Dread and Death in The Lottery and The Road through Wall - Research Paper Example

SHIRLEY JACKSON INTRODUCTION Analyzing Shirley Jackson's literature, Stanley Hyman asserts, "her fierce visions of dissociation and madness, of alienation and withdrawal, of cruelty and terror, have been taken to be personal, even neurotic fantasies" (Hyman, 4). Throughout her literature, Shirley Jackson transforms those images into meaningful general symbols. Her lifelong interest and concern was to explore and delineate the many incognitoes of death and life. Everything in Jackson's literature seems to points out author's preoccupation with dread and death theme: the subtle dissections of the self, the severity of tone, the picaresque plots, the nightmarish landscapes, the often distorted and grotesque characters, the sense of absurdity and finally the development of a grisly comic Black humor. Simultaneously, the focus Shirley Jackson made on the life theme belongs to that long American tradition of the romance, what Richard Chase refers to as "that freer, more daring, more brilliant fiction that contrasts with the solid moral inclusiveness and massive equability of the English novel" (Chase, viii). It is Chase's conviction that "the history of American novel is not only the history of the rise of realism but also of the repeated rediscovery of the uses of romance, and that this will continue to be so" (Chase, xii). Jackson's illustrations of life have been most amenable to an imagination shaped and inspired by a culture of contradiction, of disharmonies, of what Chase calls "radical disunities." From the critical perspective, it was important to list these qualities of Jackson's literature in order to see that the fiction of Shirley Jackson, specifically her focus on the themes of life and death, belong to that major stream of American literature represented by Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, James, and Faulkner. DREAD AND DEATH IN "THE LOTTERY" AND "THE ROAD THROUGH WALL" Traditionally for Shirley Jackson's fiction, her protagonists and audience are immobilized by dread and death. Indeed, author's fiction revolves around dread: what it is and what it feels like. In her work, dread is an emotion, a predicament, an existential condition. What is dreaded is a truth which seems to be the author's. As one reads, one feels the presence of Shirley Jackson in her work. In "The Lottery," something dreadful occurs from the very beginning. Regularly, once-a-year, a villager is ritually stoned to death. But this event inspires no fear. Rather, it is sanctioned by the community. From the readers' perspective, they appreciate the horror of the lottery, but their only reaction is surprise. The sense of horror comes later, after they finish reading. Like the villagers themselves, readers are dissociated emotionally from the feelings, and Jackson manages this through the delay of information. Thus a paradox emerges. Something fearful occurs, but the fearful event is not anticipated by reader or character. Nevertheless, the reader's sense of dread is increased by the story - not in the forward movement of reading, but retrospectively. The point is this that Jackson mystifies the reader in order to take the reader by surprise. In Jackson's work it is the emotion of surprise which finally gets under audience's skin and proves to readers that they have something to worry about. "The Lottery" is the tale of a town ritual, namely, the stoning of one of its citizens, chosen collectively by drawing lots. From the very beginning of the narration, Shirley Jackson displays great ability to suggest and foreshadow through her symbols and descriptions of setting and circumstances. Shirley Jackson masterfully and not accidentally put the most important symbol of her short story in its title. The lottery symbolizes death, meaningless, insensible and evident. Critically speaking, insensibility and meaninglessness are the elements of author's narrational emphasis, and these themes find their place in all Jackson fiction. In this particular short story, the cruelty of the lottery is viewed as an aspect of its banality. Like death, the lottery has no purpose; moreover, no one believes in it, no one cares about it or about anything except hurrying to the next activity. No one thinks, no one feels, imagination is dead, the lottery goes on while women wipe their hands on their aprons and men blow their noses; the scapegoat is chosen as easily as weight shifts from one leg to the other. And the scapegoat is a woman, but that also seems arbitrary. The death in "The Lottery" is perfunctory and so are the gestures of the townspeople. They participate in the lottery because it is an institution and, from their point of view, institutions are beyond question. These people are not sadists. They have very little real interest in the lottery; they do not take care of the black wooden box which is another death symbol, and it has become "stained" and "shabby" (Jackson, The Lottery, 2010). They do have a certain interest in the "stones," however, which they gather without urging (Jackson, The Lottery, 2010). But for the most part they participate in the event in the same way that a nominal believer goes to church: one stands and sits when one is told to. "Wouldn't have me leave m'dishes in the sink, now, would you, Joe" asks a woman, in the crowd, making excuses for her lateness as she joins the throng (Jackson, The Lottery, 2010). But the lottery is a dead ritual, a lifeless institution, unlike square dancing to which it is compared, and people go through the motions of the ritual without emotion or reflection. As Shirley Jackson tells the story of this ritual, her tone carries in it the controlled contempt of a tireless observer of the illogicalities of others. Similarly to "The Lottery," "The Road through the Wall" stands outside the main body of Jackson's literary work. However, when "The Lottery" is essentially a mythical story, "The Road through the Wall" is naturalistic. Similarly to "The Lottery," it presents the reader with a cross-section of humanity in a closed area - in this case, a street in the town of Cabrillo, California in 1936. It is tempting to read into the story of a group of people too self-centered to perceive the steadily growing evil in their midst an allegory of the events leading to the rise of Hitler. The novel reaches its climax with two violent events, both handled with author's usual understatement. One is the murder of a little girl by a troubled adolescent boy. Significantly, she dies by stoning, as Tessie Hutchinson did in "The Lottery." The other event is the suicide of the boy accused of the murder, Tom Donald. The murder-suicide thus constitutes a double climax of the novel, and to the fullest illustrates the theme of death in Jackson's literature. Having taken place, this murder-suicide relationship can be seen as the logical outcome of the selfishness that is the main characteristic of the people of Pepper Street. THEME OF DEATH IN JACKSON'S "THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE" In classic gothic fiction, as Devedra Varma reminds audience, "the element of terror is inseparably associated with the Gothic castle, which is an image of power, dark, isolated, and impenetrable" (Varma, 18). In Jackson's gothic fiction, "the castle stands as a central image of the lonely personality" (Varma, 19). In Jackson's novel "The Haunting of Hill House" the supernatural encounters madness or hastens its coming. It recounts the story of the gradual crumbling of a human personality. It is the story of the journey of a broken soul on a quest for love, her struggle with disintegration, and her ultimate failure and surrender to entropy. Eleanor Vance is a desperately lonely, utterly life-starved and loveless woman. Jackson's introduction of Eleanor Vance immediately evokes the feeling of despondency: Eleanor Vance was thirty-two years old when she came to Hill House. The only person in the world she genuinely hated, now that her mother was dead, was her sisterShe could not remember ever being truly happy in her adult life; her years with her mother had been built up devotedly around small guilts, and small reproaches, constant weariness, and unending despair[s]he had spent so long alone, with no one to love, that it was difficult for her to talk, even casually, to another person without self-consciousness and an awkward inability to find words (Jackson, The Haunting, 7). On her way to Hill House, Eleanor recalls an old tune but cannot remember all the words. When she reaches Hill House, they come back to her: "journeys end in lovers meeting" (Jackson, The Haunting, 27). These words run like a refrain throughout the novel, because according to Jackson's gothic idea, all journeys seem to end in "hill house," the central symbol of death in the novel. The presence of Hill House is felt on nearly every page of the novel, and it is in a real sense the major character of the book. When Eleanor passes through the "tall and ominous and heavy" gate, travels up the rutted, unpaved road to the house, her first thought upon seeing the house is that it is vile and diseased and she should leave at once. The house is over eighty years old and carries an unsavory reputation of death, madness, revenge, and suicide. The house is marked by "clashing disharmony." Some of the best description in the novel is of the house: "No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice" (Jackson, 26). It is a house "arrogant and hating, never off guard," and seems to have "formed itself, flying together into its own powerful pattern" (Jackson, The Haunting, 26). It rushes upon any unsuspecting spectator and engulfs him within it. The house "... reared its great head back against the sky without concession to humanity. It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope" (Jackson, The Haunting, 27). Like Hell the ground floor is laid out in concentric circles, with a central room surrounded by other rooms, which, in turn, are surrounded by more rooms. The house is made entirely at "wrong angles," everything is a little bit off center. All of the small aberrations add up to a rather large distortion, which Dr. Montague calls "a masterpiece of architectural misdirection" (Jackson, The Haunting, 76), and give its occupants a feeling of being off balance. Unconsciously adopting the posture and mannerisms of the college lecture hall, Dr. Montague recounts the sad and sordid history of Hill House. The house has not been fit for human habitation for over twenty years. Past tenants could only stay for a few days. One tried to flee at night and was crushed against a tree when his horse bolted from the road. None of them would discuss the reasons for their quick departures from the house, but all urged the doctor to stay away from it. The doctor cannot explain these things, but theorizes that some houses are literally "born bad," and partake of that ineffable quality that makes some places or houses unclean, forbidden, or sacred. To the doctor, it may not be too fanciful to regard some houses as sick, leprous, deranged and disturbed. A scandal, involving suicide, madness, and lawsuits, is associated with Hill House. The relationship between Hill House and Eleanor only intensifies the death theme of Jackson's novel. It is her guild-ridden and loveless life which seeks and finds a welcome in the dark corridors of Hill House. It is she who finds in Hill House a home, and surrenders willingly to its embrace, her own personality dissolving and fusing with the substance of Hill House. From the very beginning, Eleanor feels that Hill House has been waiting for her. While waiting for others to arrive, she feels like a small creature consumed whole by a monster that feels her every movement within it. However, she does not believe that she is the type for Hill House, but also does not know anybody who would be. One of the most pervasive fears in contemporary American fiction, Tony Tanner, among others, observes, is the "nightmare of being totally controlled by unseen agencies and powers" (Tanner, 16). Alvin Greenberg argues that the "novel of disintegration" has been one of the primary responses to the sense of entropy and decay in contemporary life (Greenberg, 103f). While Shirley Jackson's fiction certainly is aware of the nightmarish quality of contemporary life, the social and institutional threats to the human self, her primary interest in "The Haunting of Hill House" lies in that terror and horror found in the gap between our rationalistic pretensions and our primordial fears - the fear of death, the sense of individual powerlessness, of being caught up in something vast, mysterious, and evil, which antedates contemporary fears of disintegration. APOCALYPSE IN JACKSON'S "THE SUNDIAL" The mood of American fiction in the middle of past century has been increasingly apocalyptic. This has been not just a response to the threat of nuclear destruction or ecological forms of disaster, though these threats are certainly not forgotten. Rather, the fiction reflects a more generalized sense of foreboding, of the coming of catastrophe, the movement of human life towards the inanimate. In his provocative essay, "Days of Wrath and Laughter," R.W. B. Lewis discusses this theme at length. He notes that in fiction there is "a pervasive sense of the preposterous: of the end of the world not only as imminent and titanic, but also as absurd" (Lewis, 184). According to Lewis, humanity is at some point where "our literature and our spiritual history are in fact caught between the wrath and the laughter; and our survival, in many meanings of the word, may hang upon the outcome" (Lewis, 185). Lewis' thinking represents an apt description of Shirley Jackson's novel "The Sundial." Demonstrating her ability to find pity and death in the ludicrous and the ludicrous in death, Jackson illustrated the fantasy for the end of the world, simultaneously providing a parody for its apocalyptic imagination. Jackson's novel "The Sundial" is concerned with the nature of belief, with the way desperate people grasp a belief and make it their truth, with how belief and madness combine and lead to desperate behavior, with how belief is a form of madness itself, making people into grotesques. At the end of the novel, eleven grotesques, self-elected survivors of the imminent end of the world, are all waiting, with Mrs. Halloran dead and propped up against the sundial on the lawn of the great Halloran estate, the windows and doors battened down from the inside as protection against the growing winds of doom. Some play bridge. Others talk of the realism of a recent movie. A few drink scotch and yawn in anticipation. "'My.' Mrs. Willow stretched, and sighed. 'It's going to be a long wait,' she said" (Jackson, The Sundial, 192). Indeed it is, for audience leaves them feeling that they will still be waiting to enter their hoped-for brave new world when the supplies they have stored in the library have been used up. The disconfirmation of apocalypse will lead only to new "revelations" and to new calculations for their waiting game. No matter, because they have already sealed their doom, which is the purpose of this grisly tale of comic death and fantasy to reveal. MOTIVES OF LIFE IN JACKSON'S "THE BEAUTIFUL STRANGER" From the critical perspective, it is a challenging task to explore the "pro-life" motives in Jackson's literature deeply embedded in supernatural and gothic themes. However, her short story "The Beautiful Stranger," though one of the author's earliest compositions, constitutes a creative mix of happiness and sadness, emotions that are common for every human. In "The Beautiful Stranger," Margaret experiences what appears to be a flirtation with the supernatural shortly after going to meet her husband, who is returning from a business trip. Gazing across the room at her husband shortly after the family has returned home, Margaret realizes with a start that this man is not her husband at all. Although he looks very much like John, the man is clearly an impostor. Though initially rather alarmed by this realization, Margaret gradually becomes entranced with the presence of this "beautiful stranger" who has taken her husband's place, coming to realizes that he is much kinder, much more thoughtful than the original John had ever been. Interestingly, this story underwent significant revisions from its initial conception to the final published version. According to Joan Wylie Hall, the first draft contained numerous suggestions that Margaret was veering toward a mental breakdown, a fact which would render her perceptions of a mysterious visitor unreliable (Hall, 28). In later versions, however, the scenes suggesting psychological imbalance were eliminated, thus strengthening the case that this "beautiful stranger" did indeed exist. At one point, the man claiming to be John announces that there are reports that he had died while on his business trip, thus raising the possibility that the John look-alike is actually his ghost or perhaps another supernatural visitor. Despite this possibility (or perhaps because of it), Margaret feels a powerful connection to this man; the two share an intimacy that she had never enjoyed with her husband. Had the story ended during one of their cozy, candlelit dinners or fireside reveries, this would have been an odd but gently reassuring ghost story about a lonely woman whose encounter with supernatural forces is not frightening but magically transformative, offering her release from an oppressive marriage and a second chance at happiness. Jackson refuses to offer her readers the satisfaction of this happy ending, however. The story actually concludes on a highly disturbing note: returning home from an errand, Margaret is alarmed to realize that she does not recognize her own house. As night begins to fall, her confusion only deepens: The evening was very dark, and she could see only the houses going in rows, with more rows beyond them and more rows beyond that, and somewhere a house which was hers, with the beautiful stranger inside, and she lost out here (Jackson, The Beautiful Stranger in Hyman, 65) Rather than satisfying the reader's desire for closure, Jackson leaves her protagonist to wander alone, "lost" in confused panic, all ties to anything remotely safe and comfortable and familiar abruptly severed. As is the case in many of Jackson's stories, the concepts of "home", of "family", with their connotations of warmth and stability, are turned upside down. WORKS CITED Chase, R. The American Novel and Its Tradition. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980 Greenberg, A. "The Novel of Disintegration: Paradoxical Impossibility in Contemporary Fiction," Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, VIII, Winter-Spring, 1966 Hall, J.W. Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne Publishing, 1993. Hyman, S. (Ed.) Come Along With Me: Part of a Novel, Sixteen Stories, and Three Lectures. New York: The Viking Press, 1968. Hyman, S. (Ed.) "Preface," The Magic of Shirley Jackson, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1965 Jackson, S. The Lottery, Available at < http://jackson.classicauthors.net/lottery>, Accessed Oct 28, 2010 Jackson, S. The Haunting of Hill House. Penguin Classics, 2008 Jackson, S. The Sundial. New York: Ace Books, 1958 Jackson, S. The Road Through the Wall. New York: Macfadden-Bartell, 1969 Lewis, R.W.B. Trials of the Word: Essays in American Literature and the Humanistic Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965 Tanner, T. City of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970. New York: Harper & Row, 1971 Varma, D. The Gothic Flame. London, Arthur Barker Ltd., 1957 Read More