In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedman expresses the “loneliness, boredom, and psychic emptiness of women whose roles were strictly limited to those of wife and mother” (19). She goes on to write that, “women, lacking a hard core of self, suffered from the bored, diffuse feeling of purposelessness, non-existence, non-involvement with the world” (75). Friedman calls this the “problem that has no name” (75). Generally associated with evil and satanic themes or ideas, “Miss Jackson has been little understood… and her true literary worth becomes obscured” (Freidman). Accurately describing the housewife in the 1950s, Betty Friedan’s views of a woman’s dull, unfulfilling and restless life are parallel to those of Shirley Jackson’s who was “dubbed…show more content… According to Michael Timko, “She could describe the delights and turmoil of ordinary domestic life with detached hilarity; and she could, with cryptic symbolism, write a tenebrous horror story in the Gothic mold in which abnormal behavior seemed perilously ordinary.” Jackson expertly utilizes her stories to express the dull life of a housewife. Described by Carol A. B. Warren as “lonely, isolated, dissatisfied, and depressed,” housewives during this time period dealt with isolation which led to a loss of identity (qtd. Hague 75). With husbands absent from the home due to work, women lived alone, in a sense, with the children. Though there was characteristically an abundance of people surrounding the characters, a “great gaping hole” still existed as described in Jackson’s short story, “Pillar of Salt” (243). In this tale, Shirley Jackson describes the numbing disappointment, horrors, and confusion a woman experiences when she journeys with her husband to the city. Jackson uses images of a lost identity to depict her “city experience” (Hague 77). Sprouting from her dissatisfaction and growing panic at home, Margaret often daydreams of traveling to New York, where in her mind, she will be settled and find meaning in her life. She "had never seen New York except in movies, when the city was…show more content… Author Carl Warren depicts in Madwives a picture of the relationship between men and women in the 1950s as “one of control and dependence, respectively” (qtd. Hague 79). Warren believes that these women’s psychological difficulties were directly connected to their role as housewives, which involved “financial dependence and isolation from adult contacts, emotional dependence, depression, feelings of aloneness and abandonment” (79). She makes the argument that the wife’s “sense of alienation from reality and from self” and “detachment from life itself” are direct effects of the lack of connection and contact with others (79). Jackson illustrates this belief in the story “The Beautiful Stranger.” Jackson goes as far as to suggest that the wife loses her identity so much so, that she hallucinates and believes that she is married to another man. “The Beautiful Stranger” begins when Margaret meets her husband at the station after he has been gone on business. Early on, Jackson hints at the dysfunctional relationship when she writes that Margaret felt “frightened and hurt” in her husband’s company (Stranger 59). Husband and wife are reunited and return to the house “that could have passed for a home” (Stranger 60). Jackson paints the accurate picture of the average house the 1950s, one with a husband, wife, possibly kids, and despite the occupants inside, a