The Daemon Lover: Shirley Jackson and the Articulation of Ambiguity Timothy Sexton College

Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Daemon Lover” is nowhere near as omnipresent in the American zeitgeist as her cautionary tale about conformity taken to its ridiculous extreme, “The Lottery.” Nevertheless, in its own modest fashion, “The Daemon Lover” is the equal of its more famous sister story in terms of revealing how Shirley Jackson remains one of the foremost—and most prescient—critics of patriarchal victimization of the female in American society through her singularly impressive talent for articulating the potential for multiple truths to exist in the shadows of ambiguity.

The central female figure in “The Daemon Lover” is one instantly recognizable from a lifetime worth of watching American television; and not just watching the Lifetime Channel. She is in her early 30s, is not particularly beautiful or particularly unattractive and lives a life coincident with her looks: ordinary. Perfectly ordinary. Her nervous preparations for the day ahead in which a young man of interest is at the center is almost worn brittle with its very ordinariness: “Anxiously she pulled through the dress in the closet, and hesitated over a print she had worn the summer before; it was too young for her and it had a ruffled neck, and it was...