Lottery short story research paper

“Shirley Jackson’s Witch Children—Celebrating the American Myth by Subverting the Cult of the Child and Disrupting the Narratives of Domesticity”

Zofia Kolbuszewska

Short Story Criticism. Ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 213. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale. From Literature Resource Center.

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[(essay date 2007) In the following essay, Kolbuszewska proposes that Jackson’s short fiction repeatedly makes use of a “witch child” figure: “a disruptive child that invokes discord and disintegration in the family.” According to Kolbuszewska, Jackson uses this character in order to destabilize the sentimental conceptions of childhood innocence that underlie conventional domestic thought.]

Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writerVirginia Woolf1

Best known for her short story “The Lottery”, Shirley Jackson, in her lifetime a celebrated American writer, sunk into oblivion soon after her death in 1965. Marginalized by mainstream literary criticism of the 1970s and 1980s, Jackson was herself interested in the uncanny and grotesque exorcised from the mainstream culture of American suburban domesticity of the 1950s and ’60s. Anticipating a postmodern turn, Jackson’s fiction restores to the very heart of domestic fiction the marginalized Gothic and the fantastic, which the writer both rehabilitates and parodies.

In Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic Darryl Hattenhauer contends that while the themes the writer takes up “are often found in some modernists and even naturalists, especially her historicist rendering of gender and class”2—the latter expressing the writer’s very whimsical understanding of Marxism—her “heteroglossia, particularly her Gothicism, is one reason why she has been overlooked.”3 Hattenhauer points out that Jackson’s fiction bears all the characteristics of the writing that John Barth refers to as “proto-postmodernist” in a 1994 interview.4 The term denotes “late modernist writing that shows traits of what will become postmodernism.”5 Barth also observes that “modernism plus the threat of apocalypse may generate postmodernism.”6 The apocalyptic moment looms large in Jackson’s texts, thus placing her squarely among the proto-postmodernists. Moreover, as in other proto-postmodernist texts, not only are Jackson’s characters grotesque and disunified but they are also flat, verging on caricature and cartoon.

Hattenhauer points out, however, that “[t]he proto-postmodernists most studied are those who move back closer to realism as their careers develop, such as Welty and Salinger, or forward into postmodernism, such as Nabokov, Barth and Vonnegut.”7 Another reason the critic sees for the neglect of Shirley Jackson is the feminists’ privileging of “realism over postmodernism, assert[ing] self-fashioning over historicism, and look[ing] for role models rather than victims.”8 Also, compounding the aura of sensationalism surrounding Jackson’s works, the critic draws—in a perhaps slightly awkward manner—on the hapless biography of the writer, when she states that “Jackson’s discourse should be a case study” for modern feminists because “her writing bears traces of her resistance to social forces in general and to her husband in particular.”9

Be that as it may, on a professional plane, Jackson’s husband, Stanley Hyman, an outstanding American literary critic, thought very highly of his wife’s literary production and deplored the fact that her “work and its nature and purpose have been very little understood.”10 Unfortunately, in order to step up sales of her fiction, Hyman himself encouraged the writing of a blurb in which Jackson was presented as a practitioner of witchcraft, an opinion that turned out to be detrimental to her reputation as a serious writer. Trying later to dispel her image as an occult writer, he wrote: “if she used the resources of supernatural terror, it was to provide metaphors for all-too-real terrors of the natural. Obituary references to her in such terms as the ‘Virginia Werewoolf of séance-fiction writers’ show a considerable obliviousness to her meanings and purposes.”11 Admittedly, Jackson was interested in the history of witchcraft and witch trials. She examined the details of the Salem witch trial in The Witchcraft of Salem Village, a story for young readers.12 Appositely, a male character in a blue suit, who appears in many of the stories in The Lottery; or, The Adventures of James Harris ,13 a collection from 1950—first published as The Lottery in 1949—is referred to as the “demon lover.” Therefore, as the epithet “demon” is so strongly associated with the figure of James Harris, when discussing subversive child characters in Jackson’s two novels, The Sundial14and We Have Always Lived in the Castle,15 I prefer to employ the concept of the witch child instead of talking of the demon child.

I borrow the understanding of the concept of witch from Jackson’s three-page-long story “The Witch”, where she describes the unsuccessful efforts of a nice middle class mother, traveling on a train with an infant girl and a four year old son, to contain the son’s violent fantasies of an ugly witch apparently seen by him out of the window of the moving train. The mother is relieved to see the boy start a conversation with a new passenger, a pleasant looking elderly man in a blue suit, to whom the boy says he is both twenty six and “eight hunnerd forty eighty.”16 Amused, but also a little embarrassed, the mother corrects the boy but the elderly man takes the boy’s fantasizing at face value. The man tells the boy that he also has a little sister, whom he loves—and whom he strangled, before cutting her head off, chopping her to pieces and feeding her head to a bear. The indignant mother orders the man to leave. However, the boy enjoys the horrifying story and appears to identify with the man. When serenity and innocence seem to have been restored by a familial ritual of treating the boy to a lollipop, for which he has to say thank you, the boy recalls the man’s story and reassures himself that the man must be a witch.

Thus, a disruptive child that invokes discord and disintegration in the family, violence, brutality and death—in other words, the uncanny, the repressed other of the sanitized suburban and domestic ideal—is designated a witch child. By introducing witch children in the pre-apocalyptic The Sundial and the post-apocalyptic We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the writer explodes the Cult of the Child, and in disrupting the narratives of domesticity addresses anxieties related to the contradictions inherent in the concept of suburbia. But in the final analysis, Jackson’s critique leads to confirming rather than questioning the frozen, tableau-like time structure of the American myth.

Both novels commence rather inauspiciously, casting aspersions on the innocence of the child figure. In The Sundial, Fancy, a girl of ten, contends for power and inheritance with her grandmother.

After the funeral, they came back to the house now indisputably Mrs. Halloran’s. … Young Mrs. Halloran, looking after her mother-in-law, said without hope, “Maybe she will drop dead on the doorstep. Fancy dear, would you like to see Granny drop dead on the doorstep?” “Yes, mother.” … “Shall I push her?” Fancy asked. “Like she pushed my daddy?”17

The grandmother’s name, Orianna, intertextually relates the novel to Spencer’s Faerie Queen by invoking the figure of Queen Elizabeth I, Orianna being one of “the literary sobriquets”18 of the queen. Also, the grandmother’s kept lover is called Essex.19 Jackson’s use of allegorical elements in the novel seems to point to an interpretation of the power contest between the two generations in the Halloran house as an enactment of American history—the disobedient child, America, rejects the matriarchal power of England, symbolized by the domineering figure of Elizabeth I, and takes hegemony over the world awaiting an apocalypse and the supposed coming of a new world. Emblematic of the American experience, Fancy seems, however, to be aware that, as is revealed time and again by the stories of a disillusionment with the American Dream, “there is ‘this’ world that will always be the measure of all fantasized new ones in that they will all, upon being tested, be reabsorbed into it.”20 Twelve people, the Halloran family members and their hangers-on, are warned of the end of the world by the founder of the Halloran house, who communicates its imminence to his daughter, aunt Fanny, in a supernatural vision. Only inhabitants of the house will be saved, and they will rule the new, post-apocalyptic world. The moment Orianna is found dead at the foot of the stairs, just before the dawn of the new world, Fancy snatches her grandmother’s crown. The novel ends just before the promised apocalyptic moment occurs and so the question of the prophesy’s verity remains unresolved.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is told from the point of view of the eighteen-year-old Merricat, whose development seems to have been stunted at the age of twelve, when most of her family mysteriously died of arsenic poisoning. It is worth noting parenthetically that in Jackson’s suburban world the magical border of “hateful childhood” appears to be established by the cinema board. “Children” are those who are under twelve and are not admitted to the movies on their own: “The policeman looked … as though he hated everybody who was legally under twelve, the way the man at the movies looked.”21

Merricat introduces herself in the beginning of the novel:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cap mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.22

Only near the end of the novel does the reader learn that it was Merricat who, fed up with being sent to bed without dinner for misbehavior, added arsenic to the sugar bowl, knowing that her beloved sister Constance never ate sugar. Only Merricat, Constance, and their uncle Julian survive; the uncle never fully recovers after the poisoning. He is crippled and moves around in a wheelchair. They create a parody of a nuclear family, which revolves around the quasi-maternal, immutable and agoraphobic23 center—that is Constance. Constance never leaves the Blackwood estate, whose name, by invoking Poe, has a Gothic ring to it, and also gestures towards “The Fall of the House of Usher.” It is Merricat that faces the hostile outside world of the village and does the shopping. She treats each venture outside their estate as a board game in which a player moves pieces from square to square.

The incestuous relationship between Constance and Merricat is threatened by their cousin Charles, who wants to marry Constance in order to inherit the estate, and plans to introduce the social norms and rules which are observed at large, outside the happy and wild household of Constance and Merricat. When taking her revenge on Charles, Merricat accidentally sets fire to the house. After the apocalyptic fire, having witnessed the havoc wreaked on the half-burnt house by the villagers, the girls lock themselves up in the remaining ruin as if in a Gothic castle, and refuse to communicate with the outside world. They nevertheless accept the food that guilty villagers leave on their doorstep. The novel ends in the words: “we are so happy.”24

A brief presentation of Fancy and Merricat allows us to catch a glimpse of Jackson’s strategy of shattering the utopia of the innocent and dependent child denied subjectivity, a child who functions as a screen onto which adult nostalgia and desires as well as social and political fantasies are projected. Lesnik-Oberstein emphasizes that the idea of childhood itself is inextricably intertwined with the middle class idea of domesticity, an innocent, non-desiring child figured as the lynchpin of the domestic order presided over by another construct—the agoraphobic and ideally immobilized wife and mother, “The Angel in the House”:

Just as hysteria translated into an anatomy of the self and its desires in Victorian society, agoraphobia furnished Victorian America with a paradigmatic selfhood associated with female experience—or more specifically, summarized and reproduced the tradition of selfhood established by domestic ideology.25

Lesnik-Oberstein stresses also the political aspect of the Cult of the Child:

the very idea of childhood itself is crucially implicated in the structures of feeling that define the bourgeois nuclear family and which prioritize emotion as a structuring and motivating force both for public and private life in contemporary capitalism.26

The introduction of the figure of the witch child in these two novels throws into relief the grave crisis of the domestic ideal and runs afoul of the 1950s investment of “an enormous amount of cultural capital in the ability to form a family and live out a set of highly structured gender and generational roles.”27 In violently rejecting their ascribed place and role in the domestic script, the witch children attempt to reconfigure familial harmony by appropriating the roles denied to them, which consequently destroys the coherence of a patriarchal, nuclear middle-class family. Like in a Gothic story they endeavor to create a new family history. Fancy replaces her grandmother as a matriarch while Merricat reconstitutes the relationship with her sister in an incestuous manner by becoming Constance’s child and partner. By defying the ideal of the innocent child and by grotesquely parodying the ideal of domesticity, the witch children denounce their complicity with the capitalist enterprise and thus bring domesticity to its agoraphobic extreme; that is, absolute immobility, and complete stasis.28

It is worth noting that the stasis—that is, the metaphorical impossibility to mature—also results from the time structure of adult desires projected on the innocent child:

The child exists as a site of almost limitless potential (its future not yet written and therefore unblemished). But because the utopian fantasy is the property of adults, not necessarily of children, it is accompanied by its doppelgänger, nostalgia. Nostalgia is the fantasy of a preferred past (past pleasures, past desires for the future) … Thus both the utopianism and the nostalgia invoked by the figure of the child are, in turn, the preferred form of the future.29

Of course, it may be remarked that the witch children do not mature either. Fancy will replace her doll house, a toy model of the Halloran mansion, with the mansion itself as a toy, while Merricat at the age of eighteen is, as a matter of fact, still twelve.

In overturning the ideal of domesticity, the witch children in Jackson’s novels also manage to strip naked the political agenda of suburbia. As Evelyn E. Montgomery observes, the suburbanite identity has been formed both by the cultural legacy of the American frontier and that of nineteenth-century Victorian ideology responsible for “the presentation of the self through consumer goods and household design, and the cultural focus on children and the nuclear family.”30 Unlike immigrants seeking to join a preestablished community, the founders of the Blackwood and Halloran houses acted as colonizers, “carving out a personal empire within a space that has been transformed, through the power of brute wealth, into virgin land.”31 They “had enacted on a particularly grand scale the exurbanizing project that in more modest form had become by the 1950s an available alternative even for those of fairly ordinary dreams.”32 Not unlike Gothic mansions both the Blackwood house and the Halloran house are isolated and discontinuous with the local social and natural landscape. Indeed, the Halloran House is consciously modeled on Hugh Walpole’s Gothic castle in Strawberry Hill. Richard Pascal observes that

Just as Strawberry Hill was a make believe medieval estate, modern suburbs are make-believe small towns of a bygone era—even when, as has often been the case, the ‘suburb’ is an old town that has often been subsumed within the commuting range of a relatively nearby urban unit.33

Indisputably, both houses tower over the locality like a city on the hill, an American icon of a morally superior utopian civilization surrounded by a wilderness to be feared and conquered. They radiate cultural influence, although in a Victorian manner mainly limited to the emulation of their furnishings and ornaments. The Halloran House seems to be considered a beacon of American civilization, whereas the Blackwood house seems to be rather a center of civilization threatened by the wilderness of the uncouth and savage villagers. Thus, the suburbs inherit the legacy of the religious vision in which the future meant seeking for the origin in the mythical Edenic past. After all, a city on the hill was to be an incarnation of the New Jerusalem,34 that is St. Augustine’s Paradise.35 The suburban time structure is thus internally contradictory, riven with tensions. It looks forward only to encounter the mythical past of the origin and nostalgically harks back to the time of Victorian towns in order to “retreat into a tidily controllable new old world.”36 It also contains a brutally forward-directed secular future of the frontier inhabited by a ghostly past. The suburbs are thus miniatures of America.37 “[I]n miniature,” Susan Stewart avers,

we see spatial closure posited over temporal closure. The miniature offers a world clearly limited in space but frozen and thereby both particularized and generalized in time—particularized in that the miniature concentrates upon the single instance and not upon the abstract rule, but generalized in that the instance comes to transcend, to stand for, a spectrum of other instances. The miniature offers a closure of the tableau. …38

In addition, the critic points out

The suburbs present us with the negation of the present; a landscape consumed by its past and its future. Hence the two foci of the suburbs: the nostalgic and the technological. A butterchurn fashioned into an electric light, a refrigerator covered by children’s drawings, the industrial “park,” the insurance company’s “campus.” … Here is a landscape of apprehension: close to nature, and not consumed by her; close to culture, close enough to consume her. In the topography of the suburbs is revealed the topography of the family, the development, a network of social relations and their articulated absences.39

This time structure parallels that projected on the innocent child—this is the time of immobility, of stasis. Likewise, the very time structure inherent in the American myth makes, any change impossible:

[O]nly America has united nationality and universality, civic and spiritual selfhood, secular and redemptive history, the country’s past and paradise to be, in a single synthetic ideal. … The revelation of America serves to blight, and ultimately to preclude, the possibility of change.40

The construction of the innocent child serves the purpose of developing the American vision but the figure of the rebellious witch child cannot really shake it. The act of subversion turns into an act of celebration. As a matter of fact, the American tableau would be incomplete without the witch child. What is more, it has “always already” contained it. “To make the child innocent is to suppress the disruptive alternative to innocence—which, in fine binary logic, makes the ‘other’ essential to our understanding of innocence itself.”41

Notes

35. St. Augustine, City of God, XIX, 5. Consulted 17 Oct. 2005, available at < http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120119.htm >.

36. Pascal, 100.

37. Pascal, 99-102.

38. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1994), 48.

39. Stewart, 1.

40. Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 178-179.

41. Bruhm and Hurley, xvi.

Works Cited

St. Augustine. City of God. Consulted 17 Oct. 2005, available at < http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120119.htm >.

Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1978.

Bercovitch, Sacvan. Puritan Origins of the American Self. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975.

Brown, Gillian. “The Empire of Agoraphobia”. Representations 20 (1987): 134-157.

Bruhm, Steven and Natasha Hurley. “Preface”. Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children. Ed. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley. Minneapolis: Univ. Minnesota Press, 2004, ix-xxxviii.

Bruhm, Steven and Natasha Hurley, eds. Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children. Minneapolis: Univ. Minnesota Press, 2004.

Hall, Joan Wylie. Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993.

Hattenhauer, Darryl. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 2003.

Hyman, Stanley. “Preface”. The Magic of Shirley Jackson. Ed. Stanley Hyman New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966, vii-ix.

Jackson, Shirley. The Lottery; or, The Adventures of James Harris. London: V. Gollancz, 1950.

Jackson, Shirley. “The Lovely House”. American Gothic Tales. Ed. Joyce Carol Oates. Harmondsworth: Plume, Penguin Group, 1996, 204-225.

Jackson, Shirley. The Magic of Shirley Jackson. Ed. Stanley Hyman New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.

Jackson, Shirley. “The Road Through the Wall”. The Road Through the Wall; Hangsaman; The Bird’s Nest. New York: Quality Paperback Club, 1998, 1-271.

Jackson, Shirley. The Sundial. New York: Ace Books, Inc., 1958.

Jackson, Shirley. “We Have Always Lived in the Castle”. The Masterpieces of Shirley Jackson. London: Raven Books, 1996, 397-531.

Jackson, Shirley. “The Witch”. The Masterpieces of Shirley Jackson. London: Raven Books, 1996, 47-50.

Jackson, Shirley. The Witchcraft of Salem Village. New York: Random House, (1956) 1998.

Lesnik-Oberstein, Karín. “Childhood and Textuality: Culture, History, Literature”. Children in Culture: Approaches to Childhood. Ed. Karín Lesnik-Oberstein. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd; New York: St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 1998, 1-28.

Lesnik-Oberstein, Karín. ed. Children in Culture: Approaches to Childhood. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd; New York: St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 1998.

Montgomery, Evelyn E. The Postwar Suburban Discourse and the Definition of American Identity. Doctoral Dissertation UMI 3138695. Texas Univ. Dallas, 2004.

Oates, Joyce Carol, ed. American Gothic Tales. Harmondsworth: Plume, Penguin Group, 1996.

Pascal, Richard. “New World Miniatures: Shirley Jackson’s The Sundial and Postwar American Society”. Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 23.3 (2000): 99-111.

Plumley, William. “An Interview with John Barth”. Chicago Review 40.4 (1994): 6-18. Online database EBSCOhost consulted 17 Oct. 2005 < http://web29.epnet.com >.

Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1992.

Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1994.

Woolf, Virginia. “Professions for Women”. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1985.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)

Kolbuszewska, Zofia. "“Shirley Jackson’s Witch Children—Celebrating the American Myth by Subverting the Cult of the Child and Disrupting the Narratives of Domesticity”." Short Story Criticism, edited by Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 213, Gale, 2015. Literature Resource Center, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/H1420119850/LitRC?u=txshracd2530&sid=LitRC&xid=99b82ed9 . Accessed 26 Mar. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|H1420119850

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