Charles (1948) and The Witch (1949) by Shirley Jackson

It’s Shirley Jackson special at Friday’s Forgotten Books over at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase.

“I delight in what I fear.”

Human nature and behaviour is the focal point of many of American writer Shirley Jackson’s stories including Charles and The Witch. Both the stories are about four-year old boys who think, talk, lie, and act like most adults. They are impudent, disrespectful, and even precocious.

"The teacher spanked a boy, though," Laurie said, addressing his bread and butter. "For being fresh," he added, with his mouth full.

In Charles, for instance, Laurie has just started kindergarten and he is already lying to his parents at the dinner table. Every day he returns from school and tells his father and mother about a mysterious classmate who gets into serious trouble with his teacher and the other students. Charles is frequently punished for being bad. If one day he hits his teacher, the next day he whispers an evil word in a little girl’s ear. Laurie’s parents encourage their son to discuss Charles and his antics in class even as you suspect that they know who Charles really is and that they’re merely hiding from the truth.

"I saw a witch," he said to his mother after a minute. "There was a big old ugly old bad old witch outside."

In The Witch, four-year old Johnny is travelling by train with his mother and little sister. He is looking out of the window, bored and making childish talk, like “We're on a river…This is a river and we're on it,” or “We're on a bridge over a river,” or “There's a cow. How far do we have to go?” His mother humours him. And then, just as he is talking about seeing a witch outside the window, an elderly man with white hair and a pleasant face enters the coach and strikes up a conversation with the boy. Among other things, he tells Johnny about how much he loved his own little sister before he cut her head off and put it inside a cage where a bear ate it up. The boy’s mother is shocked and orders the man to get out of the coach. Johnny thinks the man is a witch.

To me, Charles made more sense than The Witch. Both the stories are dystopian in their character. They are about families, not necessarily happy families, even though they may seem like they are. There is a disconnect between Laurie and Johnny on one hand and their parents on the other. I found this line of thought disconcerting. I have never read Shirley Jackson before and therefore I cannot say much except wonder if that is really how she thinks families can be, or really are.

Her writing is best exemplified in an obituary in The New York Times, August 10, 1965: “Shirley Jackson wrote in two styles. She could describe the delights and turmoils 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. In either genre, she wrote with remarkable tautness and economy of style, and her choice of words and phrases was unerring in building a story's mood.”

The two stories number less than 1,600 words each, which appealed to my reading sense. While Charles was first published in Mademoiselle, July 1948, she wrote The Witch in 1949 though I couldn’t trace its original publication. Both the stories are a part of at least two collections that I know of, Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories and The Lottery and Other Stories. The good news is that many of her stories are available online. I'll be reading many of them, especially her non-macabre horror stories.

Sergio Angelini, George Kelley, John Norris, and Todd Mason have more authoritative reviews of Shirley Jackson's work at their excellent blogs. Click on their names to read them. You'll also find more reviews at Patti's blog.