gets her own chapter where we hear her voice. But as the book progresses she becomes more fully realized and moves from caricature to character.
For me, she’s the most sympathetic character in the book. I loved Aunt Morgen.
The larger target of Jackson’s satire is Doctor Wright, who is smug, officious, and quite often outright stupid in his masculine egotism. Human stupidity is one of the secondary themes running through Jackson’s writing. There is a sense of anger directed at what is perceived as the foolishness that grows out of human vanity. People and their self-importance loom like monoliths in the work of Shirley Jackson.
The discontent that produces the satire often comes from the social position of women. It’s oppressed and, characteristic of the period, unaware of that oppression as oppression. It’s the status quo, accepted and unconsidered.
Male characters are rarely more than voices of authority, domineering and unperceptive, and ultimately seen as stupid. (I can’t think of a better word.) In Jackson’s books, men generally have one of three aspects: 1) comically vain, 2) threateningly powerful, or 3) authoritatively comforting (fatherly), though dubiously so.
Women are also portrayed negatively—witless and vain—with the odd exception, such as Aunt Morgen (or Constance in We Have Always Lived in the Castle). However, those exceptions are usually flawed: weak, prey to whims of vanity, and lacking in perception. Yet they offer a sense of stability and companionship.
Ultimately, the woman’s world of Shirley Jackson is an isolated one; a lonely world of hostility behind pretence, providing few comforts, and where a woman has only herself to rely on. Almost all social interaction is play-acting. Life in the world is performance, as when Elizabeth and Aunt Morgen pay visits to Mr. and Mrs. Arrow.
Real life happens only in solitude or beneath the social surface. And when unacknowledged and repressed, as in The Bird’s Nest, brings about the alarming consequences that make up the world of Shirley Jackson.
December 2, 2017