Analysis of Shirley Jackson’s Stories (2024)

Shirley Jackson’s (December 14, 1916 – August 8, 1965) stories seem to center on a single concern: Almost every story is about a protagonist’s discovering or failing to discover or successfully ignoring an alternate way of perceiving a set of circ*mstances or the world. Jackson seems especially interested in how characters order their worlds and how they perceive themselves in the world. Often, a change in a character’s perspective leads to anxiety, terror, neurosis, or even a loss of identity. Although it is tempting to say that her main theme is the difference between appearance and reality, such a statement is misleading, for she seems to see reality as Herman Melville’s Ishmael comes to see it, as a mirror of the perceiving soul. It is rarely clear that her characters discover or lose their grasp of reality; rather, they form ideas of reality that are more or less moral and more or less functional. For Jackson, reality is so complex and mysterious that one inevitably only orders part of it. A character may then discover parts that contradict a chosen order or that attract one away from the apparent order, but one can never affirm the absolute superiority of one ordering to another. In this respect, Jackson’s fictional world resembles those of Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway. Perhaps the major differences between her fiction and theirs is that her protagonists are predominantly women; she explores some peculiarly feminine aspects of the problem of ideas of order.

Jackson’s middle-class American women seem especially vulnerable to losing the security of a settled worldview. Their culture provides them with idealistic dream visions of what their lives should be, and they have a peculiar leisure for contemplation and conversation imposed upon them by their dependent roles. Men in her stories seem so busy providing that they rarely look at and think about the order of things. Her career women are more like these men. In “Elizabeth” and “The Villager,” the protagonists succeed, albeit precariously, in preserving ideas of themselves and their worlds despite the contradictory facts that seem increasingly to intrude. In these two stories, one sees a sort of emotional cannibalism in the protagonists as they attempt to preserve belief in an order that reality seems no longer disposed to sustain. Several stories show a woman’s loss of an ordering dream. These divide into stories about women who experience the terror of loss of identity and those who may find a liberating and superior order in what would ordinarily be called infantile fantasy.

Among those who lose a dream are the protagonists of “The Little House” and “The Renegade.” In “The Little House,” a woman’s first possession of her own small country house is ruined by the terrifying insinuations of her new neighbors; they leave her alone on her first night after relating to her their fears that the previous owner was murdered and that the murderer will return. In “The Renegade,” a mother discovers an unsuspected cruelty in her neighbors and even in her children when her dog is accused of killing chickens. Although Jackson’s humorous autobiographical stories are of a different order, the often anthologized “Charles” tells of a mother’s discovery that the nemesis of the kindergarten whose antics her son reports each day is not the mythical Charles, but her own son, Laurie.

Perhaps the most successful escape into fantasy is Mrs. Montague’s in “The Island.” All her physical needs are provided by a wealthy but absent son and the constant attendance of Miss Oakes. Mrs. Montague lives in her dream of a tropical paradise, virtually untouched by her actual world. This escape is judged by the ironic frame of Miss Oakes’s relative poverty and her inevitable envy, suffering, spite, and ugliness; she has no chance of such an escape herself. Some movements into fantasy are terrifying or at least ambiguous. In “The Beautiful Stranger,” Margaret resolves a tension in her marriage by perceiving the man who returns from a business trip as a stranger, not her husband. By the end of the story, this fantasy has led to her losing herself, unable to find her home when she returns from a shopping trip. A similar but more ambiguous situation develops in “The Tooth,” in which a woman escapes into a vision of an island to evade the pain of an aching tooth. Many of Jackson’s protagonists conceive of an island paradise as an ideal order when their control of the immediate is threatened.

Some ideas of order remain impenetrable. In “Louisa, Please,” a variation on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wakefield,” a runaway daughter returns home after a long absence to discover that her family has built a life around her loss and will not be convinced of her return. In “Flower Garden” and “After You, My Dear Alphonse,” protagonists find themselves unable to change or to abandon racist ideas because the ideas are too strong or because of community pressure.

The Visit

A closer look at three especially interesting stories reveals more about Jackson’s themes and gives some indication of her technical proficiency. In “The Visit,” Margaret comes to visit a school friend, Carla Rhodes, for the summer. The beautiful Rhodes estate includes a dream house with numerous fantastic rooms. The house seems not quite real; nearly every room is covered with tapestries depicting the house in different hours and seasons, and there is a mysterious tower of which no one speaks. For Margaret, the house and the family are ideal, especially when Carla’s brother, Paul, arrives with his friend, the Captain. This idyll lasts until the evening of Paul’s departure, when Margaret discovers that Paul has been a hallucination or a ghost, for the Captain is Carla’s brother and no one else has seen Paul. This revelation clarifies several mysteries that have developed, especially that of Margaret’s strange visit to the tower. Paul has told Margaret that an old aunt often secludes herself in the tower. When Margaret pays her a visit, she undergoes a not really frightening but certainly haunting experience with old Aunt Margaret. At the end of the story, the reader must conclude Aunt Margaret to be an apparition, that she is probably the Margaret who died for love and whose picture in mosaic appears on the floor of one room. Young Margaret has lost a phantom lover as old Margaret lost her Paul. Young Margaret realizes this at the same time that she is made aware of time’s effect on the house: the age and weakness of the Rhodeses, the bitter darkness of their true son, and the physical decay of the buildings. Furthermore, she begins to doubt her own place and identity as she wonders if her visit to the house will ever end. The home of her dreaming now threatens to become an imprisoning nightmare.

In retrospect, the device by which Jackson encourages the reader to share Margaret’s hallucination or haunting may seem contrived. This choice, however, seems effective because the more fully the reader shares Margaret’s perceptions and the more subdued (without being absent) are the disturbing elements, the more fully will the reader share the shock of her awakening into nightmare. Also technically effective are the apparent connections with Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Most important among these is the succession of mirror images: multiple pictures of the house, between the house and Mrs. Rhodes, among members of the family, between the two Margarets, and between the decline of the family and of the house. These connections seem deliberately chosen in part to emphasize the contrasts between Margaret and Poe’s narrator. Because Margaret’s response to the house is so positive, the shock of her discovery is greater by contrast. Furthermore, when she discovers this house to be like what one knows the House of Usher to be, one sees the analogy between her terror at imprisonment and that of Poe’s narrator when he sees a universe unnaturally lit by a blood red moon, yet another image of the coffin lit from within. Margaret actually enters one of the dream worlds promised American girls. Under its spell, she overlooks its flaws and forgets about time, but when the Captain breaks the spell, pointing out signs of decay, Paul departs and Margaret becomes acutely aware of time as her nightmare begins.

Pillar of Salt

Time is often the destroyer of feminine ideals in Jackson’s stories because they seem to depend on a suspension of time. In “Pillar of Salt,” another Margaret loses her secure world. A trip to New York City with her husband forces a new perspective on her which produces her anxiety and, finally, paranoia. It remains unclear, however, whether her paranoia is illness or a healthy reaction to an inimical environment.

The couple’s first week in the city is idyllic, and the fast pace is a pleasant change from New Hampshire. At a party at the end of the first week, however, Margaret begins to feel isolated, unnoticed among strangers who behave in strange ways. She learns there is a fire in the building but is unable to persuade anyone else to leave. The fire turns out to be two buildings away, but she is the only one to heed the warning and flee the building. She comes to see this nightmarish experience as symbolic of her experience in New York and perhaps of her life as a whole. She begins to notice new details about the city: dirt, decay, speed, stifling crowds. She feels increasingly isolated and insignificant. Of this life she thinks, “She knew she was afraid to say it truly, afraid to face the knowledge that it was a voluntary neck-breaking speed, a deliberate whirling faster and faster to end in destruction.” Even her friends’ Long Island beach cottage shows the spreading blight; there they find a severed human leg on the sand. Margaret comes to believe that her former order was illusory. Upon returning to the city, she begins to hallucinate, to see the destruction of the city in fast motion. Windows crumble. Her bed shakes. Driven from her apartment, she finds herself unable to return, paralyzed in a fast-moving, anonymous crowd on the wrong side of a mechanical and murderous river of traffic.

Margaret comes to see herself in a modern Sodom, paralyzed not because she has disobeyed God, but because she has seen in prophetic vision the truth about the city: It is no home for human beings but rather is impersonally intent upon destruction. The allusion of the title and her critique of city life verify her perception; however, those who do not share her vision remain capable of functioning. As in “The Visit,” the internal view of Margaret encourages a close identification between reader and character which makes judgment difficult until the reader can step back; but stepping back from “Pillar of Salt” plunges the reader deeper into mystery. In both stories, the protagonist moves from dream to nightmare, but in “Pillar of Salt,” the reader is much less certain that the move is to a better or more accurate view of reality.

The Lottery

Shirley Jackson’s reputation rests primarily upon her most anthologized story, “The Lottery.” Her lecture on this story (printed in Come Along with Me) suggests that her creation of a normal setting convinced many readers that the story was largely factual. In fact, the central problem of the story seems to be to reconcile the portrait of typical small-town life in which the characters seem just like the reader with the horrifying ritualistic killing these people carry out. Here, apparently incompatible ideas of order are thrust upon the reader for resolution, perhaps in order tocomplicate the reader’s conceptions.

“The Lottery” develops by slowly raising the level of tension in the semipastoral setting until a series of carefully arranged revelations brings about a dramatic and shocking reversal. The villagers gather at mid-morning on a late June day for an annual event, the lottery, around which a great deal of excitement centers. Jackson supplies details which arouse reader curiosity: Nearly all towns have a similar lottery; it is as old as the town; it has an elaborate ritual form which has decayed over time; every adult male must participate; some believe the orders of nature and of civilization depend on carrying it out correctly. The family of the man who draws the marked lot must draw again to determine the final winner. The tension built out of reader curiosity and the town’s moods reverses toward the sinister when the “winner’s” wife reveals that she does not want to win. Once this reversal is complete, the story moves rapidly to reveal the true nature of the lottery, to choose a victim for annual sacrifice by stoning. Jackson heightens the horror of this apparently unaccountable act with carefully chosen and placed details.

Several commentators have attempted to explain the story through reconstructing the meaning of the ritual and through carefully examining the symbols. Helen Nebeker sees the story as an allegory of “man trapped in a web spun from his own need to explain and control the incomprehensible universe around him, a need no longer answered by the web of old traditions.” These attempts to move beyond the simple thriller seem justified by the details Jackson provides about the lottery. This ritual seems clearly to be a tradition of prehistoric origin, once believed essential for the welfare of the community. Even though its purpose has become obscure and its practice muddled, it continues to unify and sustain the community. Critics tend to underemphasize the apparent health and vitality of the community, perhaps feeling that this ritual essentially undercuts that impression. It is important to notice that one function of the lottery is to change the relationship between community and victim. The victim is chosen at random, killed without malice or significant protest, and lost without apparent grief. This story may be what Richard Eastman has called an open parable, a fable which applies at several levels or in several contexts.

“The Lottery” creates an emotional effect of horror at the idea that perhaps in human civilization, the welfare of the many depends often on the suffering of the few: the victim race, the exploited nation, the scapegoat, the poor, the stereotyped sex, the drafted soldier. In these cases, instead of a ritual, other aspects of the social order separate oppressor and victim, yet the genuine order and happiness of the majority seems to depend on the destruction of others. In this respect, “The Lottery” resembles many stories of oppression, such as Franz Kafka’s “The Bucket Rider” and some stories by Richard Wright; its purpose may be to jar readers into thinking about ways in which their lives victimize others.

Jackson places the reader of “The Lottery,” which lacks a protagonist, in a position similar to that of the protagonists of “The Visit” and “Pillar of Salt.” The story moves from a relatively secure agrarian worldview to an event which fantastically complicates that view. Here, as in most of her stories, Jackson emphasizes the complexity of reality. Nature and human nature seem unaccountable mixtures of the creative and destructive. Her best people are in search of ways to live in this reality without fear and cruelty.

Major works
Children’s literature: Nine Magic Wishes, 1963; Famous Sally, 1966.
Play: The Bad Children, pb. 1958.
Novels: The Road Through the Wall, 1948 (also pb. as The Other Side of the Street); Hangsaman, 1951; The Bird’s Nest, 1954 (also pb. as Lizzie); The Sundial, 1958; The Haunting of Hill House, 1959; We Have Always Lived in the Castle, 1962.
Miscellaneous: Come Along with Me: Part of a Novel, Sixteen Stories, and Three Lectures, 1968 (Stanley Edgar Hyman, editor).
Nonfiction: Life Among the Savages, 1953; The Witchcraft of Salem Village, 1956; Raising Demons, 1957.
Short fiction: The Lottery: Or, The Adventures of James Harris, 1949 (also pb. as The Lottery, and Other Stories); Just an Ordinary Day, 1996 (Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman Stewart, editors); Shirley Jackson Collected Stories, 2001.

Bibliography
Hall, Wylie. Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993.
Hattenhauer, Darryl. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. New York: State University of New York Press, 2003.
Kittredge, Mary. “The Other Side of Magic: A Few Remarks About Shirley Jackson.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction, edited by Darrell Schweitzer. Mercer Island, Wash.: Starmont House, 1985.
May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004.
Murphy, Bernice M., ed. Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2005.
Oppenheimer, Judy. Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1988.
Parks, John G. “‘The Possibility of Evil’: A Key to Shirley Jackson’s Fiction.” Studies in Short Fiction 15, no. 3 (Summer, 1978): 320-323.
Rubinsein, Roberta. “House Mothers and Haunted Daughters: Shirley Jackson and Female Gothic.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 15 (Fall, 1996): 309-331.
Schaub, Danielle. “Shirley Jackson’s Use of Symbols in ‘The Lottery.’” Journal of the Short Story in English 14 (Spring, 1990): 79-86.
Stark, Jack. “Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery.’” In Censored Books, edited by Nicholas Karolider, Lee Burgess, and John M. Kean. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1993.
Yarmove, Jay A. “Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery.’” The Explicator 52 (Summer, 1994): 242-245.

Categories: Short Story

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