ostwar period. Moreover, whether the protagonist is individual or collective, the novel adumbrates and begins exploration of one of Jackson's primary concerns throughout her career: the dark incomprehensible spot or stain upon the human soul and our continuing blindness and, hence, vulnerability to it. Jackson's fiction refuses to compromise with the glib psychologies of our therapeutic age"(Woodruff, 155). Literary critic Charlotte Jackson explains how successfully Jackson wrote non-fiction prose in her work, "Witchcraft of Salem Village". "There is good introductory background and though the story's subject is by nature horrifying the book does not play on the emotions. It ends on the positive note that public reaction to the obviously revengeful motives of some of the witnesses made these the last witchcraft trials in the New World and did much to kill belief in witchcraft generally"(103). In "Life Among the Savages"(1953) and "Raising Demons"(1957), "the horror is not absent; it is merely held at bay, as the titles themselves forcefully hint. If we pour in energy enough, these books suggest, we can hold off entropy for a while. Her two 'fictionalized' accounts of ...domestic life convey a happiness that could not have been entirely invented." (Kittredge, 14) Jackson's themes usually always come back to the evil found in ordinary things. "That the familiar can become alien, that the level flow of existence can warp in the battling of an eye, was the theme to which she most often returned. She liked characters whose minds seemed to be untidy and a touch hysterical, but whose fanatic grasp of reality is in some inexplicable way deeper than we can understand. The motivations she preferred to study were never those of reason nor yet of circumstances nor of passion-but of some dark quality in a psychological weather when the glass is falling and the wind beginning to wrinkle"(Davenport, 4). Like her theme, Jackson usually uses the same ge...
